The dissertation consists of a collection of personal essays about hunting and fishing. Because the essays are narratives and contain dialogue, characterization, description, themes, etc., they fall under the genre of creative nonfiction. The dissertation has two parts. Part I consists of an essay that discusses the author’s struggle to combine creative nonfiction with outdoor writing and also describes the author’s dilemma of writing about hunting, a topic that is often controversial at the university, while a graduate student. Part II of the dissertation consists of narratives that recount the author’s hunting and fishing experiences that occurred in North Texas and in the mountains of New Mexico. The essays discuss fishing for trout and hunting for deer, wild boars, quail, and duck. Three major themes are developed throughout the dissertation. The first theme describes the close relationship that exists between the author and his father. This closeness is partly due to the time that they have shared during decades of hunting and fishing together. The second theme discusses the ethics of hunting and especially focuses on which methods of hunting are ethical and which methods are not. The third theme explores the complex and sometimes unpleasant interactions that occur between sportsmen when they encounter each other while hunting and fishing. This theme explores the give and take attitude that must exist in order for sportsmen to get along. This attitude is necessary because no two outdoorsmen view the outdoors and hunting and fishing in quite the same way.

This inquiry focuses on creative nonfiction essay writing and its pedagogy, operating under the conceit that this category of literature possesses rich potential to render fruitful study of nonverbal communication. Creative Nonfiction pedagogy can be enriched and analysis of this genre broadened if somewhat familiar aspects of these texts are considered through the interdisciplinary lens of interpersonal and nonverbal communication. Through critical review of existing creative nonfiction pedagogy and close examination of the role of nonverbal communication in the essays of David Foster Wallace, this document aims to open possibilities through an interdisciplinary study of essay writing in order to contribute to the scholarship and knowledge available to professionals responsible for craft instruction, criticism and analysis of creative nonfiction literature.

In Breathing through the Night, the author examines the moments of understanding and misunderstanding, the moments of fear, coping, and relief that occur during her husband’s deployment to Iraq and upon his return. The experiences of this military family serve as a magnifying lens through which the author explores means of coping and the role of communication in making meaning from memory, in shaping personal narratives within layers of story and history.

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This is a work of creative nonfiction that details the authors’ own experience with homelessness, relays the stories of homeless individuals he has encountered, challenges conventional notions of poverty and what it means to be home, and invites the reader to imagine herself into a day in the life of a destitute individual. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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We Are the Asteroid is a collection of personal essays concerned with the power of erasure and manipulation of chronology that comes with writing. It both acknowledges and participates in the fact that nonfiction writers become unstuck in time, whether they want to or not, traveling between ages, rearranging the order of events into the stories they tell. The collection centers on a few traumatic events in the narrator's life, and it explores the ways in which she deals with those events through her writing. The writer utilizes various structural techniques, such as the segmented form, to play with the idea that the placement of events in a story can affect the emotions attached to those memories. In this way, the writer looks at the power that writing has over illness, violent relationships, and even death. Exploring topics as wide-ranging as infertility, inauthentic grief, and sacrifice, the collection resolutely returns to the idea that the nonfiction writer is in control of, and therefore charged with, the responsibility of making beautiful even the saddest of memories. We Are the Asteroid serves both as a wish to go back and an acknowledgement that we must, despite our abilities and tools as a writer to dwell, continue moving forward.

If Not the Body is a collection of poems centered around the physical, female body—the body in peril, the body as continuation, the body as revelation, the body as variable. Tracing both a literal and metaphorical lineage over five sections, these poems reckon with a personal, familial, and regional history in an attempt to answer the collections’ repeated questions: “What am I made of?” and “If illness uglies the world, / what redeems it?” Drawing from personal experience, family history, and reckoning with mathematic, logical, and temporal limitations, Null Hypothesis: Essays focuses on what it means to embody, to experience. With particular attention to and emphasis on the self-consciousness of writing, these essays attempt to exemplify the inevitable frameshift afforded by illness, and how our bodies, our selves, our relationships, faith, and even our memories—as embodied things—manifest and matter in the corporeal world.

This thesis is an examination of the geographical oddities of my past, the process of transitioning between worlds, and the kinds of relationships that survive those transitions. In a world where I can fly from Atlanta to Beijing non-stop in fifteen hours, I sometimes convince myself that geography no longer matters. I was born in the tropics, raised in the arctic, and became a dual citizen of the same two countries twice. I could distinguish gunshots from fireworks by age five and have ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad in both directions. I have milked a water buffalo and played Tchaikovsky’s piano and been interrogated by a Maoist by firelight on the top of a mountain at the far western edge of the earth. I have seen the Louvre and the Hermitage and the highest point in Iowa and The Pit, the outhouse that connects directly to Hell. I sometimes believe I can go anywhere. See anything. Befriend anyone. But I deceive myself. Some places are so far away, it takes years to settle, to adjust, to reach a level of familiarity where the world outside your window, and the people in that world, no longer shock you. I have seldom stayed that long. The transient life does not get easier, but you can get better at it. I have gotten better at it. Distance is a matter of perspective and convenience and desire. The farther two places, or two people, or two lifestyles are from each other, the subtler and more intricate the connecting lines. My contentment and sanity and relationships depend upon deciphering those lines. This is the story of what I’ve learned.