A novella of crime and suspense set in the townships surrounding the mining town of Welkom Two friends, both ex-miners, start a welding business only to see it fail because of interference by corrupt officials To make ends meet, they are drawn into the world of illegal gold-mining, working with criminals who employ ‘zama-zamas’: desperate foreign nationals who are prepared to live and work in the abandoned mine tunnels underground The friends make money, but the dark practices of illegal mining put a strain on their relationship, their values, and their family ties.

When her life starts falling apart, a journalist and writer heads for a small rural town. Here the strange and wonderful tales about a local woman ignite her curiosity. As the town's secrets unravel she finds the truth behind all the fantasies. And in fighting her own demons she makes an unusual connection to this woman. She soon realises that this connection holds the key to her own salvation. Or her downfall.

This qualitative narrative study investigated the relationship between emerging adults’ understandings of themselves as writers and their autobiographical memories of writing. Narrative data, largely elicited through semi-structured interviews, were collected from 14 participants who were recruited from six postsecondary institutions. Recruitment efforts aimed to yield participants who had divergent educational experiences, career ambitions, and dispositions towards writing, and who inhabited divergent racial, social, and cultural identities. The study contributes to writer identity research by applying a sociocultural framework that holds memory, narrative, identity, and culture as reflections—and, often, distortions—of each other. The research questions, asked through this lens, aimed to provide insight into the emotional residues of pre-college writing experiences, the potential patterning of narrated memories or identities among participants, and the ways in which the stories participants shared and the identities they storied shape each other. While this is fundamentally an inquiry into the narrative features of writer identity, it is also a study about how certain lived writing experiences reincarnate as highly emotive autobiographical memories; even if such memories tend to be unstable, unreliable, and suggestable, they are nonetheless meaningful reflections of the lingering effects of the past. Through this retrospective study, a portrait emerges of classroom conditions and writing experiences that are particularly hospitable to the nurturement of positive memories and healthy writing identities, as well as to the inverse. This research is intended to speak to both secondary English teachers and English teacher educators and college composition instructors by bridging secondary and postsecondary understandings of how student writers are moving between worlds, the memories they are bringing with them, and the ways in which they might be storying their writer identities en route.

Research in higher education service-learning suggests that there is a positive relationship between service-learning and student learning outcomes as well as a positive relationship between students‘ interactions with the ―real world‖ through service-learning and the effects of these experiences on deepening students‘ knowledge in their disciplines. Recent studies have established this positive relationship between service-learning and university composition and literature students. However, aside from the existing literature on service-learning and composition and writing, there has been virtually no examination of the relationship between service-learning and creative writing. The purpose of this study was to investigate how seven creative writing students experienced the process of creative writing differently after engaging in service-learning in a creative writing course at a large, urban university in the southeastern United States and to determine if students experienced a transformative learning experience as indicated by Mezirow‘s (2000) transformational learning theory. This research study employed an instrumental narrative case study design to determine how seven university creative writing students experienced the process of creative writing differently after taking a creative writing course with an optional service-learning component. The results of the study indicated that service-learning invoked a transformative learning experience in these seven higher education creative writing students, each in different ways—some in their writing processes and writing content, some in how they reflected upon themselves and their writing in relation to the ―outside world,‖ and some in their sense of civic duty

This dissertation journeys into the heart of narrative writing, exploring how personal stories shape the practices and identities of both students and instructors within academic writing instruction. At its core, it is an autoethnographic study that employs my own writing life as primary data to investigate the impact of narrative writing on teaching pedagogy. The research interrogates the traditional academic prioritization of objective, linear essay structures, questioning how such practices may obscure other legitimate forms of knowledge representation and identity construction within educational settings. Drawing from personal experiences of struggle within the constrictions of academic writing expectations, this work advocates for a narrative pedagogy. It recognizes storytelling as a rich, inclusive medium through which students can engage with texts and express complex understandings. By weaving in elements of motherhood, ancestry, and lived experience, the study underscores the need for a pedagogical shift towards recognizing the multiplicity of writer identities and the value of diverse narrative expressions.

Responding to Student Writing: Strategies for a Distance-Teaching Context identifies viable response techniques for a unique discourse community. An overview of paradigmatic shifts in writing and reading theory, 'frameworks of response' developed to classify response statements for research purposes, and an overview of research in the field provide the theoretical basis for the evaluation of the empirical study. The research comprises a three-fold exploration of the response strategies adopted by Unisa lecturers to the writing of Practical English (PENl00-3) students. In the first phase the focus falls on the effect of intervention on the students' revised drafts of four divergent marking strategies - coded correction, minimal marking, taped response and self assessment. All the experimental strategies tested result in statistically-significant improvement levels in the revised draft. The benefits of self assessment and rewriting, even without tutorial intervention, were demonstrated. The study is unique by virtue of its distance-teaching context, its sample size of 1750 and in the high significance levels achieved. The second phase of the research consisted of a questionnaire that determined 2640 students' expectations with respect to marking, the value of commentary, their perceptions of markers' roles and their opinions of the experimental strategies tested. Their responses were also correlated with their final Practical English examination results. The third phase examined tutorial response. The framework of response, developed for the purpose, revealed that present response strategies represent a regression to the traditional product-orientated approach to writing that contradicts the cognitive and rhetorical axiological basis of the course. There is thus a disjunction between the teaching and theoretical practices. The final chapter bridges this gap by examining issues of audience, transparency, ownership, timing of intervention and training. The researcher believes that she has successfully identified practical and innovative strategies that assist lecturers in a distance-teaching context to break away from old response blueprints. / English Studies / D.Litt. et Phil. (English)

This work of creative nonfiction is meant to explore the effects of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder in American war veterans and their families. As a work of blended literary journalism and memoir, the author interviewed afflicted veterans from World War II to the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars, included scholarly research, and reflected on how her father's dealings with the disorder have affected her family. / by Hillary Boles. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

Touching Brýnstone is the story of Beth, a young journalist who is troubled by misfortunes in her family and work circumstances. In a Pretoria library she is seduced by a book that consoles her and progressively becomes a fetish object. It sparks a journey to Japan, where she arrives to teach English. She is intent on meeting the author, whom she confounds with protagonist and book. This Bildungsroman is an exploration of the complex relationship between inner and outer self, and the struggle towards wholeness. Beth must find a way out of the obsession so that she can return to South Africa with an enriched insight into her shadow self.

A collection of mostly lyrical poems. The poems explore moments of experience and thought relating to longing and belonging, in terms of relations, memory and place. The poems are mostly short and intense. Silence and implied meanings are often as important as what is said; shadows are evoked to recall substance. Though short, the poems are not tightly closed – on the contrary, meanings proliferate in the process of exploration.