This collection of creative non-fiction essays is written from the perspective of a Protestant Christian church leader’s daughter emerging into adulthood and independence. She labors to define her relationship with God, family, and friends and to determine the complicated, but pervasive role of faith in her life while coping with depression and anxiety; a brain aneurysm and malformation among other health problems; working in an all-male environment in the Houston Chronicle Sports department; the death of her grandparents; the death of a Muslim friend in a murder-suicide shooting; and her troubled relationship with an agnostic friend. Although she expresses her doubts in each scenario, she identifies purpose in the trials and accepts the challenges that accompany being the child of the priest.

"The Bear Went Over the Mountain" is a memoir that marks the people, events, landscape, and era that shapes a women's identity as she journeys from adolescence to adulthood. The story evolves through accretion with the use of a variety of writing strategies such as third person limited omniscient narrator, auto-fiction, mosaic, and disrupted narrative. Other conventions of Creative Non-fiction are used such as dialogue, characterization and plot. Autotopography (photographs) are used to create a motif of ancestral ghosts. They haunt the lives of these characters as they act and react to plots that began long before they were born. An ancestral photograph is placed with the date of the story at the beginning of each section. The mismatching photograph and date is intended to show how these fierce personalities, long dead, have carved their presence into the lives and fates of these characters.

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Ghetto Medic: A Father in the ’Hood, a biographical memoir, examines Baltimore City through the experiences of my father, Bill Hennick, a white paramedic who worked in Baltimore City for over thirty years, beginning his career at the height of the civil rights movement. Numerous stories have been written about African Americans living in slums, struggling to survive, but few are told from the point of view of a white man who endured the traumas of the ghetto while trying to assist them. The Major Work explores what motivated Bill Hennick to risk his life in caring for the poorest of the poor in a city with one of the world’s highest crime rates. What did he think as he witnessed the devastation of Baltimore as upwardly mobile whites and blacks abandoned the ‘wasteland’ and headed for the suburbs? Why did he remain with the underdogs? How did he learn about ghetto culture? How did he win the trust of people in the community who were otherwise suspicious of Caucasians? How did the environment affect him and how did he cope with tragedy? The Major Work also considers whether Bill Hennick survived unscathed. In representing his encounters with an underclass in Baltimore, Ghetto Medic offers a microcosm of race relations and poverty in the United States. It raises questions about the development of the African American ghetto while considering the problem of racial stereotypes, exploring historical influences and offering insight into the chasm that still exists between black and white people. While Bill Hennick bandaged gunshot wounds, gave mouth to mouth resuscitation and assisted in birthing the babies of people who were ignored by the wider community, he tried all the while to provide a stable life for his family, sheltering us from the dangers of his job with his sense of humour. His life as a ghetto medic stands in stark contrast to suburban family life. He began his career wanting to make a difference. But did the ghetto change him? In my exegesis accompanying Ghetto Medic, I have tried to demonstrate how creative nonfiction can be used as a powerful medium in initiating social change and building a bridge between races. The genre liberated me from the constraints of traditional nonfiction while allowing me to preserve factual and historical integrity in the overall work. Because I was attempting to tell someone else’s story from his point of view, it became necessary and inevitable to understand my responsibilities, roles and rights as a creative nonfiction writer. The exegesis considers the evolution of Ghetto Medic from a dictated autobiography, based on a series of transcribed interviews interspersed with Baltimore’s history, to a ‘biographical memoir’, including my personal recollections of my father. In this process I became both listener and storyteller. My exegesis describes my experimentation with different points of view, analyses the collaborative process between subject and author and considers the relationship between assumed objectivity and ‘truth’. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

Ghetto Medic: A Father in the ’Hood, a biographical memoir, examines Baltimore City through the experiences of my father, Bill Hennick, a white paramedic who worked in Baltimore City for over thirty years, beginning his career at the height of the civil rights movement. Numerous stories have been written about African Americans living in slums, struggling to survive, but few are told from the point of view of a white man who endured the traumas of the ghetto while trying to assist them. The Major Work explores what motivated Bill Hennick to risk his life in caring for the poorest of the poor in a city with one of the world’s highest crime rates. What did he think as he witnessed the devastation of Baltimore as upwardly mobile whites and blacks abandoned the ‘wasteland’ and headed for the suburbs? Why did he remain with the underdogs? How did he learn about ghetto culture? How did he win the trust of people in the community who were otherwise suspicious of Caucasians? How did the environment affect him and how did he cope with tragedy? The Major Work also considers whether Bill Hennick survived unscathed. In representing his encounters with an underclass in Baltimore, Ghetto Medic offers a microcosm of race relations and poverty in the United States. It raises questions about the development of the African American ghetto while considering the problem of racial stereotypes, exploring historical influences and offering insight into the chasm that still exists between black and white people. While Bill Hennick bandaged gunshot wounds, gave mouth to mouth resuscitation and assisted in birthing the babies of people who were ignored by the wider community, he tried all the while to provide a stable life for his family, sheltering us from the dangers of his job with his sense of humour. His life as a ghetto medic stands in stark contrast to suburban family life. He began his career wanting to make a difference. But did the ghetto change him? In my exegesis accompanying Ghetto Medic, I have tried to demonstrate how creative nonfiction can be used as a powerful medium in initiating social change and building a bridge between races. The genre liberated me from the constraints of traditional nonfiction while allowing me to preserve factual and historical integrity in the overall work. Because I was attempting to tell someone else’s story from his point of view, it became necessary and inevitable to understand my responsibilities, roles and rights as a creative nonfiction writer. The exegesis considers the evolution of Ghetto Medic from a dictated autobiography, based on a series of transcribed interviews interspersed with Baltimore’s history, to a ‘biographical memoir’, including my personal recollections of my father. In this process I became both listener and storyteller. My exegesis describes my experimentation with different points of view, analyses the collaborative process between subject and author and considers the relationship between assumed objectivity and ‘truth’. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

This collection of memoir essays chronicles the author's 19 year struggle with chronic depression. "The Invisible Dragon" explores the onset of the disease and its cure. "The Silent Typewriter" looks at how it affected the author as a writer. "Roses for Trish" discusses how it affected his wife. "My Mother's Son" explores the possibility that he inherited depression from his mother. The final essay, "The Dragon Returns" probes the author's life in 2012 with the probability that he has a personality disorder. The preface examines several depression memoirs and explores the strategies used by William Styron, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Kay Redfield Jamison to prevent sliding into the pitfalls inherent in a linear structure. Among these are the use of alternative structures, language, characterization, focus and imagery.

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.

While investigating incidents where imperfection improves the whole instead of ruining it—across disciplines including animation, particle physics, and rug making—the narrator of “Botched” remembers an early childhood trauma, and explores how this flaw might have shaped her own life. “Botched” is a literary exploration into the heart of imperfection, blending fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and photography.

The following thesis is a memoir in essays. The narrative is a reflection of memory as a chaotic system. Each essay stands alone as a single memory but also is part of the larger story of the writer's life. The fragmentation of the story lends itself to what Roland Barthes called a readerly text. That is, a reader may enter the text at any point and read the chapters in an order, and by doing this, the reader creates his/her own version of the author's life. The overall narrative arch is one of self-discovery and self-destruction.