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Master of Arts / Department of English / Elizabeth C. Dodd / At the age of 12, I developed a condition that caused me to hyperventilate, black out, and on occasion, experience horrific visions. Though the visions were sparse at first, they quickly increased in number as weeks progressed. In the eighth grade, they became a daily occurrence. Though at the time I knew there was something wrong with me, I had no idea what was causing my symptoms. Because the episodes caused many inconveniences and embarrassments, I withdrew from social activities and stopped attending school altogether. Believing that my problems were the result of a physical illness, my parents had my blood tested for diseases such as mononucleosis. I also underwent an MRI, which checked for any tumors or abnormalities in my brain. When all of my tests came back negative, I was referred to a psychiatrist. I told the psychiatrist about my inclination to avoid social activities, but refrained from telling her about the hallucinations. Despite my withheld information, she determined I had an extreme case of clinical depression and agoraphobia. Though I was comforted by the notion that I had been granted a diagnosis, I still found it impossible to leave my bedroom without having the strange episodes. As my symptoms of depression increased, my interest in living decreased. But with the help of family and close friends, I was able to persevere and accept my circumstances despite the discomfort they created in my world.

A creative nonfiction thesis, Luke's Mama is a memoir of personal essays that explore how the birth of my son has affected the ways that I relate within and interpret different areas of my life. Chapter I, Introduction, identifies personal and ethical concerns involved in telling my story and explores how others have handled similar issues. Chapter II, Family, illustrates how my relationship with my family of origin has changed since I've become a parent and also how my new family and I interact with society. Chapter III, Calling, depicts my struggle in finding a balance between work and family priorities. Chapter IV, Partner, presents a contrast between my relationship with my partner before and after my son's birth. Chapter V, Parent, displays the beginning of my ever-growing relationship with my son and sense of parenthood.

When I was thirty-three years old, I discovered I was an adoptee. In this memoir of secrecy and love, betrayal and redemption, I reflect on my early experiences as a doted-on only child firmly rooted in the abundant love of my adoptive family, my later struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, my marriage to a fellow-adoptee, my discovery of my own adoption and the subsequent reunion with my birth family, my navigation through the thrills and tensions of newly complicated family dynamics, and my witness to God's perfect timing through it all.

This creative nonfiction dissertation is a memoir of the author's search for the somewhat mysterious hidden past of her father, the lexicographer Charles J. Lovell, who died in 1960, when the author was nine. Her father's early death left the author with many unanswered questions about his past and his family and so she undertakes a search to answer, if possible, some of those questions. Her search takes her to Portland, Maine; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Pasadena, California, where she tries to discover the facts and uncover the forces that shaped her father's life. Along the way, she realizes how profoundly his death affected and shaped her own life, contributing to the theme of loss that pervades the memoir. In addition, she begins to realize how much her mother, Dixie Hefley Lovell, whose significance she previously overlooked, shaped her life. Ultimately, she comes to understand and accept that some of her questions are unanswerable.

Drawing loosely on feminist and post-human notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154), I play with the use of Artistic Memoir as a method to explore my affectual experiences (Braidotti, 2002; Springgay, 2008) as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor working as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India. Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I engage with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out of a collection of child-driven, emergent art projects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through Artistic Memoir. Thinking with philosophies of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materiality (Braidotti, 2002; Stewart, 2007) and the autobiographical nature of a/r/tography (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006), Artistic Memoir has unravelled as a nomadic method, giving my experiences and understandings of the projects a temporal body – a disjointed place for my data, fragments of my affectual reverberations with Goa, to momentarily settle. A fragmented and non-linear collection of poems, images, anecdotes and short stories, this composition begins from the middle and poses no end; its process is designed to stir up questions over answers. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning, being and knowing (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). / Graduate / 2018-05-01 / 0273 / 0727 / 0998 / a.berry089@gmail.com

This thesis disrupts the popular narrative of high-functioning autistic individuals as the ideal and capable special needs people who are worthy of our attention. It characterizes the author’s nonverbal autistic sister as a charming, cunning, even diabolical figure who cannot be pinned to a single interpretation - a figure beyond understanding. Defying convention both stylistically and thematically, this thesis provides a nuanced, in-depth view of a family with special needs as each member copes in different and contradictory ways.

Following in the footsteps of writers Mary Karr, Joan Didion, Russell Baker, and many others, Kelly Rose writes about her childhood, marriage, and subsequent divorce from a New Orleans journalist. Her writing is broken down into various sections, which address her writing influences, her troubled relationship with her mother and her complicated divorce. Finally, the author discusses how these experiences have shaped her writing today.

“I Remember Myself” is a hybrid memoir told through poetry and prose. It tells the story of a young woman struggling to establish herself as an adult whose life is interrupted by chronic pain. The reader follows her relationships, along with her physical, mental, emotional and spiritual journeys through illness and grief. The work explores identity, the nature of the self, and the boundaries between reality and imagination.

The Legend, the Madman, and the Prophet is a memoir about fathers and sons, about the experience of being a son of a man of the Rocky Mountains, a legend grown old. The narrative centers around my struggle with the fact that my father had grown old and sick while I was still young, and my consequent search for other fathers, employing two primary examples—a martial-arts instructor from my high-school years who was later exposed as a pedophile, and the eccentric figure of my ex-girlfriend’s wealthy and traditional Egyptian-American father. The memoir relates the story of my father’s impact on my perception of manhood, my own experience with depression in the wake of his death, and the story of a spiritual search he began in me, which led me from my boyhood Mormonism toward eventual conversion to Islam. This is a story about fathers and sons, about what it means to lose a father, to want a father, and to learn to be a father to myself.