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This creative thesis includes a critical introduction that discusses a brief history and definition of the creative nonfiction genre, the ethical dilemmas faced by the writer when telling a true story, and contextualizes my work within contemporary creative nonfiction. Locust Skin contains twenty-eight original pieces describing my experience adjusting to life as a single mother. Narrative segments alternate with short prose poems that add depth of feeling and a sense of wonder and beauty to contrast with the struggles voiced in the narrative. Through research and the study of works by authors such as Mary Karr, Terry Tempest Williams and Norma Cantú, I was able to establish a framework for the creative portion of the thesis. In writing the stories, I discovered the difficulty in negotiating an effective balance between telling a true story while maintaining privacy for the real people included in the narrative. Objectivity, avoiding sentimentality, and writing about myself without producing an overly self-absorbed collection was also a struggle. Overall, the collection contains short prose pieces that strive to reflect the precise poetic prose of Karr's The Liar's Club, while combining human suffering with detailed descriptions of nature illustrated by Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place in an unconventional form reminiscent of Norma Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera.

Home Home is a collection of nonfiction essays addressing themes of mental health, popular culture, queerness, setting, and sexuality. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (MFA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

While the main goal of Three Walled World is to tell the story of my experience as a child actor, its themes run deeper. This is the story that asks the question: Can we grieve the living? Can we grieve a version of ourselves? The play structure of this piece was designed to immerse a reader in theatre. This collection is about theatre, so it was a natural choice to structure it like a play. Direct choices were made to make sure that this collection was one cohesive piece. It has a clear narrative structure and releases information slowly in order to make revelations that much more revealing. The work uses poetic devices as well as integrated flash non-fiction to tell its story. There are complex characters that may get tangled at some moments, to show the internal entanglement of the speaker and the character she plays.

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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.

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.

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