High Summer is a manuscript-length compilation of narrative science essays that trace the relationship the narrator has with her father. These essays focus on the ongoing presence of drugs, their historical basis, and their pharmacological effects on the body. / by Michelle Hasler Martinez. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Magister Artium - MA / Molla's Music is a novella about Maureen (Molla), a white Afrikaans woman born in 1935 in Cape Town, who faced poverty and abandonment before apartheid and who, during apartheid, faced the choice between an unwanted pregnancy with a married man, and a carreer in music funded by the father who had betrayed her. Maureen is introduced in three sections with very different voices in each. In the first section she is depicted in the context of being cared for by a single mother with severe post natal depression. The short chapters and long sentences reflect the naïvity of the subject, whose unfiltered observations allow the reader to bear witness to the traumas that dictate her character later in life. She was so ashamed of her poverty, her father's abandonment, and her pregnancy, that she hid all memories of her past from her children and grandchildren and almost managed to die with all her secrets in tact. The second section becomes more sophisticated with longer chapters. The reader is guided through the fifties by a young adult whose adolescent memories inform the events that unfold over a mere two days. Finally, the last section consists of only one chapter, but it reviews an entire life. It is written in the first person, revealing the identity of the narrator. Maureen taught herself piano before school. Her father played the violin and her dedication to music seems to be a mechanism for connecting to him and what his absence from her life represents. It is an absense that eludes consolidation until her death. Molla proved to be such a gifted child that she skipped two years of school and took on music as an extra subject until matric, but financial strain and the shackles of patriarchy limited her options and only after years of working, does she apply to the UCT college of music. She inherits a piano from her landlords, who are evicted during the implementation of the Group Areas Act of 1957. In the years after that, playing piano becomes her private liberation practised in plain sight, on the only heirloom that persists from her past. When she dies, her granddaughter has a heritage that beckons to be resolved and remembered. She does not play the piano she inherited from her grandmother, but starts to investigate its past. In the course of Molla's Music, I explore themes of Afrikaner identity, and question modes of being for white Afrikaans women in South Africa today. By offering an intimate depiction of an individual's search for meaning, while negotiating the forces of Apartheid and patriarchy, especially as a confluence of forces, I hope to gain clarity with regard to my own questions about identity.

The ether was proposed by Enlightenment natural philosophers as an undetectable substance filling the space between the stars, that held them in place and supported the propagation of their light across space. In The Subtle Ether: A Memoir of the Space Between, insights from the history of the ether are threaded through my experience of clearing the family home after the death of my parents, and inform a reflection on ‘spaces between' memories, family members, and between ourselves and the world. This thesis both proposes and practises writing creative nonfiction as a method of first person enquiry that bears a familial resemblance to contemplative traditions, and that can acknowledge and mourn the hiddenness of things by writing into the ‘space between' ourselves and the world. Seeking a new synthesis which meshes experience, emotion, observation, and reflection on the insights of science, I employ mixed modes of lyrical, aesthetic, philosophical and personal inquiry. The central claim of this thesis is that awareness and acceptance of hiddenness as the nature of all things counteracts human hubris. While drawing from the example of continuous, open-ended questioning the scientific search for the ‘ether' offers, this thesis both argues and demonstrates that scientific and analytical methods alone cannot address this hiddenness, and that creative practice can be an effective way to think about and communicate what cannot be directly known. I argue that the desire for complete knowledge is a form of acquisitiveness and control, and that recognising the limited scope of human senses and reason undercuts human centrality and sole agency. Crafting an artwork out of contemplation of that which cannot be directly observed opens a space of reflection in which a paradoxical truth can be held in awareness; that the external reality we observe is other than us but also inseparable from us.

Children like it simple, powerful and compelling, don't they? The "spirit" of this book makes the art of thanksgiving for children a simple, powerful yet compelling force. I Did It! I Said Thank You is a collection of short and simple thanksgiving notes for children during this month of thanksgiving and all throughout the year. Through the eyes and heart of a five-year old, we have captured and compiled short focused notes about the true essence of "why" and "what" children are thankful for. We have attempted to organize and compile it into daily reasons for thanksgiving for a whole month to preserve this all important "trigger" for children all around the world. "THANK YOU" is an "eight-letter word" so simple, yet so powerful and profound. Children are taught to include the art of thanksgiving in their quiver of manners and vocabulary. Children can and will learn about the valuable gift of thanksgiving through vivid visual illustrations and the compelling simple thanksgiving notes. This book is written for all children in every nation and every continent who want to simply say THANK YOU to the eternal source of all things precious and for the gift of life. Join us as we explore the world of thanksgiving through the eyes and heart of a kid. Enjoy! / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1081/thumbnail.jpg

Robert Morgan's Nonfiction Books

What can lead authors to come up with entirely different textual portraits of the same nation? My dissertation is an exploration of the rhetorical construction of emotion in nonfiction narratives about the United States from the Second World War to the present. I emphasize the importance of one particular rhetorical strategy: synecdoche, a substitution of part for the whole. I argue that synecdoche is as much a strategy for seduction as it is a rhetorical strategy, and therefore an emotional strategy as well. As the authors in my dissertation -- John Steinbeck, Charles Kuralt, Truman Capote and Sarah Vowell -- write of the nation, they simultaneously write of their irresistible, irrevocable attachment to the nation. In this way, these studies of the United States act like a Rorschach test, as a projection of affect onto what the authors claim to be an objective national portrait. (And we respond to them accordingly: consider the number of "America's" we encounter daily, and how many of them we automatically accept or dismantle.) The ambivalence the authors in my study feel, I would argue, comes only after the portrait is complete. The pleasure is in the process: the result is seldom as rewarding. It has become commonplace to argue that "nations provoke fantasy." I argue that nations provoke fantasy because they are necessarily synecdochical. Synecdoche provokes fantasy because synecdoche is fantasy: the seduction of another through the persuasion that similar parts represent shared wholes. However, the nation is not only a fantasy. This is where the word "fictionable" enters into the study. As one major critic has defined it, the "fictionable" is that which is "available for conversion into fiction." The "nation" as a concept is certainly fictionable, and it is well worth considering -- as an entity and experience -- that has become so much a part of the way we tell stories about ourselves, that it can come to function as a backdrop on which we project both our political ideologies and personal desires.

While much has been written about the conflicts, supposed or actual, between logic and faith, science and religion, few accounts of the personal turmoil these conflicts can cause exist. Likewise, many of these nonfiction accounts are written from a distinctly polarized place leaning either to science or faith. In this thesis, I mix research and history with memoir and a sense of poetry to explore my personal experience with this conflict. At its outset, I hoped for this project to capture my struggle as an orthodox member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in dealing with the questions my own sense of logic provided that institution. This goal was achieved in part. However, by the end of the project I had also captured a narrative exploration of my experience leaving the LDS Church and learning, instead of trusting the authority provided by a structure of orthodoxy, to feel comfortable trusting my own sense of reason. The first chapter captures my initial struggle with acknowledging questions within a religious structure. This is accomplished, in part, by merging the personal narrative with a researched account of French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I show both his struggle with questions and faith, and my desire to lean on his example as someone who acknowledged question without leaving his faith--in Chardin's case the Catholic Church. The second chapter, again following this pattern of mixing research with memoir, explores the feelings of exile I had during the time while I was still an orthodox member of the LDS church. This personal narrative is woven into several historical and literary accounts of exile. In the third chapter, I struggle with the question of what to do with the spiritual experiences I had during my time in the LDS Church after having separated myself from that institution. The short fourth chapter takes a strictly narrative line as I address my spiritual and mental outlook upon the completion of this project.

This is a book-length work of prose including fiction, creative non-fiction, with small amounts of prose poetry all focusing on the exploration of female sexuality, gender roles, relationships among men and women, and mothers and daughters. The aim of the individual pieces in this collection is to enter the cultural conversation of these issues by presenting a hybrid of genres that beg for an understanding of truth vs. fiction, and the fine line between those things when dealing with matters of the body and mind.

This thesis comprises of a series of personal essays exploring intersections and parallels between my life and D.H. Lawrence’s classic novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The essays discuss, among other things, Lawrence and tuberculosis, gamekeeping, mining in 20th century England, love, education, and youth. Thus, the collection creates a literary memoir.

A memoir that focuses on the complications of growing as the only daughter of a mother from Okinawa and a father from the United States. They met at a nightclub, where her mother worked as a waitress, outside an Army base, where her father was stationed during U.S. Military occupation of the island. These marriages between Okinawan women and U.S. Servicemen have been quite common since 1945, after the Battle of Okinawa, when a massive complex of bases was first established. Okinawan women must leave their homes and their families to follow their husbands to the United States, where they are faced with challenges of racism, language barriers and isolation. Their children often grow up rejecting and resenting their Okinawan identities, causing further alienation.