The author looks back over a long career working as a stage lighting technician in the American theatre, sharing personal experiences, and providing an insider’s view of the art, history, and culture of theatrical lighting.

Confessions of a Forager is a chronicle of Lauren Hudgins's adventures and mistakes while searching and eating wild food, and a questioning her vegetarian morals. Readers visit organized foraging projects through the Wild Food Adventures of expert John Kallas, the Mushroom Gathering at Breitenbush hot springs, and the Portland Fruit Tree Project, which turns a wasted bounty into an opportunity for public nourishment. Memoir sections of the thesis examine how food-related habits are passed down from parent to child, exploring the family's foraging history through perspective of the author's father. It is also a consideration of the community and personal relationships formed over noncommercial, hand-harvested food.

Where We Belong is more than a memoir. It is a love story about the untimely death of the oldest of five daughters born to a prominent New Haven, Connecticut family. It is also a tale of hubris, rage and frustration, a Greek tragedy about a man's life as re-examined through the lens of the two weeks his wife spent dying, a tale in which chronic illness and good intentions ensure the death of a loving wife, artist and mother. The journey on which her husband takes the reader explores a health care system oblivious to her plight, her family's unwitting complicity and a 12-step mythology that unfolds while he, her six weeping children and her aging mother helplessly look on. The author endures an agony that dwarfs incentives to lie, learning that people lie out of fear, and genuine grief supplants fear with the stark reality of what we fear most: death. Where We Belong gives voice to the internal dialogue the author encounters when reexamining not just memories, but the accoutrements of memory, as well. It is a voice that addresses his own grandiosity, sentimentalism and self-pity in the face of his wife's death, in addition to those details, circumstances and impressions that speak to the arrogance he brought to the task of being all he thought she and her six children needed him to be. He concludes the task was well beyond him, a realization evoked by the gut wrenching decision to literally "pull the plug" on this heartbreaking tale of reconstituted hope and great promise reduced to rubble by chronic illness, alcoholism, drug addiction and death. Born is the lesson that when we grieve, we are free to be ourselves. When we are free to be ourselves, we are free to love again.

Oregon City lies at the base of Willamette Falls. It was one of the few known points in the Oregon Territory, as the destination for thousands coming overland to lay claim to the acres upon acres of forested land. Presently, Oregon City is known by its proximity to Portland. The two neighboring settlements were considered "long-distance," when on a spring evening in 1889, energy generated from the falls was carried through 14 miles of recently-laid copper wire to power streetlights in downtown Portland's Chapman Square. It was the first ever long-distance transmission of electricity. Oregon City, the oldest incorporated settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, is a town in transition, as it attempts to reinvent itself as something more than an old mill town, building on its natural beauty and historical significance. This essay collection showcases the history and character of Oregon City, highlighting the people and places that have called it home.

On Earth is a collection of poems celebrating, investigating, and documenting human relationships, spiritual devotion, and both natural and cultivated environments. The focus of all five sections is largely agricultural and botanical, reflecting often on the writer’s experience of farming in Maryland and South Carolina. Onionlight is a long-form segmented essay that leaps between diverse topics including gastronomy, the agricultural and ethnobotanical history of onions, the history and culture of Bermuda, scallop shell fossils found in present-day Virginia, bulb flowers in the Amaryllidaceae family, intimate relationships, personal history, love, marriage, the specific history of the Vidalia onion, and farm experiences in the South. Short “onion epigraphs” from writers like C.D. Wright, Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton, and Carol Ann Duffy link the individual segments.

TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD is an ethnographic memoir concerning the narrator’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, South America. The plot is structured around a moral crisis in his rural Paraguayan village. The narrator’s neighbor, a man in his late twenties, threatened to kill his partner and her two children. The Paraguayan police were made aware of the situation but did nothing. Peace Corps management also instructed the narrator to do nothing. In TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD, this moral crisis is explored within the contexts of post-colonial power structures, including economic and ecologic geographies, intersections of community and government, and the colonial-indigenous language continuum of Paraguay (Spanish-Guaraní). Further, these neighbors’ localized trauma is located within historical, colonial trauma. Of particular concern is the role that languages – English, Spanish, and Guaraní – play in constructing power, worldview, and relationships within the village.

Assisted migration is a term for when people take species and move them out of their historic ranges because they are threatened by climate change. No minor hobby, invasiveness is a a risk that keeps many scientists up at night. Just ask any ecologist from the South. Kudzu vine covers some 120,000 new acres annually, its control thought "non financially feasible anymore" by the USDA. In the Chicago Shipping Channel, Asian silver carp, also known as "jumping fish" for their habits of leaping into the faces of boaters, threaten to swim into the Great Lakes, decimating $7 billion of fishing industries. The list of invasive species is extensive, but the consequences of not moving species are equally severe. Up to fifty-two percent of all life is slated for extinction as soon as 2100 because of climate change. And if global warming is overhauling the planet anyway, it makes little sense to draw fences around wildlands anymore and expect them to stay just as they were. Although my book is aimed in part at nature/science readers and will be well-researched, my prose ultimately uses a whimsical, probing stance that wider audiences will find appealing. Particularly the jargon-free tales of Florida panthers, rabbits in Australia, Texas snow monkeys, kudzu, Iowan prairies and the ancient, rare and dying (memorably named) stinking cedar, and the people who are assisting their migrations, should prove entertaining and instructive to readers who are interested in questioning what it means to be human in the 21st century. The guiding questions for this book are how can we tweak what we barely understand (ecosystems and nature) but then how can we not given the calamities that we face? And, perhaps more philosophically, what does it mean to be a human, a member of the living, in the age of human-induced climate change? These are two paradoxes that I hope to spend 60,000 words sorting out.

The essay is an exploration of a thought, an idea, an experience. To essay is simply to attempt. A conclusion is not always reached, a solution is not always found, but the writer is compelled to attempt to contain the thought, the idea, the experience, in words on the page. The performance essay makes the same attempt. But where the written essay is complete on the page, the performance essay is subject to constant transformation by the necessity of the physical body to the finished work. Not the body of the writer, but the body of the performer who stretches and bends the writer-shaped space of the essay to make it fit, completing the work in the creation of this new shape. This is the excitement for the writer of the performance essay. To surrender control of the work to another artist and see what they will make of it.

<p>This essay examines a small selection of Swedish newsreel and documentary short films, primarily travelogues, produced shortly before and after the second world war. The general aim is to expose differences in the representation of “The Other” and the “ethnic Swede” by applying a critical discourse analysis. The purpose is to illuminate how the material positions the latter as the norm and then contextualize this with xenophobic currents that had developed up until the middle of the twentieth century. Theoretical and methodological framework is drawn from the field of cultural studies as well as the nonfiction film. The analysis shows that the Swedish newsreel and travelogue indeed, to a high degree, possessed these currents even though part of them, mainly the anti-Semitic ideas, seems to relapse after the Holocaust.</p>

This thesis examines five books by the American author Philip Roth commonly referred to as the “Roth Books,” which are The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography(1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004). These books, held together by the author’s proper name, are often viewed as texts that conflate fiction and nonfiction or demonstrate the “fictionality” of all factual narrative accounts in compliance with well-known postmodernist and poststructuralist theories. Contrary to this view, I argue that a valid understanding of the Roth Books demands that we acknowledge that these works represent a series of quite different ways for the author to transform his own life into written form, a creative act which is manifested in both fictional and nonfictional writing. In the attempt to argue this view, I turn to a field of study where the question about criteria for distinguishing fictional from nonfictional narrative literature has occupied a prominent place: narrative theory. However, my theoretical and methodological point of departure does not align itself with the “standard” paradigm in narrative theory with its origin in classical, structuralist narratology. Rather, the thesis promotes a pragmatic and rhetorical perspective which is argued to better account for how we read and make sense of different narrative texts. In opposition to standard narrative theory, where all narratives are considered to adhere to the same model of communication, I argue in favour of a view where narrative fiction and narrative nonfiction are conceived as distinct communicative practices. I open the thesis by showing that Roth’s books contribute to the discussion on how to distinguish fictional from nonfictional narrative texts (Chapter 1). I then continue by approaching the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in general theoretical terms (Chapter 2). And in what follows (Chapters 3-5), I present a reading where the Roth Books are juxtaposed against each other. This reading demonstrates how these texts, although in some sense related, because of their divergent qualities and differing intentions still communicate differently with their readers, inviting a readerly attention that is dissimilar from one work to the other.