OFFSHORE is a collection of lyric essays that examines the intersections between human cultures and the natural world. The essays inspect issues of identity and belonging in different geographic, cultural, and political landscapes. Part one of the book centers on the cultural and natural landscapes of Hawaii and Japan. Part two explores interpersonal relationships in Montana. And part three focuses on social justice issues in Nicaragua and Florida. Each of the essays in this collection balances intellectual exploration with personal narrative and poetic description, allowing the essays to be simultaneously concept-driven while maintaining lyric force.

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In this essay I am trying to intertwine personal memories with reflections on the essay as a genre, exploring the subjective consistency of objective realities. The question pursued is this: How can a mutually enriching relationship between academia and creative writing be envisaged? The essayistic tradition can be seen as an answer to an increasingly specialised professionalism in academia which is in danger of alienating itself from its social, political and sensory contexts. These contexts produce the very uncertainties which are at the core of the essay’s concern.

The essay is here seen as a genre of the in-between. Commonly not conceived as a proper academic genre, its methods seemingly not as decent as the academic discourse, the essay justifies itself precisely by questioning the dubious order of the latter, as Adorno outlined. The essay seems to be understood adequately if characterized by its rhetoric or its language rather than defined by generic terms. Being both object-oriented and subject-oriented, in accepting no end of the topic, in beginning somewhere in medias res, etc., the essay might be a medium of representation of life itself.

German academic writing most commonly ignores not only the reader but also the author, which leads to a rather extravagant stylistic tone. The personal essay, as Lopate describes it and as it has been practiced from Montaigne on, still doesn’t enjoy the status it deserves in German academic writing. It shows a way of dealing with one’s authorship that opens up numerous subject-related values of (not only) literary writing.

The project explores the ‘Gothic Line’ as observed in ornament. Escaping strictly geometrical means of defining, the study focuses on capturing the Line’s elusive properties in connection to chosen architectural elements. With selected properties, the two-dimensional principles are extracted into the 3D environment. Using parametric design tools each feature is transformed into multiple prototypes of three-dimensional interpretation. The project aims to capture subtlety of the Gothic Line while providing a system enabling creation of architecturally relevant ornamental structures.

Pebbles and Shards is a collection of personal essays based on family relationships that focus upon motherhood, responsibility, and the complexity of love and loss. The essays explore how people cope with the inevitability of loss and how they move beyond that loss to find something meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. They reflect upon success and failure in the face of loss and how, either way, life goes on, heedless of people’s desires and plans. The essays in Pebbles and Shards, while meant to stand alone, are thematically connected so that, read together, each story resonates with the others. In “Promises,” I explore the fear of watching my mother die of Alzheimer’s disease. In related essays “Frame by Frame” and “In Darkness,” I focus on my mother’s efforts to struggle with Alzheimer’s and how, as an adopted daughter, I underwent a role-reversal and became the mother figure. Other essays, such as “Heart of a Deadhead” and “Circus,” consider the mothering impulse, especially the guilt and conflict that so often accompany my desire to nurture others. In attempting to support and strengthen those who seem “weak,” I have sometimes found that my own actions and thoughts underscore a deeper weakness in myself. As a collection, Pebbles and Shards contemplates the suffering and joy that is a family