La Carroza Dorada (The Golden Carriage) is a collection of essays and poetry that details the narrator’s life growing up as an immigrant from Uruguay in the United States. Through each piece, the narrator explores themes in her own life relating to family, grief, self-identity, gender roles, language, distance, and more that directly relate to the perspective of a young immigrant. Inevitably, these personal themes connect to broader issues that affect every immigrant such as the Latinx experience, familial hardships, social/economic class differences, and cultural differences. The narrator explores the American Dream and the balancing act between dream and reality in order to better understand herself and the world around her.

These personal essays present a twenty-something's evolving attitudes toward her occupations. Each essay explores a different job-from birthday party clown, to seitan-maker, to psychiatric den mother-while circling around sub-themes of addiction, disability, sex, love, nature, and nourishment (both food and otherwise). Through landscape, extended metaphor and symbol, and recurring characters, the collection addresses how a person's work often defines how she sees the world. Each of the narrator's jobs thrusts her into networks of people and places that both helps and impedes the process of self-discovery. As a whole, the essay collection functions as a memoir, tracking an often-universal journey, one that many undertake in order to discover a meaningful life, and sometimes, eventually, a career.

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"Like many young Christians, Kevin Brown had what he believed to be a strong faith, one that provided answers to all the questions he had and might encounter. He even attended a Christian college and considered becoming a youth minister. While there, though, he began having doubts about his faith, began asking questions that came from discussions both in and out of the classroom-questions he couldn't find answers to. When the church told him he shouldn't be asking those questions, he left the church and his faith behind. He kept asking questions, though, and kept looking for a faith that would allow him to have questions and doubts, yet still believe. What he found may offer an answer to the religious divide in our society-one that separates evangelical from progressive Christians, one that separates sacred from secular. In this memoir, Brown describes his spiritual journey from his first faith to the loss of faith to the way he found back to a Christianity where he can ask those questions, a different way than he knew before. He still has questions and doubts, but he also has faith, in spite of and because of those questions and doubts."--BACK COVER / https://dc.etsu.edu/alumni_books/1008/thumbnail.jpg

Great swaths of Southeastern Louisiana are drowning, land giving way to water at an alarming rate. Since the 1920s, Louisiana has lost more than 1,800 square miles of wetlands to open water, an area about the size of the state of Delaware. In the same amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Breaking Bad, our state loses the equivalent of a football field’s-worth of solid ground to the rising seas. My thesis is the first part of an accessible creative nonfiction book that tells the story of what’s happening in my home state. To what extent is it feasible to engineer ourselves out of harm’s way? What communities get relocated, and on whose terms? Most centrally, how will we address the troubling gulf between what we know to be true about our changing climate and what we are willing to do about it?

A few stories about the time I rode my bike across the Southern United States.

Ghetto Medic: A Father in the ’Hood, a biographical memoir, examines Baltimore City through the experiences of my father, Bill Hennick, a white paramedic who worked in Baltimore City for over thirty years, beginning his career at the height of the civil rights movement. Numerous stories have been written about African Americans living in slums, struggling to survive, but few are told from the point of view of a white man who endured the traumas of the ghetto while trying to assist them. The Major Work explores what motivated Bill Hennick to risk his life in caring for the poorest of the poor in a city with one of the world’s highest crime rates. What did he think as he witnessed the devastation of Baltimore as upwardly mobile whites and blacks abandoned the ‘wasteland’ and headed for the suburbs? Why did he remain with the underdogs? How did he learn about ghetto culture? How did he win the trust of people in the community who were otherwise suspicious of Caucasians? How did the environment affect him and how did he cope with tragedy? The Major Work also considers whether Bill Hennick survived unscathed. In representing his encounters with an underclass in Baltimore, Ghetto Medic offers a microcosm of race relations and poverty in the United States. It raises questions about the development of the African American ghetto while considering the problem of racial stereotypes, exploring historical influences and offering insight into the chasm that still exists between black and white people. While Bill Hennick bandaged gunshot wounds, gave mouth to mouth resuscitation and assisted in birthing the babies of people who were ignored by the wider community, he tried all the while to provide a stable life for his family, sheltering us from the dangers of his job with his sense of humour. His life as a ghetto medic stands in stark contrast to suburban family life. He began his career wanting to make a difference. But did the ghetto change him? In my exegesis accompanying Ghetto Medic, I have tried to demonstrate how creative nonfiction can be used as a powerful medium in initiating social change and building a bridge between races. The genre liberated me from the constraints of traditional nonfiction while allowing me to preserve factual and historical integrity in the overall work. Because I was attempting to tell someone else’s story from his point of view, it became necessary and inevitable to understand my responsibilities, roles and rights as a creative nonfiction writer. The exegesis considers the evolution of Ghetto Medic from a dictated autobiography, based on a series of transcribed interviews interspersed with Baltimore’s history, to a ‘biographical memoir’, including my personal recollections of my father. In this process I became both listener and storyteller. My exegesis describes my experimentation with different points of view, analyses the collaborative process between subject and author and considers the relationship between assumed objectivity and ‘truth’. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

Ghetto Medic: A Father in the ’Hood, a biographical memoir, examines Baltimore City through the experiences of my father, Bill Hennick, a white paramedic who worked in Baltimore City for over thirty years, beginning his career at the height of the civil rights movement. Numerous stories have been written about African Americans living in slums, struggling to survive, but few are told from the point of view of a white man who endured the traumas of the ghetto while trying to assist them. The Major Work explores what motivated Bill Hennick to risk his life in caring for the poorest of the poor in a city with one of the world’s highest crime rates. What did he think as he witnessed the devastation of Baltimore as upwardly mobile whites and blacks abandoned the ‘wasteland’ and headed for the suburbs? Why did he remain with the underdogs? How did he learn about ghetto culture? How did he win the trust of people in the community who were otherwise suspicious of Caucasians? How did the environment affect him and how did he cope with tragedy? The Major Work also considers whether Bill Hennick survived unscathed. In representing his encounters with an underclass in Baltimore, Ghetto Medic offers a microcosm of race relations and poverty in the United States. It raises questions about the development of the African American ghetto while considering the problem of racial stereotypes, exploring historical influences and offering insight into the chasm that still exists between black and white people. While Bill Hennick bandaged gunshot wounds, gave mouth to mouth resuscitation and assisted in birthing the babies of people who were ignored by the wider community, he tried all the while to provide a stable life for his family, sheltering us from the dangers of his job with his sense of humour. His life as a ghetto medic stands in stark contrast to suburban family life. He began his career wanting to make a difference. But did the ghetto change him? In my exegesis accompanying Ghetto Medic, I have tried to demonstrate how creative nonfiction can be used as a powerful medium in initiating social change and building a bridge between races. The genre liberated me from the constraints of traditional nonfiction while allowing me to preserve factual and historical integrity in the overall work. Because I was attempting to tell someone else’s story from his point of view, it became necessary and inevitable to understand my responsibilities, roles and rights as a creative nonfiction writer. The exegesis considers the evolution of Ghetto Medic from a dictated autobiography, based on a series of transcribed interviews interspersed with Baltimore’s history, to a ‘biographical memoir’, including my personal recollections of my father. In this process I became both listener and storyteller. My exegesis describes my experimentation with different points of view, analyses the collaborative process between subject and author and considers the relationship between assumed objectivity and ‘truth’. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

The educational shift to the common core requires educators to increase the amount of informational text that is used within their classroom. The struggle for whole group use of informational text related to units of study proved to be challenging for teachers at the study site. Guided by constructivist theory that states learners must have the means to construct knowledge and understanding, the purpose of the study was to explore the current practices and needs of teachers in reaction to the increased use of informational texts. The research questions addressed the teaching strategies and guidance that teachers provide for students' learning, what current challenges teachers have, and their needs for better implementation of the Common Core Standards. Eleven teachers from 3rd to 5th grades were interviewed and participated in a focus group. Analysis and organization of the data through its transcription and coding led to the emergence of 4 themes: the need for professional development, time management, integration of curriculum, and creativity in the language arts classroom. The findings inspired the creation of a 3-day professional development to provide teachers with an opportunity to collaborate, create, engage, and learn. This study supports positive social change by providing a resource for teachers to better serve students in having the ability to read for information in an integrated manner. This ability will help students in their educational responsibilities and perhaps future endeavors in understanding societal issues.

This thesis is an examination of the geographical oddities of my past, the process of transitioning between worlds, and the kinds of relationships that survive those transitions. In a world where I can fly from Atlanta to Beijing non-stop in fifteen hours, I sometimes convince myself that geography no longer matters. I was born in the tropics, raised in the arctic, and became a dual citizen of the same two countries twice. I could distinguish gunshots from fireworks by age five and have ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad in both directions. I have milked a water buffalo and played Tchaikovsky’s piano and been interrogated by a Maoist by firelight on the top of a mountain at the far western edge of the earth. I have seen the Louvre and the Hermitage and the highest point in Iowa and The Pit, the outhouse that connects directly to Hell. I sometimes believe I can go anywhere. See anything. Befriend anyone. But I deceive myself. Some places are so far away, it takes years to settle, to adjust, to reach a level of familiarity where the world outside your window, and the people in that world, no longer shock you. I have seldom stayed that long. The transient life does not get easier, but you can get better at it. I have gotten better at it. Distance is a matter of perspective and convenience and desire. The farther two places, or two people, or two lifestyles are from each other, the subtler and more intricate the connecting lines. My contentment and sanity and relationships depend upon deciphering those lines. This is the story of what I’ve learned.