One defining root of the essay is its goal to articulate thoughts, simple and complex, into a piece that readers might deliberate and rest and even rely on. On this or that or the other-- "on" being a word suggesting sturdiness and foundation. On and On and On is a collection of personal essays which intends to examine the theories of "truth" (another word associated with sturdiness,) within personal experiences, as they are delivered through creative means. When truths in life are examined and explored in essayistic ways, we discover more profound axioms of the soul that would otherwise remain hidden. This collection first establishes the essay's motivation and pursuit for truth, and then elaborates on the means by which an essay may most effectively achieve truth while navigating "creativity." Following this analysis, the personal essays implement those theoretical strategies, encouraging an emphasis on truth throughout explorations of human experience and thought. The essays vary in subject and style, but are largely tied together through the theme of desire for control over what feels chaotic, or understanding of what feels unknown"¦ that is, the desire for truths that give us peace.

Written in first person, NOTHING NORMAL HAPPENS TO ME is a memoir in essays that traces the narrator’s journey from self-destruction to creation. Part one encompasses the narrator’s lost years, after she breaks free from the tyranny of her mentally ill mother and goes to live on her own at 17. Part two provides context for those bad girl years, exploring her childhood when she identified with her histrionic mother. Part three comprises stories about the narrator’s years of awakening when she seeks out transcendence, faith, and a family of her own. The pieces vary tonally and stylistically as they attempt to trace the maturing voice of the narrator. Like SEEKING RAPTURE: SCENES FROM A WOMAN’S LIFE by Kathryn Harrison, this collection centers on a young girl, who without her mother’s love, struggles to love herself. It is both a cautionary tale and a story of redemption.

As is typical to the way I write essays, I did not understand the goal of this collection until I wrote the last essay, “Blue Heron Goodbye.” Up until that point I was calling the collection “Why We Need Bloodhounds.” This title felt sufficiently representative to me of the goal of the collection because in this essay, I use discussions canvassing the Bloodhounds' strong sense of smell to focus my discussion about the world of the heart. However, when I wrote “Blue Heron Goodbye,” I realized I wasn't only interested in the struggles of the human heart (a broad topic too heavy for any collection) but finding a place for my heart to live. What I mean by that, is that everyone has struggles and joys but what makes living feel worthwhile, to me, is that I can examine those emotions in a place of calm, away from the jarring pace of the whizzing world. In the essay, “Blue Heron Goodbye”, the heron is surrounded by man's technology of speed—a concrete freeway and zipping cars—yet the heron finds solitude by her churning river. I find solitude in my essays. This collection's goal is the heron's goal: to find the hidden hope of self-examination in solitude amid chaos.

Inspired by the work of writers Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and motivated by celebrity prevaricator James Frey, Journey to the Scars: A White Trash Epic is a memoir that attempts to redefine the genre by applying the ideals and themes of gonzo and new journalism. The opening chapter, "The Diary of John Doe Frankenstein" tells the story of a pivotal event in the author's life. Immediately following this narrative of a near fatal motorcycle accident, the author/narrator's reliability is called into question and the remainder of the memoir is the story of the author's efforts to uncover the truth about himself, and more importantly, the events and motivating forces that led to the author's almost Near Death Experience. Starting with a nonjudgmental look at the life of his parents before he was born, our unreliable narrator/author hopes to improve the reader's opinion of himself while also uncovering the true stories behind all the fictional ones he's been telling himself and others his entire life. As he learns more about where he came from, he begins to try to understand why he has made some of the decisions in his own life. Life is one long party for James Patrick Makowski and he shares his experiences not as a victim of his choices, but as a lonely man who just doesn't want to be left off of any of Life's guest lists. In a final attempt to improve his credibility with the reader, the author retells the story of his accident with as much focus on factual detail and verifiable events as possible. His select poems reveal his attempts at emotional honesty while appending documentation is included for the purposes of veracity. Treating himself as a hostile witness, the narrator/author goes on to share the development of his literary integrity when he meets the most honest person he has ever met--the drug dealing Dog. "Tales of the Dog" summarizes the author/narrator's attempts to improve his credibility and why this quest has been so important to him. Journey to the Scars: A White Trash Epic is the gonzo story of one man's efforts to be his own messiah. The author/narrator, after realizing that his life to date has been in large part the result of his efforts to forget his past, J Patrick Rader begins his efforts to remember his.

The personal essay provides a vibrant method of inquiry for exploring migration. Migration tests the individual on all levels and the personal essay bears witness to that lived experience in writing. In applying Montaigne’s maxim “What do I know?” to experience, the joint endeavor of trial and assessment coincide in the migrant and the personal essay. Yet to date, no study of how the personal essay and the migrant intersect and reinforce their parallel journey of discovery has been published. Emphasizing observation, reflection and synthesis, the personal essay provides a rigorous and innovative approach to investigate what migrants encounter firsthand. Both the genre and the migrant try, weigh and test experience for its value and significance in writing and in the real world. This study of the nexus between migration and the personal essay genre addresses a crucial gap in the research, a space of increasing relevance in a progressively more mobile and globalized world. Migration is a lifelong experience, and New Zealand is a nation of migrants. This research examines personal essays written by contemporary migrants to New Zealand from twenty different countries. By probing the roots and routes of migration, migrant essays address complex questions around identity and belonging to assess the lived stakes of migration. Migrants cross geographic, linguistic and existential frontiers, and their personal essays bear witness to the contact zones between self and other, self and text. The migrant personal essay reflects and analyzes experience from the outsider perspective and testifies to the dominant culture how belonging is predicated on mutual acceptance of the other. As this study demonstrates, the personal essay is the ideal genre to explore how migrants negotiate and assess the space between inner and outer, home and journey, experience and meaning – abstractions intrinsic to our sense of self and world.

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This thesis puts forward a theory for a new basis of the rights and dignities of animals. The first chapter explains how the neurobiological output / input model can be applied to animal behavior, and suggests that animals—from fruit flies to chimpanzees—and humans are most similar in their desire to experiment with the world around them. The remaining chapters explore the practical implications of considering animals through the output / input model, using literature, the author’s personal experience, biological observations, and historical anecdotes. These chapters seek to prove that animals have much more to offer us than milk and meat. / Master of Arts

Student Number : 0310050V - MA research report - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / The rationale of this work is a peripatetic exploration, both literally and intellectually: the form echoes the content. The creative work stands on its own, but the theoretical reflection contributes retrospectively to the work as part of this peripatetic process. The theoretical reflection picks up the theme, though more formally, in order to create one coherent project. I have aimed to create a dialogue between the theory and creative work on a road that goes both ways. If it appears that the section of theory devoted to the poets is disproportionately long compared to the rest of the work, this is because I discovered in the course of my exploration that poets seem more predisposed to wandering than others.