American essays -- 21st century

Overview "Inhabitants, permanent or temporary, who write about spaces have been known as travel writers. The implication in the moniker is that the writers are on scene to accomplish something, to seek out answers or realities, to find out about some unknown part of their history, to figure out their identity, to learn something new that will somehow shed light on their awareness or understanding of the world or of themselves. The essays in this collection attempt to set ambition aside and convey a...

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The early twenties are a coming-of-age for many young people, as they finish their transition from adolescence into adulthood. Comprehensive Guide features five short essays depicting my quest to reorient my worldview in light of coming out as a lesbian--

Overview "This manuscript is a collection-in-progress of essays, like conversations, between me and myself, my twin sister, old friends, strangers, flowers, and fictional characters. Each poem acts as an introduction to the essay that follows it. Every essay is a sort of confession of lessons I have learned, mistakes I have made, and my imperfect attempts to understand humanity, the world around me, and most of all, my mother. This collection is a catalog of stories, divulgences filled with loss and...

Overview "This project aims to explore the intersections between pain, chronic illness, religion, socialization, culture, the medical system, and family. The title is based on a quote from Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill" where she says that literature "...does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and...

Overview "This collection comprises ten nonfiction pieces—lyric and personal essays, reported dispatches and cultural commentary—that were produced during my creative writing career at Emerson. These works explore themes of progress and ambition, the interplay between occupation and identity, and the alienating effects of global capitalism. Skyscrapers are a main subject of several essays, and a recurring motif throughout the collection. Key settings include the suburbs and plains of the American...

Overview "This non-fiction collection is about people who live along the asymptote—ordinary or obscured people and their experiences, challenges and triumphs in the periphery; people, places and things we don't always see, hear or remember. Each of their stories reveals the vitality of the human spirit. In the ordinary, there is extraordinary. The poems and essays traverse time and continents. Across generations and geographies, the sound of living in the shadows is the same; the sound of separation,...

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"This thesis is a collection of essays exploring the different facets of the author's relationship to bodies and embodiment, illness or the lack of it, and how we grieve what we lose. The essays cover ground from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Rome as they contemplate how religion, medical diagnostic norms, homophobia, and the instructions of misogyny shape how the author learns to understand herself." -- Abstract

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This collection of essays is about the human experience of growing up. It's also about the eyes-good ones, bad ones, lost ones, new ones, eyes to see, eyes to understand, eyes to forgive, and eyes to marvel. -- abstract.

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"'Checking Behavior' is a nonfiction collection of essays written by MFA student Anna Currell. The work is a collection of humorous essays about the writer's experience in therapy and relationship she forms with her therapist. After a breakup, the writer has trouble sleeping and seeks therapy to find out that she has something much bigger to learn about herself." -- Abstract

Overview "Written using the working title "Dumpster Fire of Memories," this work examines the origins and consequences of self-defeating cyclical behavior through an epidemiological lens. "Dumpster Fires & Other Calamities" is split into several sections, each of which is concerned with a different determinant of health – childhood development, social environment, income and social status, and personal health practices and coping skills. These determinants are explored through an series of...

Overview "Fake Chill grapples with my ongoing quest to get real with myself, and in turn, the world around me. In nine essays, I come to terms with how I move through the world, while attempting to hone my craft. Eventually, I'm able to understand what it means to rely on myself as a person and a writer, and how that self-reliance provides me with the confidence to pursue difficult questions on the page. Through this examination comes the diligence to explore my relationship with my father, race,...

Overview "Fat Therapist and Other Essays investigates Julia Weeks' many points of origin, painting a vast, yet nuanced, portrait of the foundation of her life. A family relic. A slice of cake. The swaying wetlands. A historic landmark. The first four essays take place in southern New Jersey. Each gives a new perspective on Weeks' homeland, depicting what it means to live in and leave New Jersey. The final two essays try to find clarity in other aspects of Weeks' past. One depicts the nature of eating...

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A collection of humorous essays centered on one person's sense of home. -- abstract.

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Last Games traces the experiences of a twenty-six year old former college basketball player who has spent his early twenties adjusting to the loss of identity that takes place after his career ends. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island the game had been

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"This deeply personal collection of essays follows the writer in the three years after her messy separation from her husband. The writer grapples with anger and grief, loneliness and despair, and chronic pain. At the same time, she undergoes a sort of awakening in her new, forced circumstances." --Abstract.

Overview "My thesis contains six essays from my collection-in-progress, 'Mothers and Other Fictional Characters,' which blends memoir and literary investigation to explore the forces shaping girls and the women they become. In my collection's three sequential sections—Maidens, Mothers, and Crones—I consider the archetypes imposed on the female life span. What happens, my essays ask, when our inherited narratives of womanhood collide with our particular experiences and circumstances? And what can...

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"This memoir-in-essays, which unfolds more thematically than chronologically, explores themes of trauma, addiction, race, class, empathy, and the destruction that results from ignoring those very issues." --Abstract.

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"The Museum of Memory is a series of essays exploring the author's experiences as the child of an ethnographic researcher. The first essays discuss trips to Liberia, Dahomey, and Brazil. The second half of the essays concern the author's attempt to make sense of the travel memories and give them context in terms of family history, art history, and recovery from trauma." --Abstract.

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I offer this invitation into the richly weird cacophonous wrangling in the arena of my mind. I hope you accept. Demur not at the strange, but at the obsequious, insidious commplace; there we begin to essay.--Abstract.

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"This collection of nonfiction essays engages narrative forms and structures of interpretation as methods of enacting control and ownership over intangible ideas." --Abstract.