Browsing by Author "Sartor, Margaret"
Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access A Journey Chronicling Memories of Grief and Loss(2018-04-18) Shanahan, MaryanneAbstract Storytelling is a natural and necessary human behavior. Stories connect us to our past, our present, and, most importantly, to each other. They tease our imaginations and stir our emotions. Certain stories are gifts to those who listen. Such is the case with those gifted to me on this journey exploring the grief and loss of motherless daughters. Inspired by a photograph of my grandmother, the story of her death after childbirth, and my own mother’s lifetime sadness over having lost her mother when she was very young, I conducted audio interviews with women in similar situations. I interviewed women, like myself, whose mothers lost their mothers. I also interviewed women who themselves were left motherless at a young age. In this paper, these separate stories are connected within the overarching story of my personal journey to find, listen to, and document them. I also include my own reflections on grief and loss in the context of the story of my mother and grandmother. Within the stories, I have interspersed treasured photographs and written memorabilia. I conclude the paper with a description and analysis of my process: the preparatory research, the training in audio interviewing and documentary, my approach to the interview process (including the failures, successes, and surprises along the way), and my conclusions about what I learned and accomplished as I pursued and completed the project. A twenty-minute audio documentary titled Conversations: Mothers and Mother Loss accompanies this written work. In the documentary, culled from sixteen hours of audio interviews, the nine women who lost their mothers at early ages or whose mothers lost their mothers at early ages grant us intimate connection with their stories through their voices.Item Open Access Adventures in Everyday Life(2015-05-07) Fennell, GregoryThe following project consists of three sections. The first section is an analytical essay which discusses the role of culture in intimate relationships as depicted in literature. Two original, fictional short stories follow the analytical essay. The narrator of these stories has the same cultural background and life experiences as myself. In both stories, the narrator is the same character, though portrayed at different points in his life. The central question of this project is “What role does culture and cultural difference play when two individuals come together to try to form a long-term intimate relationship?” The analytical essay explores this issue in depth, looking at novels written by Moshin Hamid and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as at my own two short stories. My primary definition of culture comes from Edward Burnett Tylor’s seminal work Primitive Culture. Hamid and Kincaid depict relationships that navigate complex social and cultural issues. My short stories are meant to accomplish the same objective.Item Open Access Architectures of Memory(2014) Jansen, Candice DonnahWhat does it mean to feel at home? And how would this be photographed? These questions inspired this creative project, Architectures of Memory, which is comprised of a photographic series, Living Rooms (2013), and an accompanying essay, Landscapes of My Remembering. Living Rooms was made in the community where the author was born, called Retreat in Cape Town, South Africa. The 17 color photographs depict interior home spaces of iconic “council houses” which are identical detached, double, or often, triple storied structures built by the British and Afrikaner regimes for people of color. Landscapes of My Remembering is a 3,553-word essay that reflects on an event which inspired the photographic series. It includes an analysis of the photography book, Innenwelt- Inner World, Photographs of Romania and Exile (2007) by Beatrice Minda. Minda’s collection of 70 color photographs of rooms were made inside homes belonging to Romanians and Romanian exiles, emigrants, and itinerant workers in both Romania, and in Germany and France. The paper concludes with a list of the works cited and with portraits of the participants whose homes were photographed in Retreat.Item Open Access As the Fairy Tales Unfold(2016-05-05) Geng, YangyangThis project consists of two parts. The first part is a photo book, which includes my photographs of children and an accompanying text of individual stories of childhood, including my own. The second part is an analytical essay, which explores my process in creating and editing my photographs in the larger context of how other artists have approached the depiction of childhood. Specifically, I look at the work of photographers Wendy Ewald, Sally Mann and Olive Pierce, as each of these artists chose to depict the days of childhood by giving individual voice to the children who are most often overlooked or ignored. Over the summer of 2015, I worked with and photographed children in an orphanage school in China. I continued to make photographs of children in Durham, North Carolina and in Cuba in 2015 and 2016. As the photographs pulled me back to the past of my own childhood, I discovered that in a child’s world, ordinary things became magical vehicles and that childhood is often about the awkward process of learning to inhabit a newly bulky, changed body with aggressive needs and intensified fantasies. As a photographer, I am drawn to the beauty and pathos of the moments, when, for example, a boy, in his games, becomes a pirate, a soldier, or a sailor, or a little girl plays with a doll and imagines she is the princess. I have tried to capture and evoke the daydreams and the feelings of being lost that are specific to childhood. With my writing and in my photo book project, I have also tried to create spaces in which I allow other’s perceptions to surface with my own.Item Open Access Book of Harriet: The Disambiguation of Five North Carolinian Siblings 1840-1941(2016-05-03) Smith, Kim*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
This paper is a work of creative nonfiction that adopts the first-person narrative voice of Harriet Smith (c. 1819-1873) in order to recount the biographies of her five children, all of whom were born slaves belonging to the Smiths, a prominent Orange County, North Carolina family. The four youngest siblings were simultaneously Smith slaves and Smith progeny who continued to live and work on the same plantation post-Emancipation as did many enslaved children who were fathered by their American owners. However, the interrelationships between Harriet, her children, and the Smiths were atypical of the era and region. Harriet’s four daughters were reared in the main plantation home by their white aunt, the very mistress whom they—and Harriet—served. History marginalized all of them until Harriet’s great-granddaughter, the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, published her 1956 familial memoir Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. Murray’s memoir chronicles the life of Harriet’s eldest daughter and the family into which she married with contextual mentions of Harriet, her other four children, and the people with whom they made families. Despite their collective historical significance in North Carolina’s Piedmont region, little scholarship exists regarding these individuals, their interrelated lives, and their remarkable life stories. Written to reflect Murray’s seminal example, this narrative spotlights Harriet and all five of her children, illuminates the many accomplishments of a disremembered family of color, and contextualizes their inimitable lives during a divisive yet transformative century.Item Open Access Examined Life: Xiaoqiong Zheng's Story and Mine(2014) He, YuanTranslated and introduced the People’s Literature award-winning essay Iron, written by migrant worker & poet Xiaoqiong Zheng, and weaved in my own story with Zheng's, finding parallels below the surface. Zheng’s work reveals "another China”, “another life”, and “another reality”; it speaks not just to the life of a factory worker in China but to the larger issue of living in China now, the spiritual as well as literal poverty. Reflected on how we have both searched for our individual voices; Zheng’s being a secret writer while working in a factory; I spent years feeling unhappy and misfit in the workplace, until eventually discovered a passion for the English speaking world, and set out molding a new identity defined by that passion.Item Open Access Giving Voice(2015-04-29) Hanes, MichelleThis paper examines the work of three documentary photographers, each of whom employed their cameras in an effort to improve the lives of children. I compare Lewis Hine’s child labor project in the early 20th Century with more modern photographic efforts to give voice to children by Wendy Ewald and Zana Briski. I explore how these artists used photography as an activist tool to enact legal, educational and personal change in their subjects’ lives. By analyzing the traditional roles of documentary photographers and how those roles evolved between Hine’s era and today, I examine how these particular artists helped to push, or break through, the boundaries separating artist from subject. Finally, I analyze critiques of documentary activism and how changing attitudes towards the concept of “other” influenced the direction of Ewald and Briski’s work.Item Open Access Leftovers from the British Empire: Stories from Post-Colonial India - A Memoir(2014) Kamdin, Wendy AnnThis Project is a memoir, a collection of stories of the places I’ve been, the people that populated my life, and events both historical and personal that drew my course. I grew up in India, a child of the early 1950’s, an India fresh out of its colonial past, when the remnants of the British Empire still lingered on. My mother’s family traced their antecedents through several generations of British civil servants who lived, worked and settled in India. My father’s parents were immigrants from Russia who settled in Brooklyn, New York. My experiences led me to explore and reflect on the cultural and historical milieu I lived through, during my childhood, early adulthood, later adulthood, across continents, and through the vagaries of history that took me back to and kept me in India a while longer than expected. My stories afford amusement and have instructional value, about, among other things, life in India, its flora and fauna, the emotional life of humans, marriages good and bad, and child rearing – how not to do it, and how to attempt to do it as well as circumstances allow.Item Open Access Literacy Through Memoir: An Integrative Approach to Promote Literacy and High Student Achievement(2014) Payton, Danielle PorcheThis paper explains the necessity of including the middle school student in the educational process of literacy. Including a curriculum, this project gives guidance to the layman as well as the teacher in the organization of creating ways to strengthen the reading skills of the student with a lower Lexile proficiency. The project uses the memoir writing process as the engine to promote literacy.Item Open Access Quality and the Craft of The Good Life(2016-01-08) Cronheim, Matthew“Quality and the Craft of The Good Life” is a personal essay exploring the relationship between work and the pursuit of a fulfilling life. Originally intended to follow the narrative arc of the construction of a table, this work takes a wayward and circuitous route around the life and meditations of a craftsman. The construction of the table takes a back seat to a reflection on the broader significance of craftsmanship as a medium for understanding and articulating Quality, which is a central theme. I have not set out to reach conclusions, or to provide the reader with a definitive, or even a remote understanding of The Good Life. Rather, in reflecting on the years I’ve spent working with my hands, I’ve sought to meditate on the development of my own understanding of what a Good Life might look like, namely for me. If a broad conclusion can be drawn, it is that the elusive goal of a good life is only achieved by elevating the experience of the banal, and by celebrating the commonplace. The narrower, personal conclusion extends from the broader one. It involves the patterns of my character; the restless decisiveness that has delivered me from one ideal to the next, often in disregard of the successes of each.Item Open Access Shattered Moments: The Fall From My 30-Foot Pedestal(2015-05-19) Sroufe, BrookePart One of my final project consists of a series of creative non-fiction stories detailing a traumatic accident I experienced in 2009. The stories examine my physical recovery and reflect on my emotional recovery process. I have also written stories about my strongest memories from my childhood as a way to uncover the events that helped shape the 20-year-old girl I was at the time of my accident. The stories are not linear, but span from my childhood to the three years following my accident. Through these stories, I hope to contribute to greater conversations about trauma, emerging adulthood, and identity—particularly among young people. Part Two of the project analyzes the question of trauma and the necessity of narrative following trauma. I break this section of the project into three short essays addressing different aspects of trauma and narrative: a history of trauma, the need for memoir, and posttraumatic growth. I reference three larger works for these essays and relate the arguments and theories the authors make to my own traumatic experience and the process of writing my own stories. In addition to these written parts of my final project, I also include personal photographs throughout the project. These pictures, like my stories, are not linear. They are visual pieces of my shattered life puzzle, showing meme before and after my fall from the 30-foot pedestal I’d created for myself. By connecting these pieces, I was able to find new meaning in my experience, allowing me to move forward in the recovery of my body and mind.Item Open Access The City Has Changed Them: Storytelling, Memory, and the Family Photo Album(2015-04-29) Woods Tucker, EricaThe City has Changed Them: Storytelling, Memory, and the Family Photo Album is an interdisciplinary work that consists of five parts. Four of the parts have an analytical component as well as a personal story to accompany them. Along with the writings there are also seventeen images from one of my family’s photo albums. The purpose of the project is to locate a family through memoir and photos, and trace them through the American phenomenon known as the Great Migration. I used my maternal grandmother, Malqueen Goldsmith, and my father, James Woods, as anchors to the memoir pieces. I outline their departure from the south, their subsequent relocation to New York City, their search for work, interactions within their own communities and the larger social context in which they lived and raised a family from the mid-1940s to roughly 1975. The purpose of the project is for the researcher to view the African American family photo album as a serious historical object. I believe it to be an historical artifact as well as a visual record that warrants the same serious study as traditional historical objects.Item Open Access The Family Business: A Genealogy and Mythology of My Family at War(2014) MacSeoin, Bridgid KathleenThe Family Business is a series of first-person creative nonfiction stories exploring the genealogy and mythology of my family’s multigenerational history of war. I trace the genesis of my family’s warrior ethos from medieval Ireland to modern Afghanistan. I examine family stories, photographs, and objects, reflecting on universal —and paradoxical—themes of belonging, loyalty, patriotism, and violence buried in these deeply personal artifacts. The stories also provide a framework to describe the rich, distinct, and often troubling sense of cultural exile that is the inheritance of military children growing up in a chaotic and violent world.Item Open Access Weathered Girl: An Exploration of Scribing The Indescribable And Healing Through First Person Childhood Trauma Narratives(2016-05-04) Maxwell, Sarah K BThis project examines autobiographical writing and the ways in which some authors use memoir as a vehicle to convey and communicate childhood trauma. Mary Anna King’s Bastards, Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know For Sure and Wendy Lawless’ Chanel Bonfire are the texts I use to explore how writers, through the particular alchemy of truth and literature, transform heartrending stories into something meaningful for the rest of us.