The Atlantic and Everything After

As a reader, I am drawn to pieces that flirt with the boundaries between prose and poetry and I believe these preferences are evidenced in my own work, which not only encompasses creative nonfiction and poetry, but which also teases its way along the line separating the two. In The Atlantic and Everything After, I have worked with both prose poetry and the lyric essay, two styles that combine and highlight the different strengths of creative nonfiction and poetry.I created this work to explore the transformation I embarked upon when I first boarded that plane to Nova Scotia in August 2009. I created it to pay homage to the people and places that have moved or changed me. I created it to acknowledge the many similarities of travel and writing, both of which are often ugly, uncomfortable, a bit frightening, and terribly frustrating.In the process of its creation, I was forced to confront painful and delightful memories, to realize the significance of those memories within my own heart. I exercised the modes of poetry and nonfiction (and a few in between) in order to bring the many complicated aspects of travel together in a way that does its discomfort and enchantment equal justice. I have filled the pages of The Atlantic and Everything After with my poems and my prose, my own life-cherishing force. I am pleased to welcome you to it.

Feminist Tigers and Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies and Instrument Effects in the Struggle for Definition and Control over Development in Nepal

This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken in the conflict. I argue that the trans-discursive or “borderland” nature of development in general and women’s development in particular result in different constructions of “development” goals, means and actors based not only on divergent cultural categories but on historically specific cultural politics. I argue further that the apolitical discourse of development serves to cloak its inherently political project of social and economic transformation, making conflicts such as the one that occurred in this case not only likely to occur but also likely to be misunderstood.

So Very Far Away

I began my thesis planning to craft pieces of both fiction and nonfiction. I had very much enjoyed working on a travel essay during the fall semester, but I have always had an inherent interest in writing short stories, so I had hoped to explore both genres, using my previous work from a seminar in fiction and a travel writing class as a springboard. However, in writing “So Very Far Away,” my second nonfiction piece, which I developed from material that I was unableto keep in the essay “Lunch with the Americans,” I discovered that nonfiction was an incredibly freeing genre because the essential ingredients were already present. My personal experiences provided the basic elements of plot, character, and setting, yet I discovered new challenges as I attempted to present these experiences in a way that moved beyond mere memories and reflections and towards a larger meaning that would matter to others as well. I became sointrigued by this process of creating cohesive narratives through the editing and shaping of memories that I decided to focus completely on nonfiction for my thesis work and write a collection of essays about my time abroad.

Identifying Resiliency Performance Measures for Megaregional Planning Case Study of the Transportation Corridor Between Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC

Transportation corridors in megaregions present a unique challenge for planners because of the high concentration of development, complex interjurisdictional issues, and history of independent development of core urban centers. The concept of resilience, as applied to megaregions, can be used to understand better the performance of these corridors. Resiliency is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to change. Resiliency performance measures can be expanded on for application to megaregions throughout the United States. When applied to transportation corridors in megaregions and represented by performance measures such as redundancy, continuity, connectivity, and travel time reliability, the concept of resiliency captures the spatial and temporal relationships between the attributes of a corridor, a network, and neighboring facilities over time at the regional and local levels. This paper focuses on the development of performance measurements for evaluating corridor resiliency as well as a plan for implementing analysis methods at the jurisdictional level. The transportation corridor between Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., is used as a case study to represent the applicability of these measures to megaregions throughout the country.

What Lies Beneath

With “What Lies Beneath,” I attempt to illustrate, through a series of poems, an exploration of the subjects, images, and emotions that have colored my experience both at Bucknell and my home in North Carolina for the past four years. A large portion of the collection, however, does not address the more tangible elements of my life but rather the corners of my imagination, my dreamscape, and the absences that influence them.

River-Like

I compose a poem in the same way I compose a photograph: shifting focus until I see only what is most beautiful or most terrible, warily choosing what will be in view and what will be left out, trying to find just the right amount of light or darkness. Art¿¿poetry, especially¿¿is a way for me to frame and illuminate experience. In this collection, I investigate experiences that dumbfound me, and the details of landscape become a vocabulary for discovery. The wheat fields of the Midwest are signifiers for loss and homesickness; a Pennsylvania forest is a catalyst for meditations on pregnancy and motherhood. Images of light and of water are abundant in these poems, and the speakers of my poems look to these elements for guidance and comfort with almost religious deference.

Changeling

Changeling is a collection of poems and nonfiction prose that grapple with some of my most meaningful life experiences.