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Title: LATCHKEY: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS.
Creator: Pendleton, Nicole C, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: "Latchkey: A Memoir in Essays" is an essay collection that follows the narrator through her childhood as it relates to being raised a latchkey kid in the 1980s. The lack of published academic studies that follow children through their experience as latchkey kids and into adulthood leaves personal exploration as the primary means through which a child, specifically a young girl, can seek understanding as to how her view of the world develops. Each of the five essays explores issues of autonomy...
Show more"Latchkey: A Memoir in Essays" is an essay collection that follows the narrator through her childhood as it relates to being raised a latchkey kid in the 1980s. The lack of published academic studies that follow children through their experience as latchkey kids and into adulthood leaves personal exploration as the primary means through which a child, specifically a young girl, can seek understanding as to how her view of the world develops. Each of the five essays explores issues of autonomy, self-efficacy, sexuality, addiction, and familial bonds. It is through her reflection of specific events - the loss of a father to his addictions, caring for a mother in the early stages of dementia, recognizing the trauma of sexual abuse � that she gains a precarious understanding of how she perceives herself, the concept of unconditional love, and the world around her.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: CFH2000460, ucf:45823
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFH2000460

Title: MIDDLE GROUND: A NOVELLA AND COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES.
Creator: Uttich, Laurie, Rushin, Patrick, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: This collection of fiction--a novella and a collection of short stories--focuses on the commonality of the human condition. While we create separations for ourselves by focusing on distinctions such as, religion, class, gender, and race, we are, I believe, spiritual beings sharing a human experience. My work tends to explore these distinctions and our motivations for embracing them. In the novella, Middle Ground, two sisters in alternating narrative voices share the story of their parents'...
Show moreThis collection of fiction--a novella and a collection of short stories--focuses on the commonality of the human condition. While we create separations for ourselves by focusing on distinctions such as, religion, class, gender, and race, we are, I believe, spiritual beings sharing a human experience. My work tends to explore these distinctions and our motivations for embracing them. In the novella, Middle Ground, two sisters in alternating narrative voices share the story of their parents' struggles with separation, sobriety and cancer. Their voices, as distinct as their perspectives, explore the landscape of a family, the borders between forgiveness and acceptance, the self-preserving act of looking beyond imperfections and weaknesses, and the realization that truth is an illusion and flawed love the only certainty. The short story collection consists of eight pieces. Many of these stories explore characters in a state of recovery--a brain tumor operation, a death of a spouse, a shot to the head where a bullet rests and reminds--and plot occurs as these characters attempt to move on. They meet sandhill cranes who cry out in pain for the death of another, lovers who speak in italics, vets who swear that the blasted silence is louder than King Kong screaming in your ear. They sit with shrinks who lie, sleep with poets who stray, compete with incarcerated ex-husbands who were "man enough" to put a gun to a woman's head and pull the trigger. They are nothing--and everything--like all of us, and readers are invited to join the characters beside the mirror of our collective Middle Ground.
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: CFE0002600, ucf:48261
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0002600

Title: Nothing Buried Stays Buried.
Creator: Porven, Stephanie, Thaxton, Terry, Uttich, Laurie, Stap, Donald, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Nothing Buried Stays Buried is a collection of poems that embraces raw imagery, threads of magical realism, and allusions to classical mythology in an attempt to make sense of the tangible and intangible losses experienced by its speakers. Told through the voices of confessional speakers who struggle with loneliness, identity, faith, and death, the collection aims to delve into contrasting themes that have long been perpetuated by Greek and Roman mythology: passionate love and violent death,...
Show moreNothing Buried Stays Buried is a collection of poems that embraces raw imagery, threads of magical realism, and allusions to classical mythology in an attempt to make sense of the tangible and intangible losses experienced by its speakers. Told through the voices of confessional speakers who struggle with loneliness, identity, faith, and death, the collection aims to delve into contrasting themes that have long been perpetuated by Greek and Roman mythology: passionate love and violent death, liberation and violation, the natural alongside the celestial. Poems such as (")What You Left Behind,(") (")Loneliness Braids My Hair,(") and (")If You Die First(") dwell on the idea of loss not as a past occurrence, but as an active emotional experience that can haunt an individual, follow them throughout their daily life and into their dreams like their shadow. Speakers within the collection reexamine memories of withered relationships and explore imaginary realms (a floating island and the second circle of hell, for example) in their search for answers to the questions: What do we make of loss? And how do we go on after something or someone has been lost to us: a pair of saltwater earrings, a loved one, a part of ourselves which has left a throbbing absence we still carry in our hearts?
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: CFE0007076, ucf:52012
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007076

Title: Counter Clockwise Culture Shock.
Creator: Mercer, Matthew, Roney, Lisa, Thaxton, Terry, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Counter Clockwise Culture Shock is a memoir focused the narrator's return to his hometown, a place he barely escaped: drug addiction, incarceration, bad relationships, alienation, an Oedipal mother, and suicidal threats. It is reflection on both culture and self, after I gained an outside perspective from Japan. The narrator is forced to relive nihilism and monotony, and face the troubles of his younger years. It describes the difficult journey of today's youth, in an evermore technologically...
Show moreCounter Clockwise Culture Shock is a memoir focused the narrator's return to his hometown, a place he barely escaped: drug addiction, incarceration, bad relationships, alienation, an Oedipal mother, and suicidal threats. It is reflection on both culture and self, after I gained an outside perspective from Japan. The narrator is forced to relive nihilism and monotony, and face the troubles of his younger years. It describes the difficult journey of today's youth, in an evermore technologically dynamic world(-)with few role models able to plot a course through. This is a meditation on past actions that ended in survival. Unlike most books dealing with cultural alienation, it focuses on a reinterpretation of my own culture. The main theme of the memoir is identity. The remnants of adventure, ingrained in the narrator's mind, contrast with a return to the d(&)#233;j(&)#224; vu of a distorted hometown. Many of the stories cut across time and space to mimic the disorientation of the narrator. The clarity of these cultural distortions emerges when viewed through an outside lens. Not only does Counter Clockwise Culture Shock distill these distortions, it uses an Eastern perspective(-)and language(-)to better understand the flaws and strengths of indoctrinated cultures. An outside perspective of a different culture expands the narrator's former view of the world. Suicide and depression are destroying Western society, and this is an attempt to catalog stresses of Western culture and help people in similar circumstances.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: CFE0007345, ucf:52142
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007345

Title: The Poems You Don't Own.
Creator: Reinhardt, Emma, Thaxton, Terry, Stap, Donald, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: The Poems You Don't Own is a collection of poems whose speakers explore the journey from the simplistic perspective of childhood to the confusion of adolescence to the first experiences of sexuality, heartbreak, and grief, examining the religious, societal, and gender expectations that influence those experiences. The collection's reverse-chronological order allows readers to travel back through the many experiences that shape a present moment. In poems such as (")The Game of Life,(") the...
Show moreThe Poems You Don't Own is a collection of poems whose speakers explore the journey from the simplistic perspective of childhood to the confusion of adolescence to the first experiences of sexuality, heartbreak, and grief, examining the religious, societal, and gender expectations that influence those experiences. The collection's reverse-chronological order allows readers to travel back through the many experiences that shape a present moment. In poems such as (")The Game of Life,(") the speaker considers the gender roles that begin to influence our perception of relationships from a young age, while poems such as (")What to Know Before Writing about Heartbreak(") explore how societal perceptions can seek to control the very expression of emotional pain. The speakers struggle with masculine and feminine in an effort to unravel the association between emotional expressiveness and feminine (")weakness(") as well as reveal the harmful consequences of perceiving emotional repression as a feature of masculine (")strength.(") Amid these gender explorations, the collection often returns to speakers seeking to understand the heartbreak of failed relationships and almost-loves. By probing this universal experience, these poems chronicle the loss, confusion, and reclaiming of identity as the speakers rediscover that their story was never about (")you.(")
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: CFE0007521, ucf:52628
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007521

Title: I Have Questions.
Creator: Matejowsky, Lorena, Thaxton, Terry, Stap, Donald, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: The poems in this thesis explore mid-life feminism, family, mental illness via anxiety and panic, identities of southern girlhood/womanhood, and the challenges of a social media saturated life. Mothering plays a large part in many of these poems, both embracing it and confronting gendered expectations about it. Telling the truth is explored through poems about white women's complicity in racist systems in the southern United States and how being quiet about it benefits us. Fear and the myriad...
Show moreThe poems in this thesis explore mid-life feminism, family, mental illness via anxiety and panic, identities of southern girlhood/womanhood, and the challenges of a social media saturated life. Mothering plays a large part in many of these poems, both embracing it and confronting gendered expectations about it. Telling the truth is explored through poems about white women's complicity in racist systems in the southern United States and how being quiet about it benefits us. Fear and the myriad ways it has manifested in my life is a common thread in this work, especially the fears that accompanied white girls growing up in the Southern U.S. during a time of shifting societal roles and cultural values. The speaker in these poems both deny and celebrate the cultural, political, and environmental influences that shaped her early years. As a feminist poet in mid-life with a teenaged daughter and a teen and pre-teen son, I have a tenuous relationship with the influence of mass media. Controlling screen-time for my children and monitoring my own intake of news, braggadocio and ex-boyfriends on social media is a constant, anxiety laden burden. I am more comfortable in a world that does not always revisit itself. I have spent years trying to erase the effects of Texas big hair, provocative clothing, alcohol, and sexually explicit music, video and advertising on my life. Other times I yearn for an escape back. Poetry challenges me to look backward with bravery. These poems reflect the forces of memory and modernism that both limit and liberate modern women. In Trump's America where women are demeaned and silenced through populist rhetoric and legislation, it is more important than ever to magnify female, truth-telling voices and this collection is intended to contribute to positive change.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: CFE0007499, ucf:52652
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007499

Title: Please Don't Interrupt Me While I'm Ignoring You.
Creator: Harrington, Sherard, Poissant, David, Uttich, Laurie, Bartkevicius, Jocelyn, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: A collection of short stories and personal essays, "Please Don't Interrupt Me While I'm Ignoring You" weaves a lame of humor and private desperation on the page. An actor in one story craves career gratification, while a United Nations coordinator in another finds herself attracted to a nervous NGO. A housewife attempts to convince her husband to commit an infidelity, while an architect finds that his new pet companion isn't helping him to get over his ex-girlfriend. Having a difficult time...
Show moreA collection of short stories and personal essays, "Please Don't Interrupt Me While I'm Ignoring You" weaves a lame of humor and private desperation on the page. An actor in one story craves career gratification, while a United Nations coordinator in another finds herself attracted to a nervous NGO. A housewife attempts to convince her husband to commit an infidelity, while an architect finds that his new pet companion isn't helping him to get over his ex-girlfriend. Having a difficult time relating, these characters often find themselves stuck in a miscommunication loop, and their journey to get what they want is subtle. These stories are followed with essays about the author's own experiences while he was stuck in a miscommunication loop. Driven by his obscene fear of conflict, the author chronicles what happens when conflict is inevitable. Travel and self-loathing abound in these narratives depicted with sensitivity and sarcasm-bitterness and love. Together they leave a lasting impression of the impermeability of worldly citizens, and the internalizations they have to combat to get there.
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Date Issued: 2012
Identifier: CFE0004319, ucf:49480
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004319

Title: Some Girls.
Creator: Napolitano, Sabrina, Poissant, David, Uttich, Laurie, Preston-Sidler, Leandra, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: This novel in stories explores the viewpoint of an unnamed, agender narrator as they navigate their life from childhood into early adulthood. Through the narrator's unique lens, the stories explore gender, sexuality, mental illness, family, and loneliness. The narrator's struggles with belonging and overarching feelings of abandonment intertwine with the sometimes isolating and dangerous landscape of Florida. From their interactions with both Florida and the people who pass through their life...
Show moreThis novel in stories explores the viewpoint of an unnamed, agender narrator as they navigate their life from childhood into early adulthood. Through the narrator's unique lens, the stories explore gender, sexuality, mental illness, family, and loneliness. The narrator's struggles with belonging and overarching feelings of abandonment intertwine with the sometimes isolating and dangerous landscape of Florida. From their interactions with both Florida and the people who pass through their life, the narrator begins to learn how to accept who are they are, without apology.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: CFE0006629, ucf:51272
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006629

Title: Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir.
Creator: Crimmins, Brian, Neal, Mary, Roney, Lisa, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir explores the experience of growing up gay in the 1980s. It is one boy's journey toward self-acceptance set against the conservative backdrop of a rural community on California's central coast. The story illuminates the hunger for a life different than the one being lived, and the ever-present sense of being different exacerbated by bullying and unrequited love. It is a narrative of evolving identity, and includes cultural insights and societal context of the...
Show moreStories I Told Myself: A Memoir explores the experience of growing up gay in the 1980s. It is one boy's journey toward self-acceptance set against the conservative backdrop of a rural community on California's central coast. The story illuminates the hunger for a life different than the one being lived, and the ever-present sense of being different exacerbated by bullying and unrequited love. It is a narrative of evolving identity, and includes cultural insights and societal context of the time period. The author poses a fundamental question, (")How did I make it out of the 80's alive?(") and he explores the answer with poignant humor and self-examination. Mr. Crimmins shows that, beyond the constraints of time and place, the process of coming out remains an important and consistent element of the queer experience.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: CFE0005152, ucf:50710
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005152

Title: Hunting Down Pigs.
Creator: Astudillo, Anna-Lisa, Thaxton, Terry, Roney, Lisa, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Hunting Down Pigs is a hybrid collection of personal essays, ranging from lyrical to braided, which more often than not defy labeling. The essays explore themes of loss, faith, and self-reliance. Growing up Mormon, with all its strictures, and losing her dad at a young age, made faith an issue that the narrator grappled with continuously throughout her life. The narrator questions the validity and purpose of religion in essays like (")Possibilities(") and (")Going to Church.(") Specifically,...
Show moreHunting Down Pigs is a hybrid collection of personal essays, ranging from lyrical to braided, which more often than not defy labeling. The essays explore themes of loss, faith, and self-reliance. Growing up Mormon, with all its strictures, and losing her dad at a young age, made faith an issue that the narrator grappled with continuously throughout her life. The narrator questions the validity and purpose of religion in essays like (")Possibilities(") and (")Going to Church.(") Specifically, the narrator explores the doctrine of the Mormon church and the effects of such a strict upbringing. When divine intervention fails, the narrator must learn to transfer her faith in God to a personal faith in herself. In essence, this is a coming of age story for the late bloomer, for the forty-something woman who has realized or needs to realize that you can't rely on God or a man to save you(-) you have to save yourself, and in doing so you will receive the gift of faith in yourself.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: CFE0006437, ucf:51492
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006437

Title: Go Ahead, Daytona.
Creator: Hughes, John, Roney, Lisa, Uttich, Laurie, Holic, Nathan, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Go Ahead, Daytona is a collection of essays meant to explore the experiences and lessons learned through law enforcement. It juxtaposes hope with cynicism and encourages the reader to explore his or her own biases through the lens of a narrator believing police work is something to be lived down, rather than up. The essays depict struggles with hypocrisy, sex, homelessness, violence, moral ambiguity, and self-awareness.
Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: CFE0006529, ucf:51361
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006529

Title: The Sleepless Ouroboros.
Creator: Bohl, Grant, Stap, Donald, Thaxton, Terry, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: The poems in The Sleepless Ouroboros are about the obsessions which come to define a person. These obsessions are memories, dreams, objects or ideas that cannot be separated from the whole. Poems such as (")Thinking of Big Moe(") and (")It Begins with a Fox(") grapple with the limitations of memory, while poems such as (")The Python(") and (")Heirloom(") counterpoint memory's weakness with the supposed permanence of physical artifacts. Depression and anger, the anxieties of identity and...
Show moreThe poems in The Sleepless Ouroboros are about the obsessions which come to define a person. These obsessions are memories, dreams, objects or ideas that cannot be separated from the whole. Poems such as (")Thinking of Big Moe(") and (")It Begins with a Fox(") grapple with the limitations of memory, while poems such as (")The Python(") and (")Heirloom(") counterpoint memory's weakness with the supposed permanence of physical artifacts. Depression and anger, the anxieties of identity and displacement, and representations of the people and animals that leave lasting impact on a life are all addressed as vital components of the completed speaker. In the middle of the collection (")The Mad Scientist Sleeps(") and (")Through Milk and Oil(") surround (")Insomnia and Autocannibalism,(") reaching the core of the speaker's identity throughout the collection, imagined, present, or past. The collection, like its namesake the ouroboros, ends in the same place it begins. This cyclical motion through the collection seeks to bring the varying voices throughout into a complete, if conflicted whole.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: CFE0006568, ucf:51345
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006568

Title: Because You Are Beautiful and Dead.
Creator: Amey, Yvonne, Thaxton, Terry, Stap, Donald, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: The poems in Because You Are Beautiful and Dead deal with dysfunctional people, substance abuse, loss, and death and dying. The poems also highlight the struggle of the poet/speaker finding her place in a hideous world, which, paradoxically, she really doesn't want to belong. The poems are influenced by the playful and sad imagery and subject matter of poet Matthew Dickman. These poems, like Dickman's, are assessable and quirky. Michael Earl Craig and Terrance Hayes are two other influences....
Show moreThe poems in Because You Are Beautiful and Dead deal with dysfunctional people, substance abuse, loss, and death and dying. The poems also highlight the struggle of the poet/speaker finding her place in a hideous world, which, paradoxically, she really doesn't want to belong. The poems are influenced by the playful and sad imagery and subject matter of poet Matthew Dickman. These poems, like Dickman's, are assessable and quirky. Michael Earl Craig and Terrance Hayes are two other influences. Hayes' work is artistic and experimental. Michael Earl Craig's poems have a brilliance that isn't fueled in its complex or radical subject matter, but by the ability to see into the human condition in its most simple form. These poems are interested in language and form. The speaker in it often wants to tell someone I am sorry that I have forgotten you. You are still here, inside my poems. The poems bring people back to life. Sometimes these people are symbolic(-)not any specific person(-)but rather a representative of loss. Mostly the speaker wants to highlight the absurd and dysfunctional nature of humankind without any need to offer a remedy. Humans are predictable narcissists, they mess up their children, talk too much, and simply annoy. These poems are not predictable, boring, or always so fundamentally normal.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: CFE0006556, ucf:51335
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006556

Title: (In)Tangible Things.
Creator: Skaryd, Ryan, Uttich, Laurie, Roney, Lisa, Thaxton, Terry, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: (In)Tangible Things is a collection of memoir essays and poems that examines loss, pain, and identity. Many pieces explore familial ties through separation, secrecy, and divorce, while other stories and poems observe the author's connection to drag culture, sexuality, eating disorders, and time itself. Using techniques such as framing devices, backwards storytelling, and delineated narrative, the author invites the reader to experience memories and moments from his past that show consistency...
Show more(In)Tangible Things is a collection of memoir essays and poems that examines loss, pain, and identity. Many pieces explore familial ties through separation, secrecy, and divorce, while other stories and poems observe the author's connection to drag culture, sexuality, eating disorders, and time itself. Using techniques such as framing devices, backwards storytelling, and delineated narrative, the author invites the reader to experience memories and moments from his past that show consistency and change, betrayal and forgiveness.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: CFE0006661, ucf:51215
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006661

Title: Pebbles and Shards.
Creator: Kindle, Edith, Bartkevicius, Jocelyn, Uttich, Laurie, Rushin, Patrick, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Pebbles and Shards is a collection of personal essays based on family relationships that focus upon motherhood, responsibility, and the complexity of love and loss. The essays explore how people cope with the inevitability of loss and how they move beyond that loss to find something meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. They reflect upon success and failure in the face of loss and how, either way, life goes on, heedless of people's desires and plans.The essays in Pebbles and Shards, while meant...
Show morePebbles and Shards is a collection of personal essays based on family relationships that focus upon motherhood, responsibility, and the complexity of love and loss. The essays explore how people cope with the inevitability of loss and how they move beyond that loss to find something meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. They reflect upon success and failure in the face of loss and how, either way, life goes on, heedless of people's desires and plans.The essays in Pebbles and Shards, while meant to stand alone, are thematically connected so that, read together, each story resonates with the others. In (")Promises,(") I explore the fear of watching my mother die of Alzheimer's disease. In related essays (")Frame by Frame(") and (")In Darkness,(") I focus on my mother's efforts to struggle with Alzheimer's and how, as an adopted daughter, I underwent a role-reversal and became the mother figure. Other essays, such as (")Heart of a Deadhead(") and (")Circus,(") consider the mothering impulse, especially the guilt and conflict that so often accompany my desire to nurture others. In attempting to support and strengthen those who seem (")weak,(") I have sometimes found that my own actions and thoughts underscore a deeper weakness in myself.As a collection, Pebbles and Shards contemplates the suffering and joy that is a family.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: CFE0004704, ucf:49813
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004704

Title: The Former Lives of Buildings.
Creator: Duvall-Francisco, Bethany, Poissant, David, Uttich, Laurie, Hubbard, Susan, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: The Former Lives of Buildings is a novel about thirty-one-year-old architect Adelle Corey. Adelle is a woman in denial. A nightmare figure called the Baron steals memories of her closest relationships and most poignant experiences. He hides the memories in Adelle's dreams, where he reconstructs them into buildings. The only way she can recover the memories is by cutting or tattooing these buildings into her skin. Adelle uses notebooks, mnemonic devices, and academic trivia to keep track of...
Show moreThe Former Lives of Buildings is a novel about thirty-one-year-old architect Adelle Corey. Adelle is a woman in denial. A nightmare figure called the Baron steals memories of her closest relationships and most poignant experiences. He hides the memories in Adelle's dreams, where he reconstructs them into buildings. The only way she can recover the memories is by cutting or tattooing these buildings into her skin. Adelle uses notebooks, mnemonic devices, and academic trivia to keep track of her daily routines. The novel takes place in contemporary times and opens in the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut, where Adelle has been recovering for two months. She does not remember her stay prior to the opening day of the story, but she retains her memories from this day forward. Adelle's parents, her husband, and the mysterious woman Celesse St. Armand, who has been given charge over her care, refuse to allow Adelle to see her six-year-old son, Ben, until she can recover the missing days. Adelle suspects that something has happened to Ben. She seeks the help of Sam, her tattoo artist, to recover memories. The search uncovers painful truths about Adelle's childhood and marriage, ultimately forcing her to face that the Baron is a device she created to protect herself, not an outside force acting upon her. Adelle goes from a lonely, untrusting existence to a willingness to form deep friendships. She gains the capacity to face the whole truth instead of selecting only the comfortable parts. She does not find her son in any of the buildings. However, confronting the experiences hidden there gives her the strength to accept that she has passed her memory problems on to her son, who has not been able to remember his family since the fire. Although their marriage does not survive, Adelle and De learn to work together as parents.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: CFE0004676, ucf:49853
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004676

Title: What We Hide.
Creator: Bowcott, Ashley, Thaxton, Terry, Bartkevicius, Jocelyn, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: What We Hide is a collection of memoir essays that explores the themes of mystery and deception in personal relationships, specifically within familial and romantic ones. Though the essays in the collection explore the decades from early in the narrator's childhood through her move to Florida for graduate school, the narrator's keen discernment of the world around her and her curiosity for what experiences shape a person's character remain constant. Many essays explore the extent of her...
Show moreWhat We Hide is a collection of memoir essays that explores the themes of mystery and deception in personal relationships, specifically within familial and romantic ones. Though the essays in the collection explore the decades from early in the narrator's childhood through her move to Florida for graduate school, the narrator's keen discernment of the world around her and her curiosity for what experiences shape a person's character remain constant. Many essays explore the extent of her father's alcoholism and the consequences of it, as well as the narrator's obsession over the possible sources of his addictions. Other essays examine the narrator's relationships with men beginning when she enters high school and question the extent to which her strained relationship with her father both excuses and/or explains the way she deceives and allows herself to be deceived in these relationships. What We Hide is endlessly implicating and looks for the accountability of these situations from all sources. The narrator delves into the sneakiness of her parents' courtship, the accusations that become commonplace during their divorce, the ways in which the narrator lies to family, friends, and boyfriends for her own selfish motives, and how each of these experiences shapes subsequent ones.What We Hide uses personal experience, emails, and newspaper articles to demonstrate the vulnerability, contradictions, and complications that are inherent in all of us as humans and how these weaknesses manifest themselves in the relationships with those we are closest with.
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Date Issued: 2015
Identifier: CFE0005582, ucf:50240
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005582

Title: These Romantic Dreams in Our Heads.
Creator: Ironman, Sean, Uttich, Laurie, Bartkevicius, Jocelyn, Poissant, David, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: These Romantic Dreams in Our Heads is a collection of linked essays that study how key relationships in the narrator's life intersect. The essays attempt to show the complicated nature of relationships and how multiple lives are affected by one's decisions. Taking place over two years, the relationships in focus involve the narrator's parents, his girlfriend, and his dog. The essays deal with themes of manhood, parenthood, gender roles, religion, and memory. The characters deal with...
Show moreThese Romantic Dreams in Our Heads is a collection of linked essays that study how key relationships in the narrator's life intersect. The essays attempt to show the complicated nature of relationships and how multiple lives are affected by one's decisions. Taking place over two years, the relationships in focus involve the narrator's parents, his girlfriend, and his dog. The essays deal with themes of manhood, parenthood, gender roles, religion, and memory. The characters deal with discovering their limitations and searching for a balance between responsibility for others and responsibility for their own lives.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: CFE0005510, ucf:50355
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005510

Title: We Are the Asteroid.
Creator: Davis, Sloane, Roney, Lisa, Rushin, Pat, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: We Are the Asteroid is a collection of personal essays concerned with the power of erasure and manipulation of chronology that comes with writing. It both acknowledges and participates in the fact that nonfiction writers become unstuck in time, whether they want to or not, traveling between ages, rearranging the order of events into the stories they tell. The collection centers on a few traumatic events in the narrator's life, and it explores the ways in which she deals with those events...
Show moreWe Are the Asteroid is a collection of personal essays concerned with the power of erasure and manipulation of chronology that comes with writing. It both acknowledges and participates in the fact that nonfiction writers become unstuck in time, whether they want to or not, traveling between ages, rearranging the order of events into the stories they tell. The collection centers on a few traumatic events in the narrator's life, and it explores the ways in which she deals with those events through her writing. The writer utilizes various structural techniques, such as the segmented form, to play with the idea that the placement of events in a story can affect the emotions attached to those memories. In this way, the writer looks at the power that writing has over illness, violent relationships, and even death. Exploring topics as wide-ranging as infertility, inauthentic grief, and sacrifice, the collection resolutely returns to the idea that the nonfiction writer is in control of, and therefore charged with, the responsibility of making beautiful even the saddest of memories. We Are the Asteroid serves both as a wish to go back and an acknowledgement that we must, despite our abilities and tools as a writer to dwell, continue moving forward.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: CFE0005477, ucf:50346
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005477

Title: Woman of Dust: An Exodus.
Creator: Schultz, Lacey, Thaxton, Terry, Bartkevicius, Jocelyn, Uttich, Laurie, University of Central Florida
Abstract / Description: Woman of Dust: An Exodus is a collection of themed non-fiction experiences and stories with themes, characters, and ideas that coincide deliberately and verge on the cohesiveness of memoir. The overarching themes of this collection are womanhood and coming of age. The stories examine the ways in which childhood crushes, current relationships, parenting, religion, and pets influence the growth of a child into an adult, in this case, a girl into a woman. They take individual moments,...
Show moreWoman of Dust: An Exodus is a collection of themed non-fiction experiences and stories with themes, characters, and ideas that coincide deliberately and verge on the cohesiveness of memoir. The overarching themes of this collection are womanhood and coming of age. The stories examine the ways in which childhood crushes, current relationships, parenting, religion, and pets influence the growth of a child into an adult, in this case, a girl into a woman. They take individual moments, conversations, conventions, and thoughts and explore how they shaped the woman who now writes them. Stories range in content from how the standards of a southern Baptist church raised a girl who was afraid to date, drink, or kiss, about the role of God in the narrator's private life, to stories that explore how cartoon Disney prince crushes turn into crushing on neighbor boys and classmates, discovering the narrator's current conceptions of love as different from her early conceptions and questioning the ways in which those conceptions came into existence in the first place. These stories look at the domestic implications of religious life that dictate specific roles for women in a marriage relationship, and how the narrator interprets these implications in terms of her own love and pending marriage. Still other essays investigate how a mother's overbearing fear of sex, men, and drugs drove one daughter to be a small town porn star and drove the other to complete abstinence, how gender conventions shape a girl's mind, and how family life sometimes contradicts the same conventions. While the subject of each story is deeply feminine, revolving around a woman narrator and woman experiences, the content of these stories creates a very human experience, one outside the confines of gender. They are about one girl turned woman, from one perspective, and about one life, but they are mostly about being human, about growing, and about the ways in which humans grow.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: CFE0005246, ucf:50607
Format: Document (PDF)
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005246

memoir (5)	+ -
poetry (5)	+ -
creative writing (4)	+ -
creative nonfiction (3)	+ -
loss (3)	+ -

Fiction (2)	+ -
Florida (2)	+ -
Japan (2)	+ -
LGBT (2)	+ -
MFA (2)	+ -
Nonfiction (2)	+ -
coming of age (2)	+ -
death (2)	+ -
essays (2)	+ -
feminism (2)	+ -
gay (2)	+ -
identity (2)	+ -
nonfiction (2)	+ -
poems (2)	+ -
1980s (1)	+ -
Alzheimer's Disease (1)	+ -
Child Abuse (1)	+ -
Coming of Age (1)	+ -
Creative Nonfiction (1)	+ -
Essay (1)	+ -
Exodus (1)	+ -
Family (1)	+ -
Literary (1)	+ -
Memoir (1)	+ -
Motherhood (1)	+ -

ETD Collection (19)	+ -
Honors Collection (1)	+ -

University of Central Florida (20)	+ -
Uttich, Laurie (20)	+ -
Thaxton, Terry (10)	+ -
Roney, Lisa (6)	+ -
Bartkevicius, Jocelyn (5)	+ -

Stap, Donald (5)	+ -
Poissant, David (4)	+ -
Rushin, Patrick (2)	+ -
Amey, Yvonne (1)	+ -
Astudillo, Anna-Lisa (1)	+ -
Bohl, Grant (1)	+ -
Bowcott, Ashley (1)	+ -
Crimmins, Brian (1)	+ -
Davis, Sloane (1)	+ -
Duvall-Francisco, Bethany (1)	+ -
Harrington, Sherard (1)	+ -
Holic, Nathan (1)	+ -
Hubbard, Susan (1)	+ -
Hughes, John (1)	+ -
Ironman, Sean (1)	+ -
Kindle, Edith (1)	+ -
Matejowsky, Lorena (1)	+ -
Mercer, Matthew (1)	+ -
Napolitano, Sabrina (1)	+ -
Neal, Mary (1)	+ -
Pendleton, Nicole C (1)	+ -
Porven, Stephanie (1)	+ -
Preston-Sidler, Leandra (1)	+ -
Reinhardt, Emma (1)	+ -
Rushin, Pat (1)	+ -

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