Submission Date

4-26-2015

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

English

Adviser

Jon Volkmer

Committee Member

Domenick Scudera

Committee Member

Joyce Lionarons

Department Chair

Rebecca Jaroff

Project Description

This collection of personal essays focuses on the concept of home while examining turning points in adolescence through the lenses of family relationships and childhood experiences. The essays develop understandings of home as a physical space, a mindset, a person, a memory, and a way of life. How fluid is home? Can we exist in multiple homes at once? How do we learn to transition from one home to the next? In exploring these questions, many of the essays are centered on moments of leaving or returning home, using both physical and emotional distance from past homes to comprehend their significance. Various elements of the speaker’s homes reappear and overlap as the collection progresses, complicating the ties between home and childhood, and the extent to which leaving home is essential to growing up. The development of this creative project included researching the memoir form through a self-developed reading list, culminating in an essay discussing the reading process which serves as the introduction to this collection.

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