Goucher College MFA in Nonfiction

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/11603/3045

With its unique focus on a single genre and its strong professional emphasis on publishing, Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction has gained a reputation as the best in its field. The program is committed to preparing students for writing careers. We bring editors and agents to the summer residencies and lead discussions on such practical matters as writer finances. We also sponsor annual trips to New York, where second-year students meet with some of publishing's top editors and agents.

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An Introduction to Ethnographic Literary Craft: A Decolonizing Approach to Interdisciplinary Work
(2024-12-09) Jennifer Tehani Sarreal; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Autopsia To See For Oneself
(2024-11-01) O'Brien, Daune; MIchelle Orange; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Autopsia (To See For Oneself) A feminist gaze on caretaking, grief, and perseverance in the aftermath of family addiction. Autopsia—to see for oneself— is a story about absolution. The story traces a family fractured by the fallout of addiction, interrogating the implication of gender roles on extended grief, while unearthing unexpected healing and preservation in the natural world.
With the Same Motion: A Personal History of Belonging
(2024-12-20) Snortland, Lillian Deja; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Lillian Deja Snortland, an African American transracial adoptee, unearths fragments of matrilineal family-making myths buried amongst revelatory media and epistolary text, including postcards sent to her nineteen-year-old adoptive mother while sequestered in an unwed-mother’s home in Arizona. Roe v. Wade was argued Dec 13, 1971, approximately a year and two months after her adoptive mother would give birth and place her son up for adoption—a history Snortland discovers by accident as an adult. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers made the statement: “We affirm the inviolable position of Black children in Black families where they belong”. Snortland was part of a closed adoption in 1996, in Kansas City in the aftermath of reconstruction, redlining, and oppression, when racial assimilation was being equated with erasure. Her successful adoption by a white Irish Catholic family in Eugene, Oregon adds nuance to the concept of ideal restoration for the next generations of Black children. In the wake of an estimated 50 million transracial adoptions in 2010 in the United States, policies around freedom of information and conversations have changed drastically to incorporate new understandings of the harmful psychology of difference for adoptees, the consequences of familial separations, and an increased emphasis on mental health and multicultural belonging. Snortland’s story traces questions posed by sociologists, social workers, and mental health advocates, as well as those interested in research like The Adoption History Project through the Department of History at the University of Oregon. With the Same Motion explores cross-generational intimacy, interracial lineage, and the liberatory importance of choice as the author purposefully reshapes familial boundaries. The manuscript follows an adoptee researching her adoptive family, rather than her biological one, to understand how choice is a powerful familial tether, and complicate the idea that motherhood, sisterhood, or daughterhood should subsume a woman’s autonomy.
Today, Our Hell Is Sunny
(2024-12-24) Albright, Olivia; Randon Billings Noble; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
My manuscript invokes fairytales and myths in order to complement and make greater meaning of the traumas, both personal and familial, in the nonfiction portions of the essays. Each essay is braided or segmented, and while most essays feature a memoir portion interwoven with a retelling of myth or fairytale, two pieces (“My Guardian Banshee” and Looking at the Face, It’s Not For Us,”), utilize mythological characters (a banshee in the first, and the Grecian Cassiopeia in the second), in order to play with the idea of reality vs. fiction in light of the psychosis I was experiencing in both of the essays. In “Blood and Poetry on the Battlefield,” I also manipulate the concept of reality by using Irish war goddess mythology, specifically the crow, who talks to me within the essay. The other essays heavily focus on the aspect of physical appearance—for instance, “Bad Medicine” uses the Circe myth in The Odyssey to explore the physical nature of side effects of psychiatric medication; “I Abandon My Echo” uses the Hera and Echo myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to highlight how my father’s predatory gazing caused me to develop a speech impediment; “The Image of a Daughter’s Wasted Body” pairs the narrative of my sister’s anorexia with a tale from the Arabian Nights in which a bride refuses to eat; and “Today, Our Hell Is Sunny” traces my maternal grandmother’s modeling career and my mother’s struggle with PCOS to my current relationship with my mother. It invokes the Persephone myth to explore the idea of hyper-focusing on appearance as a kind of Hell. Throughout the essay collection, there is the arc of my mother’s personal growth, as well as the arc of my relationship with her. In “I Abandon My Echo,” she appears as an antagonist; however we learn about her abusive upbringing in “How to Get Rid of an Unwanted Child,”—which invokes changeling mythology—and we see her nurturing side in “The Image of a Daughter’s Wasted Body.” Ultimately, we end on “Today, Our Hell Is Sunny,” and in the final scene of that essay my mother and I let go of the past and enjoy delicious ice cream together (amidst the spring growth representative of Demeter).
The Mancala Effect
(2024) Boyce-Gaither, Treesa "Poesis"; Evan Hughes; Michelle Orange; Porscha Burke; Leslie Rubinkowski; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
This is a collection of essays consisting of how I move through life through preparation and what I can and cannot control.
How We Came To Be: A Memoir in Essays
(2024-04-01) Meurkens, Carolina; Leslie Rubinkowski; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
HOW WE CAME TO BE is an autobiographical essay collection by Carolina Meurkens, exploring her coming-of-age as a first-generation American during the Obama and Trump presidencies. The collection delves into the complex narratives of her Afro-Brazilian and Dutch-German heritage, reflecting on the interplay between familial duty and personal identity. Through essays that span diverse settings—from 1950s rural Brazil to post-9/11 New York City—Meurkens confronts hidden family secrets, cultural expectations, and the impact of her father's jazz obsession on her biracial identity. As she navigates adulthood and motherhood, she seeks to redefine values and embrace an expansive queer life. Positioned within the contemporary literary landscape, HOW WE CAME TO BE resonates with themes of heritage, ancestry, and collective liberation, appealing to readers interested in cross-cultural memoirs and the evolving discourse on identity among younger generations.
Heading Home
(2024) Ursin, Cheryl; Noble, Randon Billings; Hughes, Evan; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Heading Home, is a collection of ten personal essays about life: childhood, parenthood, names, driving and the fear of driving, houses and belongings, reading and libraries, anxiety, memories, growing old, and the end of life.
The Dead Parent Club: A Murder and a Memoir
(2024-01-07) Shannon Tsonis; Toumani Meline; Orange Michelle; Rubinkowski Leslie; Nonfiction MFA; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
In 1989, Terry Schmansky was violently murdered in her Baltimore apartment. When the case went cold her three young daughters were sent back to live with the main suspect in the case, their father. Over 25 years later, Terry's middle daughter Shannon, is giving birth to her own daughter, when she sees her mother's ghost walking down the hospital hallway. This event ignites an unshakable obsession with solving her mother's murder. Convinced of their father's guilt, the three sisters work tirelessly to build the case against him and jumpstart the investigation: tumultuous meetings with detectives, chilling interviews, heartbreaking evidence testing, and renegade strategies that reveal family secrets and a second suspect. In an uncompromising true-crime memoir, Shannon revisits her complicated childhood, and the judicial deficiencies as they relate to domestic violence and class. During her hunt for a murderer, Shannon learns the delicate balance of living in the past and present, while coming into her own and finding closure when traditional justice isn't an option.
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now: A Memoir
(2023-12-30) Rachel Michelle Leibrock; Toumani, Meline; Hughes, Evan; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
In September 1996, haunted by a dream I’d had, I boarded a plane from Sacramento, bound for Dallas. Nearly a quarter-century earlier, my biological mother, Pamala, had left me in a daycare and flown to the Bahamas to be with her new boyfriend while her husband— my father—still fought in Vietnam. I was two-and-a-half years old at the time and hadn’t seen my mother since. Then, I dreamed that she died before I had the chance to meet her—before I had the opportunity to ask her about the events and choices that led her to leave me behind. After Pamala left me, my parents divorced, and my father remarried. His new wife, Barbara, adopted me. We instantly bonded, setting forth a life-long relationship that withstood my parents’ divorce and my father’s ensuing absence, but turned fragile, first during my troubled adolescence and later as I entered an abusive relationship. If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now is a memoir of fragmented mother-daughter relationships and generational reckonings—a portrait of reluctant motherhood, ambition, and the pitfall of domesticity is told through the lens of riot grrrl, feminist politics, and pop culture. At its core, this book asks a central question: By examining my mothers’ lives, choices, and mistakes, can I face my own and survive?
Milkshake: Abundance and Loss in America's Dairyland
(2023-12-01) Wedde Sally; Hughes Evan; Toumani Meline; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
The MFA thesis documents and examines the impact of Wisconsin losing half its dairy farms from 2005 through 2020. Dairy farming is a cultural tradition and touchstone in Wisconsin with the state producing 14 percent of the milk in the United States in 2020, second to California. The author traveled the state personally interviewing with farmers and other professionals. In addition she included data analyzing the dairy industry from print, electronic, and video reports and archives. Concepts explored include farmer suicide, immigrant farm labor, responsibility to ancestors, use of technology in historical perspective, and the environmental impact and regulatory challenge of the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. The resulting thesis elucidates the culture of hard work and family-based abundance that forms an emotional heart of America between the coasts. Part of the rural culture is disdain for people they believe are not for hard work, don’t do hard work, and do not even define it correctly. Manure is a renewable energy source making the dairy industry a potential problem-solver on the world’s climate—if regulation and enforcement prove to be able to keep up with the pace of technological discovery. Current federal and state agencies that regulate food are less nimble in funding, staffing, and operation than the enlarged private companies they have to monitor.
The Bloomsday Project
(2023-08-11) Leiman, Erin; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
If your mother is an obsessive reader with a guarded inner life and you want to understand her and her family history, first you must lure her with literature. The result is The Bloomsday Project, a reported memoir about how a reticent mother and her anxious-to-connect middle-aged daughter travel together through June 16, 1904, the single fictional day of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. For six months, the women meet weekly—sometimes in person, sometimes virtually, but always in the shared dream-realm of fiction—to navigate Ulysses chapter by chapter. Spilling over the novel’s borders, their discussion flows into a multi-year conversation about regret and loss, religion and ethnicity, loyalty and betrayal, and the reading and writing of literature. Their guide is Joyce’s quasi-Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom: wandering ad salesman, son of a Hungarian Jew turned Protestant convert, born-and-bred Dubliner, and a stranger in his home city. The idiosyncratic Bloom becomes a conduit for the daughter’s investigations into her family’s seldom-discussed history in the Hungarian Holocaust, her mother’s post-war Bronx childhood in an Orthodox-Jewish family of refugees, survivors, and immigrants, and her own identity as a secular, childless Jew several generations removed from genocide.
I AM HOME: WAYFINDING BY DEAD RECKONING IN A GPS WORLD
(2021) Fletcher, Kenneth "Marty"; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
I AM HOME: WAYFINDING BY DEAD RECKONING IN A GPS WORLD
(2021-06-28) Fletcher, Kenneth "Marty"; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Funeral for a Whale
(2023) Cohen, Michael Todd; Orange, Michelle; Burke, Porscha; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
At ten, queer adoptee Michael Todd Cohen witnessed the bloody burial of a thirty-foot whale on a New England beach near his home. Five years later, in the last months and days of his adoptive father’s battle with terminal cancer, Cohen sees it as a metaphor for the life-altering secret buried between them. Then, widowed at thirty-two, when his husband is lost in a high-rise fire, Cohen struggles to make sense of a world that takes more than it gives. This lyric field journal from the fraught borderlands of sexuality, home, family, grief, and faith asks: in the land of capitalism, who determines our worth? What precisely is the value of grief? And how do we invest in each other when futures are uncertain?
Waterbaby: A Memoir
(2022-12-03) Simmons, Kozbi; Orange, Michelle; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
“Waterbaby: A Memoir” is a creative nonfiction narrative about the writer’s trauma, neglect, and mental illness. This is a story of the pain and survival that entered the water with her, the truths she fought through, and the hope she’s been journeying toward since. The memoir is told in three parts—"Alone,” “In the Water,” “Being Seen.” Alone begins with the sexual abuse the writer suffered when she was five- and six-years-old. Part one continues through her adolescent years with a father obsessing over the female body and instilling in her a low self-worth; the writer’s struggle to identify and find treatment for her bi-polar and obsessive-compulsive disorders; and, finally, up to 2020, a year that would become a perfect storm of environmental, professional, and personal chaos. Part two, “In the Water,” takes readers along on the writer’s 15-hours-long suicide attempt, beginning with planning and then execution. On July 13, 2020, the writer chained a cinderblock to her waist and walked into the Chesapeake Bay. When, as she began to drown, the block slipped to the Bay bottom, the writer swam through the night, hoping her body would eventually give out. Finally, she chooses life and details her return for readers. In “Being Seen,” part three, readers experience the frustration of a week in the psychiatric ward, a supposedly healing place. The writer, though, begs for release because of what she sees as a lack of productive treatment and overwhelming empathy.
Interrogating the Talismans
(2022-06-20) MacSeóin, Bridgid Kathleen; Toumani, Meline; Messitt, Margaret; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Interrogating the Talismans is a collection of short essays, flash nonfiction, and experimental prose and image pieces that examine family stories, photographs, and talisman-like objects. Against the constantly shifting, impermanent landscapes of my childhood, the talismans become portals that offer glimpses into the often troubling worlds of the US military and the Catholic church. A close interrogation of the talismans through writing leads to a process of image-making, of interacting with these objects on the screen, creating a call and response between words and images as themes of belonging, loyalty, complicity, gender, and violence emerge.
The Impatient
(2022-06-18) Levy, Lisa; Burke, Porscha; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Inside the Gate
(2022-05-29) Richmond, Emily; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
A close look at the early history of integration of the Department of Defense's K-12 schools, as well as analysis of current challenges facing the system's students, families, and campus communities.
Doctorish
(2022-05-27) Torregiani, Seth; MFA in Creative Nonfiction
A medical memoir of my career in osteopathic medicine, the choice I made to become a doctor, anecdotes from my training, and coping with burnout.
For the Love of a Neighbor
(2022-02-14) Willoughby, Laura Jane; MFA in Creative Nonfiction

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