What home I have

Thesis (M.F.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2013"What Home I Have" explores the embodiment of memory and the formation of unlikely community through storytelling. Personal essays recall the author's experiences living overseas and/or engaging with marginalized communities -- street children in Paraguay, refugees in Belgium, or people with cognitive disabilities in the United States -- in order to consider how our perceptions of self and world transform through willing reception of multitudinous perspectives. Catalyzed by her childhood rooted in the Midwest and her expatriate adolescence, the author continually searches, questions, and redefines the locus and characteristics of home and belonging. While the author's cyclical history of displacement and return resists a chronological retelling, individual pieces connect through resonant images to trace a comprehensive emotional arc. The collection engages and stretches the limits of memoir nonfiction by weaving personal account with research on etymology, biological sciences, and literature. At once personal history and prismatic window into various cultural communities, What Home I Have re-envisions the concept of belonging in a complex, often-polarized world by reflecting on moments of human connection across culture, language, or life circumstance, by finding community both through and beyond one's habitus.Me without Joséma -- Part 1. The open suitcase -- Feast day -- What kills the living and keeps the dead -- The baptism -- Part 2. Maps and visions -- A perplexing ontology of cats -- On prophets, moths, and migraines -- Concerning Jan, everyone had visions -- I was one of them -- Part 3. Take and eat -- What small things -- Go quiet -- Piecemeal -- Anastomosis -- Works cited -- Works consulted