Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, English (Arts and Sciences)

This creative dissertation features a book-length work of Creative Nonfiction forwarded by a critical introduction on the relationship between form and content in examples of visual nonfiction writing. The visual essay is a genre of nonfiction that uses elements of design and active whitespace to drive storytelling and develop visual arguments across a text. “Beasts of the Interior” is a collection of visual essays considering the deterioration of homes and landscapes, and the ways these processes mirror the fissures between people living therein. The book combines personal, journalistic, and critical approaches to consider how histories are made by certain places, and what happens to each history when a place begins to shift. This is a project obsessed with structure, form, restraint, and the relationship between a page's form and its content. The book investigates the ways stories might behave more like objects do—like a cave system or a quilt pattern, a riverbed or a blueprint. Each chapter uses a borrowed structure to guide the reader between the walls of a hundred-year-old home, down a bat-infested dry riverbed, or across a farm run by an eco- cult. In the final chapter, this book's coda, this project turns back on itself and considers formlessness instead.

Committee: Dinty Moore W (Committee Chair); Eric LeMay C (Committee Member); Bianca Spriggs (Committee Member); Courtney Kessel (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Communication; Design; Education; Experiments; Gender; Gender Studies; Language; Language Arts; Multimedia Communications; Performing Arts; Rhetoric; Textile Research; Womens Studies