Start Here: A Guide to Reading This Project

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In January 2026, I spent thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, Mexico. I was studying something I had named alonetude: the intentional transformation of imposed aloneness into chosen solitude. After nineteen years of precarious academic labour, contract after contract, never sure whether next semester would hold a place for me, I needed to understand what it felt like to be present with myself without an institution watching. This blog is what happened when I tried.

How to Read This Site

This project unfolds in three registers. The daily journal from Loreto is image-led and substantively bilingual, written in the moment from inside the retreat. The post-retreat reflective pieces in English, with Spanish woven into the prose, were written after returning home and looking back on what the thirty days asked of me. The reading guide that follows is designed to be entered at any point and read in any order.

Reading Paths

If you have ten minutes, read The Third Shore, the framing essay that names what the project is and why it exists.

If you have an hour, read The Third Shore, then Alonetude as a Human Right for the scholarly argument, then one or two post-retreat reflective pieces such as Public Healing or What Rest Taught Me.

If you want the scholarly argument, read Alonetude as a Human Right, then the Annotated Bibliography for narrative engagement with cited works, then An Interdisciplinary Project for the methodological frame and Key Concepts for definitions.

If you want the creative and personal layer, read the labour poems — They Used My Labour and Called It Privilege and The Contract — then How Do I Feel? Do You Really Want to Know?, then What Rest Taught Me, and close with The Shore.

If you want the daily Loreto journal as it was lived, begin with the January 1 entry and read forward through the thirty days; the journal moves substantively between English and Spanish and is image-led.

Browse by layer. Loreto Journal · Post-Retreat Reflection · Labour Poems · Rights Essay · Framing Essay · Apparatus

Alonetude differs from loneliness. It differs from isolation. It is the third way: a practised, chosen solitude that asks something of you, teaches you something, and gives something back. If you are reading this for the first time, the reading guide below will help you find your way in.

Welcome to 30 Days by the Sea: A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore. This is a creative thesis blog by Amy Tucker, MA Candidate in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory. The posts below are organized in their intended reading order. You are welcome to begin anywhere, but if you are reading as an examiner or new visitor, the sequence below will offer the fullest experience of the inquiry.

Preamble

  • Dedication: To the land, the people, the spirit, and the Creator; and to all who live and work in precarity
  • Acknowledgements: With gratitude to the supervisory committee and all who made this work possible
  • Cover Page
  • Abstract

A Note on Form: Why a Blog

The choice to submit this project as a blog rather than a conventional thesis was a deliberate methodological decision, not a platform convenience. A blog is sequential and public: it performs alonetude in real time rather than reporting on it retrospectively. The daily posts were written each morning in direct response to embodied experience, without the benefit of hindsight or editorial distance. That immediacy is data: it captures the arc of recovery as it happened, including the days of resistance, exhaustion, and unresolved tension that a polished thesis chapter would smooth over. The blog form also enacts the argument about audience: this project is written for a committee and equally for the broader community of people in precarious labour who have been told their exhaustion is a personal failing. A blog is accessible in ways a thesis is not. The form is itself a political choice about whose knowledge it is for.

Part One: Before the Shore: Framing the Inquiry

Part Two: Thirty Days by the Sea: The Daily Journal

Part Three: Companion Essays and Reflections

Part Four: The Geography of Fear: A Series

Part Five: Memory & Vignette

Part Six: Poems

Closing: What Remains

All photographs © Amy Tucker, 2026, unless otherwise noted. This blog is a creative research thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice, Thompson Rivers University, Secwépemc Territory, Kamloops, British Columbia.

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