I have organized the books into ten thematic clusters that mirror the architecture of my research. Within each cluster, I begin with the titles most central to the concept of alonetude itself and move outward toward the broader intellectual neighbourhood from which the concept draws. Titles marked with an asterisk (*) are directly cited in The Third Shore blog or in my theoretical framework documents.
Cluster 1: Solitude, Alonetude, and the Interior Life
Citation
Annotation
Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking. Crown Publishers.
This book gave me the sociological vocabulary for something I had been living inside for nineteen years: that the institutional world is designed for extroverted performance, and that introverted attention, the kind of inward, sustained noticing that alonetude practises, is systematically devalued. Cain's research shows that this devaluation is structural rather than accidental. I read this book on a semester break when I was too tired to prepare another lecture, and I have returned to it whenever I need reminding that the problem was the room, and the people who built it to reward volume over depth.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)
Han names the structural condition from which alonetude offers a partial remedy: the burnout society, defined as a social arrangement in which the imperative to achieve replaces external discipline with internal compulsion, producing what he calls the achievement-subject, a self who exploits herself more effectively than any external authority could. I taught before dawn, graded past midnight, and performed gratitude for each contract renewal because Han's achievement society had trained me to measure my worth in outputs. Reading him was the first time I understood that this was structural harm rather than personal failing.
Iyer, P. (2014). The art of stillness: Adventures in going nowhere. TED Books/Simon and Schuster.
A travel writer who stopped travelling and found the most interior journey the most profound. Iyer's slim, beautiful essay argues that stillness requires the same quality of attention that movement demands: it is an active discipline rather than passive withdrawal. This distinction is central to alonetude, which I define as a practice rather than a condition. I carry this book the way I carry a stone from the Loreto shore: small, precise, and heavier than it looks.
Lindbergh, A. M. (1955). Gift from the sea. Pantheon Books.
The single most direct literary ancestor of my blog. Lindbergh spends two weeks alone on a Florida beach in 1955, meditating on solitude, marriage, creativity, and the female life, and writes it into a book so honest and so carefully made that it has never gone out of print. She is doing, seventy years before my blog, what I did in Loreto: attending to her own experience with the quality of attention that makes it universally legible. What my work adds to hers is the structural critique, the labour politics, the trauma theory, and the human rights frame. Read together, the conversation across seven decades is extraordinary.
May, K. (2020). Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Riverhead Books.
Of everything I have read, Wintering sits closest to the tone and central argument of alonetude. May retreats from her own life after collapse and discovers the wisdom available only in voluntary withdrawal. Her central claim, that fallow seasons are essential rather than failures, that the pressure to recover quickly and return to productivity is itself a form of harm, is my central claim. Her prose is warm and precise and structurally aware. The difference between her book and mine is that mine goes further into the body, the institution, and the human rights frame. I recommend reading them together.
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. HarperCollins.
Moore argues that the soul requires tending rather than fixing, that depth and slowness are necessities rather than luxuries, and that the modern therapeutic culture's drive to solve and improve is itself a form of violence against the complexity of inner life. This speaks to the contemplative register of my blog and to my resistance to the institutional imperative to produce, optimize, and demonstrate impact. The care of the soul is what alonetude practises at its most essential level.
O'Donohue, J. (1997). Anam cara: A book of Celtic wisdom. Cliff Street Books.
The concept of anam cara, meaning soul-friend in Irish, extended by O'Donohue to friendship with oneself, is as close as any text comes to naming what alonetude practises at its deepest level. O'Donohue's language is spare and musical, and his argument that genuine connection with others begins in genuine companionship with oneself is the philosophical ground my entire blog stands on. He died in 2008 at the age of 52, and I read him as someone who understood that the interior life is the primary life, and that everything else flows from the quality of attention we bring to it.
Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.
The psychiatric case that solitude is as essential to human flourishing as connection, written by a British psychiatrist who was himself deeply solitary by temperament. Storr is my earliest scholarly companion on this terrain, and his clinical authority gives the argument for chosen aloneness a weight that popular wellness discourse rarely achieves. His chapter on the relationship between solitude and creative work is foundational to my understanding of why the thirty days in Loreto produced this entire body of scholarship alongside healing.
Tillich, P. (1963). The eternal now. Charles Scribner's Sons.
Tillich's distinction between loneliness and solitude, that loneliness expresses the pain of being alone while solitude expresses its glory, opens my blog's theoretical framework and recurs throughout my writing. He locates solitude as the condition in which the self becomes available to itself, which is the deepest definition of alonetude I have found anywhere. He writes as a theologian and an existentialist, and his argument that presence requires courage resonates with everything the thirty days in Loreto asked of me.
Cluster 2: Women Writing Their Own Retreats
Citation
Annotation
Dillard, A. (1974). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper's Magazine Press.
A woman spends a year attending obsessively to a single creek and its surroundings, and in doing so produces one of the most rigorous and beautiful arguments for attention as a spiritual and intellectual practice ever written. Dillard's seeing slowly, her refusal to look away from the ordinary because it turns out to be inexhaustible, is the literary antecedent to my contemplative photography methodology. She is also, in her solitude and her discipline, practising alonetude before I had a name for it.
Ehrlich, G. (1985). The solace of open spaces. Viking Penguin.
A woman moves to Wyoming after grief and finds healing in the land. Ehrlich's prose is precise and unsentimental, and her argument that landscape is a form of emotional architecture, that the scale of open space can hold what the human world cannot, speaks directly to what the Sea of Cortez was doing to my nervous system across thirty days of morning walks. The non-human world as steady companion: this is the register my Loreto photography inhabits.
Norris, K. (1993). Dakota: A spiritual geography. Ticknor and Fields.
A poet moves to the Great Plains to manage her grandparents' farm and discovers a monastic quality in the landscape that reshapes her understanding of solitude, silence, and place as spiritual practice. Norris's turn toward slowness, toward the rhythms of a landscape that demands nothing from you except attention, speaks to the contemplative methodology of my blog and to the discovery that healing requires no dramatic destination, only sustained attention to where you actually are.
Oliver, M. (2016). Upstream: Selected essays. Penguin Press.
Mary Oliver's essays on attention, nature, and the permission to devote oneself wholly to what matters are the literary language of my artist statements. Her prose has the quality of arriving quietly and then staying permanently: once you have read her on the relationship between attention and gratitude, between slowness and creative discovery, you cannot un-read it. I recommend beginning with the title essay, which is about the experience of being fully absorbed in something larger than yourself, and then reading everything else she ever wrote.
Cluster 3: The Body as Archive
Citation
Annotation
Brach, T. (2003). Radical acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha. Bantam Books.
Brach's concept of radical acceptance, defined as meeting oneself without condition, without the requirement to be different from what one is, is the emotional practice that alonetude requires. The intersection of Buddhist psychology and Western therapy she offers gives healing a quality of gentleness that neither tradition achieves alone. I read this book during a semester when I was barely managing to get dressed in the mornings, and its argument that the trance of unworthiness is a learned condition rather than a discovered truth was genuinely life-altering.
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.
Fisher's framework of structural dissociation, defined as the fragmentation of the self into parts that carry different survival strategies, gives me precise clinical language for what my childhood vignette documents: the self that learned to flatten her affect when the danger sounds arrived, the self that mapped the house for escape routes, the self who made herself small and invisible. These parts live in my nervous system still. The retreat in Loreto offered them, slowly, the sustained safety they had never before received.
Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Greenspan's concept of dark emotions, defined as grief, fear, and despair understood as purposeful rather than pathological, carrying information the body needs us to receive, is the framework that made Phase Two of my retreat comprehensible. I wept on Day 17 beside the sea, and Greenspan taught me to receive that weeping as data rather than weakness: the body finally safe enough to tell the truth about what had happened to it. Her concept of emotional alchemy, the seven-stage movement through darkness toward transformation, is the most honest map of healing I have found.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Levine's concept of frozen flight, defined as mobilisation energy trapped in the body when fight or flight are rendered impossible, explains the chronic tension my childhood vignette documents and the slow releasing of that tension across thirty days in Loreto. When a child cannot fight the violent parent or flee the home, the energy required for those responses remains locked in the tissues. My braced shoulders in the Phase One photographs are that energy, still waiting for a safe moment to complete what childhood interrupted.
Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
His most structural argument and the one most aligned with my Phase Three inversion: that what we call illness is often a sane response to an insane world, and that healing requires changing the conditions rather than simply adjusting the individual's response to them. The myth of normal is the myth that the institution perpetuates: that contract academic workers should be grateful, that chronic insecurity is an acceptable cost of employment, that performing wellness while exhausted is a professional competency rather than a form of structural harm.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother's hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Menakem extends van der Kolk's body-as-archive argument to include collective and inherited racial trauma, developing the concept of somatic abolitionism, defined as healing the body as a political practice inseparable from structural change. His work challenged me to situate my own healing within the larger question of whose bodies are permitted to rest and whose neuroception has been calibrated to threat by centuries of dispossession. The Sea of Cortez is on Indigenous Cochimi territory. I carry this book as a reminder that my capacity to be there was itself a form of privilege that demands acknowledgement.
Nagoski, E., & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The secret to unlocking the stress cycle. Ballantine Books.
The stress cycle, defined as the physiological sequence of activation and completion that stress requires in order to fully discharge from the body, is the biological mechanism for what my Phase Two documents: the body needing to finish what chronic institutional stress began. The Nagoski sisters provide accessible, evidence-based language for why rest is a physiological necessity rather than a reward, and why the cultural demand for constant productivity is itself a form of harm against the body's basic regulatory needs.
Neff, K. (2011). Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.
The research case for turning toward rather than against oneself. Neff's work is the antidote to the self-erasure that institutional precarity required of me: nineteen years of making myself smaller, apologizing for occupying space, performing gratitude in exchange for employment. Her distinction between self-compassion and self-pity, her argument that treating oneself with the kindness one would offer a good friend is a form of psychological health rather than self-indulgence, gave me permission to let the Sea of Cortez be medicine rather than escape.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
The most cited text in my blog for good reason: the body as archive, somatic memory, trauma stored in tissues. Van der Kolk established in language so precise it entered the culture that trauma is a physical condition rather than merely a psychological one, and that healing requires engaging the body rather than only the mind. This book is my methodological and theoretical foundation for treating my own physical experience in Loreto, the lowering shoulders, the returning sleep, the weeping that arrived on Day 17, as legitimate scholarly data.
Cluster 4: Grief, Dark Seasons, and Ambiguous Loss
Citation
Annotation
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Boss's concept of ambiguous loss, defined as the grief that arrives when someone is physically present but psychologically unreachable, gave me language for the two most persistent griefs I carry: my son, who is physically alive but unreachable inside addiction; and my mother, whose decline is gradual, the slow loosening of a person from herself. Ambiguous loss is the grief without closure, the grief that the culture tends to disqualify because its object is still present. Boss insists on its legitimacy, and that insistence is a form of kindness I have needed.
Boss, P. (2022). The myth of closure: Ambiguous loss in a time of pandemic and change. W. W. Norton.
The follow-up to Ambiguous Loss and, in the context of my blog, the more urgent book: the cultural pressure to resolve what cannot be resolved, the expectation that grief has a timeline and an ending. Boss argues that closure is a myth that harms rather than helps, that the more honest and more compassionate posture is to learn to live alongside grief rather than through it. I read this book at Harrison Hot Springs on February 1, 2026, the day after I left Loreto, and it gave me permission to bring my grief home rather than leaving it by the sea.
Didion, J. (2005). The year of magical thinking. Alfred A. Knopf.
Grief as deconstruction of the self. Didion's precision with language under extreme emotional pressure models the kind of honest, rigorous, embodied writing my blog attempts. She does what very few writers manage under grief: she stays rigorously analytical even as the floor disappears beneath her. Her argument that grief is a state of being rather than a feeling, that it reorganises everything including time and identity, is the most accurate description of what accumulated institutional and personal loss had done to me before I went to Loreto.
Kessler, D. (2019). Finding meaning: The sixth stage of grief. Scribner.
Meaning as the work grief asks of us, beyond the five stages Kübler-Ross and Kessler described in their earlier collaboration. Kessler wrote this book after his son's death, and the combination of clinical expertise and personal loss gives it an authority that purely theoretical grief literature cannot achieve. His argument that meaning is active rather than discovered, that we make meaning rather than find it, speaks to what the thirty days in Loreto ultimately produced: the capacity to hold what happened rather than closure, and insist that it matters.
May, K. (2020). Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Riverhead Books.
Already recommended in Cluster 1, and worth naming again here because May's central argument is precisely about grief's seasons: that fallow time is required, that the demand to recover quickly is a form of harm, and that the most honest response to difficulty is to move through it rather than around it. Her fallow season is Greenspan's dark emotions in narrative form.
Cluster 5: Precarious Labour and Institutional Harm
Citation
Annotation
Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint! Duke University Press.
What happens to the body when it names institutional harm. Ahmed documents, through interviews with people who have filed institutional complaints, the physical cost of speaking: the exhaustion, the gaslighting, the way the institution turns the complaint back on the person who made it. My poem Cell B14 is a complaint in verse form, and Ahmed's book gave me the theoretical framework for understanding that the poem is simultaneously a personal document and a structural analysis. Reading her means understanding that the complaint and the complainer are produced by the same system.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Ahmed's analysis of institutional walls, the structures that appear to include while actually excluding, is the closest theoretical companion to my concept of malperformative care, defined as institutional wellness programmes that succeed operationally while failing the bodies they serve. The diversity office that changes nothing, the contract renewal that implies gratitude is owed rather than dignity is due: this is Ahmed's territory and mine.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, defined as the attachment to structures and fantasies that actively prevent flourishing, is the theoretical name for the nineteen years I stayed. The belief that the contract would eventually become permanent, the hope that gratitude and excellence would be rewarded with security, the conviction that the institution's logic would eventually be reciprocal: all of this is cruel optimism. Reading Berlant was the first time I understood that the attachment itself was part of the harm.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Already recommended in Cluster 1 and central here as well. Han provides the structural framework for situating personal burnout within a social system that produces it rather than locating it within individual failure. His concept of the achievement-subject is the theoretical companion to every contract I signed, every unreasonable workload I accepted, every morning I performed enthusiasm for an institutional initiative I knew would produce nothing but more work.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Emotional labour, defined as the work of managing feelings as part of paid employment, performing wellness, enthusiasm, and availability as professional requirements, is the invisible toll my blog documents across nineteen years. Hochschild named this in 1983, and the concept has become more rather than less relevant as service and care economies have expanded. I performed gratitude for contract renewals that were offered as favours. That performance was labour. It was uncompensated. It accumulated.
Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious (A. Derieg, Trans.). Verso Books.
Lorey extends Standing's precariat argument to show how precarisation, defined as the systematic production of insecurity as a governmental technology, functions as a mode of control. My contract labour was functional rather than incidental to the institution's needs: a flexible, disposable, grateful workforce is precisely what academic capitalism requires, and Lorey makes visible the governmental architecture that produces and maintains that arrangement.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
The foundational text for situating my personal burnout within the transformation of universities into market actors. Academic capitalism, defined as the regime in which universities operate as market actors treating knowledge and labour as commodities to be extracted rather than cultivated, is the system I worked inside for nineteen years. Slaughter and Rhoades gave me the structural language to understand that my situation was a class condition produced by an institutional logic, and that naming it accurately is the first step toward demanding structural remedy.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
The precariat, defined as a new social class characterized by chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, and truncated access to the rights that permanent employment provides, is my structural position named. Standing's argument that precarity is a class condition rather than an individual circumstance was the most politically clarifying text I read in Phase Three of the retreat. The precariat is a dangerous class, he argues, because it has no stable identity from which to organize. That instability is the institution's achievement and its protection.
Cluster 6: Rest, Resistance, and the Right to Stillness
Citation
Annotation
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
The Nap Ministry's theology of rest as reparation and refusal of grind culture. Hersey argues, as I do, that rest is a political act rather than an indulgence, and that the demand for constant productivity is a form of structural violence against the bodies that perform the labour. Her framing of rest as an act of resistance gave my thirty days in Loreto their political legitimacy. This is the book I give to every contract academic worker I know who is exhausted and ashamed of it.
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
The ethical anchor of my entire project. Lorde's argument that tending to one's own survival and wellbeing is a political act, a form of resistance against systems that benefit from the exhaustion and self-erasure of those they marginalize, opens the concluding chapter of The Third Shore. I return to it whenever I question whether the retreat was self-indulgent, and every time I return to it I am reminded that the question itself is a symptom of the system's success.
Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.
Odell's concept of attention ecology, defined as the practice of choosing to attend to what is actually in front of you as an act of political refusal in a culture demanding constant output and connectivity, makes the same argument as alonetude from an adjacent angle. The practice of putting the phone down, of standing still until the pelicans dive, of photographing a piece of driftwood for twenty minutes rather than moving efficiently toward the next task: these are what Odell means by resisting the attention economy. Her book gave me the political language for my contemplative photography methodology.
Russell, B. (1935). In praise of idleness and other essays. Allen and Unwin.
A philosopher arguing for the right to do nothing in 1935, witty, subversive, and still urgent. Russell anticipated the burnout society by eight decades and made the same structural argument: that the glorification of busyness serves those who benefit from other people's labour rather than those who perform it. I recommend the title essay, which is short and devastating and remains as relevant as the day it was written.
Cluster 7: Nature, Attention, and the Non-Human World as Healer
Citation
Annotation
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Attention restoration theory, defined as the capacity of natural environments to hold attention gently without cognitive demand, allowing depleted attentional resources to replenish, is the science behind what the Sea of Cortez was doing to my nervous system every morning. The Kaplans showed empirically what I experienced somatically: that the natural world heals precisely because it requires nothing of the viewer in return. The pelicans diving, the tide coming in, the volcanic sand under my feet at six in the morning: this is attention restoration theory in practice.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
The most important book in this cluster for what it does to the concept of reciprocity. Kimmerer's grammar of animacy, defined as the understanding that plants and animals are persons rather than objects, that the non-human world is populated by beings deserving of acknowledgement rather than objects available for use, transforms my pelicans and driftwood from scenic elements into genuine research collaborators. Her argument that gratitude and reciprocity are the appropriate responses to what the natural world gives us speaks to what alonetude practises: receiving what is offered with full attention and giving something in return. The blog is my form of reciprocity.
Macfarlane, R. (2015). Landmarks. Hamish Hamilton.
A glossary of forgotten words for landscape and weather, assembled from regional dialects across Britain, Ireland, and beyond. Macfarlane's central argument is that we need specific language for specific conditions of light and land, and that losing that language narrows what we are able to perceive. This speaks to the contemplative photography practice: naming what you see is the first act of genuine attention. His words for the quality of light at different hours, for the specific textures of rock and water, are the vocabulary I was reaching for in my Loreto photographs.
Williams, F. (2017). The nature fix: Why nature makes us happier, healthier, and more creative. W. W. Norton.
An accessible synthesis of the global science of how nature heals, from Japanese shinrin-yoku, meaning forest bathing, to Finnish wilderness therapy to South Korean healing gardens. Williams synthesises the research that Kaplan and Kaplan began and gives it a contemporary, international scope that makes the argument both rigorous and personally usable. This is the book I recommend to people who want the evidence base for what I experienced in Loreto without the scholarly apparatus.
Cluster 8: Feminist Philosophy and Embodied Knowing
Citation
Annotation
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Ahmed's concept of the feminist killjoy, defined as the woman whose refusal to perform happiness in oppressive conditions is read as the problem rather than the conditions themselves, describes nineteen years of my institutional experience with devastating precision. I was the person in the room who named what others preferred to leave unnamed, who asked whether the contract structure was ethical rather than whether the course could be completed more efficiently, who declined to perform enthusiasm for institutional initiatives I knew would harm the people they claimed to serve. This book gave that refusal its theoretical name and its political dignity.
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Border thinking, defined as the knowledge produced at the threshold between two worlds, the mestiza consciousness that refuses to resolve into either side of a binary, is the epistemological register of my concept of the third shore. The third shore is neither loneliness nor solitude but the liminal territory between them where transformation occurs. Anzaldúa taught me that the borderland is a site of knowledge rather than a site of confusion, and that the inability to belong fully to either side of a threshold is a form of critical seeing rather than a form of failure.
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you're supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.
Wholehearted living, defined as the willingness to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to let go of who you thought you were supposed to be in order to become who you are, is what Phase Four of the retreat reaches toward. Brown's grounded theory methodology, her insistence that the data lives in human stories, is a model for the Scholarly Personal Narrative approach I practise. I have read this book many times and found something different in it every time, which is the sign of a book that is doing its work at the right depth.
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. Routledge.
Situated knowledges, defined as partial, accountable, embodied perspectives that gain their authority from within the partial rather than from a claim to see everything, is the epistemological foundation of my Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology. Haraway's refusal of the god trick, the pretence of seeing from nowhere, is the methodological stance my blog practises in every entry. I am always positioned somewhere. That somewhere is always part of what I am able to see. Naming it is the beginning of honesty.
Woolf, V. (1929). A room of one's own. Hogarth Press.
The material conditions required for a woman to think and write, argued with a precision and intelligence that makes the nearly century-old essay feel urgently contemporary. Woolf's central argument, that intellectual and creative work requires freedom from interruption, security of income, and a space that is genuinely one's own, speaks directly to what the thirty days in Loreto provided and to what nineteen years of precarious academic employment withheld. The shore in Loreto was my room of one's own. It cost me my savings to get there.
Cluster 9: Memoir, Personal Narrative, and the Examined Life
Citation
Annotation
Carson, A. (2010). Nox. New Directions.
An elegy for a brother assembled as an accordion-fold book, its form enacting its argument: grief breaks apart and cannot be rebound into conventional narrative. Carson's insistence that methodology and form are inseparable, that the kind of knowing grief produces requires a form that holds fragmentation rather than resolving it, models what my blog attempts. The images alongside the text, the Latin dictionary alongside the personal memory: this is arts-based research before I had a name for it.
Dillard, A. (1989). The writing life. Harper and Row.
The discipline and devotion that writing demands, from a writer who has given her entire life to the practice without apology. Dillard refuses to romanticise the creative process without also insisting on its necessity. This speaks to the writing practice of the blog: showing up every day in Loreto, staying in the body, resisting the temptation to write around rather than through what was true. Some mornings I wrote a paragraph in an hour. That was still the work. This book said so.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
The methodological foundation for everything my blog attempts. Nash defines Scholarly Personal Narrative as the practice of using one's own experience as scholarly data, rigorously examined and theoretically grounded, insisting that personal experience when properly theorized constitutes legitimate scholarly evidence. His three-voice model, the personal voice, the scholarly voice, and the universal voice, is the architecture every entry in The Third Shore attempts to inhabit. Without this book, the blog would be a journal. With it, the blog is a research inquiry.
Rich, A. (1979). On lies, secrets, and silence: Selected prose, 1966-1978. W. W. Norton.
The politics of speaking truth when the truth is inconvenient to the institutions that employ you. Rich's feminist epistemology is the ground from which my poem Cell B14 and my structural critique of contract academic labour grow. She argues that silence is a form of complicity, and that the act of naming what is true, even when the naming is costly, is both a political and an ethical obligation. I read this book the week after my final contract expired, and it gave me a language for what I was choosing to do in Loreto.
Cluster 10: The Contemplative Tradition
Citation
Annotation
Chödrön, P. (1997). When things fall apart: Heart advice for difficult times. Shambhala Publications.
Buddhist teachings on groundlessness, difficulty, and the wisdom available in falling apart. Chödrön's argument that the most difficult moments are also the most alive directly addresses Phase Two of the retreat: the softening, the grief, the terrifying freedom of having nothing left to perform. She says that the shakiness we feel is wisdom rather than weakness, and that the willingness to remain in uncertainty without reaching for the next distraction is the fundamental contemplative practice. I have returned to this book more often than to almost any other.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.
Mindfulness as attention practice, presence without agenda, the secular version of the contemplative life that my blog practises. Kabat-Zinn's central insight, that the act of paying attention to what is actually happening is both the practice and its own reward, is the foundation of my contemplative photography methodology. He is also careful to insist that mindfulness is a practice available in ordinary life rather than a retreat that ends, which speaks directly to what alonetude argues: the practice is portable, available anywhere the practitioner is willing to arrive.
Karr, A., & Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography: Seeing the world with fresh eyes. Shambhala Publications.
The central text for my visual methodology. Karr and Wood define contemplative photography as the practice of receiving visual experience before interpreting it, letting the world come to you rather than going after the image you already have in mind. This is what I practised in Loreto, and it turned out to be the same practice as healing: both require slowing down enough to receive what is actually present rather than what you expected or feared. The camera trained the researcher to be present before being analytical.
Section Two: TED Talks and YouTube Resources
These talks and channels bring my theoretical interlocutors into their own voices, and that matters. Reading van der Kolk is one thing; watching him explain why the body keeps the score in a twenty-minute lecture, pausing to demonstrate with his hands, is another kind of knowing. I recommend these resources as companions to the books rather than substitutes for them. All TED Talks are freely available at ted.com and on YouTube.
Over sixty million views and still the most precise public articulation of what vulnerability costs and why it matters. Brown's grounded theory methodology, her insistence that the data lives in human stories, is the model for my Scholarly Personal Narrative approach. I watched this before I understood what I was doing in Loreto; now I watch it to remember that what I am doing matters and that the willingness to be seen is the prerequisite for genuine connection.
The companion talk to The Power of Vulnerability, and in some ways the more important one for my work: the distinction between shame and guilt, the argument that shame is the belief that one is fundamentally flawed rather than that one has done something wrong, is precisely the shift my Phase Three inversion performs. Nineteen years of institutional precarity had trained me to feel shame about my situation. Phase Three taught me to locate the problem in the structure rather than in myself. This talk models that shift.
Burke Harris makes the epidemiological argument that my childhood vignette makes personally: that adverse childhood experiences, defined as the ten categories of childhood trauma identified in the landmark ACE study by Felitti et al. (1998), remain in the body, and that treating the symptoms without addressing the structural conditions that produced them is inadequate medicine. She speaks with the authority of both a physician and a survivor, and that combination gives the argument its particular weight.
The cultural devaluation of solitude and inward attention in a world designed for extroversion. Cain's talk gave my experience of institutional misfit its first public language: the introvert is misaligned with a room designed for the extrovert, and the introvert's refusal to perform constant sociability is read as inadequacy rather than as a different and equally legitimate way of being in the world.
Grief as carried rather than resolved; Boss's ambiguous loss made accessible, personal, and occasionally very funny. McInerny is honest about the way the culture demands recovery on a timeline that bears no relationship to how grief actually works, and her refusal to perform resolution while still finding humour in the impossibility of the expectation is exactly the register I was attempting in the blog's Phase Two entries.
The most watched human rights TED Talk and the most powerful twenty-three minutes of structural argument I have encountered in any format. Stevenson makes the inversion my Phase Three makes: that injustice is structural rather than individual, that narrative shapes law and policy, and that proximity to those most affected by structural harm is the prerequisite for meaningful change. He says this about mass incarceration. I apply the same logic to contract academic labour. The inversion is the same.
Already cited in my blog. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed the same participants for over eighty years, distilled into twenty minutes. Waldinger's central finding, that the quality of our close relationships and our relationship with ourselves predicts health and happiness more than wealth, achievement, or social status, gives the alonetude argument its most accessible public anchor: the interior life matters, and tending to it is the most important work we can do.
Hersey's ongoing public work on rest as resistance, reparation, and the refusal of grind culture. Her lectures and interviews extend the argument of her book into the current political moment with urgency, warmth, and a theological grounding that gives rest its deepest ethical legitimacy. I watch these videos when I need reminding that choosing to rest is choosing dignity, and that the culture's demand for constant productivity is a political position rather than a natural law.
On Being with Krista Tippett. (2003-present). On Being [Podcast and YouTube channel]. https://onbeing.org/
The most sustained public conversation on the interior life, grief, poetry, science, and meaning that I have found in any format. The entire archive is adjacent to my blog: Tippett's interviews with Maté, van der Kolk, Kimmerer, O'Donohue, Porges, and dozens of others are the audio version of the theoretical library I carry into my writing. I recommend beginning with her interview with John O'Donohue recorded shortly before his death in 2008: it is one of the most beautiful hours of conversation I have ever heard.
Short, beautifully produced essays on solitude, grief, contemplative life, the examined self, and the emotional intelligence that no one teaches us formally. The register is accessible scholarly, close to my blog's voice, and the production quality is consistently high. I recommend the essays on solitude, on the benefits of being alone, and on what therapy is actually for as entry points into the channel's broader argument that the interior life deserves the same quality of attention we give to the exterior one.
Publishers of contemplative and healing content, the YouTube channel features Brach, Chödrön, Menakem, Levine, and others in conversation and lecture. The quality of attention in these recordings is consistently high, and the conversations tend to go deeper than the standard interview format allows because the interviewer and subject share a common framework and vocabulary. I recommend beginning with Tara Brach's lecture series on radical acceptance.
Section Three: Websites and Online Resources
These websites are included because they provide ongoing, living resources rather than fixed texts. They are updated, they are in conversation with current events, and they offer different kinds of access to the ideas my research engages. I have verified all URLs as of March 2026.
Tricia Hersey's ongoing public work on rest as resistance, reparation, and the refusal of grind culture. The website includes essays, event listings, and resources for building a rest practice rooted in political resistance rather than self-help culture. This is the most important ongoing resource for understanding rest as a human rights claim rather than a lifestyle preference.
The online home of Krista Tippett's radio programme and podcast, with a searchable archive of over eight hundred conversations on science, faith, grief, meaning, and the examined life. The website also includes a series of shorter essays and reflections curated from the programme's broader conversation. I use the search function regularly to locate specific conversations on topics I am writing about.
Essays, resources, and short films on emotional intelligence, the examined life, and the philosophical questions that formal education tends to leave unaddressed. The articles section is particularly rich on topics adjacent to alonetude: solitude, grief, self-compassion, and the relationship between attention and meaning. The writing is accessible without being simplistic.
The full archive of TED and TEDx talks, freely searchable and available with transcripts in multiple languages. The most relevant talks for alonetude are cited individually in Section Two, but the broader archive on solitude, grief, trauma, rest, and human rights provides ongoing resources for the thematic conversation my research engages.
An online community and resource centre for practitioners of contemplative photography, defined as the practice of receiving visual experience before interpreting it. The network provides workshops, resources, and a community of practitioners working in the tradition Karr and Wood (2011) describe. I recommend this resource for anyone interested in developing their own contemplative photography practice as a research methodology.
The foundational international human rights document, freely available online in multiple languages. Articles 1, 7, 23, 24, and 25 are the most directly relevant to my research: the right to dignity, just and favourable conditions of work, rest and leisure, and a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing. I recommend reading these articles alongside the blog entries from Phase Three of the retreat, when the personal experience of institutional harm is mapped onto the structural remedies these articles demand.
Canadian Association of University Teachers. (n.d.). CAUT: Canadian Association of University Teachers. https://www.caut.ca/
The national advocacy organization for academic staff at Canadian universities and colleges. The CAUT website provides data, reports, and advocacy resources on the conditions of academic labour in Canada, including the growing proportion of courses taught by contract academic staff. The data here gives my personal experience of precarity its structural and statistical context.
Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC. (n.d.). FPSE: Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC. https://fpse.ca/
The federation to which my union at Thompson Rivers University belongs. The FPSE website provides information on collective agreements, labour rights, and advocacy for contract academic workers in British Columbia. The Non-Regular Faculty Committee, on which I have served, is documented here alongside the broader landscape of precarious academic labour in the province.
Section Four: Films and Documentaries
Films are cited using standard scholarly citation format, as follows: Director(s), A. A. (Director). (Year). Title of film [Film or Documentary]. Production Company. I have organized them by thematic cluster rather than alphabetically because the connections between films across clusters are often more illuminating than the individual titles.
Cluster 1: Alonetude, Solitude, and the Interior Life
Citation
Annotation
Jarmusch, J. (Director). (2016). Paterson [Film]. Amazon Studios.
A bus driver writes poetry in a secret notebook, attending to the world around him with extraordinary care across seven ordinary days. This is my seeing slowly is a methodology argument made into a film: attention as the practice, the ordinary as inexhaustible subject, and the interior life pursued without institutional validation or external audience. I recommend this film to everyone I know who is trying to practise alonetude in the middle of a busy life. It demonstrates that the practice requires no retreat, only intention.
Vallée, J.-M. (Director). (2014). Wild [Film]. Fox Searchlight Pictures.
The closest film to alonetude in existence. Cheryl Strayed walks the Pacific Crest Trail alone after personal collapse, the death of her mother, the dissolution of her marriage, and addiction. The body is the research site. The trail is the methodology. Grief is completed through movement and endurance rather than through talk. Reese Witherspoon carries the entire film in her body rather than her words, and the film's refusal to impose resolution on what is actually a process of continued living is exactly right.
Zhao, C. (Director). (2020). Nomadland [Film]. Searchlight Pictures.
Structural economic disposability made human and dignified. Fern chooses the road after her town disappears when the gypsum plant closes, and what Zhao's film does that so few films manage is to portray that choice with respect rather than pity. The community of nomads she finds has built something worthy in the margins of the economy that disposed of them. This is alonetude at the collective level: transforming imposed displacement into chosen presence. Frances McDormand is extraordinary.
Varda, A., & JR (Directors). (2017). Faces places (Visages villages) [Film]. Cohen Media Group.
A ninety-year-old filmmaker and a street artist photograph ordinary people in extraordinary ways and paste the results on the buildings where those people live and work. Varda is doing photographically and methodologically what I am doing: insisting that ordinary lives matter, that the act of seeing them carefully is an ethical practice, and that ageing is no reason to stop attending to the world with full creative force. The film is also about grief, memory, and the courage to keep looking. I have watched it five times.
Cluster 2: Trauma, the Body, and Healing
Citation
Annotation
Benazzo, Z., & Benazzo, M. (Directors). (2021). The wisdom of trauma [Documentary]. Science and Nonduality. https://www.thewisdomoftrauma.com/
A feature documentary on Gabor Maté's work: trauma, addiction, and what the body needs to heal. Maté's structural argument that addiction is a response to pain rather than a moral failure speaks directly to my son's situation and to my blog's Phase Three inversion: the problem is the conditions that produced the person's response to pain. This is the most accessible introduction to Maté's work for readers encountering his work for the first time.
Jenkins, B. (Director). (2016). Moonlight [Film]. A24.
Three chapters of a life shaped by shame, violence, and the slow labour of becoming. Jenkins uses the body as the primary language: the way the protagonist holds himself across three decades tells the story that the dialogue cannot quite say. This is van der Kolk's body keeps the score rendered in pure cinema. I recommend it as a companion to Fisher's (2017) work on structural dissociation: the man in the final chapter is the child from the first chapter, carrying the same survival strategies into a life that no longer requires them.
Wells, C. (Director). (2022). Aftersun [Film]. A24.
A daughter reconstructs her dead father through holiday footage she took as a child. This is the closest cinema has come to doing what my blog does: using photographs and memory and the body's knowledge to grieve something that was never fully seen while it was happening. The film understands that photographs are negotiations with the past rather than records of it. Charlotte Wells made this film at thirty, and it is a work of extraordinary maturity and precision.
Cluster 3: Precarious Labour and Institutional Harm
Citation
Annotation
Loach, K. (Director). (2016). I, Daniel Blake [Film]. Entertainment One.
The most important film in this cluster and, alongside Nomadland, the film most directly in conversation with my blog. Loach documents what it feels like to be reduced to a number in a system that processes human beings without encountering them, that demands compliance with procedures designed to exhaust rather than assist, and that reads dignity as an obstacle rather than a right. Daniel Blake navigates this system with patience and humour until he cannot, and the film's climax is one of the most politically devastating moments in contemporary cinema.
Loach, K. (Director). (2019). Sorry we missed you [Film]. Entertainment One.
A family's dissolution under precarious gig labour. The father becomes a delivery driver owner-operator, meaning he owns all the risk and none of the rights, and the film documents with brutal precision what this does to a family's body, dignity, and ability to care for each other. This is my ICESCR Article 7 argument, the right to just and favourable conditions of work, embodied in a family's daily life. Loach has spent fifty years making films about structural harm and human dignity, and this is among his most precise.
Wells, J. (Director). (2021). Maid [Television series]. Netflix.
A woman escaping domestic violence with a toddler navigates a maze of institutional systems that appear designed to prevent escape. Every system she contacts has a gap between what it promises and what it delivers: this is my concept of malperformative care in dramatic form. Margaret Qualley carries the series entirely in her body, and the physical exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the emotional labour of appearing competent while collapsing, is documented with a precision that clinical literature rarely achieves.
Cluster 4: Grief, Dark Emotions, and Ambiguous Loss
Citation
Annotation
Bayona, J. A. (Director). (2016). A monster calls [Film]. Focus Features.
Greenspan's dark emotions made visible for a general audience without being simplified. The film argues, as my blog does, that grief contains truth rather than weakness, that the inability to speak the unspeakable is itself a form of suffering, and that relief arrives through naming rather than through avoidance. The monster is the grief, and the film's climax is the child finally permitted to say the true thing rather than the acceptable version of it. I recommend this film as an entry point into Greenspan's (2003) theoretical framework.
Van Groeningen, F. (Director). (2018). Beautiful boy [Film]. Amazon Studios.
A father's experience of his son's addiction, which is the precise definition of Boss's (1999) ambiguous loss: the grief that arrives when someone is physically present but psychologically unreachable. The film documents the oscillation between hope and devastation, the ambivalent love for someone who is disappearing into a substance, and the way the family reorganises itself around the person who is struggling while everyone else's grief goes unnamed. I watched this in Loreto during Phase Two of the retreat and wept for an hour after.
Cluster 5: Nature, Contemplative Photography, and Seeing Slowly
Citation
Annotation
Ehrlich, P., & Reed, J. (Directors). (2020). My octopus teacher [Documentary]. Netflix.
A man heals himself through daily attention to a wild octopus, and what the film documents is the specific quality of receiving rather than pursuing: the octopus requires nothing of him and in doing so provides precisely the conditions his depleted system requires. This is Kaplan and Kaplan's (1989) attention restoration theory in its most intimate cinematic form, and it is also a meditation on what it means to be genuinely seen by a being that has no stake in your performance. The sea gave me something similar for thirty days.
Schwartzberg, L. (Director). (2019). Fantastic fungi [Documentary]. Area 23a.
The underground network of mycorrhizal communication connecting trees through soil: an intelligence beyond individual organisms, a form of connection that the human nervous system, calibrated to hypervigilance, can barely register and desperately needs. Robin Wall Kimmerer appears in this film and her presence anchors the argument in the theoretical tradition my blog draws from. The film is also simply beautiful, and beauty is a form of attention restoration that the depleted nervous system requires.
Varda, A. (Director). (2008). The beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès) [Film]. Ciné-Tamaris.
Varda's autobiographical memoir-film: photography, memory, self-portraiture, and the sea. This is structurally the closest film to my blog in terms of methodology: a woman using images and narrative to examine her own life with intellectual rigour and emotional honesty, on a shoreline, late in her life, without apology. Her use of the beach as both literal research site and methodological metaphor is mine as well, and watching her work is a form of scholarly companionship that reading about her cannot fully replace.
Cluster 6: Feminist Embodiment and Women's Interiority
Citation
Annotation
Daldry, S. (Director). (2002). The hours [Film]. Paramount Pictures.
Three women, three eras, one question: what happens to the interior life when the exterior life demands total performance? The film is about interiority under institutional and social pressure, the cost of performing a life that fails to fit, and the particular kind of solitude that is imposed rather than chosen when the surrounding world refuses to make room for the self that actually exists. Quietly devastating in exactly the way my blog is quietly devastating: the grief is structural, the beauty is real, and nothing resolves.
Sciamma, C. (Director). (2019). Portrait of a lady on fire [Film]. Pyramide Distribution.
A painter must memorise her subject without her knowing, and in doing so produces the most sustained cinematic meditation on what it means to see someone fully that I have encountered. The female gaze, art as attention, the ethics of looking: this is Azoulay's (2008) civil contract of photography in period dress and in the most beautiful light imaginable. The film is also about the difference between being looked at and being seen, which is precisely the difference alonetude practises.
Cluster 7: Memoir and the Examined Life
Citation
Annotation
Polley, S. (Director). (2012). Stories we tell [Documentary]. National Film Board of Canada.
Polley investigates her own family's secrets through multiple narrators and discovers that the same story holds entirely different truths depending on who is telling it. This is Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology in documentary form: the personal as legitimate scholarly data, the impossibility of a single authoritative account, the researcher as both subject and investigator. The film's final scene, in which Polley reflects on what the making of the film has cost her, is the most honest ending to a research inquiry I have seen in any format.
Taylor, A. (Director). (2008). The examined life [Documentary]. Sphinx Productions.
Eight philosophers deliver philosophy while walking, in motion, in the world. Judith Butler, Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, and others think out loud while moving through specific places, and the film's argument by form is that ideas live in bodies and that the location of the thinker is part of the argument. This is Haraway's situated knowledges made cinematic, and it is also simply a pleasure to watch people think with their whole selves rather than from behind a lectern.
A Closing Note
This list is incomplete by design. The best annotated bibliography is one that keeps growing as the inquiry grows, that adds titles as the questions deepen, and that occasionally discovers that a resource encountered years ago holds an answer to a question only recently formed. What I have assembled here is the intellectual and creative neighbourhood of alonetude as it exists in March 2026: the texts and films and talks and websites that have been my companions in the work of understanding what happened to me in Loreto, what produced the conditions that made Loreto necessary, and what the thirty days by the sea made possible.
I offer this list as companionship rather than curriculum. Follow the threads that call to you. Return to the ones that surprise you. Set aside the ones that arrive too early, because they will still be there when the time is right.
Every one of these resources is, in some sense, about the same thing: what it means to attend to a life that has been difficult, in conditions that were produced rather than chosen, through practices of attention that the culture tends to devalue. They are about the body's wisdom. They are about the labour of presence. They are about what becomes possible when we finally stop performing and begin receiving.
Aqui estoy. Here I am. Still.
Amy Tucker
Kamloops, British Columbia, Secwepemc Territory
March 2026
