mzjn, thanks for the comment. your second link provided some good insight on how to format docstrings.
furthermore, i failed to mark the proper sphinx-quickstart prompt answers (as specified in the link, http://pythonhosted.org/an_example_pypi_project/sphinx.html#full-code-example). particularly, answering yes to:
autodoc: automatically insert docstrings from modules (y/N) [n]:
also, as noted in the link, http://codeandchaos.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/sphinx-autodoc-tutorial-for-dummies/, and the conf.py comments, i needed to append locations of modules to the system path. i should note that i ran into a problem appending filenames. when i appended paths where modules could be found, everything worked perfectly.