Digital Commons Network^™

Critically And Creatively Engaging With Trauma-Informed Mental Health Research And Treatment Of Lgbtqia+ Communities As Expressive Arts Therapists: A Literature Review, Kelli Lavallee

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Expressive Arts Therapists are uniquely situated as both artists and mental health counselors working in psychological pedagogy rooted in systems of oppression. Given the arts-based approaches to the therapeutic relationship, it can be unethical to offer these approaches without acknowledgement of the ways in which the arts intersect with social justice, and justice is only viable if practitioners critically review the clinical mental health education they are consuming from the institutions they learn in, specifically trauma-informed mental health research assimilation and treatment approaches for Expressive Arts Therapists in training, practice, and education. A review of the literature in this paper …

Carpenters: A Short Story Collection, Grace Keir

English Honors Theses

This collection of four short stories explores the interfamilial dynamics and internalized traumas of womanhood across three generations of mothers, sisters, and daughters. In doing so, these stories confront the raw, painful, and beautiful lives and experiences of women and girls.

Espejismo: Imagen En Poemas, Mariela Cedillo

Theses and Dissertations

Espejismo: Imagen en Poemas is a collection of poetry that explores the idea that art – creating poetry can heal trauma wounds. This collection not only tackles the trauma of sexual assault, but the effects of mental health and its recovery. It is meant to portray a full story of womanhood, and all that that embodies. This collection explores these topics through the lens of personal narrative and experience through various poetry forms.

A Rhapsody Wild, Corey Davis

Honors Theses

This thesis is a fictional novel which explores themes of morality and tragedy within the society of a crime-and-murder-ridden city called Spekender. The mayor, Ev Edison, has become a disgraced recluse as a result of the tragic deaths of his wife and unborn child a year and a half prior to when the story takes place. His remaining children (three boys and a girl named Nimble) are left to navigate their disaster-torn worlds in isolation from their father and from each other. All of this changes one day when Nimble encounters a dangerous supernatural character that seems to know everything …

Conceptualizing The Unspeakable: A Conceptual Metaphor Theory Analysis Of Sexual Assault Trauma In Creative Nonfiction, Ariana Ciamaricone

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This paper explores the use of conceptual metaphors (CMs) in two works of creative nonfiction, namely Laurie Halse Anderson’s (2019) Shout and Elissa Washuta’s (2014) My Body is a Book of Rules. Anderson’s (2019) poetic memoir centers on her experiences with sexual assault throughout her childhood and the process of writing her young adult novel Speak (1999). Washuta (2014) writes on her experiences with rape and mental illness via prose. Both memoirs detail their authors’ reckoning with the experience of sexual assault, and this paper investigates how trauma narratives attempt to “resolve what cannot be resolved, to generate meaning, …

Shadow Smoke: A Nonfiction Collection On Memories Lost, Taken, And Storied, Sarah Ann Canterbury

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Shadow Smoke investigates the neuroscientific nature of memory and memory’s role/ authority in creative nonfiction as an illustration of how the genre lays the process of memory bare and accurately models the mind’s process of memory. The scholarship as well as body of creative works revolve around the understanding and tension of memory being a creative process which is explored through genre discussions, neuroscientific studies, and individual creative works. Shadow Smoke consists of four braided nonfiction essays and five nonfiction vignettes to form a collection on memories lost, taken, and storied framed by a critically researched introduction assessing the collection’s …

I Didn't Know You Had A Daughter, Jennifer L. Nickle

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

I have heard it said that one of the hardest genres to write is the memoir. It is definitely the most emotionally and physically draining writing I have ever done. Reliving traumatic events and finding the right balance between accuracy and forgiveness is an exercise in mental contortions. There have been many days where I felt like the world’s most impossible necklace knot by the end of writing a single page.

By completing this memoir, I am untangling a knot and freeing my true self. I'm sharing my story. It is not a story of trauma and child abuse, even …

Pre-Professional, Sophia C. Doctoroff

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Sonya Sternberg, a former pre-professional ballet student, must navigate a new life and a shattered sense of self after an emotional breakdown forces her to leave the dance world in this eight-hour semi-autobiographical limited drama series. The action toggles back and forth between periods of Sonya’s life: her darkly eccentric and at times endearingly quirky childhood in suburban upstate New York, her deliriously joyous year as a ballet student in New York City, her tortured teenage years, and her soul-searching time at a rural New York college.

Ivy Dreams On, Emily Davis

Theses and Dissertations

Ivy Dreams On is a realistic young adult novel which explores the effects of grief and trauma on adolescents through humor and non-traditional narrative. This book will appeal to readers of young and new adult, written in the spirit of Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak).

There was no mystery to Ivy’s death: G’s sister was drunk, G’s sister was high, G’s sister fell off a cliff. But when D, an ex-friend and longtime target of G’s torment, insists that there’s more to Ivy’s death, G is reluctantly moved …