Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 30 of 46
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Lightning Flowers, Nickalus Rupert
Lightning Flowers, Nickalus Rupert
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Lightning Flowers traces the psychological collapse of Waylan Dranger, an East Texas construction worker / folk artist. Waylan suffers from hallucinatory encounters with Reeve, his missing brother. Reeve often blames Waylan for his disappearance and implied death. Waylan also worries that Sam, his live-in girlfriend, will leave him before he can resolve his own increasingly erratic behavior. Largely, Lightning Flowers is preoccupied with the consequences of nostalgic thinking. Among others, the novel grapples with the following questions: What defines contemporary notions of "brotherhood"? To what extent does one's survival necessitate self-delusion? How do social stigmas inform our experience of mental …
Road Stories, Louis Mindar
Road Stories, Louis Mindar
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Road Stories is a collection of three novellas that explore the pull, allure, sanctuary, serendipity, and adventure of life on the open road. The novellas examine how for some, the road holds the promise of a new day, an improved life, a better opportunity, or a deeper love; while for others, it is nothing more than an assortment of jumbled blue lines on a map. In Tierra del Fuego, a man takes to the road to figure out how to deal with the grief and sense of betrayal he feels following the death of his wife. Lake of the Falls …
Friday Is A Planet: Stories, Allison Pinkerton
Friday Is A Planet: Stories, Allison Pinkerton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Friday is a Planet: Stories is a collection of short fiction that explores the ways loss can alter family bonds. Characters in these stories have lost daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. Some characters go to extreme lengths to return to their loved ones—one woman hallucinates, another time travels. Others deal with the loss in more conventional ways, through support groups and the emotional outlet of community theatre. What ties these stories together is a sense of post-loss confusion and mystery. The characters are unsure how to move forward, or if they should try. The men and women in these stories …
Sunset View, Danielle Armstrong
Sunset View, Danielle Armstrong
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Sunset View is a linked collection of short fiction that explores the dynamics of dysfunctional families. Characters in this collection have been affected by the neglect, absence, or death of their family members and friends. They search for recognition and love as they try to find their place in life. Some turn to animals or fleeting relationships to fill this void. Others attempt suicide or simply disappear. The characters are in denial, unsure how to deal with grief, and often make decisions that alienate them from the friends and family they do have. Set in northeast Tennessee and named after …
Black Skies And Gray Matter, Jacquelyn Bennett
Black Skies And Gray Matter, Jacquelyn Bennett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Black Skies and Gray Matter is a collection of stories thematically centered on characters that are lonely or lost in the world. These stories explore the characters' personalities through their interactions with others (strangers, family, friends, and spouses) and the difficulties they face being misunderstood. Their journeys are ones of trying to find happiness and their place in society (or rejecting it). As they face alienation, they must endure the trials of everyday life (some more extreme than others) and, at the same time, search for kindred spirits, a sense of belonging. Some stay true to themselves while others conform …
Ascending Mango Hill, Lorri Camueiras
Ascending Mango Hill, Lorri Camueiras
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ascending Mango Hill is a collection of work that represents me. The intention is to connect with readers by depicting protagonists who are unable to fit in, a theme most readers can relate to. Many times the protagonist must find the courage to confront a situation rather than remain quiet. The collection is separated into two sections: The Essays and The Short Stories. The essays detail my own experiences at being an outsider while exploring the topics of family and personal growth. In the stories, characters must overcome unresolved childhood issues, recognize unhealthy relationships, and decide when to set off …
Lonely Monsters, Patricia Davis
Lonely Monsters, Patricia Davis
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Lonely Monsters is a full-length feature screenplay that explores the ways in which a classic damsel narrative may be reconsidered. It offers ideas on how death and girlhood may find symmetry. The characters within Lonely Monsters deal with loss, identity of the self versus the world's ideas on self-identity, place, gender, and class. Utilizing the elements of a fairy tale, the narrative seeks to complicate the roles of gender in a cautionary tale. Set in the fictional Florida town of Puerto Palmera, an economic divide between the Estates and the Glades makes for a ripe, troublesome environment for a foul …
A Look To Burst The Brightest Neon Hearts: Attempts, Eric Fershtman
A Look To Burst The Brightest Neon Hearts: Attempts, Eric Fershtman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A Look to Burst the Brightest Neon Hearts is an inquiry, via constellation of stories diffuse in structure and subject matter, into the various (and really weird) phenomena comprising contemporary American existence. Cumulatively, the stories seek to: (1) kick up, like bottom feeders searching biogenous sediment, an underlying value system, and (2) explore how language both breastfeeds and like, weans this value system-e.g., what dark matter is it that tethers bromances to reality TV? Quantum mechanics to pop music? How can a country be responsible for both the world's highest incarceration rates, and OKCupid? These stories also explore various American …
Land Of Flowers, Michael Morrison
Land Of Flowers, Michael Morrison
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Land of Flowers is a collection of short fiction presenting a Florida that stands in counterpoint to the image the state holds in the national consciousness-an image of a backward region rife with rednecks, retirees, racists, and religious kooks. In contrast, these stories feature the natives, the tourists, the immigrants, and also the transplants who are drawn to this "paradise" with hopes of finding warmth, escape, and a new life that so often fails to materialize. Many of the inhabitants of these stories are mired in a state of introspection. In the title piece, an early Spanish explorer contemplates his …
Last Kind Word, Dianne Richardson
Last Kind Word, Dianne Richardson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Last Kind Word is a novel that explores the ways people seek control and power in the face of the unknowable. Set in the fictional town of Thorpe, South Carolina, the story follows four main characters-Donna Neese, Melissa Burnside, Anthony Washington, and Jill McManus-struggling in the aftermath of biracial teenager Micah Burnside's disappearance. They search for a replacement for the lost connection to Micah and for a sense of control at a time when their lives seem to lack it, when other forces, be they people or circumstances or spirits, hold power over them. In the midst of this, the …
Martin Cenquizqui, Christina Guillen
Martin Cenquizqui, Christina Guillen
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The historical novel, Cortes Cenquizqui, set in sixteenth century Mexico and Spain, follows the conflicted lives and minds of several characters through an age of freshly crossing culture, language, and power. The narrator, Maria de Quesada of high ranking Spanish and Mexica parents, resents the white world for condemning her work as a female healer or curandera. Yet she acknowledges that she is ill-equipped to leave Mexico City to live in the outlying Indigenous villages. Maria recalls the tale of her three brothers who were caught in a web of pride and prejudices. Her interjections throughout shed light on questions …
The Former Lives Of Buildings, Bethany Duvall-Francisco
The Former Lives Of Buildings, Bethany Duvall-Francisco
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Former Lives of Buildings is a novel about thirty-one-year-old architect Adelle Corey. Adelle is a woman in denial. A nightmare figure called the Baron steals memories of her closest relationships and most poignant experiences. He hides the memories in Adelle’s dreams, where he reconstructs them into buildings. The only way she can recover the memories is by cutting or tattooing these buildings into her skin. Adelle uses notebooks, mnemonic devices, and academic trivia to keep track of her daily routines. The novel takes place in contemporary times and opens in the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut, where Adelle …
Mirrors And Vanities, Leslie Salas
Mirrors And Vanities, Leslie Salas
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Mirrors and Vanities is a multi-modal collection which showcases the diversity of working in long and short storytelling forms. Featured in this thesis are fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, and screenplay. Using unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to achieve emotional resonance with the audience while maintaining high standards for craft, these stories and essays explore the costs inherent to the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships. The fiction focuses on the complications of characters keeping secrets. A husband discovers the truth behind his wife’s miscarriage. A girl visits her fiancé in purgatory. A boy crosses a line and loses his best …
Drops Of Light In The Dark, April Urban
Drops Of Light In The Dark, April Urban
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The short stories in this collection focus on young individuals’, especially women’s, experience and development as they navigate personal relationships and search for a place in the world. Both longer stories and flash fiction are included, and stories are told in past and present tense, and from first, second, and third person point of view. However, the narration of all of these stories stays close to the characters’ points of view, inhabiting their visceral experience. These stories take place in a variety of settings, including a beachside motel, college campuses, bars, and offices. All of these characters, though, struggle with …
Preventable Conditions, William Wight
Preventable Conditions, William Wight
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Preventable Conditions is a collection of literary short stories intended to explore themes of familial communication, complementary dysfunctions, and the degree to which we all try to hide from or correct our own mistakes. The first five stories in the collection are related, while the last three stand alone. Each of the stories before “Fair Grounds” is told from the perspective of a different member of the Powell family, a fictional clan from Marietta, Georgia. The Powell family stories largely adhere to the basic conventions of realism, while the three remaining pieces venture closer to the absurd.
Reason For Rejoice, Jennifer Karr
Reason For Rejoice, Jennifer Karr
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection of short stories features characters who face unexpected situations arising from ordinary circumstances. Most of the characters find themselves compelled to react in ways that may even surprise themselves. A young woman finds her first feeling of joy in a long time in the face of her mother’s possible death. Best friends recall their years spent doing drugs and ignoring responsibility. When a woman confronts her fear of sex, she finds herself literally in another world. Rather than sticking with one form, several stories depart from traditional structures. One flash fiction piece is told in the first-person collective …
Toward The Red Shore, Gary Bomhoff
Toward The Red Shore, Gary Bomhoff
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A fictional novel utilizing third person limited narration from the perspective of the primary character, Ilya Kollide, who narrates the story as though it were happening in his head as it occurred, with frequent embellishments. He has come to live near an old mansion on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, named Neimasaurus, to find an antiquated, dusty world of faded aristocracy. Temporarily orphaned at the age sixteen by the recent death of his parents, he has traveled four thousand miles to live with his last living relative, an uncle named Demetri, whom he has never met. The year is 1990, only this …
A Clutch, A Pride, A Murder, John Miles
A Clutch, A Pride, A Murder, John Miles
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A Clutch, A Pride, A Murder is a linked collection of seven short fiction pieces and one novella that examine a world much like our own, but with the cover revealed—a world laid bare, exposed by its desires, its emotions, its beauties, and all its machinations. All of the stories involve, either directly or indirectly, the fictional Ohio city of Milton. Some of the stories take place within this seemingly typical American city, while others only involve characters coming from or in some cases returning to this unassuming location. Regardless, the events of these stories either in cause or effect …
The Never-Knowns, Ryan Haskins
The Never-Knowns, Ryan Haskins
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Never-Knowns is a novel about a high-intensity behavioral group home for adults with severe to profound developmental disabilities, its residents, and the staff who are employed there. Focusing on plural protagonists, no single narrative is ever fully realized or resolved, leaving only a cryptic aggregate of experiences, revelations, and trauma. In a typical suburban neighborhood, much like any of us grew up in or now live, there is a house down the block that no one discusses openly. This house seems like all the rest, well landscaped and tidy. Although three times a day much coming and going of …
Renovations And Other Stories, Amanda Rene Lager
Renovations And Other Stories, Amanda Rene Lager
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Renovations and Other Stories is a linked collection of ten fiction stories that examines the ways by which women renew or restore themselves. The collection is set in the imaginary city of St. Clair, South Carolina, a town balancing historical accuracy with the sensational tourist industry; Carolinians who trace their ancestries back to the American Revolution with suburban newcomers; and the notion of cherishing the past with moving forward. Many of the characters struggle with identity, whether it is regional or feminine individuality. The protagonists must challenge self-image when faced with situations that make them reconsider their places in their …
Hidden Variable, Heather Harms
Hidden Variable, Heather Harms
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Hidden Variable is a novel that blends linear storytelling with the novel-in-stories form. It poses questions about the nature of identity as well as the feasibility of personal power, particularly with respect to disorders of the mind. Darla Pierson, the novel’s protagonist, is a woman in crisis. She is steeped in selfloathing brought on by the knowledge that she has, in effect, become her dead father—a genius with an epic libido, habitually using and discarding people. Her father has another habit that Darla doesn’t share: being struck by lightning. After the second strike kills him, Darla makes a conscious attempt …
Stuffmobile: A Novella, Ted Greenberg
Stuffmobile: A Novella, Ted Greenberg
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The leitmotif of Stuffmobile, a modern day Florida-based novella, is that of relational healing: a son with his father, ex-lovers with one another, and, even more challenging perhaps, a son making peace with his dead mother. New beginnings are explored, both as resurrection of long dead feelings and as starting afresh after loss. A husband finds distraction in a covert project after his wife’s death, so much so that his preoccupied isolation worries his two adult children. The son comes to investigate, and his malfunctioning car leads to a reunion and the beginnings of reconciliation. Hours later, an accident nearly …
Trade Secrets, Rachel Kolman
Trade Secrets, Rachel Kolman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Trade Secrets is a collection of fourteen short stories that explores characters falling in and out of relationships and coping in unusual and even comedic ways. These characters are often obsessive and do not trust one another. They think life is funny, and discover that love is funny, and yeah, sex can be funny too. They don’t feel the right things when they’re supposed to. They find love, and lose love. They find hope, and lose hope. They escape sometimes, but more often are unable to go anywhere. These stories consider relationships through the disconnection between reality and fantasy, exploring …
The Boys' Republic, Jonas Mueller
The Boys' Republic, Jonas Mueller
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The young men in The Boys’ Republic live in a world that is continually falling apart. Their houses collapse into sinkholes, forest fires carve out chunks of their towns, plague spreads through their communes, the money runs out on the construction project where they work. This decay mirrors their own collapsing identities, as they are forced to question their mastery of nature, their nostalgia for their youth, their relationships with others, and the value of masculinity itself. Drawing on the work of writers like Dennis Cooper, Flannery O’Connor, and Benjamin Percy, The Boys’ Republic depicts men in the midst of …
Escape Artist, Alejandro Mujica
Escape Artist, Alejandro Mujica
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
My thesis, Escape Artist, is a composite novel written as a fictitious memoir, similar in style to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, that describes my experiences between the years 2001 and 2011. During that time I went through Marine Corps Boot Camp, became a military police officer, patrolled Yuma, AZ, was sent to Iraq for a sevenmonth tour as a security detail just before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and made it back home four years later. The novel also looks into my struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, how they affected the people around me, and what …
Wires And Light, Ashley Inguanta
Wires And Light, Ashley Inguanta
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Wires and Light is an experimental story cycle composed of fiction and hybrid pieces, which blend poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction together. The characters in these pieces are propelled by uncertainty and a strong desire to be connected to places, people. If these characters do find the connections they are searching for, most of these ―joining‖ moments are fleeting. A girl, straight out of high school, misses her ―wonder boy,‖ befriends a woman nearly a decade older, fists her in the desert while California‘s on fire. A woman who dives horses off the Atlantic City Steel Pier is forced to …
Half-Virgin, Alexander Gregory Pollack
Half-Virgin, Alexander Gregory Pollack
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Half-Virgin. (Under the direction of Jocelyn Bartkevicius) Half-Virgin is a cross-genre collection of essays, short stories, and poems about the humor, pain, and occasional glory of journeying into adulthood but not quite getting there. The works in this collection seek to create a definition of a term, “half-virgin,” that I coined in the process of writing this thesis. Among the possibilities explored are: an individual who embarks upon sexual activity for the first time and does not achieve orgasm; an individual who has reached orgasm through consensual sexual activity, but has remained uncertain about what he or she is doing; …
A Floating World: Stories, Karen Best
A Floating World: Stories, Karen Best
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A Floating World is a collection of short stories inspired by fairy tales. Often set in worlds where the mundane and the fantastic come together, these stories explore moments of strangeness that slip beyond the bounds of realist fiction. Fantastical events intrude into mundane reality as characters attempt to reconcile the known with the unknowable.
We Will Make Your Head Explode, Jaclyn Sullivan
We Will Make Your Head Explode, Jaclyn Sullivan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
We Will Make Your Head Explode is a collection of short fiction stories that explore themes of friendship, family, love, lust, jealousy, loyalty, and disappointment. The characters in these stories are utterly human; they are pushed, pulled, and often fall victim to circumstance. A woman grapples between her love of roadside attractions and her boyfriend's grief. A son is forced to decide whether or not to honor his mother's final wishes. A college student is blind to her brother's evolution beyond their family. A woman discovers new possibilities while stalking graveyards to escape the memory of a man who left …
Potential Energy, Edward Bull
Potential Energy, Edward Bull
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Potential Energy. (Under the direction of Pat Rushin.) Potential Energy is a collection of sixteen short stories. They range from the fictional to the autofictional to the entirely non-fictional. In all of them, characters both real and imagined struggle to live and define themselves in a world that is outside their control. They cope with the inevitability of loss, dangers both internal and external, and the passing of their own greatness. Some of these characters become lost while others learn to embrace life on its own terms'to accept 'without hope or expectation.' More often, they are not lost or enlightened, …