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A Gold-Colored Background (English With Czech Accent), Mandy Alyse Kalish
A Gold-Colored Background (English With Czech Accent), Mandy Alyse Kalish
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
As part of the degree requirement for an MFA in Creative Writing I am submitting an unpublished, original novel as my thesis. The novel is a first-person narrative of a woman from the Czech Republic. As the story develops, Data, the main character, comes to Las Vegas with her husband. The two eventually win a large jackpot, at which point the husband dies of heart failure and Zlata inherits all of the winnings. She stays in Las Vegas and eventually teams up with a tiny busboy to design and open her own hotel/casino on the strip. This novel is meant …
Loose Slots: Imaginations Of The American Demos, Jessica Frances Thomas
Loose Slots: Imaginations Of The American Demos, Jessica Frances Thomas
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
Millions of Americans are subject to television programs about Las Vegas through shows such as CSI and Las Vegas, but there is little fictionalized writing done about this city, and only a small percentage of that takes place off the Strip. Since the publication of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , there has yet to another pop literary examination of Las Vegas as a cultural contributor to the American experience. Partially because of the fluid nature of the city, its ability to shape-shift within a decade, and partially because it is so difficult to avoid the …
Donning The White Agbada, Abayomi Animashaun
Donning The White Agbada, Abayomi Animashaun
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
No poet, Eliot says, makes art alone by himself; he works with the collection of the dead and living poets around him. It is with this in mind that I have put together this poetry collection, Donning the White Agbada, in honor of William Stafford. Although the collection is dedicated to Mr. Stafford, it is not limited to him; it draws freely and extensively from different writers, different materials, and different periods---from the Christian Bible, to Robert Frost, to Sophocles, to Nigerian History, and to Yoruba mythology, among others. So that what is created (in my ongoing exploration of Western …
Electric Banana, Mongolian Sky, Stacey Abbott
Electric Banana, Mongolian Sky, Stacey Abbott
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
Although these poems stretch from Las Vegas to Mongolia---two peculiar and exotic places---and a few points in between, they remain tethered to the quotidian of life. They illustrate familiar details of the human experience such as love, learning, distance, and change. The poems of Electric Banana, Mongolian Sky aim to, as William Wordsworth states in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, as far as [is] possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw over them a certain coloring of …
Permanent Record, Jonathan Bauch
Permanent Record, Jonathan Bauch
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
Permanent Record is a collection of loosely connected short stories, told primarily in the first person (framed by a prologue and epilogue in other points of view), taking place on Staten Island; New York, during the 1980s. Tracing the character's development from his bar mitzvah through college, the stories deal primarily with a young man's attempt to reconcile his feelings of rebellion---against his parents, teachers, tradition, etc.---with his growing awareness of the Judaism instilled in him as a child. As much as the character tries to distance himself from his parents and their religious values, he becomes increasingly aware how …
No Fine End For A Modern Day Alice In Transit, Lisa Brooks Markowitz
No Fine End For A Modern Day Alice In Transit, Lisa Brooks Markowitz
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
To the reader---; How I live is a giant writing thing, even when I'm not writing. There is always breath, both shallow and deep, and somewhere, wet jackets, sides of the same world. It is about the blob, mostly because all of this has been written and said but for the ghost that follows me around. What matters most finds us when we are open, the way a flower opens up for the Sun I write because I don't have a choice, the way Alice had to go through Wonderland before she could get out. What is left, having left …
Answers The Dog Whispered, Allison Marie Wilkins
Answers The Dog Whispered, Allison Marie Wilkins
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
A woman writing must learn to fuse all of her identities in order to be true to herself and her writing. She must think about the issues that affect all women, and then she must decide how to handle them herself. These issues are what make up the body of poetry in "Answers the Dog Whispered". The poems are about answering the questions that life asks of a woman; The poems range in topic from motherhood to grief, erotic love to family, relationships to writing. Their common unifying theme is a strong woman's voice that pushes the boundaries between the …
Jesus' Shadow, Meredith Lee Stewart
Jesus' Shadow, Meredith Lee Stewart
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
The poems in this collection are mainly drawn from personal experience, especially the experience of place as seen through the perspective of the "I." Many of the poems have overtly spiritual themes. I envision even those poems that aren't overtly spiritual as being prayer-like because both prayer and poetry require a connection to something outside the self as well as deep honesty about the self; There are some poems in this collection that are inspired mainly by research rather than personal experience. I focused much of this research on women's issues and bringing to light women who have been overlooked …
"33", Caleb Brooks
"33", Caleb Brooks
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
"33" is a collection of poetry divided into three sections. The poems in the first section, Cycle, represent twelve "snapshots" of a year in a relationship. The names are Native American names for full moons within each of the twelve months. The initial poem in the series is a traditional invocation, this one to the god of Love The second section is less thematically grouped, however I feel that for the most part they do fit the tone and thematic intent of the work. That section is entitled Pompeii of Love after one of the poems contained therein. The final …
The Lyric Subject, Matthew Shears
The Lyric Subject, Matthew Shears
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
The ensuing creative dissertation operates, essentially, as a book of poems. As such, it demonstrates my most up to date engagement with poetry and poetics, although many poems have been discarded during my stay at UNLV. One of the weaknesses of my outlook on poetry as I entered school here was the hodgepodge of received opinions which, when mixed with a kind of individualized vision of writing, operated in place of "theory," and under the sign of "poetics." In short, what I most needed to develop was some sort of critical/theoretical apparatus, in terms of reading and writing; But poets …
The Other Country: Stories And A Novella, Vu Hoang Tran
The Other Country: Stories And A Novella, Vu Hoang Tran
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
The Other Country is a collection of seven short stories and a novella, all of which take place in Saigon and the Saigon area and portray the lives of its citizens in contemporary Vietnam. Given the country's recent history, this setting inevitably evokes the Vietnam War, a connection that casts the book---especially from the American perspective---into the shadow of contemporary American fiction that focuses on the war both as a historical experience and as a cultural idea: important novels like Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, and …
Glean: Poems, Joshua Peter Kryah
Glean: Poems, Joshua Peter Kryah
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
Glean, a reference to the gathering of grain after harvest, explores the appalling trust implicit in any act of faith---that prayer may not elicit a response. Spare and evocative, the collection struggles with a language at odds with itself. How do we write about an absence that can never be fully possessed or known, an absence that may be all we ever glimpse of the divine? When does spirituality become more real than its pursuit? Moving between doubt and vulnerability, the body and its unresolved spiritual fate, Glean dedicates itself to the exploration of faith, simultaneously investigating the possibility of …
Wake Up The Family, Katherine Lien Chariott
Wake Up The Family, Katherine Lien Chariott
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
WAKE UP THE FAMILY is a collection of short stories, set in contemporary Las Vegas. These stories share more than a geographic setting; they share common concerns of loneliness, loss, alienation, and illness. The stories are further linked by the repetition (across multiple narratives) of plotlines, images, phrases, and key words. The links between these stories---thematic and otherwise---are meant to encourage a reading of the collection as one extended work of fiction, rather than as a group of separate works. It is hoped that these links will lead the reader to interpret each story in terms of the other (related) …
Birds In Paradise, Constance Ford
Birds In Paradise, Constance Ford
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations
Birds in Paradise is a novel telling the story of a teenage girl in Idaho who is seduced into leaving her troubled home life with her parents to live with a passionate and charismatic religious zealot in his house on the banks of the Snake River. The main character, Janice Evans, has recently moved to the small town of Meade, Idaho, in the wake of an event in her family---her father has had an affair and has left his university teaching position to start over in this conservative, rural town. Her parents' marriage continues on, full of turmoil and anger, …