Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mating Call, Andrew Cohen

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mating Call is a memoir set in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s, in what Spin Magazine calls "Seattle's Golden Age." The story begins with my arrival in the West and a self-inflicted broken heart, a relationship I had severed due to "missing pieces." The quest is to find these pieces, and throughout the search the memoir analyzes love and relationships for Generation X. The quest takes seven years, during which the narrative explores Seattle's breweries and bedrooms, and the Northwest's rainforests and volcanoes, all the while investigating interpersonal chemistry, sex, and friendship. For all the searching, the missing pieces …

Florida Pure, Lauren A. Doyle

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

FLORIDA PURE is a satiric novel set in the orange juice industry of contemporary Florida that begins when the deaths of four migrant workers lead to the demise of the orange juice company, Florida Pure. The novel follows three plot lines that result from this demise. The company's fallen president has to cope with the loss of the company as well as the more recent loss of his wife, who has left him for the governor of Florida. A former Florida Pure trucker purchases an orange grove to make juice "honestly." And three brothers from Brazil seek to destroy the …

Broken Heroes, Michael Creeden

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

BROKEN HEROES is a mystery novel set in the modem day Southern California rock music scene. The protagonist is Declan St. James, 35, an alcoholic ex-musician and frustrated music journalist who, with friend and former bandmate, Stevie Richards, investigates the mysterious death of mentor Art Schulman. The search ultimately leads them to PowerTrash, a cult favorite band which, years earlier, suffered a mysterious death of its own. The novel is told in Declan's first-person voice looking back on these events. Like A.S. Byatt's Possession, the book uses the study of artists and their work to connect past and present …

Jump! How High?, Tracey Ann Broussard

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

JUMP! HOW HIGH? is a memoir of a journey to a black belt in Karate, one that explores the duality inherent in being a nurturing yet powerful woman. The book moves between personal growth and an exploration of karate training, questioning both the means by which martial arts training promotes growth and the dichotomy of what it means to be a good girl/bad girl. The karate style in which the author trains embraces the Samurai virtues of honor, justice, loyalty, wisdom, compassion and bravery. This is juxtaposed by the virtues of the Southern woman, compliance, hospitality, and warmth, with which …

Itch, Thomas Demarchi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ITCH is a collection of short fiction that explores the ways people give and receive love. The love explored is not limited merely to romance; the deep bond of friendship, the strained relationships between family members, and the quest for mending broken connections are also explored. The stories' protagonists are male, range in age from seven to mid-forties, and hail from different backgrounds: there is a fireman, a biologist/medical student, an adjunct English professor, a computer programmer, a drug addict, an attorney, a prepubescent thief.

Simple and straightforward, the plots predominantly linear, these stories present situations where ordinary people attempt …

The Takings: A Novel, Andrew P. Golden

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Takings is a mystery novel set in present day New York City and upstate New York. The novel is told in the first person point of view by its main character, Reese Coppage. Reese is a Sandhog involved in the construction of City Water Tunnel #3, the city's largest public works project ever. When completed in the year 2020, it will carry enough water to temporarily replace the existing two water tunnels, which are in bad need of repair. Reese witnesses a crime within these tunnels that he doesn't understand and finds himself wanted by both the police and …

Firefly Curios And Sundry Lights, Maidel H. Barrett

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Firefly Curios and Sundry Lights contains 33 poems and 55 pages, mostly free verse lyric narratives issuing from various geographic, emotional, and temporal landscapes. The book is divided into four sections which might roughly be titled: "before," examining themes of childhood and death: "on-the-road," relaying the compulsion to travel, "odd-and- ends-limbo," including pieces which have no context within the time line; and "in-one- place-for-now," reflecting modes of communication, ordering, and longing. Other concerns include speculations about existence, observations of nature, and the importance of science as a means of apprehending the world. The work reveals a belief in the interconnectedness …

Double Fortune, Dan Bentley-Baker

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Double Fortune is a novel relating events taking place in Miami, Central America, and The Bahama Bank in October and November, 1983. The main character, Michael Hayden, is a free-lance music producer who has become jaded and impotent. A chance encounter on the Bay with Marisol, a Salvadoran heiress, and Hector, her brother, propels him into a complex plot to expatriate money through U.S. government channels. Willy, a brooding Cuban bodyguard hired to protect and instruct the Salvadorans, emerges as both nemesis and key to the duplicities of the scheme. The final showdown involves the four of them on the …

Jack's Bight : Solace Of An Open Place, Hamish Winthrop Ziegler

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jack's Bight: Solace of an Open Place is a non-fiction book; partly a story of place, as well as the spirit of the people I lived with for seven years aboard a houseboat in a floating community called the Anchorage, off Miami. It starts with how I came to the Anchorage and my first months aboard with my girlfriend. Character portraits follow, with a shrimping trip and a historical account of Jack's Bight. This is followed by the first of several chapters on our political struggle with Miami city government. Subsequent chapters describe living aboard in nature, the life of …

The Church Of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon The Waters, Preston L. Allen

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters is a collection of short stories about Elwyn Parker, a devout pianist who becomes a worldly car salesman. "Thirty Fingers," "My Father's Business," and "Apostate" introduce Elwyn, a saint at church and a trouble-making evangelist at school, who nevertheless finds himself in a love affair with an older woman, Sister Morrisohn. In "Captivity," Elwyn, a college freshman, experiences worldliness, then grows to resent and ultimately reject Sister Morrisohn. In "The Leap," Elwyn is back at the piano, but unemployed and unhappily married. He finds comfort only in his decade-old …

Howardsville Depot And Other Stories, John Albert Childrey

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The collection of stories recreates an impression of a lost time and place. In "Howardsville Depot," the stories are set in rural Virginia and span the years from 1929 to 1969. While kernel situations are based in identifiable events, the stories explore the subtle dreams and aspirations of characters in the community which has the railroad depot as it hub.

In "Head-on Collisions," protagonists find themselves in inevitable situations provoked by their own limitations. The only choices are forced and evolutionary with no clear solutions.

Where There's Smoke, Elisa Albo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of thematically arranged poems that explore one of the significant ways in which we define ourselves as human beings, that is, through our past and present relationships with others, whether those relationships are familial, cultural, social or personal. Through the direct presentation of images, these largely narrative poems seek to refine perception and thus reveal some of the complicated truths inherent in our various relationships with others, all in an effort to find meaning. The form of the poems often reveals a process, a continual redefining of views on human experience in both its life-affirming …

Gull Lake : A Novel, Pamela Sue Gross

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GULL LAKE is a novel written in alternate chapters. The odd chapters deal with forty-three year old Megan Harris’s recovery from her failed marriage while the even chapters trace her marriage from its beginning until its dissolution. Despite the fact that her artist husband, Martin, has left because of her own insistence, Megan has fallen into a depression and has confined herself to her home. Acting on her friend Ellen Jarvis’s advice, she travels north to Gull Lake where Ellen has a summer cabin. At the lake, Megan comes to understand the reality and necessity of her decision to end …

Reaching Home : A Novel, Virginia R. Oesterle

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is the coming-of-age story of a twelve-year-old girl who lives in a Florida fishing village in 1968, and is thought to be retarded. On a birthday trip to see dolphins perform at a road side show she learns that they are captives simply because man believes he has the right of dominance over "dumb" animals. This emotionally conquered child develops a feeling of kinship to these dolphins and when, with outside help, she discovers that she is dyslexic, not retarded, it frees her to recognize that errors in thinking may exist at many levels. Her release from the trap …