Arts and Humanities Commons^™

There Was Confusion, Carter Cumbo

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This collection is about a young man with an overactive mind trying to make sense of life in early recovery from alcoholism. It focuses on the reckoning of his past, how it appears to go with him into the present, and the relationships that exist on the periphery of his adamant self- examination. It is about the realization that his obsessive process of self-examination, and desperation for answers to life’s universal questions, pale in comparison to the wisdom of his own lived experience. It is a journey through current and past life and the reckoning of a confused mind.

Follow The Shimmer, Meghan Bradbury

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Follow the Shimmer is a creative thesis collection of poems and songs that explore the depths of trauma, love, and healing. Told through the lens of fairy tale and fantasy, it is a story of grief and hope. Some of the tales are familiar, others are strange and abstract. Fables and nursery rhymes are remixed by the hands of a daughter who wishes for her deceased mother's touch. Archetypes and mythology are scrambled through the kaleidoscopic eyes of a woman who survives the violence of a patriarchal society. The world becomes a landscape of dangerous yet magical realms to discover; …

La Fille Publique: Depictions Of Sex Work In Fin-De-Siècle Literature, Nicole Araujo

All Student Scholarship

This thesis conducts a feminist analysis of depictions of sex work in fin-de-siècle, or turn of the19th-century, French literature. It draws connections between literature from this time period and the social and political forces that sought to eradicate female sexual autonomy. In the introduction, the political and social setting of fin-de-siècle France is explored, when sex work was widely prevalent and for many women offered a route to sexual and financial autonomy that was otherwise unattainable, much to the anxiety and irritation of the patriarchal forces in place.The first chapter analyzes Emile Zola’s Nana as a classic representation of the …

Maine Bisexual People's Network (Mbpn), Kat Hartford

POP 101: Queering the Archives

This presentation attempts to construct a history of the Maine Bisexual People’s Network (MBPN), drawing from primary sources from USM’s Special Collections, specifically from the LGBTQ+ Collection in the Jean Byers Sampson Center. Information includes when, why, and how the MBPN was founded, who founded the organization, important events in the MBPN’s history, and the experience of bisexuality for Mainers. Also included are images of the primary sources, such as clips from Our Paper: Serving the Alternative Community, a publication that served queer Mainers. While the MBPN was just one of several examples from Maine’s history of LGBTQ+ organizations, the …

Words And Power: Four Stories Of Women And The Unseen World, Elisabeth Brander

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Stories do not appear out of nowhere. Every story is woven from preexisting threads of inspiration: history, mythology, tales that have already been told by another. Each of the four stories in this thesis engages in dialogue with an older narrative: "A Fistful of Letters to Change the World" focuses on the development of the printing press in Western Europe; "Three Feasts" tells the Greek myth of Erysichthon from the perspective of Erysichthon's daughter, Mestra; "Evening Faces" is a modern critique of the patriarchal society portrayed in the 11th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji; and "Hoshiko" is inspired by …

Too Cool, Lillian Margaret Cary

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Too Cool is a collection of short stories and essays concerning a young woman’s experiences with relationships, and how they help shape the world around her. The body, foregrounded as metaphor, is threaded throughout each story and essay in the collection in the hopes that all readers will relate to the sometimes un-relatable. Both in fiction and non-fiction, these pieces explore heartbreak, friendship and the human need for connection. The stories and essays are written in a minimalist style to emphasize that what is written is just as important as the information that has been left out, and their themes …

The Eternal Waters, Heather Meeks

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This creative thesis is from the first book of a planned trilogy. It is the beginning third of a young adult, dark fantasy novel about a secondary, drowning world. Merfolk and humans have been at conflict for centuries over territory and resources. When an angry ocean goddess wakes after a thousand years of slumber, both societies are threatened. The races are forced to work together to solve their environmental and fantastical perils.

We see the island and water worlds though an alternating point of view. The two male point of view characters, one human and the other merfolk, become attracted …

Time Away, Loren Hart Francis

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Loren Francis planted himself squarely into his life in 2008, and looked around from there, trying to remember what the view was like from then: a time of building, music, creativity and expansiveness followed by an accident, panic attacks, and the deep rout of alcohol and drug addiction. He picks up the threads, tugging on them and letting them take him where they would back through his family tree to his Irish farmer grandparents on his mother’s side, and his British and Lebanese grandparents on his father’s. Music, addiction, family and entrepreneurism all play a salient part in his life …

Coalescing Finish, Daniel James Mcminn

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This thesis comprises five short stories, the climactic chapter of a novel, two short plays, one short screenplay, and two poems by Daniel James ("Dan") McMinn. The work focused on satisfying endings. Most of the work is speculative fiction---either science fiction or fantasy. The work is prefaced by a statement describing Dan's development as a writer in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program. The short stories address the following topics:

• An aging salesman gets replacement internal organs and becomes an opera singer

• A female presidential candidate must keep a straight face while watching a ridiculous PSA

• A sniggler (eel-catcher) …

Catching Fireflies, Stephanie Mejia Loleng

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Included in this thesis are five short stories and the start of a novel. Themes include Filipino American and Filipino cultural identity, definitions of home, and first and second generational family interpersonal relationships. The stories are written in either first or second-person point of view, mainly from a female perspective. The settings for the stories feature natural and urban landscapes including locations in Northern California, New York City, the Philippines, Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Prague. The main characters are Filipino or Filipino Americans who experience feelings of loneliness, internal conflict, parental pressure, and both platonic and romantic love.

Bones I Found In The Garden, Alena Indigo Anne Sullivan

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This collection is a volume of small, intimate moments portrayed in both poetry and prose. Rather than grand, operatic plots telling convoluted stories, this work speaks of the magic in simple things, looking in at personal (and often difficult) moments—the process of finding the beauty in ugly things, finding the crumbs of human emotion that slip through the cracks—lending them the attention they are due but often fail to receive. This collection digs up potsherds of childhood trauma, bones of old romances, and ghosts of things that will never be, all presented to the reader through the lens of fantasy. …

Empowering Metacognition In The Writing Center, Katelyn Parsons, Deanna Richards, Garrett Erb, Jake Angelico, Vic Schalk

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

Anxiety about writing often impedes students from writing. This “writing paralysis” is often seen at the Writing Center. In order to become better writers, writers need to reflect, ask questions, and practice writing. These strategies enable the development of a metacognitive process that empowers student writers to understand why certain rhetorical conventions are chosen over others. The Writing Center encourages metacognition by facilitating writing strategies with student writers. This project explores how the Writing Center’s work assists the process of metacognition by asking questions about student writing processes and drawing on students’ knowledge of different genres and intended audiences. We …

Telling Room: Color In Action, Ryan Poag, Meaghan Gonsior

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center in Portland that helps young writers ages 6 to 18 build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real opportunities for students to display their creativity for audiences. Every year they approach creative writing through a unique theme to help keep young writers engaged. Their anthology’s theme this year is COLORS. Colors can symbolize and illustrate various aspects of life including human emotion, energy levels, and cultural phenomena. Using the connection between color and creativity, we have embarked on a project to produce a series of six short videos based on the colors …

The Paul Barker Ethnographic Research In Haiti, 1950s-1960s: Assessing The Usm Vodoucollection, Hannah Marcel

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The Collection was obtained by Paul Barker, a faculty member of the Gorham State Teachers College, during the period of 1950-1960s (see Figures 1-4, 7). It is compiled of religious artifacts mostly relating to Haitian Vodou, with a few objects from Africa and the Dominican Republic. Haitian Vodouis heavily influenced by aspects of African religions that traveled to the Americas on the slave trade. It shares some characteristics with Louisiana Voodoo, Santeria, and other Afro-Caribbean religions who were also influenced by religions being introduced to the Americas by means of the slave trade. Each religion developed distinct characteristics shaped by …

The Yelping: Essays And Stories, Anthony Marvullo

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

The Yelping is a collection of essays and short stories that focus thematically on the evolution of a relationship from courtship to marriage. The essays explore loneliness and ego and identity and mortality, while the short stories do the same, except under the guise of fiction. Many of the pieces start with a minor misunderstanding or a failure of communication, and the humor and crises that result.

Everyhere, Everythere, Maxene Kuppermann-Guiñals

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Food and people are arguably the poetic commonalities among us all. We eat together; we dine together, we snack together. Wherever we are on the planet, we derive pleasure from the source of our singular and communal energy. We share our food in the most intimate process: what sustains me I give to you to sustain yourself. We love when people appreciate what we have given them, and we are grateful when someone gives their food, or their poems, to us. They become expressions of love.

Food, and poetry, has a complexity of understanding and acceptance. What do we eat? …

The Haunted Animal: Peirce's Community Of Inquiry And The Formation Of The Self, Jacob Librizzi

All Student Scholarship

American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce pioneered the concept of a community of inquiry as a superior method of investigation to the approaches of any one individual. Within Pierce’s philosophy, accounts of developmental subjectivity appear alongside their connections to community. Peirce grounded the application of the community of inquiry in the social. Here the application of the community of inquiry extends to the level of the individual, as a conceptual illustration of thought within the human psyche. Within this reading, haunted emerges through memory as a central condition of the individual. The term significant has here been used to represent the …

A Poet In Space: Identity Construction Through Hybridity, Jonathan Pessant

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

William Carlos Williams wrote: A poem is a small Machine made of words. Poetry and the STEM fields are no different when each discipline attempts to find meaning in the world, when each creates something beautiful through experimentation. STEM has the scientific method, with inductive and deductive reasoning, and the laws of nature while English has rhetorical style and grammatical structure. With a little imagination, hybridity between these two seemingly different discourses can produce new perspectives within each, and for each. These new perspectives could lead to new questions which would not have been imagined separately. This hybridity may be …

Connecting The Unconnected: Understanding Creativity At Work, Kate Rogers

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

To explore the diversity of creativity in the minds of individuals from a spectrum of occupations.

To understand the value of creativity in society and in education.

Using A Mini-Artificial Language To Investigate Question-Formation: Does Underlying Production Pressure Affect Surface Form?, Sarah Dinsmore, Laura Shaw, Jazmyn Sylvester-Cross, Marissa Willette

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

Our general hypothesis is that the sentence planning process influences the kinds of structures languages allow. In particular, the type of wh-question structures in a language will be determined by the challenges involved in planning the structure.

Gnaw Bone, Tiffany Joslin

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Even in the woods of Indiana (in an unincorporated community called Gnaw Bone, to be exact) life happens much as it happens elsewhere—people fight, they fall in love, they go to jail. I escaped this place of my childhood and moved to Washington, D.C., where I learned that much is the same no matter where I go. By exploring significant moments of my childhood in the region many call the Heartland and comparing it to my new city life, I touch on themes our country as a whole is pondering—identity, belonging, acceptance, and greed. I shine a light on an …

The Editor And Les Travailleurs: How Albert Tenney Championed The Rights Of The French-Canadian Mill Workers During The 1886 Diphtheria Epidemic In Brunswick, Maine, Laura Mosqueda Almasi Ma

All Student Scholarship

This thesis explores the devastating diphtheria epidemic that rocked the small Midcoast community and how Albert Tenney, through his weekly editorials, championed for the French immigrants and called attention to not only the shocking living conditions of the Cabot Mill‟s housing, but also convinced the Maine Board of Health that there was in fact an epidemic decimating the population. It is a story of passion, courage and partnership in acting upon what is right regardless of race, religion or nationality.

One Bruised Apple, Stacie Mccall Whitaker

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

The Quinn Family is always moving, and sixteen-year-old Sadie is determined to find out what they’re running from. In yet another new neighborhood, Sadie is befriended by a group of teens seemingly plagued by the same sense of tragedy that shrouds the Quinn family. Sadie quickly falls for Trenton, a young black man, in a town and family that forbids interracial relationships. As their relationship develops and is ultimately exposed, the Quinn family secrets unravel and Sadie is left questioning all that she thought she knew about herself, her family, and the world.

Wearing Bare Feet, J. P. Schlottman

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Wearing Bare Feet is a linked collection of wry short stories about a family of three on fictional Eel Island, three miles off the coast of Maine, an island that revolves around lobstering, tourism, billionaire movie stars, department store heirs, jewelry store heiresses, people who houseclean for snowbirds ... and the old, rich and entitled summer people who come back from Florida for the annual Fourth of July Parade, and then die. Because it is easier to die there. It is why the 13-mile-long "rock off America" has more ambulances per capita than anywhere else in New England.

It also …

This Is Not Your Life, Ella M. Carroll-Smith

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

My novel, This Is Not Your Life examines themes of identity, class, and fate. Identical twin sisters, Annie and Quinn Graves, shared a troubled childhood, which led each of them down very different life paths. Annie is now climbing the corporate ladder at work, while Quinn leads the perfect family life in Richmond’s elite suburbs. And yet, they’re both unhappy, yearning for something different than the lives that seem to have chosen them. The two women decide to switch places for a while, hoping for a change of scenery and lifestyle. However, that decision has potentially disastrous consequences for them …

The Beast Inside, Steve Cave

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This thesis contains the first seven chapters of the novel Ravenous, the short story “Faithfall,” and the academic paper “From Hellhound to Hero: Tracking the Shifting Shape of the 21st Century Werewolf.” Both of the stories deal with werewolves as a common element, but use very different types of werewolves in each. The werewolves of Ravenous transform through losing control or giving in to their passions, while the werewolves in “Faithfall” change only with the full moon, and retain no control once transformed. Both stories have a gay male protagonist, though also in very different ways. Ravenous follows the story …

The Unseen Hole, Jeremy Chase-Israel

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Every story in this collection is an escape attempt. Some have better tools and plans than others, but they're all working towards a shared goal. When I sit down to write, I often picture the small crevices in my brain the ideas squeeze through before dropping down into the sewer of my imagination. If they manage to break free, then I clean them off, picking away bits of filth, until they're able to stand and grow on their own.

The characters filling my thesis are composite sketches of people I’ve known, animals I’ve met, and a sampling of my insecurities …

Heart Of The Machine, Lauren Liebowitz Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Rion lives as a roach in the down-below, sharing what little she has with other kids in need. An encounter with a dead body leaves her with what seems like someone else's memories in her head--Obsidian, one of the synthetic humanoid Protectors who battle against unknown, inhuman invaders. Rion's everyday struggle to survive and keep her friends safe is complicated by this unfamiliar, unwanted presence. As she searches for a cure or at least an explanation, she comes to the attention of different powers at play who want access to Obsidian's memories, at any cost. Soon she is fighting not …

Black In Maine, Joseph Nathadus Jackson Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Black in Maine is a collection of poetry composed around the narrative of poetry being used as a source of liberation and rehabilitation for incarcerated persons. The poems find several protagonists self-reflecting or speaking to an assumed audience about their experiences as prisoners within the Maine Department of Corrections.

I Am Adele Bloch-Bauer, I Am Hester Prynne, Laurie Lico Albanese Mfa

All Student Scholarship

I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE is a compilation of fiction and nonfiction. This cross-genre thesis includes two excerpts from historical novels with female protagonists, and an essay on women’s historical fiction. For the study and creation of female-centered historical fiction I researched and wrote in a wide range of areas, both intellectual and temporal. First, I read and traced the emergence of female-focused American historical fiction that began with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and continues today with historical fiction based in fact such as Lily King’s Euphoria and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife and Circling the …