Creative Writing Commons^™

Witch Hazel Advent, The Story Of An Ozark Poet, Sarah Moore Chyrchel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this Master's thesis project was to document the life of my maternal step-grandfather, John Ross Rule, in a visually compelling manner. Using equipment provided by the Lemke Department of Journalism at the University of Arkansas, I shot and edited a half hour long documentary film comprised of interviews and footage of John at his home near Winslow, Arkansas. John is a talented poet, and segments of his poetry are woven throughout the film.

The inspiration for this project is deeply rooted in place: the remote farmstead in the Boston Mountains of northwestern Arkansas that my grandparents called …

Tiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things, Ashley Mary Siebels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The stories in this collection revolve around a central theme which is expressed by my titleTiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things. All my characters feel guilt about decisions and experiences that haunt their past. In the present, they have come to a crossroads and are trying to decipher between what they were made to do as in vocation and evolution and what they are being made to do by the authorial pressures that loom over them (e.g. bosses, parents, loan officers, prison guards.)

In this way, my thesis pivots on the word made. Made (or to make) has many …

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …

Love Is Just A Word For The Last Body I'D Like To Keep Vigil Over, Robert Jagger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Love is Just a Word for the Last Body I'd Like to Keep Vigil Over is a collection of poetry that was composed during my time spent at UNLV. Comprised mostly of prose poems, it was heavily influenced by the works of Richard Hugo, Robert Coover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and several French poets who are often categorized as being members of either the Symbolist or Decadent movement. At its best, the collection attempts to invoke a sense of Joseph Cornell's boxes--odd juxtapositions of everyday items and language that create new and uncertain circumstances. Unlike Cornell's boxes, however, the poems aren't …

"Playing Superhero": Agency And The Role Of The Teenaged Superhero, Jessica R. Saunders

Theses & Honors Papers

The discussion of agency within Young Adult Literature is an extensive topic that includes various criteria, such as power in various types of relationships and social ideologies. In the media form of graphic novels, the concept of agency is taken to a separate level because the primary teenagers depicted in graphic novels are titled as superheroes with abilities that surpass the norm. The role of being a teenaged superhero becomes conditional, depending on whether the teenager demands agency in the form of controlling his/her abilities or are assigned the role by their adult prototypes and society. The texts that this …

After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After a Funeral, Before a Test; and Other Stories is a collection of nine fictional short stories. Their focus is diverse in regard to multiple aspects of creative fiction: subject matter, theme, style, setting and characters. Despite the array of material, one common method was to provide narration that would invite readers to make their own interpretation rather than to present overt, didactic stories. This narrative strategy was accomplished by using fictional concepts of setting, the objective correlative, and literary minimalism. Other elements include surrealism, Hemingway’s “iceberg effect,” and psychologically complex narrators. Literary influences include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great …

Literacy, Discourse, And Identity: The Working-Class Appalachian Woman Academic, Sarah Marie Mcconnell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Drawing on conversations about the politics surrounding literacy acquisition, I take a deeper look into the effects of obtaining membership within an academic discourse community on Appalachian women from the working class. The tensions that develop between the two opposing discourses promotes a sense of loss as they create distance between these women and their home community, alter relationships, and disrupt identity. Working-class Appalachian women occupy the borderlands between discourses: one foot in their Appalachian community; the other in their academic community. They negotiate their fragmented identities in order to play the appropriate role within the appropriate context. Their status …

Storm Chaser, Samir Ali Abdel-Aziz

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Storm Chaser is a work of fiction that uses strange, almost supernatural occurrences to symbolically represent various meanings and truths for different characters. Works of fiction that influenced Storm Chaser include The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. Reappearing themes include sacrifice, the desire to live a life of purpose, freewill, and the fear of becoming one’s parents.

The Black Gum Well, Carolyn Ruth Pennington

Online Theses and Dissertations

The writing of the novel as a creative thesis in American literature was a special project approved by the English department of Eastern Kentucky University. Beyond the university's departmental requirements in the course of study for a a Master of English in American literature, I did an independent study of creative writing texts recommended by the creative writing department at Easter Kentucky University. I attended three summer workshops at the Hindman Settlement School Writer's Workshop, Hindman, Kentucky, with classes under professors/authors Robert Morgan, Gurney Norman, Lee Smith and other noted others. My undergraduate study of the English novel and my …