Creative Writing Commons^™

Eng 200: The Approaches To Grief By Robert Frost & Joy Harjo, Heaven Howard

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Crafting Character: Exploring Elder Identity Through Story, Cameron Fontes

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The following thesis is a culmination of several key activities I have engaged in as a creative writer with a single focus: to create fiction that employs the perspectives, the voices, of persons at later stages of their lives, a population vulnerable to disease and, more insidious, loneliness. First, I discuss my experiences reviving the Western Kentucky student organization Companions of Respected Elders. C.O.R.E. allowed undergraduates to work with local residential centers (nursing homes) by engaging their residents in the collaborative act of creating stories from picture prompts and encouraging questions, following the training and paradigm of TimeSlips^TM. …

I Love You, Go Away (A Novel), John Matthew Steinhafel

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

I Love You, Go Away, a novel set in Milwaukee, tells the story of a twenty-two year-old nobody, Gabriel Driscoll, who meets and befriends a middle-aged, drug addicted, recluse actor, Beau Brooks. But less than six months into their friendship Beau commits suicide. At the funeral Gabriel meets a twenty-nine-year-old corporate executive, Michelle, the daughter of Beau’s long-time girlfriend. Gabriel and Michelle bond over their mutual grief and quickly strike up a romance. At the same time, Gabriel’s semi-estranged mother, Sadie, a recovering heroin addict, reaches out to him in an effort to rebuild their relationship. What follows for Gabriel …

Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.

Blood At The Root, April Schofield

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a coming of age story about two very different boys – Jason, a Northerner who ends up stuck in a small Southern town and Billy, a Southern boy with an abusive father. The boys become friends and grow up learning the dark secrets that are allowed to fester in a tiny southern town ruled by the Good Ol’ Boy System of justice. The story chronicles how their shared experiences change them in ways they never imagined and ultimately destroys their friendship and their lives. Through a history of violence and prejudice, Billy and Jason learn who they really …

Female Characterization In The Novels Of Robert Penn Warren: Variations On A Cinderella Theme, Martha Brent

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The psychological construction of Robert Penn Warren's characters is an established tenet among Warren critics as is the influence of Sigmund Freud's work upon Warren's fiction. Specifically the oedipal nature of Warren's male characters has been widely discussed especially in regard to plots culminating in patricide. Based upon this criticism of Robert Penn Warren's novels to date, Warren's female characters are revealed to be developed likewise upon an oedipal paradigm. The female paradigm which corresponds to Freud's Oedipus complex in women is the Cinderella tale. These stories, some at least a thousand years old, were critically divided into three main …

Ua12/2/1 Hillside, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Archives Records

Special magazine edition of the College Heights Herald:

• Anna, Cara. Keeping the Balance – Ralph Willard, Kevin Willard, Basketball
• Armes, Anya. Giving the Gift to Others – Jim Wayne Miller

Feminism, Selfhood & Emily Dickinson, Regina York

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This paper will draw on the work of leading feminist critics and the works of Dickinson, her biographers, and her critics. No effort is being made to trace the history of feminist criticism; that has been done numerous times by critic after critic. Nor does this paper attempt to provide a concordance to critical thought on Dickinson. That, too, is unnecessary. Rather, this paper looks at the relationship between self-identity in Dickinson's poetry and the fundamental need for such a pronounced sense of identity to serve as the cornerstone of feminist criticism. Dickinson's courage to be female and the implications …

All Points Distant, Scott Earle

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Fictional story written by Scott Earle.

River People, Ruth Madden

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In the introduction to The World of the Short Story, Kay Boyle challenges the short story writer "to invest a brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of style, selection and ordering of detail, and -- most important -- to present the whole action in such a way that it is at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and real, both a valid picture of some phase of experience, and a sudden illumination of one of the perennial moral and psychological paradoxes which lie at the heart of la condition humaine." …

Desire: An Essential Element In Wallace Stevens' Poetry, Barry Gary

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Man naturally pursues that which brings pleasure, and Wallace Stevens recognizes this inescapable desire, exploring it fully in his poetry, prose, and letters and depending upon it to build the foundation for many, if not most, of his major themes. For Stevens, one's world evolves through the use of poetry, and this world, complete with jubilations of fulfilled desire and frequent despair as illusions of fulfillment are destroyed, chronicles the life of every man. As a result, different kinds of desire and different attempts at satisfying these desires emerge as one reads Stevens--three of which will be advanced in this …

Waste Land Or Promised Land: T.S. Eliot's The Idea Of A Christian Society, Amy Wallace

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, the poet questions the nature of our society's foundations; he believes that Western culture is moving dangerously closer to the liberal and secular and that this shift could be disastrous. Instead, Eliot suggests that we return to what is at the very roots of Western tradition: Christianity. To facilitate this change in direction, Eliot stresses the importance of an educational system which takes a Christian perspective. Also important in his thinking is a Community of Christians, who would act as leaders, and the Christian community (encompassing most of the …

J.D. Salinger's Code Hero: The Moral Character In An Immoral World, Rebecca Hendrick

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

J.D. Salinger's fiction can be approached by looking at the various elements of fiction, but his largest statement rests in the ways that his characters interac within his world. This interaction leads to a code of behavior that the heroes follow, and can be used to determine the heroic character within a particular piece of fiction, much as the Hemingway code developed by Carlos Baker identified the characteristics of the Hemingway hero, Salinger's heroes are all aware of the phony which is in the world around them. They see this phoniness as something undesirable within the world, yet they must …

Auden's Poetic Theory & The Child-Like Voice, Diana Graham

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

W. H. Auden shares with most of his contemporaries, including Yeats and Eliot, the goal of lighting modern man's way back to a sense of harmony with his universe--the certainty of identity which his ancestors enjoyed. In New Year Letter, Auden announces that the problem lies within man himself because each of us is possessed of a "double" nature, thus rendering us our own schismatics.

Auden finds that only with the help of divinity, specifically Christian, can the destructive element be overcome. To illustrate this solution in his poems then becomes Auden's great challenge. Employing a child-like voice or tone …

The Existential Elements In The Poetry Of Wallace Stevens, Patsy Satterly

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study will deal with such existential elements in Stevens' poetry. The poetry will be treated in three main divisions: the early period of Harmonium (1923); the middle period of The Man With the Blue Guitar (1936), Ideas of Order (1937), and Parts of a World (1942); and the late period of Transport to Summer (1947) and Auroras of Autumn (1950). Two introductory chapters will precede the actual study of the poetry; one is a chapter on existentialism as it is expounded by Sartre and Camus, and the other is a description of the existential bias in Stevens' mind, in …

The Poetry Of Thomas Merton, Nancy Nelson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

There is a need, then, for a study of Merton's poetry as a whole--a study based not on the poetry as a result of his poetic theory but on the poetry primarily as poetry, and which would include his last three volumes. This paper, therefore, will be a survey of representative samplings from each volume of Merton's poetry, and will take into account the differences and similarities between his early and later periods. It will attempt to discover and illustrate the most significant aspects of the development of Merton's philosophy and poetics, as revealed by the poetry itself and by …

Edgar Allan Poe's Criticism Of The Novel, James Gage

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Edgar Allan Poe wrote forty-three critical reviews of novels during the period 1_835 to 1848 that he was associated with the various literary journals in the East. And, although his best known critical works concern themselves with the tale and with poetry, his statements regarding the novel are of sufficient quantity to merit scholarly research. Yet investigation of the major bibliographic sources reveals this to be not at all the case. Thus, this thesis snail endeavor to place some substance in the void of scholarship concerning Poe's criticism lf the novel with the hope that this substance might provide ample …

Primary Concerns In The Poetry Of Robert Frost, La Verne Murphy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this study is to classify the poems' themes and to reveal frequency patterns, thereby disclosing Frost's heaviest interests. The study is limited to an analysis of the poems contained in the Complete Poems, which includes most of his poetry. The Masque of Reason and The Masque of Mercy, appearing at the end of the Complete Poems, are not included in the study because they are allegorical poem-plays of the Job and Jonah stories respectively. While the study is confined primarily to an interpretation of the poems themselves, important critical studies relating to the themes are …

Alan Seeger & Joyce Kilmer, American World War Poets, Mary Gardner

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

American war poetry did swell to greater volume, but much has been written already about this poetry and much more will be written before it has passed the test of time and found its proper rank in the literature of the ages. Numerous collections and classifications have been made, but, strange to say, very little attention has been paid to the poets themselves. We have brief sketches or scattered magazine articles on the lives of some of the war poets, but it seems that the most interesting phase of work has been neglected, that of making a detailed study of …