Creative Writing Commons^™

Draw Us Something: Ekphrasis In Reverse, A Meeting Of Minds, Cara Makuh

Master of Arts in Humanities | Master's Theses 1936 - 2022

This creative Master’s Thesis is a collaborative effort between my writings and various visual artistic responses. I submitted my writings to volunteers who agreed to send me a visual or illustrative response to what they read. There were no rules or formatting requirements. The response could be any kind of visual artwork, from a painting, line drawing, or even a photograph. Posting the call for volunteers on Facebook and using simple digital platforms for sharing writing and artwork proved instrumental in enabling this project to reach a global audience.

While this experiment had no expectations or intention at the outset, …

To My Room’S Future Tenant, Abigail Garcia

Honors Theses

To My Room’s Future Tenant is an original collection of poems accompanied by a critical preface.

If We Are Honest, Lisa L. Anthony

MSU Graduate Theses

If We Are Honest is a collection of narrative poetry in which I explore the conflicts, struggles, growth, and transitions involved in many facets of life. Some poems deal with the relationship between a parent and a child. Others deal with the difficulties of marriage and divorce. Family history and experiences are the basis of many poems as well, specifically a series based on the life of my grandmother. Ultimately, most of the poems in this collection examine what it is to struggle but to persevere, to continue growing and changing, and to never quit the work that lies ahead.

To Love The Birds And The Places They’Ve Made Their Home: Poems From The Magic Valley, Alyssa B. Garza

Theses and Dissertations

The theme of the collection could be summed up in these lines written by Caryll Houselander in The Reed of God, “body and soul together give glory to God: the sharper the capacity for sorrow and joy, the greater the hallowing...Christ laid hold of the world with His human hands...He wed Himself to it. Our life is the response of the bride” (66–67). Our loving connection to every human person is our loving connection to Christ—charity is our bride-ness. The poems follow one bride through her journey, with the author’s environment (the Rio Grande Valley) coloring the verses, as …

Detention, Virginia Murray-Torres

Theses and Dissertations

A novel-in-verse about a teenage girl's detainment in an immigration center, separation from her family, and removal proceedings hearing with a 360 degree point of view from the people she interacts with, as well as her own.

Let Me Be Myself, Brandon Stettenbenz

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Let Me Be Myself is a collection of short stories, essays, oral history, and poems that deals with generational trauma, history, traveling, family, war, oppression, and healing. This project serves to inform, evoke understanding, lend perspective, and inspire others. It aims to help others understand the trauma of being born from a Holocaust surviving family, and its impact on somebody in modern day society. It explores the story of a first, second, and third generation Holocaust refugee. It connects a timeline of eighty years of trauma through violence and oppression, and a pursuit to find healing from Nazi Germany.

Zona, Zachary Williams

Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of poems written between 2011 and 2019. Zona the title of the book, meditates on themes of precarity, loss, imagination, and transformation. Drawing from both the Surrealist and Deep Image traditions, the book comments on life and aesthetic experience under late-stage capitalism.

Exploring The Current Poetics Of The Great Lakes Through The Emergent Lens Of Cultural Ecology: The Aesthetics Of Instability/Volatility And Sustainability (Or Survival) In An Ever-Changing Bioregion, Terrance Mccafferty

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Looking At Shadows: Four French Texts In English Translation, Kalena M. Hermes

World Languages and Cultures

This project present four French texts in English translation that share the theme of loss. This theme is perhaps one of the most poignant and relevant; loss is an experience that every human will encounter, and as people we continue across time to grapple with what it means for us and how to deal with it. These four texts will bring the perspectives of four authors to light in English. When we study how other countries and cultures deal with common human issues, we are able to gain new views on these issues. This project will make these texts accessible …

Summer Troubles And Other Poems, Jeremy Thomas Burke

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Following the example of Gary Snyder's "Axe Handles," I introduce my poetics and poems in the preface. Other influences, including Lucille Clifton, John Ashbery, and Anne Carson, are also explored. The original poetry that follows the preface attempts to enact the language of philosophical exploration, relationships, memory, conversation, and meditation while paying close attention to the musicality of everyday speech and avoiding clear and specific conclusions.

Escape Artist, Justin Lamb

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This poetry manuscript explores themes of family and addiction, education and New Orleans, and fear and escape in the span of three parts. Its preface examines the poet’s background and influences, his relationship with performance and humor, and the levity he hopes to create in his work.

The Caged Bird Still Sings: The Poetics Of Peace, Sofia Diane Skavdahl

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Although poetry has been used as a method of peacemaking since Homer’s Iliad, little research, theory, or analysis has been done evaluating precisely what role poetry holds in the realms of peacemaking and conflict resolution. Poetry, along with other arts-based practices of peacemaking, is beneficial because of its ability to encourage personal autonomy and emotional communication, while offering an open and creative space to heal from violent conflict. In terms of the arts, poetry is especially unique because it holds the ability to transform relationships between adversaries and the relationship with the self. This paper seeks to analyze both the …

How To Water The Body, Taylor M. Lorenzo

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction about metamorphosis, both literal and figural, in short fiction. I analyze essays on metamorphosis by Marc Chenetier and Stanley Corngold and apply them to my work as well as other works which are influential to my own writing style and form, including Lydia Davis. Metamorphosis in literature is a reaction of the human condition of resistance to an end. In utilizing transformation, writers can explore the longing humans experience to continue themselves while revealing deeper truths about written subjects. After the critical introduction, you will find flash fiction and poetry. My work is …

At Least Buy Me A Drink First, Ali Renee Geren

MSU Graduate Theses

This is a collection of poetry that focuses on relationships and how those relationships shape our identities. The collection begins with a critical reflection on the poems in the piece and the way that they interact with pop culture and other contemporary poetry. Although the piece is not divided into sections, the poems deal (primarily) with three types of relationships: romantic/sexual, mother/daughter, and patient/caregiver.

Middle Car, Christopher Daniel Crabtree

MSU Graduate Theses

Middle Car is a collection of poems written during my course of studies at Missouri State University, and illustrates my evolution as a writer through a consistent focus on story. The poems explore the everyday, fantastical, often unexpected, and sometimes forced frictions between people and or environment, which cause moments of meaning and resonance. The poems collected here are introduced by and an essay advocating for the preservation of story through narrative and situates my work in a neo-Romantic position in a post-Deconstruction world.

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Moments As They Pass, Jesus Armenta

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This is a creative project titled “Moments as They Pass.” It’s an anthology of poetry with over 106 original pieces, spanning over 135 pages. These pieces all center on the thematic elements of existential philosophy and its intersection with beauty, time, and concept of self. Each poem will explore a particular facet of existentialism. The anthology will be broken up into chapters that reflect each concept accordingly. There is a dialogue that occurs within each piece that will encourage readers to reflect on their own lives and how they navigate their own search for meaning. Ultimately, this creative …

Sunday Dinners Creative Introduction & Poem Analyses, Sophie Clark

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

In tandem with my Writer’s Workshop poetry thesis, in which I will work with Dr. Lisa Fay Coutley to produce an original chapbook of 25-30 poems, my Honors thesis will analyze my use of poetic devices and forms throughout my chapbook. To do so, I will write a 250-page analysis of each poem and its overall contribution to the book as a whole. In addition, I will also provide an introduction to my chapbook upon its completion, in which I will summarize my responses to detail an overview of my thematic and structural concepts.

Three Quarters, Michael Mckee Green

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Three Quarters makes retrospection into prospection. Following its speaker from the near-present to the near-past, the text imposes a spiritual and affective pilgrimage onto nine months (three quarters of a year) of his life. Codas, pieces of parataxis, and grammatical slippages color and heighten the experiences of a young man coming to terms with himself by reliving what’s come.

Merciless: A Crude Hagiography, Lindsey Ann Klessens Appell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the culmination of a project that began as an attempt to explore my relationship, as a teenager, with the Main Street of my hometown, Roundup, MT. In the process of looking through the Roundup Record-Tribune archives and revisiting adolescent memories, I began to see connective tissue between the autobiographical aspects of this documentary project and the work I had been doing in reclaiming, repurposing, and “translating” folklore and mythology in my poetry. Coming out of classes in Old English and translation theory, I had also developed an interest in experimental and creative translation of early medieval texts, …

The Overview Effect, Todd Osborne

Dissertations

The following poems were completed by the author between September 2015 and February 2019.

Probably Nothing To Worry About, Jennifer Bravo

Dissertations

These are (allegedly) poems.

Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This long-form poetry project follows the human will — in this case the “criminal,” or captive will — as it is manhandled through an archive of reverends, wardens and superintendents narrating the future of prison reform. Drawing primarily from National Prison Association Conference archives between the years 1874 and 1895, these documents saturate the work with a will resistant but compelled towards subjugation by the state — as it appears within the text across forced labor economies, eugenic prison science that dictates starvation, classification, and isolation as the rule, the dehumanization of banal bureaucratic processes, the visceral and spectacular violence …

This To Which We've Come., Holly Tabor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of works explores the linkages between moments, the connective thread that accumulates over time to create for each of us a unique present. The title, “This to Which We’ve Come,” attempts to convey that each moment is a point of arrival colored by the smallest of temporal fibers, our most interior histories that stretch and bend and fold back onto themselves when the present forces us into action, or inaction. Through these characters and their stories, I attempt to examine that moment of arrival. A secondary thread explored in this collection is the idea that humans are still …

The Day, The Pain, The Plough, Faith Thompson

Poetry MFA Theses

A collection of poetry focusing on such issues as womanhood and religion.

Touch The Soil, Kirstin Fierro

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Stella And Valerio, Silvia Iorio

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

The Introvert's Guide To The Galaxy: A Reflective Guide Of Solo Travel And Study Abroad, Hope Patterson

Senior Theses

Oringinally meant to be a much longer volume, The Introvert’s Guide to the Galaxy is a creative anthology of works that explores one person’s Study Abroad and solo travel experiences. The main goal is to open a space to talk about unique experiences that cannot be anticipated, but should be learned from later. Topics include culture shock, sexism, alcohol culture, family, freelance tutoring, and risky outdoor activites.

Travel with our trusty guide as she fills you in on the things to know while traveling abroad, including finding perfect outdoor sleeping conditions because you missed all the taxis, dealing with the …

Pangaea, Nishat Manzoor Ahmed

English Theses & Dissertations

Pangaea is a collection of poems that revolve around themes of race, culture, identity, religion, faith, mental illness, death, and love. The themes in Pangaea aim to pinpoint the where all these ideas intersect in the body and the heart, each theme a continent on its own right coming together to make the overall landmass of human existence. In Pangaea, I am asking to find the root of urgency that drives one to love, to hate, to feel. This thesis is an attempt at unearthing that root.

Only One Went Through The Green Door, Rachel Sahaidachny

Graduate Thesis Collection

Written in three parts, Only One Went through the Green Door, explores abandonment, homelessness, childhood, womanhood, and choices made or unmade that create the complicated and winding path of life. The poems use narrative and lyric to examine the effects of childhood trauma on the development of a persona, and its shadow. Emotional realities explored through natural landscapes, and at times through child-like language, create an unsettled speaker who quests for some final understanding that might lead to peace.