Creative Writing Commons^™

Iowa Gothic, Caroline Bailey Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

Iowa Gothic deals with the stories that we tell ourselves, for better or worse, and is an interconnected short story collection set in the fictional town of Madison, Iowa. The stories are grounded in realism, but are also slightly off from the way we typically experience the world: a hoarder who tries to win a cooking contest by boiling a rabbit, a woman who recreates her neighbors' living rooms out of their yard sale items, a hypnotic rooster that starts a feud, residents who believe in ghosts, or at least the communal value of ghost stories. By asking the reader …

Brave Irene, Nicole Mccaffety

Theses and Dissertations

While magical realism steps forward as guiding hand within the manuscript, these poems are interested in re-purposing the myth of the rabbit in the moon in order to explore family history and legend. The organizational force is an emotional narrative that gives shape to a manuscript full of poems interested in the speaker and their personality. The speaker invites, pleads, begs, borrows, and steals all for the purpose of being both interesting and understood. Form, particularly the sonnet, is another noticeable element with the second chapter comprised of poems entirely dedicated to the reader where the speaker comes forward onto …

Screwball, Alexandra Mayer

Theses and Dissertations

This manuscript of poems explores Sephardi Jewish identity within the American diaspora. As the speaker attempts to make sense of herself and of her Jewishness in relation to her ancestry, she feels increasingly at odds with the Ashkenazi cultural practices picked up during her childhood in New York City. The poems grapple with questions such as: what Jewish culture belongs to whom? Who do bagels belong to? Who does Phillip Roth belong to? When Jewishness is not based in religious practice, what is it? Is it possible for a Sephardi Jew in America to disentangle themselves from Ashkenazi production? How …

Growing Up Water, Dominique Barbee

Theses and Dissertations

“Growing Up Water” is a full-length manuscript consisting of one long poem in two parts. Louisiana is one of the most verdant naturally fertile states in the U.S. The state loses a football field of land almost every one-hundred minutes. This is largely due to climate change, oil drilling in the gulf, the cutting of canals, the waste poured in to the Mississippi river by the chemical plants that line this area (known as “Cancer Alley”), the onslaught of invasive species, the list goes on. Furthermore, due to global warming, “big” hurricanes are only becoming stronger and more frequent. Any …

That Strange Darkness, Matthew Boedy

Theses and Dissertations

This novel is about the past. It is a novel about how the past always encroaches on the present and the future. Even for those who are saved from it.

Fireweed, Robert Kopfensteiner

Theses and Dissertations

Fireweed is a novel following a family in the North American fur trade of the 1830’s. The son of a mixed race parentage and only surviving child of a natural disaster, the protagonist, titled only as the boy, must navigate the complex relationships his father has established between independent trappers, the burgeoning United States military, and the Anishinaabe peoples. The father’s dealings have culminated in the loss of the mysterious iron safe he possesses, which houses what each interested party desires, as well as a truth the boy fears the most.

The novel examines time and the American identity through …

Bough And Hollow, Jeffrey Dylan Nutter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore the complex relationships surrounding the speaker and the father. Furthermore, the poems contained here work to address the major themes of language, family, and home in an attempt at unraveling the self and discovering identity. Another important touchstone for this thesis is the thread of abuse throughout the father’s life. Together the various threads and themes of this thesis are working toward a collective understanding of how the past and present manifest in the body and voice of the speaker.

This World Hasn’T Killed Us Yet, Marcus Jamison

Theses and Dissertations

This World Has Not Killed Us Yet is a collection of poems that engage with notions of imminent/inherent death as faced by the former slaves and their descendants within the United States, particularly in the U.S. South. These poems build from utilizing concepts of Judeo-Christian creation mythology to craft an alternate mythology for those who populate the poems. The collection also gives credence to the impact of gospel, blues, and jazz music on the temperament and adaptability of African Americans, as well as the role of community in fashioning a life worth living in the face of accelerated death. Together, …

Balance Check, Anne Louise Hilenski

Theses and Dissertations

This novel-length work of fiction seeks to explore the world of women’s elite gymnastics and the way it invites glory as much as it invites sacrifice, mental fortitude, physical pain, and suffering. When gymnast Rachel Wallerstein secures four gold medals at the World Championships a year before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, her destiny as an American Olympic hero is preemptively written into the history books. What happens in the gym stays in the gym, but not for long, as the ever-present approach of the Olympics casts light on the cracks in her parents’ seemingly perfect marriage. On the …

Cult Of The Day Moon, Markham Sigler

Theses and Dissertations

This book is a collection of short stories and miniatures. A variety of themes and styles are employed. Themes include environmentalism, the family, late capitalism, and alienation. Styles include surrealism, neorealism, hysterical fiction, and science fiction, as well as speculative fiction.

There Fly The Crows, Daniel R. Adler

Theses and Dissertations

Where there is a corpse, there fly the crows. —Netherlandish Proverb

Wonderland Station, Melanie Elizabeth Walker

Theses and Dissertations

Wonderland Station is a love story about an affair between a Salvadoran line-cook and a white waitress who has lost custody of her daughter because of heroin addiction. It is a story about a love of necessity, about two people who love to forget their trauma, to imagine a new life in which they are seen and respected. Reality quickly finds them however, as they have no place to be together; Stephanie lives in a halfway house and Mauricio is in an unhappy marriage. Their romance takes them through a very different Boston than is often written about; they fall …

Beneath The Dry Teeth Of Mountains, Susan Doherty Osteen

Theses and Dissertations

In certain pockets of rural America time functions in different measure. This collection of stories focuses on one such anomaly, the rural ranching community in northeastern New Mexico. In the shadow of ancient Volcanoes, the soil is thin, rocky, arid, but surprisingly fertile for native dry land grass. Elevation fluctuates from to 9,000 feet to less than 4000, depending on whether one is on top of a mountain or down in a canyon. It is a place where wealth is measured in cattle and land, where horses are a necessity and pressed Levis are considered Sunday dress. Life continues much …

The Youngest, Trezlen Drake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of poems that considers life in a southern Black family, memory, nostalgia, dysfunction, race and gender, and generational trauma. These poems are influenced by poetry, fiction, music, popular culture, and scholarship, each providing a different perspective on life and language to talk about that which can sometimes be unspeakable.

A recurring character in this collection is the girlchild, reminiscent of Marge Piercy’s character in “Barbie Doll.” The girlchild here is the figure of the woman or girl who experiences trauma, and what some consider to be unspeakable.

These poems are also an exploration and disruption …

Might Could, Cody Donovan Hosek

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to draw attention to the means in which we communicate ourselves and our experience, namely in the aftermath of loss—loss of loved ones, of a sense of home, loss of trust in the veracity of one’s own senses. While exploring these affective spaces, attention was drawn especially to the eye and the translation implicit in the mind’s work of perception. The writing process involved returning to the sites of home—the Outer Banks, the Blue Ridge mountains, Oconee county, the southern stretch of Appalachia—and it is in this dynamic geography that the images, more often natural than …

Ivy Dreams On, Emily Davis

Theses and Dissertations

Ivy Dreams On is a realistic young adult novel which explores the effects of grief and trauma on adolescents through humor and non-traditional narrative. This book will appeal to readers of young and new adult, written in the spirit of Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak).

There was no mystery to Ivy’s death: G’s sister was drunk, G’s sister was high, G’s sister fell off a cliff. But when D, an ex-friend and longtime target of G’s torment, insists that there’s more to Ivy’s death, G is reluctantly moved …

Our Hands Built This House, Sarah Rose Benal

Theses and Dissertations

Three sisters attempt to grapple with their personal setbacks while their midwestern town experiences a series of tragedies during the summer.

Hand-Me-Downs, Hannah M. Warner

Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of linked short stories that take place in or in relation to the town of Henning, Michigan. The characters are interrelated, but there are two families at the center: Linnea Reynolds and her son, Truman, and Tessa and Ross Wilson and their seven children. “Hand-Me-Downs” explores inheritance within families—the desired and undesired inheritance, the inevitability and assurance of it.

Horsepower, Joy Priest

Theses and Dissertations

Horsepower is a collection of poems curated to be a cinematic, black femme, escape narrative. The speaker, who is experiencing a self-imposed exile from her home, radically envisions waywardness as aspirational.

Beyond The Limits Of Sight, Catherine Ntube

Theses and Dissertations

Beyond the Limits of Sight is a collection of poems exploring black diasporic identity through and beyond the silences that come to surround violence. In this experimental collection, black bars representing selective silence appear throughout the work, in protest of the compulsory release of licensing rights to the university and its corporate partners as a degree requirement, and in insistence that the poet be able to decide on what terms and via which platforms their voice enters the public sphere.

All That Is Still Here, Julia Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

All That Is Still Here is a fictional novel following the character Amelia Hopkirt as she goes on a quest to discover the identity of the human remains she accidently purchases at a garage sale. Amelia becomes increasingly attached to the ashes throughout her journey, laying more and more personal items to rest with the ashes as she discovers moves closer to discovering who’s remains she possesses. Socially inept at interacting with her peers and smothered by an overly protective family, Amelia attempts to meet her emotional needs by using the ashes as a stand in friendship, inadvertently isolating herself …

When We’Ve Left The Table, Lauren Rose Clark

Theses and Dissertations

When We’ve Left the Table is a collection of poems that explores personal identity as it relates to family and upbringing, as well as grief in its various forms.

Dead Eye Open., Carlos Guillermo Gomez

Theses and Dissertations

This collection chronicles the youth and adulthood of a speaker, and how those experiences shaped considerations of masculinity, intimacy, and sexuality.

Mothers, Blaine Scovil

Theses and Dissertations

The following is a collection of fiction creative writing, including five short stories and one novella. The stories center around themes of gender and Southern culture. The novella is a work of historical fiction based loosely on an early twentieth century case of clan violence and anti-Semitism

Uncertain Animals, Laura Irei

Theses and Dissertations

This collection includes thirteen short stories that together form a fiction collection.

Milkfish, Emylisa Warrick

Theses and Dissertations

Milkfish is a collection of poems that explores familial and generational trauma in a Filipino-American family. Primarily written in first person narrative, it gives voice to a Filipina-American who has experienced controlling behavior, verbal abuse, silencing, and colorist attitudes and behaviors from her father and mother. The collection seeks to understand why the speaker’s parents raised her this way by investigating how the parents were raised in the Philippines. These poems were constructed with the help of interviews between the author and her parents. Additionally, it explores the patriarchal structure of Filipino families and shines a light on “women’s work,” …

1 Hour Ghost Visit, Charles Elizabeth Martin

Theses and Dissertations

1 Hour Ghost Visit is a collection of poems that engages with loss, as well as what can grow in the face of that loss. In “Dancing on My Own,” the poet describes being alone on a dance floor: “when the drop comes I become/a glowstick rain/downpouring fire/sprinkler bursting/with glitter/the corpse I’m/growing towards--/what will bloom in our ribcages will be deadly—” and this hunger for determination, for construction in the face of destruction, grows into a roar by the concluding poem’s call for collective celebration in the face of the end of the world.

The poems collectively sing together; they …

Everyone You’Ll Never Meet, Jonathan Dunn

Theses and Dissertations

Everyone You’ll Never Meet is a multi-perspective mystery set in the fictional southern town of Ransom, South Carolina. It follows a young woman whose boyfriend disappears, a failed megachurch pastor at personal and professional crossroads, and a young father coming to grips with the shape of his life in light of a chance encounter with a murder victim.

Wave Of Arrival, Cathleen Bonner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore the influences of space and geographical location on subjective perception and vision. More specifically, it aims to use landscape to observe the visible and invisible qualities of a geographical space, and investigate the ways in which perception of those spatial boundaries can be used to create self-portraits. It also aims to revise traditional, romanticized versions of the American West as manifested in poetry and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To do so, it focuses its attention on the man-altered landscape, rather than the pure, wild landscape as a space barricaded …

All The Blood In Love, Maya Marshall

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore my history and those of my matriarchs now that I find myself at the end of the line. The writing of this manuscript entailed interviewing my parents and their parents; researching Augusta, Ga and Brooklyn, NY have been particularly helpful in reconstructing the worlds my matriarchs inhabited from the 1940s to present. The work includes various characters—some amalgams representing my mother and grandmother—others, perhaps less realized currently, employ archetypes in an effort to turn their referents to unveil some truths about what it is to be an American. They include American Girl, Abiku (in …