Creative Writing 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; …

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. …

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? …

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 …

Crisis Across The Dog-Starred Verse: Tales Of Heroism, Horror, And Apocalypse, David Arroyo

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Crisis Across the Dog-Starred Verse: Tales of Heroism, Horror, and Apocalypse is a collection of formal and free-verse poems. Although a few pieces are confessional in nature, many of the poems borrow from the genres of speculative fiction: horror and science fiction specifically. The thesis is not divided into sections, rather it alternates visions of a confessional real world and fantasy space. Many poems cover the death of my dog and our adventures in the multiverse, while others like “Together We Are Monsters” are meditations on monsters and pornography. Two longer pieces, however, “Campus of the 21st Century,” and “The …