Creative Writing Commons^™

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.

Glorious Indignities, Benito Salinas Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this creative work is to illustrate the relationship between the identity of the Rio Grande Valley as a whole, corporate control, immigration status, and interpersonal connection. This illustration is achieved through a series of interconnected short stories that culminate in a telling of a real-life event, the prison riot in the Willacy County Correctional Facility. This event has ramification for every character in the novel and for an entire county. This work attempts to simultaneously take a birds-eye view and microscopic examination of the events that lead up to the riot over the course of two and …

Same Air: Human Relationships In Playwriting, Nicole Cardenas

Theses and Dissertations

The culmination of the creative work and its introduction focus on human relationships, friendships, and the interactions and dynamics of individuals with traumatic experiences. The one act play explores how a secret can strain a group of friends, causing them to create their own realities to cope with the betrayal and guilt cultivated throughout time.

To reach my conclusions, I drew inspiration from various works, playwrights, and the words of other writers. My work is meant to showcase how fragile and resilient friendships are when faced with misunderstanding and lies.

The Blackbird Blood, Danielle Birnell

Theses and Dissertations

The Blackbird Blood is a novella length piece of young adult fiction. The piece not only includes themes dealing with coming of age such as love, complexities of relationships, and identity, but also touches on issues dealing with race and privilege. This coming of age novella explores these themes through the lens of teen characters navigating life on a military base in a country destroyed by war.

The Soft-Spoken Girl, Ashley Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

This project is a collection of poetry that celebrates the power of the mujeres fuertes in my life, cultural expectations and prevalent barriers. It is set in the Rio Grande Valley where the unique blend of two cultures, caused much heartache and courage. Each poem in this collection weaves a coming of age story.

A Citrus Wildfire, Mark Anthony Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

An American Dream forged by greed. A family caught in the middle of a race war. A young boy trying to learn how to be a man. A Citrus Wildfire is a fiction novella that tells the story of a Mexican family struggling to survive in the Rio Grande Valley after their only source of income burns down, and the lengths they must go to in order to get the life they were promised.

A small preface from the author proceeds the work. This novella is inspired by many different authors and educators, as well as the Rio Grande Valley …

En La Guarida/Where The Wolves Eat The Lion, Jose Rodriguez Ventura

Theses and Dissertations

En la Guarida/Where the Wolves Eat the Lion is a work in the tradition of Latin-American hybrid literature. It transitions between prose, poetry, and prose-poetry, as it details the family history of its narrator and traces the South-to-North crossing Mexican immigrants undertake in order to pursue a better life north of the Reynosa/Hidalgo border. The thesis details the difficult life mothers, daughters, and sons face as they try to assimilate into the first-world, whether linguistically, or culturally. It is concerned with the power dynamics between men and women, fathers and mothers, and daughters and sons in Mexican American Culture in …

Desecration, Natalia T. Arredondo

Theses and Dissertations

Deacon Christopher, a soon-to-be-ordained Catholic priest, is faced with the reality of the sex scandals in the wake of his upcoming ordination.

Identity In Life Writing: Fact, Fiction, And Memory, Bridget Langdon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of excerpts that explores the lives of a Midwestern family who are forced to cope with a new reality following the AIDS diagnosis and eventual death of Bruce, the son and brother. The stories are meant to examine the way new identities are created posthumously through memory as well as identities that result from social expectations. Additionally, this collection explores the concepts of truth and fact on individual and social basis within the fiction and non-fiction aspects of memoir.

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.

"Quiddity | Leaving Home", Jonathan U. Barton

Theses and Dissertations

The poetry collection in four sections features pieces concerned with memory, particularly of the author’s childhood in Ireland. Difficult family relationships as well as early romantic failures are prominent obsessions. Landscapes and careful portraits of characters recur. Travel to Eastern Europe and within the author’s adopted United States give the opportunity to meditate on larger issues and spans of time. Domestic pleasures and the struggle to be a good parent and husband provide the ultimate trajectory of the work.

The nonfiction memoir consists of eight essays which tackle among other topics a failed first marriage, a return visit to the …

Untitled Unknown, Taylor Simone Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

This article is the first of a series exploring domination culture through the ways narrative has been indoctrinated as reality and weaponized as a holding cell for captives. Within this exploration, the narrative of domination is placed in relation to higher dimensional realms of the unknown; this being the before and after of domination culture. This positioning will allow for the reality of a simultaneous existence within the labyrinth of domination and a higher dimensional unknown to be framed. Within this series of articles, I question the roll of the rogue characters shamanistic agents of resisting domination, the fear of …

Proteinic Geontopower, Agustine Zegers

Theses and Dissertations

PGP is a study of how we come into intimate contact with capitalism through our digestive tract. It is a study of the increasing valuing of protein in contemporary diet culture, focusing on how this phenomenon has resulted in mass-scale global soya production. Protein synthesis and distribution are rearticulated in this work as a set of molecular transactions enacted within/out bodies, moving loosely through ligaments and industrial machinery.

PGP is a speculative exercise in communing with a damaged planet through our daily ingestions.

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …