Creative Writing Commons^™

Raise Up Lakefog, Dive, Joseph N. Duke

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

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Neon Is Trying To Tell You Something, Grace Arenas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The following is the manuscript of my poetry collection, “Neon is Trying to Tell You Something.” This manuscript represents my development of poetic voice and style over the course of the past two years. In these poems, images accrue and take on new meaning, while still retaining echoes of their original connotations. This is how the speaker’s mind makes sense of things: evolutionarily. As a collection, these poems do not attempt to world-build or use their foreign landscapes as the driving force of symbol, but rather they use these landscapes as the essential terminology for their logic puzzles, their syllogistic …

Poison In Pink, Sydney V. Cook

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Humans slather, spray, mist, and cleanse their bodies with personal care products like lotion, hairspray, cologne, and shampoo every day. Our cupboards are stocked full of them, but few of us understand what is in those jars and bottles. We trust that if it’s on the shelf at the store, it’s safe. However, this is not always the case, and many personal care products contain chemicals that are harmful to human and environmental health.

My multi-disciplinary Environmental Studies thesis project combines evidenced-based research, interviews, nonfiction narrative, and science communication to create part of a book manuscript intended to educate general …

Ground Fires: Essays On Land And Scouting, Matthew R. Hart

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Ground Fires is a collection of creative nonfiction probing the social and environmental complexities that marked the narrator’s long membership in the Boy Scouts of America. I grew up a Scout, part of a quirky, adventurous troop in a New England college town. After earning Eagle and graduating high school, I moved west, working for seven summers and a few more seasons at Philmont Scout Ranch in northern New Mexico. I led backpacking trips through the mountains and high desert, teaching teenagers about land I knew and loved, land that was changing fast. From bears to wildfire to challenging politics, …

The Grand Gallery, Nicole Roché

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Grand Gallery is the story of a woman coming to terms with her identity and purpose in a small town in Kansas during the post-WWII boom. Astrid Grand is the heiress apparent to the family business, a gallery that has been at the center of the town’s operations from the time of its founding. The gallery displays a person’s “collection” at the time of their death. The townspeople collect everything from Victorian mourning jewelry to gum wrappers to objects found in trees. “In many ways,” as the novel’s opening chapter states, “the collections displayed at the gallery served as …

The Keeping House, Anna J. Blackburn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This collection of poems and short prose is a meditation on questions of boundary and perception. The Keeping House is locus of loss and entrapment, resistance and desire. It embodies the irresistible gravity of the self—both its material and psychical spaces. The speaker grapples with the instability of a world where “shrouds become things, and things become shrouds.” Even knowledge is unreliable. These poems enact a quest for meaning through internal and external landscapes.