Creative Writing Commons^™

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.

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.

Thirteen Unlikely Stories, Joseph Gray

Dissertations

Thirteen Unlikely Stories is a collection of fiction composed and revised at the

University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers.

The Body Mends Itself, Hannah Elizabeth Dow

Dissertations

The following poems were completed by the author between September 2014 and April 2017.

Groundhogs, Tanya Mason Smith

Dissertations

This dissertation contains a collection of stories that explore loss and grief, illness and disability, parent and child relationships, and marriage and its expectations within the gay community and the south.

Beacon Light And Other Stories, Joseph Arnold Holt

Dissertations

The following stories, composed between fall 2013 and spring 2016, concern matters of devotion, obsession, trauma and recovery. They progress from objective points-of-view to omniscience, along the way adopting larger narrative time frames and casts of characters.

18 Dorset Ct., Allison Catherine Campbell

Dissertations

The following poems and essays were completed by the author between October 2012 and April 2016.

Material Matters, Thomas George Holmes

Dissertations

Material Matters is a collection of original poems written by Thomas G. Holmes, while a doctoral student at The University of Southern Mississippi. The poems explore the materiality of writing.

Cacophony: Stories, Michael J. Goodwin

Dissertations

Cacophony: Stories was written over three years in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. The collection depicts middle-class characters disconnected from relationships, careers, and family. Each story explores disillusioned characters forced to confront a major moment in their lives from a bleak setting. Characters find varying degrees of success in forging an identity in the face of flawed existence. This existence lingers, producing an apathetic lifestyle where characters must act. These characters act passively through the narrative and the collection sees them forced to break away from their malaise. The collection aims to explore austere suburban …

Things You Can't See, Alan Ellis Purdie

Dissertations

The following is a collection of short fiction exploring the human-dog relationship. The stories work to evade the sentimentality generally associated with fiction wherein pets or animals are featured, depicting instead the dramatic complications the canine has upon human relationship and interaction.

Masters thesis: http://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/228/

Blackletter: Fiction And A Wall Of Precedent, Louis Anthony Di Leo

Dissertations

The eight stories that make up Blackletter explore situations in which people are forced to challenge the legitimacy of authority, rethink and rebuild their own identities, or confront their own involvement in human and environmental degradation. A central theme running throughout the collection is law, broadly, and the ways in which people adhere to or sometimes break from a particular rule, be it social or legislative. In each case, the role of law and its correlation to place and identity—either overt or veiled—serves as a major component of each story. In this way I locate these stories within a sociolegal …

Quarry: Poems, Christina Ann Rothenbeck

Dissertations

A book-length poetry manuscript including poems about hunting, illness, domesticity, illness, girlhood, and the body.

The Knowledge Weapon: Ways Of Knowing, Annette Christine Boehm

Dissertations

This collection of poems explores the language of knowledge and instruction. While it can provide a sense of security, what we are given as ‘knowledge’ is frequently unreliable or even misleading, and used much like a weapon.

Next Year In Juarez: Stories, Christopher Michael Brunt

Dissertations

This creative dissertation comprises a collection of short fiction and a critical preface. The preface explores the concept of variousness as it affects the contemporary production of literary fiction. Reference is made to a range of twentieth century writers in order to position the dissertation in a context of literary history. The piece titled “The Essay on Longing” is the first chapter of a novel-in-stories.

Dreamers: Stories, Eddie Wayne Malone

Dissertations

The short stories in Dreamers explore American masculinity in the twenty-first century. They also examine and complicate Asian-American identity at a time when decades-old stereotypes persist in the culture. In the title story, a war veteran returns home from Afghanistan to find an American landscape that has the feel and texture of a terrible dream. In other stories, men fixate not on women but on each other. In “Still Life,” the middle-aged main character is preoccupied with a friend who died over fifteen years ago. The main character in “At War with the Insects” pursues a man who was both …

Filipino, Too: Compositions On Culture And Identity, Randy Eugene Gonzales

Dissertations

“Filipino, too: Compositions on Culture and Identity” is a creative dissertation that documents my journey to understand my cultural heritage, focusing on my displacement as an expatriate and as a third-generation Filipino American.

This Animal, Elena Therese Tomorowitz

Dissertations

This Animal is a poetic narrative about humans’ animalistic instincts and how we use them to navigate our relationships with others and the world around us.

Explorations: Five Science Fiction Stories, Daniel Joseph Pinney

Dissertations

These stories explore a universe populated by the stuff of space opera—enormous space stations, mysterious alien artifacts, starships and terraforming and emission nebulae, a human civilization that over millennia has spread across the galaxy. These explorations are not conducted by the usual swashbuckling heroes of space opera, however, but rather by the sorts of people who would have to live and make a living in such a future.

The perspectives from which this future is explored include those of an asteroid miner who loses his ship even as he is discovering the wonders of art, a man whose misuse of …

The Pine Effect, Andrea Kay Spofford

Dissertations

This dissertation includes original poems written during my time at The University of Southern Mississippi.

Slackwire Calliope, Lauren Dale Oetinger

Dissertations

This collection of essays and stories strives to consider questions of belonging and estrangement, family, and the many layers of the human experience. This collection is equally interested in questions of genre, and the potential for genre to stretch its own limits. Above all, this collection endeavors to question what makes a story, and what makes a story good.

Ornithology And Apparent Magnitude, Sarah Michelle Wynn

Dissertations

Ornithology and Apparent Magnitude is a collection of poems with a critical preface.

Quarry Light And Other Stories, Claudia Lois Smith

Dissertations

Quarry Light and Other Stories is a collection of short stories and one novella articulating themes of violence, trauma, and sexuality. The stories in Quarry Light and Other Stories are arranged according the theme, movement, and tonality. Although they can stand alone, the stories are meant to be read interdependently. The collection is accompanied by a critical introduction.

Nobody's Boy, Linda Maria Mobley

Dissertations

"Village literature," literature that is written for and about the tribe, or community, has been a long standing tradition among African American writers such as Toni Morrison. These stories follow that tradition in that they are largely reflective of the African American Experience particularly South Alabama during the sixties. The decade that was marked by such violence and bloodshed is reflected here through the stories of a family experiencing it firsthand, yet who are not fully aware that they are living in a historically significant period of history. It is only through the retrospective lens of a child in that …

The Wanderers And Other Stories, Courteney Danielle Watson

Dissertations

The Wanderers and Other Stories is a collection of short stories that explores themes of travel and isolation within interior and exterior spaces. The object of this collection is to define the point of disruption between persona and the “other” self and to evaluate the limitations of communication and language. Many of these stories reflect on the literal and metaphorical distance between people and attempt to hone in on the point of contact—and often rupture—that characterizes the fraught nature of human relationships. The collection is accompanied by a critical introduction.

That He May Raise, Armond Joseph Boudreaux

Dissertations

This dissertation is a work of fiction written during the author's time as a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Son Of A Thousand Fathers, Colter Patterson Cruthirds

Dissertations

The following collection, which explores the often tenuous relationships between fathers and sons, was written by the author between 2008-2011.

Ladies And Gentlemen, Robert John Bartholomew

Dissertations

This collection of short stories treats of the following diverse themes: the redemptive possibilities for seemingly despicable characters; the ways in which circumstances and the social environment affect characters' sexualities and personal relationships; the lengths to which characters are willing to go to get what they want, which want is often the desire to make contact with others; the struggle between characters' narcissism and their need to come to terms with a new self image, a self image which is often at odds with the one they wish for themselves; and the beauty of vulnerability. Additionally, one of the chief …

Strange Places, Alex James Morris

Dissertations

Strange Places is a collection of short stories and short shorts written during my time at The University of Southern Mississippi. Set primarily in Akron, Ohio, the stories in this collection explore a range of themes, such as trauma, death, alienation, social class, and the struggle to connect to others. This collection is preceded by a critical introduction.

Girls Of Easy Virtue, Elizabeth Anne Wagner

Dissertations

This is a collection of four stories I have written during my time in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.