Creative Writing Commons^™

"Do You Want To Build With Snowman?": Positioning Twine Story Formats Through Critical Code Study, Daniel Cox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Using critical code studies, this dissertation examines the Twine story format Snowman. Despite existing books on the authoring tool Twine, a central part of its functionality, what it names "story formats," is rarely covered. This study steps into this gap and, based on my own experiences through working on story formats and documenting examples using Twine, explores the greater social context of the story format Snowman through examining its source code. This dissertation consists of three chapters, each using a different set of research methods. First, the metaphor of a stack is used to better understand how software like Snowman …

Boys To Men, Brandon Bradley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Primarily through adolescent narrators, Boys to Men is a series of short stories that attempts to identify the lessons, traumas, and joys that offer—and in some cases, withhold—the tools that allow Black boys to become Black men. In "Hard Ball," an eleven-year-old baseball player on the cusp of entering middle school wants nothing more than to be less sensitive. In "That's the Way Love Goes," a fifteen-year-old visiting Florida for the summer faces his first hurricane, alone with only his grandmother and unresolved family turmoil as company. And in "Hallelujah," a young church-goer publicly challenges a powerful, yet unruly spiritual …

Tin Hammock, Ian Lindsay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Tin Hammock features the first four chapters of a novel. The keystone setting is a trailer park called Oak Hammock, located on a developed pine forest reaching into the swamplands off U.S. 41. The subsidiary settings are predominantly written in Florida with occasional shifts elsewhere. The literary project was written with nods to the Faulknerian Southern Gothic, borrowing from traditions of science fiction and horror, with an emphasis on expanding the forms of past hegemonic narratives. The stories explore trauma and redemption, answering how characters have arrived and live, often in poverty and violence, in this trailer park. Tin Hammock …

Diverse Expressions Of The Black Identity In Jackson, Mississippi: Stories, Elisabeth Campbell

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Diverse Expressions of the Black Identity in Jackson, Mississippi: Stories is a collection of short stories that seeks to focus on the outsiders, the pariahs, and the social outcasts of Black society in Mississippi throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. By way of emigrations and immigrations, a race of people of multiple cultures that do not necessarily identify with the ethno-racial term "African-American" has emerged in the city of Jackson. Through the exploration of historically significant events, including America's involvement in WWI, the legislation surrounding Black History Month and the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, this collection represents …

Foreign Constellations, Steven Archer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Foreign Constellations is a magical realist collection that centers queer people of color in states of displacement. Facing disconnect from their own tribes along axes of faith, cultural tradition, sexuality, race, geography, and more, the Black and Hispanic characters in these eight stories chafe against the capacity of intersectionality to stratify rather than unite. They are, however, all Floridians, challenging the constraints of national perception with the breadth of their lived experiences. Set across Florida and beyond, each piece sees its protagonists venture into unfamiliar surroundings, or else return to old homes they no longer know how to navigate. A …

Save The Drowning Child: Stories, Kayla Cayasso

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Save the Drowning Child is a collection that explores place, power, and the way collective trauma trickles down through history and families. These stories bridge the author's African American Studies scholarship and love for language. Set against the North Florida landscape, the collection moves readers across time and begs one question again and again: how does one reconcile characters' deplorable choices with the horrific reality of their lives within the Diaspora. On the outskirts of Nassau County, a pig farmer and his wife face addiction and starvation during the Great Depression, but the return of an estranged daughter might signal …

Try Again, Peyton Newell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

In my thesis collection, Try Again, I aimed to explore the consequences of choice. Through four short stories and one novella, I focused on close relationships between two focus characters and how both large and inconsequential choices can shape futures. In the novella, Try Again, I practiced game writing and learned how to shape a character when perhaps the largest signifier of character—choice—is left in the hands of the reader, rather than the author. The construction of this thesis and its stories developed my abilities to find high tension in lower stakes.

The Spicy Girls: Writings On The Lived Experiences Of Latinas As The Exotic "Other.", Nina M. Lopez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The Other in mainstream U.S. society—in this case, the Latino Other—faces oppressive forces in the journey to find belonging. Latinos are marked by stereotypes, regardless of whether such stereotypes have a factual foundation. Latinas specifically are labeled as submissive servants, maids, or nannies. On the other end of the spectrum, Latinas are exotic and enticing sexual beings that must satisfy white men’s fetishes and lechery. Through this thesis, I will explore what Latina women face as an Other that is paradoxically both rejected and desired and evokes aversion as well as awe. In this creative thesis, in creative nonfiction, poetry, …

Authoring Inclusion: The Sonnet's Shifting Form, Aloysius Devine

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The history of canonical love poetry is inaccurate without the inclusion of minoritized groups. The relevance of the sonnet’s incomplete history and its lingering impact on contemporary poetry are not examined enough within academia. The sonnet is taught through white-, straight-, and cisgender-centered lenses, contributing to the erasure of historically relevant sonneteers who do not align with these identities. This thesis celebrates the diverse history of sonneteering, while drawing attention to the remaining narrow-mindedness within the poetic community. This thesis dismantles traditional elements of the sonnet through varying form, subject matter, and stylistic choices.

When viewed in the physical form, …

On Your Painted Wings, Sandra M. Ford

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to explore historical issues of Cuban restrictions on emigration through a magical realism lens. Drawing inspiration from Cuban-American writer Ana Menéndez and Columbian writer Gabriel García Márquez, this thesis focuses on family relationships, especially how grief shapes those relationships and the people in them. The thesis approaches these issues of family, grief, and Cuban emigration by weaving a more grounded central narrative with an original fairytale.

La Carroza Dorada (The Golden Carriage), Camila Cal Mello

Honors Undergraduate Theses

La Carroza Dorada (The Golden Carriage) is a collection of essays and poetry that details the narrator’s life growing up as an immigrant from Uruguay in the United States. Through each piece, the narrator explores themes in her own life relating to family, grief, self-identity, gender roles, language, distance, and more that directly relate to the perspective of a young immigrant. Inevitably, these personal themes connect to broader issues that affect every immigrant such as the Latinx experience, familial hardships, social/economic class differences, and cultural differences. The narrator explores the American Dream and the balancing act between dream and reality …

Hymnal Of Teeth: Southern Stories Of Folk And Fey, James E. Phillips Iii

Honors Undergraduate Theses

We are the stories we tell. Folk and fairy tales are reflections of the cultures that pass them down. Contemporary literary traditions, such as the Southern Gothic and tales of magical realism, also provide unique ways of responding to concerns within our society. This thesis attempts to merge these literary traditions to create a collection of Southern folk and fairy tales. These stories vary in style from very traditional fairy tales to more modern styles of magical realism and lyrical poetry. This collection was crafted after studying an extensive reading list of novels and short story collections written by masters …

Bodies Of Clay, Noor Ur Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

A little boy named Armaghaan grows in a fictional tribal village Kashmala along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan during the seventies and eighties. His father Roshaan Khan and mother Shandana are living together in a conflicted marriage. Their desires and needs are at odds with each other, and their children suffer at the cost. Armaghaan observes his parents and elders, explores the physical environment of Kashmala and tries to grapple with his circumstances. The story of Armaghaan's childhood and adolescence plays in the backdrop of the USSR-Afghan War. Though the war itself doesn't become the focus of the narrative, …

Good Patients, Susan Mesler-Evans

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis is the first 21 chapters (approximately 150 pages) of a novel, Good Patients, accompanied by a complete synopsis. Good Patients is a social satire which seeks to touch on the flaws of the American healthcare system and social media culture, and how these two intersect for many people. To prepare for writing, I spent my first semester completing a guided reading list and preparing the synopsis, both of which were approved by my thesis chair. While writing, I consulted several medical articles to make my work as accurate as possible. The novel explores the way social media …

Inheritance, Kenneth Noguera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Inheritance follows the journey of a boy finding himself through the discovery of family secrets and his own sexuality. This hybrid work, part poem, part essay, explores a boy transitioning to adulthood while unearthing secrets about himself and where he comes from. He finds solace in the retelling of stories passed down from within his family and encounters creatures which shift, morph, and lie. In this surreal world, people commune with spirits, the dead find a voice, and a boy breaks and remakes himself. The work divides into three parts, beginning with memoiresque poems from the speaker leading to an …

Water Damage, Rebecca Rowell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

This novel explores the nature of good, if flawed, people that are put under intense pressure. Using alternating point-of-view characters, I showed the good and bad parts of Washington, DC and the surrounding area through the eyes of someone that has benefited from privilege and someone that has not. These juxtaposing views change over the course of the novel until both point-of-view characters have become something different than they were at the start, learning humility and trust, respectively. Through the alternating chapters, I wanted to show two viewpoints of the same city and the same set of events, each contributing …

Memoria: Re(Member)Ing How To Heal, Vilma E. Portocarrero

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This serves as a contextualization of my family history and a reflection of my lived experience as a first-generation Nicaraguan American woman living in the United States. In my writing, I explore displacement caused by political unrest and the intergenerational impact of war on families. This work is multi-genre, incorporating elements of creative nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and oral history.

Crime/Mystery: Reinventing Tropes, Gabrielle Santiago

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Throughout the ages, the crime/mystery genre has stayed marginally the same with a variety of tropes making their debut as time went on. Many of these tropes were introduced by notable writers, such as, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy L. Sayers, and others. Due to this, the researcher decided to pinpoint the most common or overexposed tropes within this genre and reinvent them within the narrative that the researcher has created. The tropes that will be utilized are the ones with a remote location and limited suspects, having every person connected to the victim to …

Transcendence, William Rincon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Transcendence is a novel that examines masculinity and self-acceptance in the modern era: How do we move on from wrongs done by others and our own mistakes? A coming-of-age novel, Transcendence follows Cassiel, a young man in his mid-twenties, as he searches for his absent father and finds himself in a monastery where monks have strange abilities. He decides to learn meditation and find the source of his unhappiness through trials that test his discipline and faults. With the promise of enlightenment and learning what happened to his long-lost father, Cassiel completes each trial and comes closer to finding the …

Representation In The Story: The Social Impact Of Diversity In Transmedia, Tiffany S. Tanaka-Cooper

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to take a more profound and nuanced look into the effects of diversity in transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) on society, more specifically, how the representation in these stories affect the minority groups that interact with transmedia. This thesis investigates the depiction of minority groups in transmedia storytelling and the influence of identifiable characters and plotlines. The research and following interviews I have engaged in will encapsulate into a screenplay set in a fictional court that offers the discourse of "forced diversity" within the transmedia narrative: whether or not …

Taking Inventory, Constance Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

"Taking Inventory" is a biography about my mother, whose life spanned decades filled with hope, heartbreak, loneliness, and adversity. Weaving together micro-essay and prose poetry set at the merger of her adulthood and my childhood, this mixed genre collection examines the many ways her life influenced mine. The triptych structure of the book moves backwards in time, exploring the relationship between my mother and the world she navigated, beginning with the final stages of her life, moving through a turbulent mid-life, and ending with the young woman affected by a world war, an alcoholic father, and a devoutly religious mother. …

Macho Remixes: A Collection Of Writings, Daniel A. Hernandez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Macho Remixes: A Collection of Writings is a thesis containing short stories, poetry, and a personal essay that discuss the matter of toxic masculinity through the representations of male and macho sexuality in the Latinx culture. It covers depictions of how Latinx men have been stereotyped in today’s society. The works included here are my own perspectives of what masculinity means to me as a young multicultural male navigating life. Throughout these texts, I—my speakers and narrators—grapple with understanding the conflicting and oppressive expectations drawn from my roots, particularly those based in Latinx culture. The purpose is considering the negative …

A Tale Of The Terminally Fey: A Modern Take On Collaborative Folklore, Olivia Damm

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Writing has long been seen as a solitary affair, but this was not always the case. Before widespread literacy, stories were told and retold through the power of speech. Whole communities came together to weave tales and myths. Recently that tradition has been making a return to mainstream media with the renaissance of tabletop role-playing games, which serve as a standard vehicle for group collaboration. A Tale of the Terminally Fey is an attempt to reconcile the collaborative, off-the-cuff nature of oral storytelling with traditional narratives. The author has adapted the transcripts of live sessions into the first chapter of …

I Have Questions, Lorena Matejowsky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this thesis explore mid-life feminism, family, mental illness via anxiety and panic, identities of southern girlhood/womanhood, and the challenges of a social media saturated life. Mothering plays a large part in many of these poems, both embracing it and confronting gendered expectations about it. Telling the truth is explored through poems about white women's complicity in racist systems in the southern United States and how being quiet about it benefits us. Fear and the myriad ways it has manifested in my life is a common thread in this work, especially the fears that accompanied white girls growing …

Assisted Living: Stories, Donovan Swift

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assisted Living is a collection of stories that explores themes of parenthood, brotherhood, old and new love, adultery, financial strife, and the many faces of loss. The collection offers different points of view, which allow the reader to experience these themes within varying lives and situations. For example, the eponymous "Assisted Living" is from the perspective of a pet-sitter at the brink of losing both her job and husband, while "Holy Mother" explores the point of view of a wife coming to terms with her affair and the physical injury that has changed her husband. "The World of Reptiles" follows …

Latchkey: A Memoir In Essays, Nicole C. Pendleton

Honors Undergraduate Theses

"Latchkey: A Memoir in Essays" is an essay collection that follows the narrator through her childhood as it relates to being raised a latchkey kid in the 1980s. The lack of published academic studies that follow children through their experience as latchkey kids and into adulthood leaves personal exploration as the primary means through which a child, specifically a young girl, can seek understanding as to how her view of the world develops. Each of the five essays explores issues of autonomy, self-efficacy, sexuality, addiction, and familial bonds. It is through her reflection of specific events – the loss of …

Counter Clockwise Culture Shock, Matthew Mercer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Counter Clockwise Culture Shock is a memoir focused the narrator's return to his hometown, a place he barely escaped: drug addiction, incarceration, bad relationships, alienation, an Oedipal mother, and suicidal threats. It is reflection on both culture and self, after I gained an outside perspective from Japan. The narrator is forced to relive nihilism and monotony, and face the troubles of his younger years. It describes the difficult journey of today's youth, in an evermore technologically dynamic world - with few role models able to plot a course through. This is a meditation on past actions that ended in survival. …

Boitawl: Soil, Lost And Left, Bishnupriya Chowdhuri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Boitawl ("Boi"- lack, devoid of, "Tawl"- bottom/ ground/ foundation), the word in one of the Bengali dialects refers to one without a ground beneath her feet. The thesis, a hybrid collection of prose and verse including narratives and graphic vignettes, flash, fabulist and short stories, prose poems and free verse imagines the inside worlds of such un-settled existences. In the process, the pieces connect migration, memory, childhood and lost towns with fractured humans caught in between - to reveal what lies under pillars of desires, the shapes of unsaid longings and recurrent images in their dreams.

Small Nothings, Leah Washburn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Small Nothings is a collection of ten short stories exploring the connection between place, friendship, and family. Set in Missouri's capital, a variety of characters grapple with different types of separation and loneliness. Couples struggle with emotional distance, children try to reconnect with their parents, and an old woman faces the loss of her independence. Through small conflicts and choices, these stories revolve around isolation, disconnection, and absence. How do missing presences affect family and friendship? How do people deal with change through everyday choices?

What Remains, Michael Leavitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Grief is a personal thing, as unique as it is ubiquitous, and each character in What Remains approaches their grief in a different way and handles it with differing degrees of success. The collection blends both realist and fabulist stories in its efforts to explore these themes, from the eponymous "What Remains," in which a man attempts to reconcile his feelings about the death of his abusive, absentee father, and what that means for his relationship with his own son; to "Convoy," a story of a Marine who confronts the culture of violence into which he's been indoctrinated, and which …