Creative Writing Commons^™

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

That Strange Darkness, Matthew Boedy

Theses and Dissertations

This novel is about the past. It is a novel about how the past always encroaches on the present and the future. Even for those who are saved from it.

Fireweed, Robert Kopfensteiner

Theses and Dissertations

Fireweed is a novel following a family in the North American fur trade of the 1830’s. The son of a mixed race parentage and only surviving child of a natural disaster, the protagonist, titled only as the boy, must navigate the complex relationships his father has established between independent trappers, the burgeoning United States military, and the Anishinaabe peoples. The father’s dealings have culminated in the loss of the mysterious iron safe he possesses, which houses what each interested party desires, as well as a truth the boy fears the most.

The novel examines time and the American identity through …

Bough And Hollow, Jeffrey Dylan Nutter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore the complex relationships surrounding the speaker and the father. Furthermore, the poems contained here work to address the major themes of language, family, and home in an attempt at unraveling the self and discovering identity. Another important touchstone for this thesis is the thread of abuse throughout the father’s life. Together the various threads and themes of this thesis are working toward a collective understanding of how the past and present manifest in the body and voice of the speaker.

This World Hasn’T Killed Us Yet, Marcus Jamison

Theses and Dissertations

This World Has Not Killed Us Yet is a collection of poems that engage with notions of imminent/inherent death as faced by the former slaves and their descendants within the United States, particularly in the U.S. South. These poems build from utilizing concepts of Judeo-Christian creation mythology to craft an alternate mythology for those who populate the poems. The collection also gives credence to the impact of gospel, blues, and jazz music on the temperament and adaptability of African Americans, as well as the role of community in fashioning a life worth living in the face of accelerated death. Together, …

Wonderland Station, Melanie Elizabeth Walker

Theses and Dissertations

Wonderland Station is a love story about an affair between a Salvadoran line-cook and a white waitress who has lost custody of her daughter because of heroin addiction. It is a story about a love of necessity, about two people who love to forget their trauma, to imagine a new life in which they are seen and respected. Reality quickly finds them however, as they have no place to be together; Stephanie lives in a halfway house and Mauricio is in an unhappy marriage. Their romance takes them through a very different Boston than is often written about; they fall …

Balance Check, Anne Louise Hilenski

Theses and Dissertations

This novel-length work of fiction seeks to explore the world of women’s elite gymnastics and the way it invites glory as much as it invites sacrifice, mental fortitude, physical pain, and suffering. When gymnast Rachel Wallerstein secures four gold medals at the World Championships a year before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, her destiny as an American Olympic hero is preemptively written into the history books. What happens in the gym stays in the gym, but not for long, as the ever-present approach of the Olympics casts light on the cracks in her parents’ seemingly perfect marriage. On the …

There Fly The Crows, Daniel R. Adler

Theses and Dissertations

Where there is a corpse, there fly the crows. —Netherlandish Proverb

Cult Of The Day Moon, Markham Sigler

Theses and Dissertations

This book is a collection of short stories and miniatures. A variety of themes and styles are employed. Themes include environmentalism, the family, late capitalism, and alienation. Styles include surrealism, neorealism, hysterical fiction, and science fiction, as well as speculative fiction.

The Youngest, Trezlen Drake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of poems that considers life in a southern Black family, memory, nostalgia, dysfunction, race and gender, and generational trauma. These poems are influenced by poetry, fiction, music, popular culture, and scholarship, each providing a different perspective on life and language to talk about that which can sometimes be unspeakable.

A recurring character in this collection is the girlchild, reminiscent of Marge Piercy’s character in “Barbie Doll.” The girlchild here is the figure of the woman or girl who experiences trauma, and what some consider to be unspeakable.

These poems are also an exploration and disruption …

Might Could, Cody Donovan Hosek

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to draw attention to the means in which we communicate ourselves and our experience, namely in the aftermath of loss—loss of loved ones, of a sense of home, loss of trust in the veracity of one’s own senses. While exploring these affective spaces, attention was drawn especially to the eye and the translation implicit in the mind’s work of perception. The writing process involved returning to the sites of home—the Outer Banks, the Blue Ridge mountains, Oconee county, the southern stretch of Appalachia—and it is in this dynamic geography that the images, more often natural than …

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.

Children's Literature As A Catalyst For Social Change, Lyndsey Reynolds

Senior Theses

This thesis is the amalgamation of a creative writing project and an exploration of the ways that children’s literature influences and draws from social justice causes. It started after reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and realizing that children’s books are not as simple as I remember them being. This book inspired me to consider the power of children’s literature to push young readers to be aware of and thoughtfully engaged with political, social and cultural conversations. The first phase of my thesis was exploring the relationship between social justice and children’s books by reading scholarly materials. In these …

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.

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 …

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.

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.

The Introvert's Guide To The Galaxy: A Reflective Guide Of Solo Travel And Study Abroad, Hope Patterson

Senior Theses

Oringinally meant to be a much longer volume, The Introvert’s Guide to the Galaxy is a creative anthology of works that explores one person’s Study Abroad and solo travel experiences. The main goal is to open a space to talk about unique experiences that cannot be anticipated, but should be learned from later. Topics include culture shock, sexism, alcohol culture, family, freelance tutoring, and risky outdoor activites.

Travel with our trusty guide as she fills you in on the things to know while traveling abroad, including finding perfect outdoor sleeping conditions because you missed all the taxis, dealing with the …

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.

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.

Applying Jung's Archetypes And Theory Of The Collective Unconscious To Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lindsay Covington

Senior Theses

The premise of this thesis is to explore the concepts of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypes using myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In exploring the archetypes of the Animus, the Mother, the Hero, the Child, the Trickster, and Rebirth through these myths, I aim to demonstrate their relevance to modern psychology by directly connecting them to related psychopathologies as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Behavioral and Mental Disorders V. Through this, the validity of the concept of the collective unconscious will be demonstrated in how the enduring archetypes of stories that are over two …

1 Hour Ghost Visit, Charles Elizabeth Martin

Theses and Dissertations

1 Hour Ghost Visit is a collection of poems that engages with loss, as well as what can grow in the face of that loss. In “Dancing on My Own,” the poet describes being alone on a dance floor: “when the drop comes I become/a glowstick rain/downpouring fire/sprinkler bursting/with glitter/the corpse I’m/growing towards--/what will bloom in our ribcages will be deadly—” and this hunger for determination, for construction in the face of destruction, grows into a roar by the concluding poem’s call for collective celebration in the face of the end of the world.

The poems collectively sing together; they …

Wave Of Arrival, Cathleen Bonner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore the influences of space and geographical location on subjective perception and vision. More specifically, it aims to use landscape to observe the visible and invisible qualities of a geographical space, and investigate the ways in which perception of those spatial boundaries can be used to create self-portraits. It also aims to revise traditional, romanticized versions of the American West as manifested in poetry and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To do so, it focuses its attention on the man-altered landscape, rather than the pure, wild landscape as a space barricaded …

Mothers, Blaine Scovil

Theses and Dissertations

The following is a collection of fiction creative writing, including five short stories and one novella. The stories center around themes of gender and Southern culture. The novella is a work of historical fiction based loosely on an early twentieth century case of clan violence and anti-Semitism

Everyone You’Ll Never Meet, Jonathan Dunn

Theses and Dissertations

Everyone You’ll Never Meet is a multi-perspective mystery set in the fictional southern town of Ransom, South Carolina. It follows a young woman whose boyfriend disappears, a failed megachurch pastor at personal and professional crossroads, and a young father coming to grips with the shape of his life in light of a chance encounter with a murder victim.

Uncertain Animals, Laura Irei

Theses and Dissertations

This collection includes thirteen short stories that together form a fiction collection.

Milkfish, Emylisa Warrick

Theses and Dissertations

Milkfish is a collection of poems that explores familial and generational trauma in a Filipino-American family. Primarily written in first person narrative, it gives voice to a Filipina-American who has experienced controlling behavior, verbal abuse, silencing, and colorist attitudes and behaviors from her father and mother. The collection seeks to understand why the speaker’s parents raised her this way by investigating how the parents were raised in the Philippines. These poems were constructed with the help of interviews between the author and her parents. Additionally, it explores the patriarchal structure of Filipino families and shines a light on “women’s work,” …

All The Blood In Love, Maya Marshall

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses poetry to explore my history and those of my matriarchs now that I find myself at the end of the line. The writing of this manuscript entailed interviewing my parents and their parents; researching Augusta, Ga and Brooklyn, NY have been particularly helpful in reconstructing the worlds my matriarchs inhabited from the 1940s to present. The work includes various characters—some amalgams representing my mother and grandmother—others, perhaps less realized currently, employ archetypes in an effort to turn their referents to unveil some truths about what it is to be an American. They include American Girl, Abiku (in …

A Social Study Of Discworld Autonomy, Morgan Rogers

Senior Theses

From 1983 to 2015, Sir Terry Pratchett wrote a series of forty-one novels, several short stories, and companion works set on the Discworld. The Discworld is a flat world that rides through space on the backs of four giant elephants that stand themselves on the back of the Great A’tuin, a world turtle. The Disc is based around the Hub, or central point, and the Rim, or the circumference of the world. There is a waterfall all around the Rim of the world that falls into space itself. The Hub compares to the Earth’s poles in that it is the …

Well Enough Alone: Stories, Sarah Jane Huskey

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories aims to capture the difficulties of telling anything at all, let alone the truth, the whole story, or the abstract reality. Though its thematic concerns might seem a bit cheerless at first blush, Well Enough Alone aims to treat them as prominent features of day-to-day life rather than gloomy afflictions or the loci of trauma.