Creative Writing Commons^™

August In The Dog Moon, Desmond Fuller

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of a novel in progress. August in the Dog Moon depicts a story about the strange, beautiful, and frightening things we find while exploring the liminal perspective in wild and abandoned places.

In constructing a long-form narrative, this thesis attempts to demonstrate the interworking of multiple narrators through a close third-person narration shared between three primary characters, two supporting characters, transcriptions of found recordings, and several chapters from an omniscient perspective. The intention being to explore the narrative of place through various perspectives and experiences. The accumulating effect being one of panoramic storytelling, increased instances of dramatic …

Not About You: A Novel, Hillary Colton

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This novel-in-progress explores the complexities of single parenting and coming of age in a misogynistic society. Through the perspectives of a recently divided family, we are drawn into the coping mechanisms of characters who have been impacted by the cyclical nature of sexism, alcoholism, and abuse. Told through multiple points of view, the novel aims to explore questions of how internalized misogyny and generational trauma force a person to look at their complicity in the rippling effect of societal expectations, and whether it is possible to break free after a lifetime of trying to survive in a society rooted against …

Gleanlings, Natalie Stein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The following poems were written in sentences formed by spilling milk onto objects of ritual significance. In the epic tradition of crumbs. Surfaces offered their chamberlets with the insistence of a larynx. In the shapes of: My Father, The Dead And Their Voices. There was milk, marionette drudgery, implacable lambs. Mice feature greatly– on toast, making bags. Mouse cream. Fragments of lost texts that were divined. A lullabye. These poems inhabit the formal and rhetorical devices of woolgathering, a loculus, and marginalia.

The Book Of Ela Or Apokalypsis In Five Acts, Noah Leventhal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Book of Ela or Apokalypsis in Five acts seeks first and foremost to investigate the layers of mental abstraction in which the human mind engages when thinking, and by extension, when writing. Writing and thinking do not end at the boundaries of genre. As such, I felt the styles therein should not stop at those boundaries either. Making use of influences such as Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Renee Gladman and Rosemarie Waldrop, I have endeavored to use narrative as a to form more fully and poetically explore the contours of language, and by extension, the contours of the mind. …

Laughter, Mahrukh Aamir

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Set in Boise, “Laughter,” is centered on a gullible anti-heroine and an aspiring writer, who is infatuated with a poet.

The novel is about relationships with parents, friends, strangers, complete strangers. An inquiry into what it means to live an authentic life; and what to make of “other” people in fiction: people in books, films, songs.

It’s about blurriness: funniness and sadness; creepiness and devotedness; fiction and reality.

Horsonnets, Shriram Sivaramakrishnan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

‘Horsonnets’ was conceived and written between September 2019 and December 2021. As the name suggests, the collection is centered around horses, as objects of desire, metaphor, tropes. The collection is structured into four sections: ‘the way a horse frames blueness’, ‘to nurse a hurt’, ‘horsonnets’ and ‘landscape with horns’. Together, they all address different kinds of pain (horses became emblematic of that): bodily (‘the way a horse frames blueness’), historical (‘to nurse a hurt’), cultural (‘horsonnets’), and spiritual (‘landscape with horns’).

Tsiyim, A Hiding, Aaron Lopatin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Tsiyim is a collection of poems and poetic sequences that investigate faith, doubt, and the natural world. The poems draw on the stories of martyrs, saints, prophets, and pilgrims, entering a mimetic chain that sets language and poetry as the placeholder for a contemporary faith to take place.

Gift For Burning, Di Bei

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Growing up amid one-child policy in Beijing, Zhi-Nan is pursuing her PhD in Houston while living at a birth tourism house. She receives a text from her adopted cousin who has joined a monastery in Idaho. Convinced that her cousin is in a cult, Zhi-Nan starts a road trip with a white colleague to rescue her cousin from God.

Todd In Eternity, E. J. Pettinger

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work represents the first significant portion of a novel in progress. It is a first-person narration following a teenage boy’s involvement with a modern-day prophet. The story examines the nature of visionary belief systems and the ways in which they can degrade a person’s connection to the everyday world. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with the protagonist’s struggle to escape the dark dream of the prophet and reconnect to the plain givenness of the world. The narrative explores the religious use of horror and glory as visionary elements, and the role of humor and affection in the …

The Starsplitters, Aurora Stone Mehlman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A mysterious letter summons Helen Starbird, and her granddaughter, Laramie, to a dying mill town on the shores of Lake Umbagog. Together, the two women—who leave vastly different lives mired in similarly hopeless ruts—return to the Northwoods. A New Hampshire fire tower where Helen posted during WWII, and the sight of a forbidden romance and life-altering tragedy, pivots from secret to obsession, and getting there progresses from dream to necessity. On the way, they confront private traumas, and volatile forces of prejudice, oppression, and environmental despoliation that have smoldered for centuries. Will they uncover festering family wounds, end the legacy …

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

Initiate, Becca Anderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

After the sudden death of her father, sixteen-year-old Cal Townsend is sent to live with her estranged maternal grandmother on one of Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands. She soon learns that she is descended from a long line of practicing witches.

Three Quarters, Michael Mckee Green

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Three Quarters makes retrospection into prospection. Following its speaker from the near-present to the near-past, the text imposes a spiritual and affective pilgrimage onto nine months (three quarters of a year) of his life. Codas, pieces of parataxis, and grammatical slippages color and heighten the experiences of a young man coming to terms with himself by reliving what’s come.

The Roxy Letters, Mary Pauline Lowry

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Roxy Letters is a comedic written in letters from Roxy—an undersexed, underemployed, well-educated, and verbose twenty-something working at the deli of the flagship Whole Foods in Austin, TX—to her ex-boyfriend Everett who is living with her, but is failing to pay rent while succeeding in totally ruining her mojo!

As Roxy struggles to raise herself from her artistic, romantic, and employment slumps, she finds a new best friend in Artemis, who is a burlesque dancing, girl goddess, and huntress of men. Roxy battles with the meth heads who live next door; reluctantly tries out a sex cult focused on …

Merciless: A Crude Hagiography, Lindsey Ann Klessens Appell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the culmination of a project that began as an attempt to explore my relationship, as a teenager, with the Main Street of my hometown, Roundup, MT. In the process of looking through the Roundup Record-Tribune archives and revisiting adolescent memories, I began to see connective tissue between the autobiographical aspects of this documentary project and the work I had been doing in reclaiming, repurposing, and “translating” folklore and mythology in my poetry. Coming out of classes in Old English and translation theory, I had also developed an interest in experimental and creative translation of early medieval texts, …

Circle Drive, Matthew Naples

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The massively multiplayer online role playing game, World of Warcraft follows many leveling systems that spoon-feeds its players a steady and carefully calculated sense of progression, control, and power. This is part of what makes the game so appealing, as well as the intricate character creation and vast community-based elements. Millions of players share this world of Warcraft, as if it were its own real world (and in a way it is), and they do so with characters they’ve created and customized. What furthers this connection between player and character, and player and player, is how their characters move and …

Shimmer, Daniel Lau

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Shimmer is a collection of poems that explores the unfixed nature of self-construction through the complications of intersectionality. Throughout the text, the speaker, possessing multiple positions that share the locus of the singular unified body, navigates existing power structures in various publics in which bodies and cultures are read and deemed legible or illegible to situated hegemonic social structures. Through confessional and lyric strategies, the speaker reflects on the rituals that reify culturally informed social contracts within diverse publics.

The World Of Don Santo, Veiko Valencia

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The following paper is an investigation on the legacy of colonization, exploring the question of how to produce an object without the colonizers’ presence. By creating fictional characters, myths, and a fake computer software I am proposing a different way to respond to this question. Using the notion of the copy as the core to this alternative response, I am exploring the idea that the copy of the copy at some point can become its own original.

The Body Experience, Jacqueline Sizemore

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

After a deadly disease sends a jaded college graduate to an isolation ward, a virtual technology provides all the escape she could dream of. When her life collides with an abused woman fleeing across the country, they both struggle to find each other before it is too late.

Land Of Entrapment, Scott M. Anderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

“Land of Entrapment” is a colloquial pun on the state motto of New Mexico, “The Land of Enchantment.” Though not every story is set in New Mexico, all of these stories examine characters trapped by something. In some cases, it’s drugs or terminal disease, while in others, characters are manacled by their emotions and feelings. In almost every case, the characters are haunted by their past, an inextricable part of their story, their existence. The narratives explore how these characters cope with their inescapable past while under some kind of duress, and find that the space between acceptance and despair …

Bleach, Cream, And Other Dolls, Elizabeth Diane Mackness

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Bleach, Cream, and Other Dolls questions current rape culture and the political power plays that take place behind it. As a whole, this work also investigates how the positioning of a speaker affects the ability to communicate, build and participate in relationships. Through this problem each speaker’s identity becomes skewed and the speakers struggle to find their identity through various mediums—revenge, death, penetration, definition, nature, skin and disintegration (among other possibilities).

Comedown, Lacey Daley

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

These stories examine the private spaces we keep within ourselves, and the people we claim to know best. The characters are not connected by place or time, but rather their struggles to learn the same lesson: the body is bound to fail us. “Comedown” explores love and loss beyond what is expected and each story ends with the discovery that these emotions are not always visceral.

Auto/Aura, Michael Wanzenried

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems, And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, section 6

Auto/Aura attempts to follow through on Whitman’s project by literally using materials from the world to create a situation that challenges the traditional reader-poet relationship. The poems here diverge from the page into a three-dimensional setting to continue in a largely personal and arbitrary lineage (as all poet-historical lineages tend to be according to Jerome Rothenberg) of 19th and 20th century poetic …

Kania, Indrani Sengupta

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Kania begins as a poetic revision of fairy tales, an attempt to extract the potential female narratives buried within the source texts, in their stifling archetypes. In the spirit of Angela Carter, it attempts to manipulate the most recognizable fairy tale motifs in order to explore issues of violence, deviant desire, sexuality, and monstrosity. As the text evolves, the archetypal “monster” shifts in location, becoming increasingly internal to the woman/speaker. First “he” is the abuser, then “she” is the errant woman, then finally, “it” is the interior anxiety, the self”s nightmare, ungendered and constantly in flux. The manuscript strives, through …

All The King's Horses, Christopher Caruso

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

All The King’s Horses juxtaposes the struggle of artistic creation alongside the trauma of 9/11. This collection of poetry presents the failure of language and art to define the boundaries of anxiety’s origins. Aware of these limitations the “I” in this poem struggles to find a reprieve in defining something that cannot be defined.

Misremember Me, Alex Kiesig

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

An American travels to Crete with his English ex-girlfriend in Misremember Me, a modern novel in the tradition of the Lost Generation.

Calling Through The Hollow, Mollie J. Ficek

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

These stories are bound by place. Each was born of a connection to the upper-Midwest prairie, to North Dakota and Minnesota, to the places I’ve called home. This collection explores the complicated natures of that home: of human connection navigated across a long horizon line, of cold-weather people, of loneliness in open spaces, of hope, and hotdish, and sometimes healing, too.

O In Mouth, Genevieve Neuville Kohlhardt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The poems in O in Mouth are concerned with pleasure and guilt, self and other, form and transgression, orgasms and the weight of the moments after. They focus on orality in poetry and in sex, locating the mouth as the site of all these concerns.

Much of this book is written in dialogue with other texts, including Shakespeare’s sonnets, Dante's Vita Nuova, Helene Cixous's "The Newly Born Woman," as well as many others, including some of Pablo Neruda’s love poems. While reading representations of eros, I was excited by the passion and desire felt by the lovers; yet I …

Golden Flower Of Prosperity, Katelyn Elizabeth Holland

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Golden Flower of Prosperity is a mixed genre work, incorporating letters, found material, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, and prose to explore the experience of two Chinese immigrants in Eastern Oregon at the turn of the twentieth century. By combining found documents with imagined narratives and creating folktales from a few facts, the poems provide an embellished interpretation of history, building the characters of Ing Hay and Lung On into archetypal legends, while still endeavoring to make them seem like real people.

The Objectivist poets Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky inspired some of the formal aspects of the project. Reznikoff’s found …

Le Spleen D’Ash: Poems, Ashley Gould

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The problem presented in Le Spleen D’Ash is of identity, paralysis, and the Lyric. “Ash” serves as a representation of traditional connotations—a fire’s remains, a resurrection, the ash tree—as well as a symbol for the Lyric “I” in the poems: a plea toward my own voice in the manuscript. Placing honestly into a book is normal, and, when combined with abstract ideas, builds a foreign yet simultaneously comfortable frame for the poems. The presence of a named speaker, Ash, is a common practice, but the fact that my speaker is also metaphorically complex adds further dimensions.

Familiar images like a …