Creative Writing Commons^™

On Being Seen Or For Those Who Break Like Me, Shanisha K. Branch

English Theses & Dissertations

The nature of truly seeing is something I’ve had a hard time grappling with. If you understand the difficultly of seeing and wanting others to see you that same, then these pages are for you.

What We Do Not Perceive When We Perceive It, Hannah Jane Trammell

English Theses & Dissertations

The thesis herein attempts to traverse, overcome, and, ultimately subsume back into the conventions of such genres as science-fiction, fabulism, surrealism, romance, horror, and speculative fiction. The primary tool used for this purpose is a great bag of hot, sparking meat caught between two ears and a thick skull. A few notebooks, pens, and a laptop might also have helped in this pursuit. The stories and poems contained herein are works of fiction inspired by non-fictional systems of feeling. Using all the tools given to me by my professors and the craft and theory books I read during my coursework …

Responsible Friend, Nina Correa White

English Theses & Dissertations

This novel explores the purity of friendship and the ugliness of grief, and how each can affect, complicate, and enhance the other. It represents the life-changing relationships that exist in this world, but those that do not need romance or sexual desire to save us. This is a love story between two friends.

Pangaea, Nishat Manzoor Ahmed

English Theses & Dissertations

Pangaea is a collection of poems that revolve around themes of race, culture, identity, religion, faith, mental illness, death, and love. The themes in Pangaea aim to pinpoint the where all these ideas intersect in the body and the heart, each theme a continent on its own right coming together to make the overall landmass of human existence. In Pangaea, I am asking to find the root of urgency that drives one to love, to hate, to feel. This thesis is an attempt at unearthing that root.

No Net To Catch You, Will Yarbrough

English Theses & Dissertations

No Net to Catch You is a collection of nine stories. It is about loss, love, and loneliness. It is about men, women, and children who fail to understand themselves in ways that are often tragic, sometimes ironic, and make choices that usually end in self-defeat.

Sugartown, Emma Moore

English Theses & Dissertations

Ren Baggarly, the seventeen year old foster daughter of a local minister and his wife, goes missing the day of her boyfriend’s high school graduation. Sugartown is an examination of a small, strange, sometimes spiteful Southern town and its demons. It is told through the eyes of the three women who are inadvertently charged with piecing together the story Ren left behind.

Museum Of Unforeseen Circumstances, Ethan Forrest Ross

English Theses & Dissertations

On the day of his mother’s death, Charlie Agate abandons his current life and returns to his childhood home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For months, this new residency enables his thirst for isolation and comfort, but at last Charlie ventures back into the public world where he forms an unlikely bond with an elderly woman, Virginia Day. Virginia is strange and impoverished, broken and yet hopeful as she maintains an assertion so outlandish Charlie can’t help but pursue the truth of this mystery alongside her. This novella is about faith and mystery, guilt that leads to opportunity, and the persistence of …

Your Favorite Place, Christina Marable

English Theses & Dissertations

This is a composite novel based on travelers.

Safe Passage To The End Of Earth, Gregory Martin Chandler

English Theses & Dissertations

Safe Passage to the End of Earth is representative of my work as a poet and my ideas about the world. It’s broken down into four sections that approach the world from different perspectives. Each section reflects my interests mostly independent of one another, though they connect thematically. The order of the sections, and the order of the poems within the sections, reflects what I felt was the strongest sense of motion from one idea to the next, beginning with a poem that touches on many of the themes in a single page and moving through politics, history, religion, and …

Sugar Acts, Amanda Raquel Gomez

English Theses & Dissertations

Sugar Acts is a poetry collection which seeks to incorporate themes such as women, gender trauma, the body and its position toward and against society, identity, heritage, and colonization, topics which can be considered abstractions but have very visceral and real physical manifestations. These themes wreak havoc on the body, namely the female colonized body, and as a Puerto-Rican American woman, I am asking the question of what it means to make sense of 21st century colonialism. This thesis, then, attempts to discover the ways in which trauma resides in the body and continues to be passed on to each …

A Right-Hand Man: A Novel, Christopher Giofreda

English Theses & Dissertations

This is the first half of a Catholic novel about a mailman with a hook hand. It is about the power of friendship and invites us to think about the posthuman.

We Are The Bobcats, Jacquelyn Mohan

English Theses & Dissertations

We are the Bobcats is a novella that follows a group of high school seniors as they undergo the loss of two of their peers. Its central themes include grief, guilt, loss, and the complications between the three in the aftermath of tragedy. The story also concerns ideas of group identity, individualism, and the disparity between external presentation and internal struggles.

Permanent Resident, Joshua Mcgarry

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis emerges out of the author’s own experiences as a permanent resident of the USA in a time of increasing tension towards immigrants. As the poems progress they deal not only with the immediate political concerns, but also with the familial issues of living on another continent as the poems address the way distance adds an extra layer of strain the death of the author’s grandfather in early 2016.

The thesis attempts to find a counterpoint to the increased sense of nationalism and distance through the use of music as a plane of aesthetic engagement that goes beyond nation. …

The Backwoods Stories: A Saga Of Fear And Wonder, James Mcclendon Adams

English Theses & Dissertations

The Backwoods Stories are a collection of short stories all set in and around the same fictional small town in Southern, Central Florida. The stories are all of the supernatural vein, tales of witches, ghosts, and goblins. Backwoods, as the town is known, is a hotbed for all manner of supernatural activity, and the residents and visitors are constantly discovering more and more dangerous and yet amazing secrets of the town.

The Backwoods stories are tales of desperation, confusion, fear, and discovery. A common theme is the horror of facing something that breaks the characters’ established understanding of reality. Yet, …

The Last Cherokee Of Blue Ridge, Dexter Benjamin Gore

English Theses & Dissertations

This work is an exploration into the life of a young queer man in the United States Army charged with aiding in the removal of the Cherokee Native Americans during the 1830s Indian Removal. It is my hope that my characters and setting bring attention to the politics of queerness and nativism in a way that has not been allowed by mainstream fiction.

Sub/Mission, Abigail Naomi Brunt

English Theses & Dissertations

The poems included in this manuscript look at the ways in which women have been silenced and forced to submit, with emphasis on, though not limited to, a patriarchal fundamentalist Christian subculture called Quiverfull. Part autobiography, part documentary and part myth, the manuscript explores the various ways such damage becomes interwoven into women’s identities and stories, but also the ways in which women find resilience and strength.

The Quality Of Mercy, Kerry Mcnamara

English Theses & Dissertations

The Quality of Mercy is a hybrid of memoir and reportage, the story of a daughter’s love and her father’s journey through his vocation to the Catholic Church, his entry in the priesthood and his years of missionary work. Not many people discover in their teenage years that their father had been a celibate Catholic priest. Not many have the opportunity to trace their father’s story through diaries, interviews, and recollections. The Quality of Mercy is both a window into the world and a mirror into the soul, a daughter’s attempt to tell her father’s unique tale.

The Otherworlds Of Men, Aaron Morris

English Theses & Dissertations

The Otherworlds of Men is a collection of short stories that draws equally from the traditions of speculative science fiction dystopias and western noir. The stories often have a plot grounded in gritty realism, similar to the stories of Annie Proulx, Daniel Woodrell, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison; however, the main character typically is typically injured by a psychic wound that leads to a speculative, otherworldly occurrence. The characters experience time travel, out of body experiences, wormholes to other worlds, spaceflight, distortions of relativistic physics, and, in one case, a character is haunted by Geronimo’s ghost. The characters experience these …

A Little Bit Of A Breakdown, Margaret Libby

English Theses & Dissertations

These stories have to do with a little bit of a breakdown. The characters are old, young, and in between. Some are men; some are women. Some are breaking, some are broken, and some are coming out on the other side.

This collection examines the lives of six people, their breakdowns, and what they do about it.

With Light, Emily Howell

English Theses & Dissertations

I am a photographer. I’ve spent years training myself to shut out 99.9% of the world, see things with one eye closed through the frame of my viewfinder and stop time for a single instant. With Light is a collection of lyrical nonfiction essays that explore those instants. Thematically, the essays focus largely on place, time and a search for a sense of belonging. In addition, they touch on grief, longing, fear, friendship, art and love. They are steeped in images. They are lyrical. In short, they are pieces from an album documenting my search for home.

Healthy Living And Other Electives, Lamar Giles

English Theses & Dissertations

Healthy Living and Other Electives is an excerpt of a young adult novel that follows a sixteen-year-old boy, Del Rainey, as he pursues a romantic relationship with a member of his church’s Purity Pledge class. In addition to romance, Del also seeks a better understanding of manhood through interactions with his peers and father. Along the way, we discover how messily intertwined the church, school system, and lives of teenagers are in Del’s small Virginia town. The novel examines themes of religion, bureaucracy, and toxic masculinity.

Unconditional Positive Regard, Tyler Beckett

English Theses & Dissertations

This collection of short stories brings together the work of Tyler Beckett for the first time, representing the breadth and depth of his skill in fiction. His stories largely focus on the small towns of the American South, and the identities that those towns' residents create for themselves. Through this investigation we see questions on community, belonging, outsiders, and the challenges of joining communities, as well as the question of whether those communities are worth joining. Throughout the collection, Mr. Beckett uses his clear, lucid prose to engage with his characters in a tender way, even as they commit their …

Dead Cooks, Aaron David Lawhon

English Theses & Dissertations

Dead Cooks is a collection of short stories set in the cities of Austin and San Antonio Texas. Some recurring themes throughout the collection are class exploitation, addiction, and cycles of abuse. Characters often feel trapped in their lives as they try to resist the cycles in which they are trapped. They mostly fail, but sometimes find moments of strange grace, solidarity, and connection.

Intersexion, Cynthia Davis

English Theses & Dissertations

A combination of memoir, reportage, and opinion writing, Intersexion explores the realities of growing up intersex while also examining the conservative mindset that caused the narrator—a happily married suburban mother—to lose a tenure-track position at a Christian university for being unwilling to label Danny’s intersex condition as “repugnant” and “offensive to God.”

New Elegies, Sarah Mccall

English Theses & Dissertations

This manuscript investigates a poetics of desire—how desire manifests in and around the self, the body, and the world. Bearing witness to desire has afforded me an opportunity to develop and refine my own sensibility in my poems, which are deeply personal and narrative by nature, and craft my work around these related themes: Spirituality, marriage, grief, home, identity, sobriety, love, and even racial and environmental concerns. In my work, desire represents a container for a broad consideration of yearning, and wanting—and how to manage such feelings every day, in the world.

Elegy motivates many of these poems, though like …

Mexican Bingo, Amanda Michelle Galvan Huynh

English Theses & Dissertations

This collection of poetry is an elegy for what I have lost and what I have left behind in order to reach this point in my education. These poems attempt to be a witness to the Latinx community who migrated across Texas for field work, for a better future, and for their children. The collection is meant to communicate the loss of culture, generational differences, familial struggles, assimilation, health, womanhood, and trauma. While these poems are not all encompassing, they are a beginning and a way for me to better understand my role as a poet.

Sex, Love, And Black Lives, Mack Curry Iv

English Theses & Dissertations

The title of my thesis is Sex, Love, and Black Lives. This title embodies the three prominent aspects of my life: intimacy, relationships, and being black in America. These subjects are important to me because they influence a lot of my writing. They have also made played a key role in shaping me into the person I am today. Section one will focus on my sexual experiences, section two will focus on romantic and platonic relationships I’ve had, and section three will focus on my perspective of being black in America.

Writing about my various thoughts and opinions allowed me …

Versus Los Angeles, Thomas Vincent Kelly

English Theses & Dissertations

The poems included in this manuscript construct, explore, and interrogate hyper reality and how it affects the twenty-first century. Simultaneously creating and destroying representations of a world made in the image of electronic entertainment, Versus Los Angeles inhabits various pop-culture personas in order to illustrate loss of identity, fame as commodity, the erosion of language, and the politics these various icons or platforms promote.

Ulu Boyar, Caleb True

English Theses & Dissertations

Set during the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), ULU BOYAR traces the uprising of the Drinsk Cossacks against the tyranny of the Kiev Bolsheviks, who have taken residence in the sacristy of the holy of holies, the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. An homage to Nikolai Gogol's paean of the ancestral Cossacks, the historical satire ULU BOYAR utilizes the steampunk furniture of the Russian Civil War to weave a hilarious and hyperbolic epic of Ukrainian patriotism and resistance for an era of renewed Ukrainian-Russian antagonism.

Explaining Poetry To The Open Heart, Matthew Wayne Larrimore

English Theses & Dissertations

“Explaining Poetry to the Open Heart” is a creative writing thesis of poetry. It makes use of lyric and narrative poems that utilize sound, imagery, and other creative devices in order to communicate the narrator’s relationships with place, others, and self to the reader. A shifting point of view alternately restricts and expands the reader’s perspective in order to direct attention toward the reader’s own perceptions of the narrator, the world, and ultimately herself.