Creative Writing Commons^™

The Oracle Of The Pig's Head, Taylor L. Denton

LSU Master's Theses

The Oracle of the Pig’s Head is a collection of two poems, a short story, and a novel centered around themes of the role of the feminine body in society, monstrosity, disgust, divinity, and human impact on the environment. Inspired by other works of eco-criticism, gothic literature, surrealism, Appalachian folklore, and Greco-Roman mythology, this collection explores how marginalized bodies interact in a world forever altered by climate change.

Denton is primarily interested in how severe climate change has influenced not only human’s overall relationship to the environment, but also how writers are meant to engage with a world riddled with …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

A Walmart With No Televisions, Samuel A. Bickford

LSU Master's Theses

A Walmart with No Televisions is a deconstructed novel about the perils and heartbreak of adolescent drug addiction. What begins as a fad, a social affectation, quickly becomes a guiding light. The novel illustrates hope as a potentiality, and escape from oneself as something always in question. Happiness is uncertain, but the experience is not.

Hindsight, Haley Elizabeth Moore

LSU Master's Theses

“Time travel is theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't want to give it up as a plot gimmick.”—Isaac Asimov

“Of all the concepts in Speculative Fiction, Time Travel is probably the one that, over time, has provided us with the most possibilities for storytelling, and therefore the one that has been (clocked as having been) exploited the most.”—TVtropes.org

Hindsight is a one-hour long show with an eight-episode arc per season. It is a story of authenticity and gimmicks, privilege and disadvantage, mediocrity and exceptionalism. These are all pretty big concepts, and yeah, we look at them on a macrocosmic scale, but …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Fuckstutter, Anthony Francis Ramstetter

LSU Master's Theses

This manuscript is my Master thesis, which I have compiled to fulfill the requirements of a creative writing examination in poetry. It collects various pathways of poetry in terms of both form & content into professional & publishable finality. The thesis presents sections (untitled) which include subsequent themes & variations that qualifies, consolidates, & measures the poet’s work during this program of writing herein.

Twa: A Masque, Jacqueline Kari

LSU Master's Theses

Twa: A Masque is a collection of poems arranged in five impossible plays, subsumed under one general dramatic architecture. The work plays with the tradition of balladic variation, locating in the violence and strangeness of murder ballads and other aspects of the folk base an opportunity to explore themes of gender, identity, and trauma, and to expand the performative potential for non-linear narrative voices inside narrative poetry. This project re-versions archetypal characters and storylines and synthesizes multiple registers of language against the backdrop of a necropastoral fantasyland. Twa: A Masque doubles and mis-takes poetry for theater, archaism for neologism, and …

The Journeyers, Alyson Pomerantz

LSU Master's Theses

On May 3, 1932, Minnie Zenkel’s Original Yiddish Puppet Theater, located in the heart of the Lower East Side’s “Yiddish Rialto,” burns down under mysterious circumstances. The police suspect arson but there are no persons of interest, and the theater’s namesake, a twenty-year old female puppeteer, disappears just after the fire; some believe she has stolen the theater’s original scripts in an act of revenge. Eighty years later the successor puppet theater once again finds itself without a home, when it receives word that developers want to raze the theater, now in Tribeca, and construct a forty-foot hotel. In the …

Domusphere: And Other Poems, Min K. Kang

LSU Master's Theses

This collection of poems aims to explore the ways that language institutionalizes and perpetuates various forms and degrees of sexism, racism, and ageism. The poems highlight the untidy and imperfect nature of the prescriptive grammar of English language through the introduction of internet slang and Kongrish.

Beating The Red Stick, Tracey Anne Duncan

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis explores the history of Roller Derby, its modern revival, and the way that it changes the lives of the women who play it. From October 2009 to March 2011, I conducted ethnographic research and interviews with the Red Stick Roller Derby in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My perspective is that of an observer turned player, and the piece centers around my own story of personal transformation. This work is part cultural history, part ethnography, and part memoir, written from an explicitly feminist perspective.

Brackish, Hillary Dalton Major

LSU Master's Theses

none

Kids Will Be, Thomas E. Moran

LSU Master's Theses

This is the pilot episode of a television series, which explores a young girl’s descent into suburban drug culture. In this episode, the main character, Ally, follows her disaffected love interest, Marco, to the squat, an abandoned building inhabited by runaways and addicts.

The Gurgitators, Scott Gage

LSU Master's Theses

Hardy Runyan, an obese dishwasher from Louisiana, seeks to become a champion gurgitator through the guidance of Trina Hicks, a coach of competitive eating who’s starving to reclaim her former glory. Armed with a stunted gag reflex and a stomach he can stretch to the skin, Hardy eats his way toward a showdown in which he dethrones the world champion of oyster eating.

Lying In Translation, Brooke Rachel Champagne

LSU Master's Theses

Lying in Translation is a thesis of creative non-fiction that is a process of self-discovery as I retell my Hispanic grandmother's stories and the life we lived together. Lala is a woman to be feared and loved by all those who encounter her, and the main thread through the work is whether or not I will ultimately decide to embrace her insanity or running screaming from it. Other questions arise, and hopefully, are answered in this book: What does it mean to be half of one thing and half of another? How do immigrants survive in America, in a land …

Good To Be Gone, Robert George Bloom

LSU Master's Theses

n/a

Cane Burning Season, Ashley K. Berthelot

LSU Master's Theses

Short story collection.

Ball And Chain, Eloise Holland

LSU Master's Theses

Ball and Chain is a coming-of-age story that explores the pain and joy of an unusual first love. Patsy is a twenty-six-year-old virgin. As her body begins to deteriorate as the result of an unknown ailment, she finds herself intrigued by the beautiful and vibrant Anita. Initially unwilling to admit her attraction, Patsy distracts herself with work, her best friend’s quest to find the perfect tattoo artist, and the politics of her wealthy Houston family. When Patsy grows increasingly ill, she decides that she must find a way to get Anita’s attention before it’s too late.

Adventures Of A Former Girlfriend: A Novel, Colleen Helen Fava

LSU Master's Theses

This is a novel about a young woman trying to redefine herself after years of defining herself through her relationships with other people, most specifically her boyfriends, but also her family. The heroine faces many challenges: the end of a long-term relationship, the illness of her niece, complications with her best friends, and a revelation about her parent's relationship. These ordinary obstacles of everyday living will propel the main character into a confrontation with her perception of herself and the world around her.

Becoming The Cat Lady, Melissa Anne Goslin

LSU Master's Theses

Emma Baronne is mourning her lifelong dream of losing her teeth. When her company folds and her on-again-off-again boyfriend gets engaged to another woman, Emma wants to make a fort in the living room and never come out. But, she soon realizes – with the help of her quirky Catholic family and a coven of French Quarter cat ladies – puberty is often easier the second time around.

My Maiden Cowboy Names: Poems, Victoria Brockmeier

LSU Master's Theses

On the title: for a dichotomy of vulnerability and resistance; for self as plural and/or changeable; for acts of claiming. To hint at tone, setting, and content. On sound: to shape a poem's mood, and because these pieces should leave your mouth a little tired if you read them out loud. On lineation: to highlight the near-misses in language-ambiguities, double meanings, troublesome literalization-and to see these not as pitfalls but as opportunities. On stanza and strophe breaks: if a stanza is a room, the breaks between must be doorways, and who wants to sit down and rest in a doorway? …

B.S., Michael P. Redmond

LSU Master's Theses

This is a novel about a hack of a novelist who guides a fraud of a novelist around an allegorical version of the United States of America. It tests the limits of its readers’ patience with irony and metafiction. Themes that are explored, mocked, and then explored again include belief, identity, reality, geography, the intersections of the aforementioned, and the comical futility of such exploration. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Strange Fire, Sharon Nelson

LSU Master's Theses

In the aftermath of a worldwide war, the planet Xica is split into small pockets of humanoid civilization. One pocket is a divided abandoned military compound. Beyond the wall is the Outer Rim where people are free yet violence is rampant. Within the wall is the state of Sheol whose inhabitants are drugged and have few choices. Sheol’s ruler, Jared, conducts an experiment where children are raised without physical contact in the Complex at the center of the city. One boy, Zahid, escapes from the Complex and meets other children; Nick in Sheol and Alexandra in the Outer Rim. Together, …

Keys Of War, Clay Carter Weill

LSU Master's Theses

At the dawn of time the gods created heaven and earth. The creator of the moon joined with the creator of the sun and together they produced the first Empress. She is the embodiment of all that is good and holy. She is the spiritual guide to all the tribes of man. The tribes are ruled by men. When one man, Baron Stier, rises above the others he is crowned Archduke. He rules in the Empress’s name and his dynasty lasts for half a millennia. Upon the discovery of the land beyond the sacred islands the dynasty falls. And tribes …

How To Tell A Sea Story, Brock Yusef Hamlin

LSU Master's Theses

A young African American adolescent named Lion is forced to leave his hometown of Rivertown, and join the navy. While in the navy, Lion acts an enforcer and collector for another sailor who runs an illegal money-lending operation on the ship. Lion also learns how to box and manages to fight his way to the Fifth Fleet championships. After winning the championship fight, the captain of the ship uses his influence to place Lion in a very competitive commissioning program. With the chance of becoming an officer, Lion changes his behavior, leading to serious conflict with old allies. He escapes …

Caller Id, Plamen Ivanov Arnaudov

LSU Master's Theses

As one might expect from a young poet writing at the turn of a millennium, recurrent in "Caller ID" is the theme of struggle with literary tradition and of seeing it as both necessary and constricting to the project of forging one's own creative identity. The collision between history and the self is visible in the often conflicted references to great philosophers and poets of the past as well as in the call for renewal of the body poetic after an envisioned 'end of history' marked by creative sterility and exhaustion. The proposed renewal does not entail destruction of tradition …

Out The Loop, Matthew Christian Anderson

LSU Master's Theses

Often referred to as resembling an architectural blueprint, the screenplay is known for its laconic style. Discarding the subjective abstractionism of a more flowery writing, the screenplay's brevity forces the writer to make use of the physical world of the text to display its underlying currents of thought. This trend in artistic representation, of which the influence has been heatedly discussed since the onset of the cinema, is not stagnant but evolving. The screenwriters of today produce their craft with an increased savoir faire not only in relation to plot and form but also in regards to the aesthetics of …

Prisoners Like Us, Sean P. Cavanaugh

LSU Master's Theses

A fictional work about a wilderness writer and a man who transports prisoners of war set in the Moosehead Lake region of northern Maine.

Men, Women, And Children, Marie Dufour Goodwin

LSU Master's Theses

All of my fiction has to do with relationships. I suspect this is true of most creative writers, but in my place this broad theme takes precedence over other creative aspects of writing, such as language. While I would not call my prose minimalist, I have tried to set down my short stories in a plain rather than an involved or noticeably poetic idiom. As for the three-tiered division into “Men,” “Women,” and “Children,” the stories themselves naturally fell into these three categories, depending on the main, point-of-view character. I found it enthralling to change the authorial voice to conform …

Backwaters, Tamika L. Edwards

LSU Master's Theses

Backwaters is a novel heavily steeped in the supernatural. It chronicles the lives of a mother and son who have been disconnected from one another through a series of curses. Unaware of the other-worldly forces propelling their lives into chaos, each loses themselves to madness and isolation. Their only escape is in loving others too hard, and not each other enough.

The Blues In Three Parts: A Collection Of Poetry, Short Stories, And A Screenplay, Desha Tolar Kelly

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is entitled, “The Blues in Three Parts: A Collection of Poetry, Short Stories, and a Screenplay.” The first part, a collection of poetry, contains themes of childhood and adolescence, love and loss, life struggles, writing, and death. The second part, a collection of short stories, contains five stories centered on similar themes. The third and final part, a screenplay entitled “Cow”, contains elements of the first two parts as well. The epigraph, which contemplates the idea that the blues is not only music, but all the ups and downs of life, sets the stage for the central thread, …