Creative Writing Commons^™

Conjuring The Moon, Ariella Berkowitz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conjuring The Moon wrestles with the question of why we as women still submit to norms created by men who can't possibly understand our reality. Why should we support ideologies that claim to represent us while actively working against us? Why should we conform to a system that positions us as inessential Other? The speaker of this book aspires to liberate herself from such burdens. Conjuring the Moon encapsulates one woman's search for the feminine divine within herself, her religion, and her environment; but as empowering as this search may be, it remains inextricably connected to her social and historical …

A Million Little Griefs, Justine Hayes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Million Little Griefs is a poetry collection that explores themes of time, place and identity through personal experiences and observations of a young mother living cross-culturally in Malawi, Africa. The book is divided into the three sections, Embrace, Ground, and Release (EGR,) which create a cyclical trajectory that serves as a guide for walking through transitions and new experiences.

Coffee Black & Melancholy Bright, Lisha Elizabeth Mccurry

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A hybrid memoir encompassing a collection of personal essays and poetry that tells a story of depression, grief, and family intersecting in a journey through destruction and healing.

Illuminations, Kristina Michelle Thoman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Abstract: Illumination is the multi-general story of a Jewish family, and their oral traditions. The story will trace the family from just before the biblical exodus, through the holocaust, and follow them to modern day America. The family will face antisemitism at each place in history along the way, losing a child to the pharaoh's cruel decree to slay the male children of the Hebrew slaves, narrowly escaping a death camp in the holocaust, and finally facing growing anti-Jewish hate in America. In the last act of the story, the family will be faced with the question, if you are …

The Homecoming Game, Olivia Dorothy Daras

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

What is the first thing you think of when you think of a story or novel about someone who is gay, or on the LGBTQ+ spectrum? The common answer would likely be, a story about the process of a queer person being in the closet, coming out. Are we as writers afraid of telling the stories of LGBTQ+ characters without coming out as the main topic? Is it about money, or is it about telling a story that is meaningful, that allows the LGBTQ+ community a glimpse into a character’s life that looks like their own? By which I mean: …

I Lie Awake, Pauline Juliet Ku

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Maggie Kim is a Korean American girl coming of age in Chicago and San Jose before moving to Pasadena, CA to study Biology at Caltech. Her struggles with her own sexuality, immediate family, growing up in an abusive church, traumatic memories and hallucinations and delusions make for a riveting read that validates her personal experience through trauma, stigma, and mental illness in the first-person point of view.

Incesante, Claudia Viridiana Flores Ramirez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

PREFACIO CRÃ?TICO

Manuscrito

Incesante, es un proyecto que a lo largo de tres años pasó de ser un concepto a un manuscrito. La idea surgió a finales de febrero de 2020, justo antes de que la variante SARS-Cov-2, mejor conocida como COVID-19, pusiera al mundo en pausa. El 9 de febrero de ese año, el caso de feminicidio de la joven Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, conmocionó a México debido a la brutalidad de su asesinato. Ingrid de 25 años al momento de su muerte, no solo fue asesinada a manos de su pareja sentimental, sino que fue desollada y destazada con …

Tabby Canyon, Jamie Rae Crowley Meyer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Critical Preface1.1 Scope

In Native American traditions, dreams are a significant part of their culture. They are believed to help one connect or communicate with the spiritual world. This ability is not limited to warriors or medicine men, anyone may contribute to the spiritual knowledge of the tribe. Many nations seek visions at a young age, and children are asked about their dreams. Each tribe across the country has a different way they may interpret the dreams. Typically, dreams often have a metaphorical/symbolic, literal, or prophetic meaning.

Whereas, in many non-indigenous cultures, individuals see dreams as something to be forgotten, …

Stray Bullets, Jesse Hanna

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Screenplay

She Poses On A Wailing Stage, Kara Marie Hollowell

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

She Poses on a Wailing Stage is a work of autofiction that is part epistolary and part bildungsroman. The main protagonist Charlotte is for me a vessel to channel my thoughts on the aftermath of an abusive relationship I found myself trapped. She Poses on a Wailing Stage is a story that, at its core, is about a woman overcoming the negative effects of loneliness and becoming an active agent in her escape with the help of a support system to obtain a more fulfilling and truthful life. My goal of this novel is to challenge the perception of abused …

A Life Of Work, David Labounty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Life of Work is an examination of workplace nonfiction where work is, for good or bad, a defining moment in a personâ??s life. This collection of creative nonfiction essays about the jobs that have shaped me was created to encourage people to tell their own tales. There is nothing groundbreaking about the work I have done (and continue to do); however, by sharing my experiences, I hope to spark other workplace remembrances, be they stories about slogging away for fifty years on one job or having multiple rewarding careers. The work we do has an enormous impact on the …

A Screenplay With Critical Preface: 5150 Tarot Canyon, Jacob B. Phillips

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

5150 Tarot Canyon—a screenplay/dreamplay—anonymous twenty something, X, has left a deadend job, spent savings, and gone, in a last-ditch effort to follow a dream, to art school (in the middle of the desert and a pandemic) but struggles to cope once there with high stress and heavy deadlines. Exhaustion, fear, and loneliness begin to creep in—and, along with them, a stranger, a Walking Sam (possibly X’s double) always at a distance, but never far away. X can’t be sure, but it’s almost like someone’s started stalking them. X tries to ignore it, tries to focus, to grow—but things aren’t coming …

Remnants: The Family Archive As A Foundation Of Historical Fiction The Match, Melisa A. Spencer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This work addresses the role of the family archive and how it serves as a basis for historical fiction.

The Drive, Marisol Adame

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Drive is a hybrid-poetry collection containing lyric poems, as well as fiction and non-fiction prose pieces, that explores the impact of different types of misogyny and violence against women, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of digital violence. This collection presents different voices and stories that examine themes of violence against the female body.

Heart Of Golde, Joely Bowman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Heart of Golde is a female coming-of-age story centered around Jyn Taryn, who lost her mother and her early memories in a tragic car accident 15 years before the story begins. She struggles with feeling at "home" anywhere in the world. When she discovers her mother's name written in an old poetry book, her curiosities lead her to the home of Edward Golde, her father. While there, she is forced to come face to face with the past she never thought she would be able to remember. Room by room, memory by memory, Jyn puts the pieces of her past …

Encampment, Deborah Michelle Hutson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Novella about a German Jew, Frederic, who escapes Nazi Germany on the SS Columbus by concealing his religion after the arrest of his mother by the Gestapo. After the Columbus is torpedoed by the British while trying to run a blockade, he eventually ends up at the Fort Stanton German Internment Camp in New Mexico. There he falls in love with Elizabeth, a Mexican American nurse at the tuberculosis hospital, who is also dealing with grief and questioning her place in the world after losing both of her parents. The bombing of Pearl Harbor forces Frederic to deal with tightened …

Shades Of Blue, Allison D. Thomas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

"Shades of Blue" is a confessional narrative that explores the ways in which our lives can be covered in a tinge of color. The experiences that shaped this collection are marked by the calm powder blues and rough midnight blues that change the way we see and think about the world. This narrative work took on a confessional voice because of the autobiographical nature of confessional poetry. Like other confessional collections this work is an exploration of the self and the truth of life. This collection was constructed by employing various poetic devices and forms. Several poems take on correspondent …

Shooting Scars: A True Story (More Or Less), Trent C. Jonas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When putting together this collection, it made sense to me to view it as a carnival, or a variety show, in which each flight of fancy - or vignette - is accompanied by a kernel of truth, like a ringmaster who introduces a contortionist, or a magician, or a carful of clowns. Because of the "holes in [my] family history" (Sikelianos), this work is necessarily autofiction, but I wanted to ground it firmly in reality so as to create a blend of truth and fiction that is imperceptible to readers, who would likely see it as memoir. I don't mind …

Vatra: A Poetic Memoir, Ashley Nichole Stevens

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When I initially began researching for and composing this collection, the idea I had in mind was a simple one: tell my great grandfather's story, on many Lemko-American immigrants lived in the early 1900s. However, it took several months for me to realize this was not the complete story. It required refinement. While I had always felt a significant connection to this particular side of my family, I could never articulate why. The genealogical and historical research I conducted spoke for me. My great grandfather survived numerous traumas associated with being an ethnic minority in his homeland as well as …

An Imaginary Man, Benjamin Bouvet-Boisclair

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Novella about an American expat nicknamed Tintin and his search for intimacy in all the wrong places. While teaching English in South West France, Tintin struggles to confront his mother tongue, the deaths of his grandfather and great-grandfather, and the end of his long-distance relationship with Ela. Brushes with violence, French history, and other lonely, wayward men, frame an exploration of masculinity, desire, and loss.

Indumentaria Contra La Mujer, Ines Gallo De Urioste

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A translation of Anne Boyer's Garments Against Women.

La Tumba Vací­A, Yoshimar Gerardo Maceda

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El presente proyecto consta de una serie de cuentos cuya narración principal son los crímenes cometidos en torno a una serie de eventos que ocurren en un lugar llamado La Cuadrilla. Cuando tuve la idea de comenzar a escribir estas historias, quería que cada personaje tuviera su momento narrativo por separado, aunque estuvieran ligados al mismo lugar. Relatos sin protagonistas, donde el asunto de los crímenes y las venganzas fuera el primer tema a explorar. Sin embargo, a medida que la idea se fue desarrollando en el manuscrito, las piezas comenzaron a tomar otra forma y me di cuenta de …

Elegies For My Past And Future Selves, Tori Michelle Hicks

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

“Here I stand at the beginning
with more questions than
answers”
–George Ella Lyon, “Provenance” from A Many Storied House

This collection of poems and flash memoir tries to be memory in the flesh. Perhaps it’s the other way around – this book is composed of memories striving to be poems, pieces of music, flashes of memoir, and photographs, all for the purpose of exploring who I was, who I am, and who I could become. Whichever way one interprets it, Elegies for My Past and Future Selves is a hybrid collection that looks at the events of my past, …

Losing The Audience: A Poetry Collection, Robin Latimer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT LOSING THE AUDIENCE: A POETRY COLLECTION By Robin Marcelle Latimer A collection of 35 poems in forms as varied as lengthy dialogical poems to swift lyrics and leisurely narratives, including several prose poems, illuminate a personal history of a poetic relationship with the audience of poetry. The Preface to the collection notes that the act of voicing from the past into the present and aiming at the future (audience) is elegiac in nature, with the poem a type of monument to the poet's process and voice, and for this reason the trope of audience is enjoined to the genre …

The Strain, Jonathan Maltz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My project, The Strain, began as a screenplay, but has now evolved into a novella/novel potentiality. The Strain, positioned in the genre or tradition of speculative fiction, concerns the tumultuous goings-on of Ben Gottman, an underground journalist who reports on the war front infecting the planet. He returns to the city of Terra, feeling darkly removed and dissociated from domestic life as result of having witnessed the violent totality of war. No sooner has he returned then he is summoned by his supervisor, Victor Proto, who, facing the pressures of a dissolving press, as the inhabitants of Terra are rapidly …

La Tela, Un Fluir, Hugo Javier Moreno

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Tesis para Escritura Creativa. Un libro de poesía. No se requiere abstracto.

Remember When We Tore Each Other Limb From Limb?, Adam Ramsey

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

REMEMBER WHEN WE TORE EACH OTHER LIMB FROM LIMB? is a collection of short stories and surrealist prose poems. Most of these are not connected in terms of character or setting. However, there are two episodic stories that reoccur throughout the book, each of them grounded in real-life situations meant to offset the fantastical settings in which the majority of the other pieces are set. The first of these episodic stories is a series of vignettes about a character named Noah, a young man who is taking care of his elderly mother. The other is a series about a young …

Only The Eyes: A Novel, Jason Michael Palomo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Only the Eyes revolves around a series of murders that take place in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, the government of which suppresses the media to maintain the nation's reputation as a safe, innovative tourist destination. After the murders are leaked to the international press and can no longer be ignored, the Sheikhs of the country. decide to procure an investigative consultant through manipulative means to help them capture the unknown suspect. Former-Special-Agent Ramon Del Toro is now a true-crime writer, and he reluctantly takes on the difficult task of creating a psychological profile of the suspect, much to the …

Recortes, Ana Mayela De Velazquez Farfan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Recortes es un libro organizado en fragmentos discontinuos con la intención de narrar sin un orden cronológico, para evocar el proceso de la memoria: los recuerdos surgen o son rememorados, en ninguno de los dos casos aparecen en el orden temporal en el que se vivieron. La búsqueda de la intimidad en Recortes consiste en capturar testigos involuntarios, se mantiene en la superficie, no construye una narración; no busca recuperar una esencia, reproduce los recuerdos como surgen en una asociación libre: de los viajes en tren de mamá a las camas infantiles que compartieron dos hermanas, de la nostalgia del …

Vagabondage, Andrea Lora Castillo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Vagabondage is a novel about grief and identity. The novel opens with its protagonist, Jilly, learning about her brother Parisâ??s death via a phone call with her grandma. Throughout her time of grief, she must contend with her husband, James, taking advantage of her grieving state and using her as a model for his photography careerâ??a career in which he amasses quite a reputable amount of fame. As Jamesâ?? career grows, Jilly is introduced to his best friend, Michael, a musician in a rock band. He and Jilly begin a love affair, and it is through this relationship that Jilly …