Creative Writing Commons^™

Shadow Smoke: A Nonfiction Collection On Memories Lost, Taken, And Storied, Sarah Ann Canterbury

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Shadow Smoke investigates the neuroscientific nature of memory and memory’s role/ authority in creative nonfiction as an illustration of how the genre lays the process of memory bare and accurately models the mind’s process of memory. The scholarship as well as body of creative works revolve around the understanding and tension of memory being a creative process which is explored through genre discussions, neuroscientific studies, and individual creative works. Shadow Smoke consists of four braided nonfiction essays and five nonfiction vignettes to form a collection on memories lost, taken, and storied framed by a critically researched introduction assessing the collection’s …

A Poetic Exploration Of Landscape And Negation In Larry Levis's The Dollmaker’S Ghost, Cynthia Mccomas

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The following thesis contains a collection of poetry, which portrays an exploration of landscape through negation and meditation. These poems often describe the region of Appalachia via a speaker who seeks wisdom through thoughtful images of nature and its decay. Prefacing the creative body is a critical introduction which highlights my influences, craft, and methods of writing. These poems were written while studying the poet Larry Levis, who provides an imaginative and thought-provoking perspective of natural landscapes and the people who coexist among them.

The Truth About Literature: An Examination Of Emotion And Ethics Across Genre, Christian Alexander Simms

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The following thesis presents strategies for reading ethically across a series of texts while discussing the emotional labor writers endure throughout their writing processes. By examining the current pedagogical approaches in composition studies, readers of writing can interpret the use of emotion in texts as a rhetorical strategy, while also recognizing instances of its social construction beyond the classroom. Once providing evidence for how writers execute emotion in their work, the thesis continues by discussing how J. Hillis Miller’s theory of ethics is applied to the narrative structure of stories and texts, and how readers can recognize the emotional strategies …

Bad Things To Good People: Stories, Christopher Ryne Brewer

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Bad Things to Good People: Stories is a brief collection of five fictional short stories. As the collection’s title, which also serves as a bookending table of contents, indicates, these stories focus on the wide-ranging idea of bad things happening to good people. Written mostly in the literary style of minimalism, these stories explore various themes which circulate around topics such as: relationships, both familial and romantic, grieving losses, and a basic human need to make meaning of the sometimes-troubling events in one’s life. In the introduction to this collection, the stories offered here are compared alongside the works of …

The Monster That Can't Be Defeated Here, Aaron Theodore Morris

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis is a poetry manuscript that establishes its footing in multiple poetic traditions, particularly blank verse and free verse, in order to discuss general themes of separation, isolation, and alienation on both the personal and social fronts in an imaginative light that proves aesthetically pleasing and points the reader in the direction of solutions to these problems. While the poems of the first section generally speak to issues of both the struggle to tame language to one’s own desires and to issues of personal alienation, the poems of later sections branch out more into the world in general and …

Hillbilly Heroin(E), Lauren Audrey Tussey

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

As a native to this region and a writer I have spent much of my life attempting to capture a unique aesthetic of what I see through my essays and poetry. The following thesis is a manuscript of nonfiction essays with a critical introduction and conclusion that work together to provide a cohesive narrative centered in the Appalachian region. Through place specific imagery and implementation of regional dialect, and a narrative lens, my collection reveals an aesthetic of the rapidly expanding genre of Appalachian Literature. By exposing the patriarchal structures present in the region and emphasizing issues such as domestic …

Travel Sized: A Collection Of Essays, Wendi L. Kozma

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Travel Sized: A Collection of Essays investigates the importance of memory and understanding the self in relation to one’s experiences with travel and food. It is the author’s contribution to the genre of creative nonfiction and explores themes of body, self-awareness and self-realization through events that shaped who she is, both personally and professionally. The collection houses eight essays—each focusing on space, the body, and exploration of memory to better understand one’s self. Subjects range from coming to terms with one’s size to appreciating one’s experiences both stateside and abroad. At the center of the collection is the need, no, …

Why We Stay, Brittany Nicole Mcintyre

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Why we stay is a piece of Creative Non-Fiction, is a work that is heavily focused on region. The narrative takes up the life of a female Appalachian. The challenges of being an Appalachian woman raising a family are analyzed alongside such issues as domestic violence, family dysfunction, and mental illness. Because the piece is set in both rural and urban Appalachia, the issue of family is examined in terms of generational conflict and the strong bonds of a matriarch.

Who Is You? Identifying "You" In Second-Person Narratives: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis, Davina Kittrell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In narratives, characters are introduced to readers through the use of textual clues left by the author. These clues, often in the form of pronouns, enable the reader to follow the various characters involved throughout the story. Pronouns have no lexical content and are used as referential devices, guiding the reader through the story and helping them recover the identity of the story’s characters. However, some narratives employ a literary technique in which the story’s protagonist is introduced by the pronoun “you” with no previous textual information given. As a result the pronoun “you” is assumed to be exophoric, pointing …

Approaches To Life Narrative: A Scholarly And Creative Thesis, Tanya Bomsta

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis includes both scholarly and creative approaches to women’s life narrative and rhetoric. The author first analyzes Terry Tempest Williams’ recently published memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory. She examines how Williams’ hybrid genre negotiates the boundaries between journaling and autobiographical writing and between silence and voice. She argues that Williams employs a feminist rhetoric in her writing in order to negotiate these boundaries.

The second and third works are personal essays in which the author examines her journals and her marriage. These creative works meditate on the …

Impossible Storyworlds And The (Unnatural) Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, Mitchell C. Lilly

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The following thesis defends reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as an early example of an “unnatural narrative” in American literature. Adapting unnatural narrative theory, a recent area of study in narratology developed to analyze the existence of unnatural storyworlds, minds, and acts of narration prevalent in postmodern fiction, this thesis analyzes the unnatural dynamics at play in Pym’s storyworld and storytelling that do not comply with what the reader knows is otherwise physically, logically, or humanly impossible in the physical world. Legitimating Poe’s novel as a work of unnatural narrative coincides with arguing how the …

Systemic Functional Linguistic Discourse Features In The Personal Essay, Anna Jones Rollins

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this thesis is to look at published and student-produced creative writing, more specifically, personal essays, through the lens of discourse analysis theories in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). From the analysis of these personal essays, this thesis provides pedagogical insight concerning the linguistic features that are prevalent in published and student personal essays. Although research has been conducted looking at academic student writing through the lens of SFL, little research has been conducted looking specifically at the elements that make up pieces of creative writing. In fact, Blythe and Sweet (2008), with over seventy years of experience teaching …

After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After a Funeral, Before a Test; and Other Stories is a collection of nine fictional short stories. Their focus is diverse in regard to multiple aspects of creative fiction: subject matter, theme, style, setting and characters. Despite the array of material, one common method was to provide narration that would invite readers to make their own interpretation rather than to present overt, didactic stories. This narrative strategy was accomplished by using fictional concepts of setting, the objective correlative, and literary minimalism. Other elements include surrealism, Hemingway’s “iceberg effect,” and psychologically complex narrators. Literary influences include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great …

Storm Chaser, Samir Ali Abdel-Aziz

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Storm Chaser is a work of fiction that uses strange, almost supernatural occurrences to symbolically represent various meanings and truths for different characters. Works of fiction that influenced Storm Chaser include The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. Reappearing themes include sacrifice, the desire to live a life of purpose, freewill, and the fear of becoming one’s parents.

Literacy, Discourse, And Identity: The Working-Class Appalachian Woman Academic, Sarah Marie Mcconnell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Drawing on conversations about the politics surrounding literacy acquisition, I take a deeper look into the effects of obtaining membership within an academic discourse community on Appalachian women from the working class. The tensions that develop between the two opposing discourses promotes a sense of loss as they create distance between these women and their home community, alter relationships, and disrupt identity. Working-class Appalachian women occupy the borderlands between discourses: one foot in their Appalachian community; the other in their academic community. They negotiate their fragmented identities in order to play the appropriate role within the appropriate context. Their status …

Persistence: "My Grandmother's Eyes" And Other Memories, Christine Fede Williams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Persistence: “My Grandmother’s Eyes” and Other Memories is a collection of five essays based on the author’s life. “My Grandmother’s Eyes” depicts the difficult, but loving, communication between the author and her grandmother, who speaks Italian as a first language. “Christmas: A Journey” compares and contrasts the celebration of Christmas in the author’s Italian-American family and her celebration of Christmas as an adult. “Room in My Heart” describes the events leading up to a decision to adopt a child. “Renaming Oriental Avenue” follows three threads: the author’s relationship to the Monopoly game; the author’s study of the Japanese language and …

Heavier Than It Looks And Other Stories, Matthew Tobias Ray

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Heavier Than It Looks and Other Stories is a collection of fiction containing one novella-length story, in six parts, centering on the life of a young man coming to terms with a close friend’s suicide. The remaining stories depict different characters amidst situations unique to each character’s stage in life: childhood in 1930s Appalachia in "The Other Kid In a Candy Store," mourning and violent crime in "Picking A Lock," transcendence in "Pathétique," mid-life changes in "Lester’s Last Melancholy," managing addiction in "Staying Clean," youthful folly in "Just For Fun," and storytelling in "The Taste of a Story." Works that …

The Present Giver And Other Stories On Human Connections, Erin B. Waggoner

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The Present Giver and Other Stories on Human Connections is a collection of seven short stories dealing with individuals that struggle to connect to another person. However, the stories also explore that these characters still feel the need to connect, stories very indicative of my own struggles with apathy and relationships. The critical analysis takes on a creative non-fiction approach as a way to show my development as a writer and how these stories relate to what I've learned through the years from my love of reading.

Silence As Insubordination: Friday And Michael K’S Wordless Weapon, A Post-Colonial Approach Toj.M. Coetzee’S Foe And Life And Times Of Michael K, Cody C. Mullins

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

While most critics of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction focus on silence as a weapon of imperial oppressive forces to subjugate representations of the "other," this thesis argues that, on the contrary, characters representing the traditional colonially oppressed use their silence as a weapon to in turn oppress the representations of imperial power. Through close reading explication and the use of the post-colonial theories of both Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, I focus on the inverted oppression, the shifting of identity, and the role of authorial authority within the novels, Foe and Life & Times of Michael K. By engaging in this …

"A Long Wonder The World Can Bear & Be" : Narrative Strategies In The Dream Songs, Cooper Childers

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis examines the narrative development of The Dream Songs while viewing Henry as the locus and the impetus of the various narrative strategies deployed therein. Through the abundance of generic and literary allusions present in The Dream Songs, Berryman's sequence functions both to engage and to interact with the Western literary canon. The first chapter of this thesis locates The Dream Songs within Petrarchan sequences. The second chapter treats Henry's and the unnamed speaker's local language and shows how their competing speech genres inform the sequence's modes. The third chapter examines the role of epic codes in creating the …

The First Act, Angela Hunt

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The First Act is a creative thesis which explores the boundaries of biography and autobiography, fact and fiction, as the life of my mother, Deborah Wolfe, and my own, intersect in prose and drama. My purpose in writing this thesis was to examine and seek an understanding of my own relationship with the past and the present, as I explored the roots of my family history, specifically through the eyes of my mother, while using aspects of my family’s West Virginian and Mormon heritage. By reading the following story, you will, in a way, go on that journey with me …

Nothing Personal : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays Exposing The Perverted Experiences Of Life, Interactions, And Responses, Benjamin P. Taylor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Nothing Personal is a collection of nonfiction essays playfully written in response to subtle misunderstandings. Such misunderstandings, in this creative thesis, are fueled by an unexplained divorce, alcoholism, the new absence of love, and the difference between the personal and the traditional church. The essays also expose the science of conversation and other lighter occurrences and happenings in an esteemed pursuit to live life more humorously.

The Description Of The Characters In Herman Melville's White-Jacket, Or The World In A Man-Of-War, Toru Nishiura

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Many characters who have various personalities app ear in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket . However, few critics have comprehensively examined the action and the characteristics of them in detail. In this thesis, I explore Melville’s depiction of the battleship world in this novel by clarifying the narrator ’s standard to judge ot her characters. In White-Jacket, the whole story is narrated by White-Jacket; therefore, the characteristics of his narrative clarify the theme of this novel. I start with an analysis of his narrative and examine whether he is a reliable narrator or not. Then, I explore the relationship between the battleship …

Canary In The Dark, Andrea Fekete

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

I began researching Appalachian culture in 1998. I wanted to tell a story about conflict and beauty while revealing my vision of who my people were/are. I strived to create a fiction not unlike poetry with realistic and minimalist features to give Appalachia the most accurate face possible as perceived by me through my own lens.

I wanted to explore the idea of beauty: Virginia’s (the main character) ideas about her beauty, her culture and other cultures. What is beauty? Who defines it? Can it be found everywhere? How? What does it look like when it is somewhere you wouldn’t …

A Place Between Heaven And Hell, Holley Barker

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After twenty-some years of marriage, routine, and living life without feeling, time finally catches up to Effie Crunkleton, giving her the opportunity to confront a haunting past (her hell) which thwarts peace of mind (her heaven). As inner and outer voices lure Effie to a nearby cemetery (actually found at Twin Falls State Park), she exposes herself to a lifetime of suppressed memories and emotions that have taken place in the fictional Appalachian town of Coal Hollow.

Capers Island, A Novel, Jennifer J. Cavender

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Capers Island is a creative thesis about a woman named Delaney who has been having problems sleepwalking ever since her grandparents passed away. She decides to spend the summer on Capers Island, visiting an old college friend. While there, she visits a hypnotist to uncover repressed memories from her childhood. She begins the novel alone in West Virginia, and in the end, winds up on Capers Island in a tightly knit community. The novel contains elements of magical realism, the supernatural, and the psychological.

Godspeople, David Deborde

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

godspeople is a creative thesis focusing on the relationship between humanity and divinity. In three sections of poetry, the work explores the idea of sacrifice as it relates to the human conception of the divine (“gods and people”), presents a portrait of a godless, and therefore hopeless, society (“godspeople”), and explores the search for meaning in individual lives (“people of god”).

American Standard & The Princess Of Rome, Ohio: Two Plays, Jonathan Joy

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

From the back roads of Eastern Kentucky to the front porch of a southern Ohio home comes this collection of full length comedic plays by Jonathan Joy. Join two rural State Senate candidates (one Republican and one Democrat) forced to travel the campaign trail together in the political farce American Standard. Or see the world of dysfunctional family politics through the eyes of a fourteen year old girl in The Princess of Rome, Ohio. Also, trace the development of both works, from inception to production, in commentary that focuses on the process of writing for the stage.

Telling God’S Sanction : Storytelling In The Narrative Journalism, Memoirs, And Creative Nonfiction Of Rick Bragg, Jennifer Nicole Sias

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Self-described paid-storyteller and Pulitzer-Prize-winning-narrative-journalist, Rick Bragg has used the storytelling techniques he learned from his people to write two best-selling memoirs that redefine the boundaries of the genres of memoir and creative nonfiction. His speakerly texts combine the voices of the working class of the Alabama foothills of Appalachia, his own voice as a member of this culture, and his narrative journalistic voice. In his works, Bragg has managed not only to carve a place for the voice of the working class, but also to celebrate and preserve the oral culture, history, and beautiful language of his people, the working …

Hit The Ground Running: A Novella And Other Stories, Lisa Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis contains a collection of short stories divided into two parts. The first half, a novella entitled Clothes on a Line, consists of a series of linked vignettes that depict the life of a young, unnamed Appalachian girl and her relationship with her promiscuous mother. Throughout the work, the narrator struggles to create and come to terms with her identity as she experiences the adversities of sexual abuse, death, alcoholism, and the looming “secret” of her unknown father. The second half, Consumed and Other Stories, features several short pieces that, while not inter-related like those in …