Creative Writing Commons^™

Learning To Speak: Poems, Celina A. Gomez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This project is a collection of poetry that weaves together past, present, and the hopes of a future that causes change. It is set in South Texas and discusses borders spanning from social class, language, and identity. The collection primarily focuses on the Chican@ voice and the shame that comes from the borderlands. I have drawn from the Rio Grande Valley as a source of inspiration while also using family experiences, my own reaction to shame, and the possibilities of an empowered voice.

Doc And The Chimera Conspiracy, Jesus Beltran Ii

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Doc and the Chimera Conspiracy, is a story that takes place in a world which diverged from our own in 1861 and led to a cooperation between the stoic science of Europe and the holistic science of indigenous people around the world. It is because of the cooperation that there is an explosion in advancements of science and technology. One of these advancements is the creation of Clones and human/animal genetic creations known as Chimera. I tell the story of Jack (a.k.a. Doc) a Chimera who lives in this present day, alternative Earth. The story teeters on the edges of …

Queer Monsters, And Bruno & His Speaking Queers, Charles R. Mcgregor

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This multi-genre thesis spans across nonfiction (Queer Monsters), poetry (Bruno & His Speaking Queers), and fiction (A Queer Empire Named Eden) in an attempt to break down the categorical control the hegemonic powers like to assert over not only the arts, but gender and sexuality as well. The creative pieces are unapologetically polemic tackling queer issues and the newfound surge in acceptance for queers across the United States. The creative works question how far queers should assimilate into a hegemonic system that was built with heteronormativity enshrined as one of its cornerstone pillars. The nonfiction piece tracks the author’s own …

Transylvania, Texas, Joshua Murray

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis is a collection of poems about my experience realizing that I was transgender, working through my feelings prior to this realization, the moment of realization, and the fallout that comes afterword. It begins by dealing with the feelings of depression and alienation that accompany unrecognized feelings of gender dysphoria, examining feelings of disconnect from the body, the mind, and everyday life. It builds to the slow realization of being a trans woman, a woman taught to be a man by society, and the joy and relief that comes with that epiphany. Finally it looks at what comes afterword, …

Last Breath, Marshall James Saenz

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Last Breath is a Gothic Web Series about a girl who recreates her identity while recovering her lost memory. She discovers dark family secrets and a rigid society that is as equally imprisoning as her room. Ultimately, she engages in a game of intrigue, putting her family name and soul at stake. The story incorporates traditional Gothic and Southern Gothic influences described by Bailey, De Vore et al., Radcliffe, and others. The issue of format is analyzed using insights by Felicia Day, Syd Field, Tennessee Williams, and Robert McKee. The Web Series remains a pioneering medium. Shows such as The …

I Won't Die, Azael Villarreal

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Sid is 22, and like the rest of the men in his family, he will die when he is 24. Sid will take his brother’s identity, money, and college degree to get ahead in life before death takes it away again. Sid will travel to the other side of the world in pursuit of adventure and meaning. In the final stages of his short life, Sid will try to make sense of his curse, and try to figure out what is left worth pursuing.

I,Metaboy, Mario Leal Jr.

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

I,metaboy is a stage play about a young homosexual couple, one a soldier and the other a writer, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and the struggles they encounter in their relationship when the soldier marries a woman to pass in the military. The story follows in the tradition of other Queer literatures that explore the state of the trope of the homosexual male within his given historical period. This historically places the identity. I,metaboy is based on an amalgamation of imagery from a variety of media (theatre, literature, TV, film, social policy, historical texts, myths, …

Finding No One, Sarah Owen

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Finding No one is a Non-Fiction creative writing piece written around one young woman’s desire to overcome obstacles in order to prove she is the complete opposite of her enemies: strong, determined, and brave. The main character shares her story of surviving childhood abuse, how she used Anorexia to cope with the aftermath, and what it took to become someone with a desire to fight for a future. The writer has taken the readers directly into vivid scenes of abuse and the innermost thoughts of self-loathing, refusing to hide any secrets. Finding No One explicitly shares details of therapy and …

Special Delivery, Jacob M. Guerra

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Special Delivery is a play that focuses on gender roles, specifically that of the Latino male in today’s culture.

Living In The Outskirts, Thomas De La Cruz

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Living in the Outskirts is a bildungsroman collection of short stories of a young Chicano growing up in the Rio Grande Valley town of Elsa, Texas. In the critical introduction of this thesis, I discuss how my stories challenge traditional Chicano/a cultural ideals of masculinity, language, class and nationality. Included in my introduction are other Chicano/a writers who engaged with these Chicano/a cultural ideals, and who I find myself in conversation with through my work. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of the “New Mestiza Consciousness,” I show how the protagonist of my stories gradually changes throughout the collection and adopts …

Stolen Youth: A Co-Authored Memoir, Jeanilee A. Garza

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This literary work of creative nonfiction qualifies under the literary genre of memoir, as a co-authored memoir. While the work incorporates the practices of both memoir and testimonio, the classification as a co-authored memoir recognizes a collaboration between the writer and the individual interviewed for this piece. “Stolen Youth: A Co-Authored Memoir” presents nine chapters and an epilogue, and is part of a larger creative work. The piece narrates the life of, Cirano “Cid” Lagunas, III, a dear friend who offered me the opportunity to convey his personal experiences through memoir. His memoir begins at the age of 12, following …

Angel In Skirts, Mary Ruth Chen

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Angels In Skirts is a memoir composed of organic memories thematically linked through essays and chapters. I re-create the story of a young girl’s vivid and imaginative way of seeing life, the intensity of her emotions and what it feels like to desperately want to control men by handing over her body. Highlighted is a discussion of the struggle I had with labeling my work nonfiction. I also explore the effective use of parataxis in dialogue and the effect structure has on the narrative arc and characters in a work. I discuss my process when deciding on a form for …

[No Titles In Utopia], Esteban J. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The intended purpose of this thesis it to compose a collection of poetry consisting of four sections with each section containing between four to ten poems. The poems themselves will range between one to three pages and will be divided according to their particular subject matter, such as, but not limited, to childhood reflection, father-son relationships, the estrangement from suburbia and modernized America, and ekphrasis-inspired pieces that weave both art and narrative elements together. My main goal with this collection is to write poems in a clear straightforward manner without obscuring language, and constructing persona narratives that invite the reader …

Another Sort Of Life: A Novel, Andrew S. Hollinger

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

In the critical introduction of this thesis, I examine the academic and creative impulses that helped me to complete this novel. In particular, I detail my seemingly nonlinear course of study as I planned, wrote, and reflected on this novel draft. This work required significant research and study outside the field of creative writing: health care systems, cancer, shame, vulnerability, guilt. I discuss at length the processes by which I became knowledgeable of these subjects, and how even after the first draft of the creative work was completed, I continued to create a more nuanced and sophisticated concept of my …

The Last Orchard, Caleb David Camacho

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The Last Orchard is a screenplay about two rival groups of ten-year-olds in 1989 Pharr, Texas. Their elementary school conflicts create a neighborhood war within their mobile home park, coinciding with the entire park's wide eviction and land ownership crisis. The story is written with a mythic fiction approach – a method I learned through Carl Jung's and Joseph Campbell's works on archetypes, mythology, and the hero's journey; it is a practical tool for storytelling. The Last Orchard is based on Homer's Iliad: the Trojan War, its heroes, and gods. Some plays and numerous films have their mythic counterparts, along …

Fort Brown, Jeannie Marie Floyd

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This is a collection of four short stories and three essays with a critical introduction. The people in these stories, both fiction and non-fiction, are all on the fringes of society. They are experiencing financial ruin, emotional turmoil, sickness, mental instability and other struggles. This material is an examination of their lives and the alternately humorous and tragic attempts of coping with their circumstances. Some of the pieces are related to the shrimping industry in the Port of Brownsville, one is about prostitution in Mexico, still others are about social misfits in California and other parts of the country. But …

Time And Fortune, Tiffany C. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Time and Fortune, a graphic novel script, takes the true story of John Harrison’s competition for the longitude prize, as told by Dava Sobel, and seeks the changes that could have culminated had Harrison sought other avenues for his product. Considering his judge was his competitor, if Harrison made a secret copy of H-4, a watch that accurately holds the time from homeport, and gave it to a sailor invested in its success, naval military power could have changed today’s world as we know it. Imagining that John Harrison changed one small decision in his life, this storyline sets a …

Mariguano, Juan Ochoa

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Mariguano is a fictional account of a young man growing up in a family in whose patriarch is a Mexican drug lord. The narrator, el Johnny, and his father, Don Julio, crisscross through Mexico with total disregard for distance or time bribing comandantes and stopping turf wars all in preparation for their next score. The novel culminates in Don Julio’s attempt to fix the 1988 Presidential election in Mexico. Don Julio’s son, El Johnny, lives to tell the tale of the rise and fall of his father’s drug smuggling empire and of the destruction of his family. The events in …

“Oye: Words Are One Big Mind” A Collection Of Poems, Samuel Arizpe

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Oye: Words Are One Big Mind. A Collection of Poems comprises forty poems arranged into three sections. It is preceded by a critical introduction in which the author discusses: 1) the childhood provenance of his love for language; 2) how his Latino linguistic, religious and cultural roots from South Texas set him on the path of poetic discovery and contextualized his poetic style 3) the influence of early Chican@ poets upon his poetry; 4) commonalities of Latin American poetry in his own work; 5) the convergence of spiritual, social, religious, mystical, and universal issues in his work.

“Breakfast Shots” And Other Stories: Collected Fiction Of Joseph D. Haske, Joseph D. Haske

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The following thesis for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing consists of two parts. The first part contains five excerpts from a short story cycle, tentatively entitled Breakfast Shots. The second part includes experimentation with the short story form, including the noir-influenced Bloqueo and two minimalist stories derived from this piece. Several stories included in this thesis have been published in journals such as Boulevard, Fiction International, and Dark Sky. The rest are currently under consideration for various journals and anthologies.

And They Were Thirteen, Daniel Sanchez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

In the critical introduction to my thesis, I explore how the progression of my creative work straddled the gap between fiction and nonfiction and how, in trying to make the creative work a combination of both, I failed to make it work as successfully as I could have as a narrative. I then segue into my research on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and how it has even affected narratives focusing on teachers. I then explain how elements present in my work coincide with aspects of the monomyth. Because of the prevalence of the monomyth in American pop culture, I make an …

“Combustible Sinners” And Other Stories, Myra Ivette Infante

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This is a collection of six short stories with a critical introduction. The characters in the short stories are all connected (sometimes remotely) to a small, Mexican, Pentecostal church in South Texas. The critical introduction explores the religious background and evolution as a Chicana writer of Myra Ivette Infante.

Disciples Of Vu, Leif Carl Behmer

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This project is in the design of high-fantasy sword and sorcery, wherein the concepts of mana and magic are employed as expressions of virtue to highlight contemporary issues of cultural identity and belonging. This project is also an experiment to attract a readership of non-traditional fantasy readers into the genre by creating, rather than assuming, a fantastic world context using immersive rhetorical techniques.

This project in of itself is not so much a re-invention of the traditional adventure quest as it is an exploration of its post-Tolkien form (the attraction of mythology and folklore, the narrative use of prophecy), and …

After “Borderlands” The Making Of An Academic Chola: Poems, Veronica Sandoval

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This poetry collection is by a Mexican American spoken word, performance poet, Lady Mariposa, from Sullivan City turned Chican@ feminist after coming to terms with her mestizaje through Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In Lady Mariposa’s journey as an “Academic Chola,” the term “chola” articulates her Chican@ identity and creates a new space in academia by using “chola” as a hybrid of identity and style in the formation of her poetics. Her poetry can also be called pocho, pocha, Tex-Mex and code switches. She is inspired by Chican@ literature and history, lowriders, cholo culture, cholas, jazz, hip …

Awake: A Young Adult Novel In Verse, Minerva Vasquez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This project is a manuscript for a YA novel written in verse and represents the type of YA literature I hope to publish after graduating. Awake chronicles the story of Alejandra de Luna, a high school student from the Rio Grande Valley who must come to terms with an abusive home situation, while at the same time struggling to find her place and her voice as an artist, writer, daughter, and young Latina. To complicate her world more, she begins to dream of Tenochtitlan, the former capital of the Aztec Empire. She experiences Aztec culture as one of patriarchy and …

The Ripening Of Mangos, Katherine Hoerth

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This project is a collection of poems which draw influence from Romantic, confessional, and post-modern poetry movements, and can most accurately be described as Confessionalistic, though they are resistant to categorization. The poems function to dismantle archetypal definitions of feminine identity, and instead aim to depict identity to be fluid and multifaceted.

The Ripening of Mangos is divided into four sections. The first section deconstructs the 'angel' or 'virgin' archetype, while the second deconstructs the 'monster' or 'whore' archetype. Section three includes voices of procreation, and functions to complicate the image of 'the mother.' The last section, Transplanting, shows gendered …

Senso No Himitsu (Secrets Of War), Ricardo Tijerina Jr.

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This creative thesis is a divided into two parts: “Critical introduction” and “Senso no Himitsu”, which is a full-length staged play. The play involves the lives of two brothers secretly stationed with a family in Okinawa Japan during WWII.

Tierra Sagrada: Stories, Jose Rene Martinez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis consists of fourteen stories and a critical introduction. Each story is set in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and features Mexican American characters. The critical introduction discusses the history of the Rio Grande Valley and traces my development as a writer. It also shows the influences Mexican American writers such as Américo Paredes have had on my work.

My Made For Tv Life Or How We Survived My Psycho-Killer Dad, Sarah Beth Mcdonald

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The critical afterword discusses my struggles writing a memoir after a lifetime of primarily fictional influences, the ethics of truth and memory, and my attempts to find a style that would do justice to my mother s struggles. The memoir began its life as a portrayal of my mother's story, but in the end was the story of a girl growing up with the knowledge of her father's attempted murder, and the strength of her mother's guidance. My story.

Poeta Power: The Poetic Journey Of La Erika: Poems, Erika Marie Garza-Johnson

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This is a collection of poetry set in the borderlands of deep South Texas. The poems take as their subject Chican@ identity, family, the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, Edcouch-Elsa, Texas, cancer, sexuality, Chicana feminism, childbirth and children, marriage, education, folklore, epithets, among others. As a cycle, they represent the poet‘s development through key stages in her life, including childbirth, marriage, and death of a parent. Many poems in this collection also reflect the linguistic diversity of the U.S.-Mexico border through the poet’s use of code-switching and Tex Mex.