Creative Writing Commons^™

Four Junes, Sara Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Four Junes is a poetry collection of elegies and pastoral elegies that aims to discuss and explore the interconnectedness of the body within the frame of health and illness to the landscape of long-term and short-term dwelling and ideas of home. Through fractured frames of home oppositional in landscape and environment, the collection discusses how the body functions and exists in health and unhealth and explores the reactions and processing of half-deaths involved in cancer, and specifically, stem cell transplants as treatment for terminal illnesses. More specifically, the cancerous body and healthy body are contrasted to one another and considered …

Sight Words: Poems, Benjamin Harrison Socolofsky

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Sight Words is a collection of poems that questions the image as the central unit of meaning in poetry. Sight words is a lyric bildungsroman, that traces the process of metaphysical alienation that an individual undergoes in the postmodern world. The speaker is exposed to an overabundance of meaning that the visual world transmits and as the order of language deteriorates, meaning multiplies and falters. The language and poetics of Sight Words struggles to reconcile the disconnect between visual language and spoken language. Every missed communication points to a denial of access to the self, which the speaker apprehends as …

Horse Loose: Essays On Fear And Attachment, Alyse Burnside

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I began writing my thesis about my grandmother, who lived out the last few years of her life as a new age healer speaking in tongues and believing she was the channel for an ancient Lemurian shaman. We were not close until the very end of her life, and even then I felt far away from her. Not in the least because of her estrangement with the rest of my family. I tried and tried to write about her but always ran up against her mystery. She was not a woman many knew, and if you did know her, you …

That Hidden Country: The Travels Of Jacob Singleton, A Novel, James Earp

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Thomas Jefferson believed, or wanted to believe, that mammoths foraged the grasslands of the continental American interior. This was not an uncommon belief among the learned in Jefferson’s time and place, so it is not altogether remarkable that Jefferson did charge Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, when they led the Corps of Discovery to the Oregon coast, with keeping an eye out for signs of the living mammoth. This novel attempts an aesthetically viable narrative synthesis of American myths in several layers, the top layer being, in the words of cultural critic Cintra Wilson, a ‘‘ripping yarn’’ in the traditions …

Ricky & Grams, Berthold Brock Albin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

When his wife kicks him out of the house, Richard (Ricky) goes to live at his parents’ house where, it turns out, his pistol of a grandmother (Grams), is house-sitting. Ricky is incensed and imagines he will have to take care of her and clean her dentures. She is incensed and wants to be left alone to her debauchery. But the tables turn and ultimately Grams and the other women in his life help Ricky get back on his feet and find direction and love and Ricky helps Grams rethink her priorities.

It’S Not About Brooklyn, Elee Maybelle Oak

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program has culminated into a collage form hybrid comprised of vignettes, poetry, and other creative works. The writing engages central themes, through the Queer gaze of the character Sissy. She became suspect at an early age because of her odd aptitudes along with a physical appearance that never fit. She dodged and at times embraced an identification as a sort of side show curiosity, and an intoxicated freak of gender, race, and talent. She survived physical and mental attacks. Then she blindly stepped …

The Skinny House, Leo August Jilk

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The title of my thesis is The Skinny House, a phrase which might indicate: 1) The body of a human or other animal, 2) A coffin or grave, and 3) A residence in Mamaroneck, New York built of recycled materials (e.g. railroad ties and a chicken coop) by an African-American carpenter named Nathan T. Seely in 1932. Seely and his brother ran a business that thrived for several years prior to the Great Depression, catering specifically to Southern blacks moving north. While only a few pages of my thesis are directly concerned with the Mamaroneck residence and its social implications, …

Seers In Greensand, Michael Lawrence Berger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on poetry has culminated in a poetry manuscript of 60 pages in length. Many of the poems in this manuscript are inspired by my experiences studying English poetry and literature in this program, with a particular emphasis on devotional and spiritual poetry and poetics. A third of my thesis poem, in fact, came out of my experiences fulfilling the “study abroad” requirement in my MFA. To fulfill that requirement, I embarked on a couple pilgrimage walks through rural parts of the United Kingdom. The longest walk was the one I took from …

Mouthy Bones, Shaun Leonard

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As a collection of poetry, this work interrogates the well trodden ground of the Beloved, hopefully with a modicum of originality, though the text itself wonders if, and how (and how!). Can “us” be? Amorous capability is extolled and explored, and people worry. Love happens, and everything is all right. Love happens, and nothing is alright. And then it is. The poems play with the act of writing and how that affects the reader, the subject/s, and the memories being used as fodder. The time and space of emotion and selfhood are melded and molded, through unexpected line breaks, poetic …

Heaven On Their Minds, Rebecca Kate Robison

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Heaven on Their Minds is a novel written from the first-person perspective of teenage

protagonist Melody O’Malley. The plot details Melody’s attempt, along with two close friends, to undermine their conservative Christian theater camp’s summer production of Godspell via the edgier songs and theology of Jesus Christ Superstar. Though ostensibly a satire of the Evangelical Christian community, Melody’s insecurities are the true heart of the novel--her fraught relationship with her best friends, her concerns about her post-high school future, and her ill-advised crush on the most prominent RFC (Robot for Christ) in the camp, a crush that has terrible consequences …

The Edge Of Mercury, Aurora Brackett

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Edge of Mercury is a collection of stories inspired by myth, ritual and fairy tales. Many of the stories in this collection investigate the making of meaning and the construction of identity. Others directly reference Biblical stories or Greek and Roman myths, seeking to fuse contemporary realism with the numinous, and to create in the pairing, a narrative that is focused on the liminal, the silence beneath plot. In “Brother Death” two sisters create a ritual to revive their living-dead brother, only to lose him in the current of a river. In “Ambrosia,” the ghost of Pavarotti’s mother is …

Tearing Up The Tallgrass, Brett Salsbury

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative thesis project is a culmination of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree at UNLV. The thesis—currently titled Tearing up the Tallgrass—was composed entirely during my graduate semesters at UNLV. As a book of poetry, it explores the dynamics of humans in nature, white privilege, objectivity, fact- and myth-making, and artistic practice. Written under the supervision of Claudia Keelan (committee chair) and Donald Revell (committee member), my committee further includes P. Jane Hafen (English) and Pierre Lienard (Anthropology). Their disparate subject and genre interests are meant to diversify the feedback received during this project’s composition. Some …

Keep Moving: Stories, Syed Haider Shahbaz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis is a collection of short stories, all of which revolve around themes of travel, migration, and displacement. Ranging from short, one-page flash fiction pieces to longer stories, the six pieces in the collection are put together with the hope that they will thematically interact with each other and provide new meanings and interpretations for the whole collection, even as they continue to stand as distinct narratives in their own right. Through their interplay, I hope to throw light on the way human relationships are challenged by movement and migration.

Mr. Universe Wants To Live Forever, Oksana Marafioti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An aging rock star suffers from Alzheimer, and must deal with loss of identity.

Wolf!!! Vol. 1, Jamison Crabtree

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following manuscript, titled "WOLF!!! vol. 1," investigates the cultural fetishization of power. By placing value on power and on progress, each lauded for their own sake, distances these values from how they serve people. In a situation like this, a system of power is virtuous as far as it can't be overcome by another power. This concern is postmodern one; recognized by theorists such as Foucault, Lyotard, and Jameson. Lyotard posits that efficiency becomes the rubric for goodness in a late-capitalist society. Something is considered good if it produces the maximum amount of output with a minimal amount of …

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

Cycle Of Return, Clancy Gabriel Daniell Mcgilligan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An American reporter in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is fired by a local English-language newspaper after he and his lover, a copy editor at the paper, use drugs and she overdoses and dies. The reporter, whose name is Francis, feels partly responsible for her death. He also feels guilty about his life as an expatriate in Cambodia, a poor, developing country that has a large aid community and a history of communist killings and war. He decides to find whoever sold the drugs to his lover, Sara, and to exact some sort of punishment or revenge. However, he’s uncertain what he …

Las Vegas Paperboy, Matthew O'Brien

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I’m an author and journalist who has lived in Las Vegas since 1997. My first book, Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, chronicles my adventures in the city’s underground flood channels. My second book, My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, is a creative-nonfiction collection set in off-the-beaten-path Vegas. These two books grew out of my eight years as a writer and editor for Las Vegas CityLife alternative-weekly paper.

I enrolled in UNLV’s MFA creative-writing program in the fall of …

Going Anywhere: Stories, David Armstrong

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Growing up in a rural, Appalachian town, I recognized that tight-lipped doggedness was a mark of strength. As a writer, I became intrigued by how I might portray people whose defining attributes were silence, how essentially to give voice to voicelessness. The answer for me was to begin exploring place as an origin of inner expression. The stories in Going Anywhere track people moving through the landscape, their journeys, often destinationless, traversing the space between life's dark realities and the fantastic leaps of faith we all make to survive. A father seeks out a way to deal with the unexpected …

Hotel Bukovyna, Rebecca Ann Bosshart

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This collection of short stories and first chapter of a novella take place in the historical area of Bukovyna, the beech tree land, partly located in Chernivetska region, western Ukraine. On the edge of it, or under it, or traveling to and from it, in contemporary time. I've been occupied with "the outsider," represented here, and where the seven stories reside, by the giant grande dame tourist hotel on Main Street, across from Shevchenko Park, in Chernivtsi, the region's city center. The occupants: the outsider looking in and around. Outsiders looking at other outsiders. An outsider being welcomed in. Most …

A More Perfect World, Amy Katherine Mayo

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A More Perfect Worldis the story of Gabriel Garcia Levine Connolly, an intelligent, charismatic, and idealistic man who invents "Thing," which quickly becomes indispensable to virtually everyone in the world. His new-found wealth presents him with the opportunity to create a community that suits his values and his creative process, taking several friends and co-workers with him. Their search for a new home leads them to the idyllic island of Luu Saabhel; for Gabe, the opportunity to protect this small island and its indigenous people while creating "a more perfect world" for his own community is the ideal situation.

The …

All Is Ripe For Fire, Dana Marie Killmeyer

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

All is Ripe for Fire is a two-part lyrical meditation that captures the world of the unnamed speaker who is visited by the image of a woman, such as the one who appears in the very first poem, "The Unnamed," which begins with an invitation to reader: "Let us look at the French woman's hand touching the flame to her sleeve." However, no sooner is the reader's attention drawn to the woman's hand, the flame, and then to her sleeve, than the image of the woman is gone entirely. In a matter of a few words, the figure of the …

Combining The Names Of Ancestors With The Names Of Birds, Jessica Sierra Durham

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following manuscript deals with a range of themes including origin, family, place, gender, sexuality and their intersections. The title, Combining the Names of Ancestors with the Names of Birds, and title poem exemplify the intersection of origin, family, place (ancestors) and gender, sexuality, movement, change and freedom (birds). Combining

their names speaks to the interplay between memory and imagination that has served as a foundation for all of the poems in this manuscript. This manuscript is split into three sections: Origin, which deals with home, with growing up in Louisiana, with the land and the water, my family and …

Little Rituals, Bruce Johnson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following stories represent what I have accomplished in my three-and-a-half years in the Master of Fine Arts-Fiction program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They are all realist stories, most of them with a minimalist leaning. Together for the first time, they are more than a mere sum of the writing I've done in my time in the MFA program. They are the stories that, when I read them now, still occasionally delight me. Most of the stories that I wrote as an MFA candidate do not pass this test, and thus are not included here. If there is …

Maps On The Backs Of Our Eyes, Joan Paulette Robinson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A collection of poems related to places in the Mojave Desert and the Las Vegas area or in rural central Michigan. Most poems deal with history and memory and the overlapping nature of experience.

Samsara, Erica Anzalone

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In Samsara, I bring a spiritual-historical lens to art, war, feminism, religion, and the body in extremis. Although the word samsara resonates mostly within the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, meaning literally to wander through the rounds of death and rebirth, my poetics of transience and trauma crosses cultures, including Muslim, Christian, and Judaic notions of spirituality. Bosnia, Iowa, Boston, and Prague are all shifting sands within the mandala-like hourglass of this collection. My voice often issues from a working class register and speaks with rebellious power from a place of powerlessness: "E-bay nirvana, you want me to yes sir/I'll get …

Always Away, Mollie Bergeron

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

At any given time, there are pages of notes and thoughts running through our minds; these have to come out in some way. In order to stay sane, to stay human, I write poems. These poems are interested in breath and space, memory and nostalgia, loss and water. Each of these ideas has its own fit as part of the poem as well as part of life and being alive. Human emotion is varied through these. Observation and perception, turned into poems through the very physical act of putting words onto a page, allow these memories and experiences to live …

Pyramid Of The Sun, James Joseph Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Pyramid of the Sun is a novel which is experimental in structure. It weaves traditional prose with original poems based on Aztec creation myths. The narrative is not strictly linear, but approaches the plot from several angles - past, present, and future - simultaneously. It comes back to its starting point at the end, like a snake devouring its own tail. The novel takes the Aztec and Mayan belief that time is circular and never-ending and reinterprets it in a contemporary, hard-edged setting that touches down at various points across the globe, including Moscow, Seville, Seoul and Las Vegas. Pyramid …

Due Partly To Inertia, Justin Lee Irizarry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the preface to Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman said, "The poets of the kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from its need, and riches from its conceit." My poetry aims to exist in Whitman's `kosmos' and in doing so advance through the turmoil and the strategies of certainty to something resembling principles. Politics is a common theme; it is not in an attempt to write political poetry, but an attempt to not leave anything out. Other themes throughout this manuscript include death, music, wanting, having, …

There Are Moments That Hang Suspended, Mark B. Lennon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project is the culmination of ten years of work in poetry. It was begun in imitation of those who impressed, not only with their fine words and dexterity with language, but also with their clear conviction in their subject material. Reflected in the works of Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Adrienne Rich, among others, was evidence of a life lived, in Thoreau's term, deliberately. The writing of poetry seemed to be not simply a means of expression, but a goad to live a life worth examining, and to keep doing so; a progress report for a radical mind.

Politics …