Creative Writing Commons^™

Buckeye Gumbo, Michael Kenneth Parsons

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Caudill College of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Michael Kenneth Parsons on December 3, 2002.

Into The Machine, Scarlett Stewart

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Caudill College of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Scarlett Stewart on November 26, 2002.

Waiting For Mary Jane: A Collection Of Modern Appalachian Short Stories In The Joycean Tradition., Lorie Ann Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of a collection of short stories stylistically reminiscent of the works of James Joyce yet with an Appalachian and feminist voice. Waiting for Mary Jane should appeal to readers interested in experimental styles as well as feminist and Appalachian literature. The protagonist of the collection is Mary Jane, a female from present day East Tennessee. The reader experiences her life from age three to thirty. The introduction to the collection explores the link between James Joyce, Appalachia, Feminist writing, and the short stories. Structurally and thematically the collection reflects the works of James Joyce by using the …

Luminous Days, Mitchell S. Jackson

Dissertations and Theses

Luminous Days is a representation of my artistic vision, literary goals, and social influences. Artistically, I intend to create fiction that is aesthetically appealing. This aesthetic appeal includes the presence of a distinct narrative voice, realistically rendered settings, multidimensional characters, meticulous attention to diction, and sentence construction. The literary goal I hold in the highest regard is the creation of a body of work that demonstrates continued growth in my craft.

What I intend to render in my thesis is an accurate portrayal of the effects that drugs on the lives of my characters, and more specifically the relational strains …

Journeys: A Critical Analysis Of The Diary Of Sarah L. Wadley, Regina C. Davis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

As a young woman living in Louisiana during the Civil War, Sarah Lois Wadley documented in her diary the fractured, conflicted perspective that was her experience as a woman living in the war ravaged South. Her writing is evidence of the confusion she felt as a result of the discrepancy between the expectations of Southern patriarchal society and her own needs as a woman. Wadley’s diary is a complex text similar to a novel in that it relates events through a construct that reflects her response to her reader’s/society’s expectations. From a deconstructionist perspective, the power of Wadley’s text lies …

Dancing With The Bag Lady, Mora Lee Finnerty

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Predominantly explores the author's decade-long struggle with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, from pre-onset to present day. Other universal themes include dysfunctional family life, discrimination, materialism, adolescence, alcohol and drug abuse, music, religion, academia, married life, hypochondria, disease, and death.

This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii

Masters Theses

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …

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, …

Her Still Singing Limbs: A Collection Of Poetry, Anthony William Rintala

LSU Master's Theses

"Her Still Singing Limbs: A Collection of Poetry" is a fragmented rumination on the intrinsic loneliness of the human condition. Using the Greek myth of Echo’s destruction at her beloved Narcissus’s hands as the foundation, these poems combine voyeuristic images of beauty and violence to explain why all poets write "songs of exquisite loneliness."

Standing Liberty And Other Stories, Richard Buchholz

LSU Master's Theses

This miscellany represents the pick of the vignettes, tales, and anecdotes the author has gathered and spun out over the past few years. Personal experience, with the exception of a few inessential details, is not represented. The influence of ragtime music, which played with relentless syncopation in the author's head as he composed with pencil and yellow pad, may be discernable to those who take the trouble to read the sentences aloud.

In The Temple Of Off-Ramps, Nat W. Hardy

LSU Master's Theses

Any creative thesis of poetry is an attempt to distill one’s aesthetic sensibilities into a single masterwork. This particular venture is not unique in that respect. What separates this lyrical endeavour from more flaccid mainstream poetry, however, is its visionary temper, for this is a poetics of revolt for truly revolting times. This poetics of subversion embodies a reactionary aesthetic that traverses both the beauty and the horror of our world, and as the poems expose social injustice, they venture sporadically into the sublime delicacy of disgust. “In the Temple of Off-Ramps” is ultimately a search for meaning in the …

Advent, Gregory Baxter

LSU Master's Theses

The novel follows the lives of a family in a Texas tourist town after a stranger's arrival.

Marty On The Edge, Bill Feltt

Masters Theses

Marty Kaden can fly. A champion Taekwondoist with serious hopes and a good chance of making the United States team, propelling him all the way to the Olympic Games one day, he takes his chosen martial art seriously. Trouble looms on the horizon, however, and soon brings Marty down to Earth. After suffering defeat at the hands of an arch-rival, Marty spins out of control. Worse, his master instructor disappears under what Marty believes are mysterious circumstances. Yet no one will take him seriously—the police, his mother, his master's assistant. None of them shares his concern. Marty's despair sends him …