Creative Writing Commons^™

The Meaning Of The Moment: A Collection Of Short Stories., Jonathan David Benton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of three short stories in very different genres but tied together by a intensely personal look at the lives of its protagonists culminating in epiphanies. One of these epiphanies is intended solely for the reader, but in two cases, the reader and character gains the insight. “The Tears of Angels” looks at the effect one person in a moment, even a stranger, can have on the protagonist’s life. “Climbing Heaven and Gazing on Earth” focuses on the haunting power of history and the need we as humans can feel to share a story, to make sense of …

Under The Bridge: Poems By Faith Shepherd With Critical Introduction, Faith Shepherd

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The first poem with which I became fully engaged--that is, the first poem with which I interacted beyond one or two readings--was Wallace Stevens' "Autumn Refrain" my senior year in high school. At this point in my life, I was already enamored with literature, and I had written fair amounts of "poetry" for my high school creative writing classes. However, even though I occasionally enjoyed reading poetry and understood that its language tended to be more compact than other types of literature, if I didn't understand a poem after reading it through once or twice I set it aside and …

Mothers Of Us All: When Does Political Message Take Precedence Over Art In Some Modern And Contemporary Women’S Poetry, Shanda Hansma Blue Easterday

Dissertations

This dissertation contains an essay with the above title, as well as two sections of poems. The first section of poems is entitled Maria Sibylla Merian, Artist and Naturalist , and is a collection of poems about, and in the voice of, Merian. Many of these are what are known as personna poems. The second section of poems is entitled The Beekeeper's Wife , and uses autobiography as a framework for communicating the humor in human relationships, and for illustrating the surrealism in the human race's relationships with the natural world.

My research for my essay entailed the study of …

Dear Beyond, Kirsten Hemmy

Dissertations

My project. Dear Beyond, a collection of poetry, examines the connection between landscape—both internal and external, or private and public—and environment. My poetry reflects my own unique background and my struggles with emplacement, or the placing of oneself in any particular landscape. It aims to challenge dominant paradigms of voice, expression, and even inquiry; it questions traditional, systematic forms of inquiry such as the Cartesian idea of an essential separation between object and subject. Culture and landscape, I have discovered, manifest themselves everywhere, in variegated forms: in spaciousness or intimacy, in internal and external contexts, in tactile experiences, in focused …

Making Peace With Contradictions: Reflections Of Territory And Identity In Israel/Palestine, Chase Clow

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Both historical and personal essay, this culminating project is a creative non-fiction work exploring the modern historical roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Part I surveys the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Palestine, centering on two key figures: Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion (1886-1973), and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muslim Leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni (1897-1974). Interweaving historical fact, myth, personal story, and biography, with Israeli and Palestinian poetry and poses by the author, themes such as relationship to land, attachment to home, and the displacement created by industrialization upon a traditional, rural lifestyle are explored. Part II relates the …

The New Girl, Angela Marie Meredith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The New Girl is a collection of poems in which the poet assumes a direct, unfeigned voice. These rhythmic poems cover the deeply personal to the universal and social. The body is presented as a record of experiences both good and bad. Feminist issues pertainingto marriage, work, and sexuality are explored. Whether the poem is about a personal relationship or some aspect of society, it is likely to be multi-dimensional and suggest a duality. Overall, the poems are rooted in the spiritual and attempt to relate, with holistic honesty, a sense of reverence for the impure parts of life.

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.

Trackers, Robin Rozanski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Trackers is a collection of short stories that attest to the oddities and complexities found even in the non-exotic middle-class American suburbs. The characters in these stories experience disappointments that result from the physical and emotional distancing of families. In "Tokens," a woman's attempts at revenge on her cheating husband are unsatisfying because she ends up feeling more alone than before. In "Trackers," eleven-year old Richard hunts for Bigfoot as he and his family cope with the emotional aftermath of his sister's suicide attempt. In these stories people struggle to maintain normalcy in their lives--sometimes through inappropriate means. When their …

The Albanian And An Accompanying Exegesis : Place And Form In The Albanian, Donna J. Mazza

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis takes the form of a novel titled The Albanian and an exegesis, “Place and Form in The Albanian". The novel spans the period from October 1989 to the end of 1991 and is set against a backdrop of Eastern European change and its effect on a small group of Albanian refugees and Rosa, a young woman from Western Australia. Rosa narrates the tale in first person, present tense. The novel begins with her arrival in Dubrovnik, where she meets a young Albanian man on the verge of exiling himself in order to survive ethnic persecution. He fascinates Rosa, …

Minutes From Pragma, Juan M. Martinez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Minutes from Pragma is a collection of twelve pieces--a memoir, five short stories, and six short-shorts--exploring ways in which estranged characters may find refuge from chaos and entropy. These stories attempt to deal with bleakness and despair through playfulness and humor. In Enterprise Carolina: A Capsule Review, time has stopped, but somehow everyday life goes on as usual. In Errands, children work in razorblade factories. In Roadblock, the narrator lives with a relative who repeatedly sets his possessions on fire. The collection concentrates on hardship and alienation, but suggests ways in which characters may confront and endure hard times. Characters' …

Gravity Fails, Kereth Cowe-Spigai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gravity Fails is a collection of four short stories and two memoirs that explore the ways in which characters adjust and fit into to a world that is destructive, fragmented and sometimes alien. Many of these pieces deal not with the moment of crisis, but with the aftermath. In "Gravity Fails," the young Danielle struggles to feel safe after the violent murder of her mother. Eliza Morrison negotiates the disappearance of her husband in "More Colors." "Following Rebecca" chronicles a woman's return to normalcy after her alcoholic husband divorces her. These characters are not happy; they are not healthy. Their …

Assumption, William Hinton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assumption is the story of a slave named Nathan living in a racially hostile environment in antebellum and post-Civil War Louisiana. Assumption Parish was the kind of place where slaves were whipped frequently, where disease and rustic living were the normal course of life, where the swamp, with all its savage foreboding, loomed nearby. It was a place, Nathan discovered, that traded in men's spirits, breaking them little by little for purposes that were difficult for him to comprehend. Like many slaves of his time, Nathan is raised without biological parents. His surrogate mother, Abbie, longs for the day when …

Becoming The Cat Lady, Melissa Anne Goslin

LSU Master's Theses

Emma Baronne is mourning her lifelong dream of losing her teeth. When her company folds and her on-again-off-again boyfriend gets engaged to another woman, Emma wants to make a fort in the living room and never come out. But, she soon realizes – with the help of her quirky Catholic family and a coven of French Quarter cat ladies – puberty is often easier the second time around.

Eight Ways Of Saying Infinity: A Collection Of Friction Poetry And Friction Stories, Wayne D. Hetzler

Theses

This culminating project contains sixteen friction poems and sixteen friction stories. The format places the poems first, followed by the story. The story and the poetry are matched. The poems are not written to tell the story. They are written to strike an image, a friction image. The reader supplies lubrication as required.

The stories take the reader on a trip that lubricates the story to filet out the imagery. The author writes about incidents that have occurred during his life. Simple stories. about eating a potato chip, or rolling up your senile grandmother in a carpet. The writer solves …

My Maiden Cowboy Names: Poems, Victoria Brockmeier

LSU Master's Theses

On the title: for a dichotomy of vulnerability and resistance; for self as plural and/or changeable; for acts of claiming. To hint at tone, setting, and content. On sound: to shape a poem's mood, and because these pieces should leave your mouth a little tired if you read them out loud. On lineation: to highlight the near-misses in language-ambiguities, double meanings, troublesome literalization-and to see these not as pitfalls but as opportunities. On stanza and strophe breaks: if a stanza is a room, the breaks between must be doorways, and who wants to sit down and rest in a doorway? …

Every Rose Has Its Thorn: The Complex Nature Of The Female In Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Paintings And Poetry, Michelle A. Cullari

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

.

Visions Must Be Re-Visioned : Gender Politics In Earthsea, Audrey Barton

Theses : Honours

This thesis analyses Ursula Le Guin's interpretation of gender and genre in her Earthsea novels, A Wizarf of Earthsea (1968) and Teha1111 (1990). Examining Le Guin's assertion for the need to "re-vision" her former work with the latter, I interrogate the ways in which she attempts to "break free" from the ideologies that impose themselves upon her work. Part one explores the mode of the hero quest used in A Wizard of Earthsea and examines the significance of this in terms of "gendering" the text. Part two examines the revisioned text Tehanu and the ways in which the …

B.S., Michael P. Redmond

LSU Master's Theses

This is a novel about a hack of a novelist who guides a fraud of a novelist around an allegorical version of the United States of America. It tests the limits of its readers’ patience with irony and metafiction. Themes that are explored, mocked, and then explored again include belief, identity, reality, geography, the intersections of the aforementioned, and the comical futility of such exploration. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Black-Eyed Peas And Cornbread, Janet Lewien

Theses

Black-Eyed Peas and Cornbread is a collection of autobiographical stories covering the period of my childhood in the mid-I950's and into adulthood. The stories describe my recollections of growing up in different regions of the country and the formative experiences that shaped me. Its sub-title could read "Passages" because the stories recall pivotal events that influenced the directions of my life.

The idea for this story began forming when I was enrolled in the Literary Non-fiction course for the Lindenwood College for Individualized Education. This cluster program contained a section on "Memoir and the Personal Essay" which was taught by …

In The Space Behind His Eyes : Donald R. Stuart : A Biography, Sally Clarke

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The major part of this thesis, In the Space Behind His Eyes, is a biography of Western Australian author, Donald Robert Stuart (1913-1983), a colourful life story woven around accepted and persistent myths found in the Australian psyche. In his childhood, Donald Stuart listened to stories about his Scottish immigrant grandfather finding gold on the Victorian fields and his father's part in the 1891 Queensland Shearers strike. His poverty-stricken, but peaceful, upbringing in suburban Perth, Western Australia, was overtaken by the 1930s Depression and, as a rebellious fourteen-year old, he left home and took to the road. In the next …