Creative Writing Commons^™

Rain Town, Melanie Crow

Dissertations

My project, a collection of poetry, examines both loss and transformation. Personal loss informs the poems, but the work also addresses how the speaker is accorded insight into the world because of loss and is transformed. The work takes into account mythology, science, and the act of writing in order to understand what it means to live in mutability. Many of the poems demonstrate an acute awareness of the body. Robert Lowell and Jorie Graham are both writers who have informed my poems in this way; both explore a dual consciousness of loss and renewal and both represent moments of …

Things We Don't Say & Other Stories, Frances A. Stubbs

Theses & Honors Papers

The purpose is to conduct an examination of what it means to survive, specifically in terms of overcoming the expectation to fail. The focus of each narrative is to be a struggle for survival by means of reconciling public opinion, assumed or real, with an individual’s perception of what it means to fail. The reconciliation emerges from understanding of identity, ideas about failure, and relationships between characters. In each story, moments exist where the character chooses between accepting other’s expectations or becoming something different. The characters struggled to survive emotionally and physically in a world with skewed value systems and …

Beasts And Other Stories, Amanda Walton

Theses & Honors Papers

The purpose of the short story is to create characters who reveal the theme of hope in dire circumstances in short story form. The interest being in unlovable characters who are considered unlovable because of their actions. The author views unlovable characters as more loveable. She is interested in the backstory of each unlovable character and how they face life’s hardest moments. The author gives each character a history and individual qualities so that the reader can understand the reasoning behind their actions. The author created an understanding of perspectives. She shed light on the idea that characters who commit …

Reviving The Subject: A Feminist Argument For Mimesis In Literature., Messina Lyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For centuries we have taken for granted Aristotle's assertion that fiction must encourage emotional identification by representing life realistically. With the development of a more pluralistic society, Postmodernist writiers have come to question that assumption. Having repudiated our ancestor's notions of identity, these writers create stories whose sole purpose is to comment on other stories. However, as some feminist critics have shown us, we must each have an identity in order to have the collaborative society that is the Postmodernist's goal. Therefore, the notion that a story must make a sensory impression on us and stand on its own as …

Metaphor Manifested: An Examination Of Metaphor In Katherine Mansfield, Kathleen E. Kotaska

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Hatchery Of Tongues, Michael Wallace Bassett

Dissertations

Hatchery of Tongues is a collection of poems accompanied by a critical introduction.

Waking Life, Dionne Irving

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Collection of short fiction dealing with themes of isolation and self-discovery. Contents include: Waking Life, Rice and Peas, Weaving, and Collage.

Bloodlines, Pamela Toner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Bloodlines" is a collection of personal essays that focus on the process of remembering, imagining, and reflecting on the past through the lens of a perpetually shifting present. They consider situations ranging from mental and physical illnesses, from cancer to alcohol addiction, to career changes, to the often dysfunctional and displaced family ties that distance and adulthood have not severed. In "Searching," I write the narrative of the ongoing search for my birthmother, and how the search complicates the relationship with my adoptive mother, who always feared she’d lose me. Similarly, "Of Flesh and Blood" recounts and negotiates how hereditary …

Between Continents, Mona Hassan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Between Continents is a collection of thirty-two poems. The most challenging aspect of finding the right voice and the appropriate metaphors in "Between Continents" has been the difficulty in assimilating a diversity of traditions within my own work. The polarity of aesthetic values is a well known feature of contemporary American poetry. Charles Webb in his essay on the competing aesthetics in poetry uses the metaphor of apples and orangutans to point out how exaggerated this difference really is. Jorie Graham sees in the way young writers today are simultaneously influenced by elements of poets whose philosophies mutually exclude each …

The Rowing Coaches, Bernard O'Grady

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Rowing Coaches is about friendship, money, love, loss, and rowing. It chronicles the turning point in the lives of three friends who are professional rowing coaches. The friends are Don Bestos, Bill Maxwell, and Bergman, men who are or were at the very top of their sport, and now question their friendships with each other and where their lives are headed. The story takes place on a weekend in the summer of 2000 at the USRowing Convention in Las Vegas, the big blow-out for everyone in the sport of rowing. The Rowing Coaches also offers a look at an …

Is This A Mirror I See Before Me?: Adolescent Girls Use Imaginal Writing To Re-Vision Life Experience: A Dissertation, Cameron L. Marzelli

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This participant observer collective case study was an investigation of the ways in which an imaginal writing process might facilitate resilience in adolescent girls who had previously used writing to respond to challenging life experience.

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.

Myhopoeia, Benjamin Fider

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Welcome To The Branch, Turia R. Pope

Theses and Dissertations

Welcome to the Branch is a two-act play that investigates issues of cultural differences in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or LDS church), more commonly known as the Mormon Church. Set in modern-day, downtown Richmond, Welcome to the Branch follows two very different members of the LDS church as they examine and try to understand both their religion, in the context of its cultural and social history, and their place in it. One is Molly, a Caucasian, middle-class young woman from Utah, in Richmond temporarily for her husband's graduate school; the other is Aina, an African …

From Below Table Mesa, Cynthia Grier Lotze

Theses and Dissertations

I lived in Boulder, Colorado longenough, and I dreamed low-resolutiondreams, sharp only at eyes and slow movinghands.Kate's hair was a cloud of insurrectionon the tarmac, then I would watch the hoursmelt off the wings of her plane as eachstate became not-Tennessee, not-Kansas.I wanted to meet her in the air; Icould will this without a plane, with sadness,with need, I would enter the plane in flightand I would say, "Kate, take me home," and shewould turn the plane around. Everythingwould become not-Colorado, not thisstaticky dream, hard breath miles up from the sea.

Catholics, Curses, And Cousins In A Cracker Box, Kathryn Wallace Iffrig

Theses

In a small sitting room of a mortuary in a rural Missouri town, the author considers the life of her recently departed cousin. Having shared a family home early in their childhood, and despite similar upbringing, their lives had ultimately diverged, with him choosing a path that many would consider self-destructive and bound to lead to an early death.

Contemplating the circumstances of her cousin's death, the author falls into ruminations on their childhood, family, and common experiences they shared during those early years. Considering the disparate paths their lives ultimately took, the author questions the influence of nature versus …

Behind Blue Eyes: A Memoir Of Childhood Who Am I?: A Collection Of Essays, Glyn Parry

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

How should one approach childhood memories for the writing of literary memoir? Behind Blue Eyes is my childhood revisited. I have fashioned my earliest memories in order to tell a story. My story, and the story of my family. It covers the years between 1963 and 1967, when I was a boy growing up in the north-east of England. I made the decision from the outset to tell the story through the eyes of a child. This is an approach seldom taken, but one that has intrigued me for some years now. Could I sustain the voice of a four-year-old, …

Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie, Kyle Shrader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie" recounts my pilgrimage in the summer of 2000, from southwest Florida to a canyon beach in California where Jack Kerouac—as I had read in his Big Sur—lost his mind forty years earlier. I was heavily influenced. Kerouac’s On the Road showed me what to do with myself. Big Sur showed me where to go. In the twentieth century Americans shifted their notions of the west coast from a means for sustenance to a symbol of post-war freedom. Kerouac seems to embody this momentum; the world and the burning spirit his work describes is a precursor …

A Bell In The Storm: Persistent Unexplained Pain And The Language Of The Uncanny In The Creative Neurophenomenal Reference, David A. Buchanan

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

A Bell in the Storm - Persistent unexplained pain and the language of the uncanny in the creative neurophenomenal reference is a doctoral work comprised of three parts. Part 1 is an exegesis Persistent unexplained pain and the language of the uncanny in the creative neurophenomenal reference; Part 2 is The Plays, A Bell in the Storm (produced by deckchair theatre in May, 2005) and the radio play To Fall Without Landing (produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission for Radio National in October 2005); and, Part 3 the book of monochord poems, Secrets of the Driftwood.

Dead Man: And An Accompanying Exegesis: `Labyrinthine Modes In Dead Man And The Castle By Franz Kafka.', Anna Green

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Dead Man is a novella about four brothers. They live an unrestricted life until their mother decides that they lack fear and this lack could make their lives difficult when they are adults. To combat this, she recruits the help of another boy to create a sense of fear and threat that remains endlessly elusive, that will make her sons more wary and alert than she thinks that they would otherwise be capable of. Neuroses always seek their source and Dead Man explores this notion. The source of neurosis for the brothers in Dead Man is a real person; a …

Growing Into Womanhood, Charlene Engleking

Theses

Unavailable.

Brackish, Hillary Dalton Major

LSU Master's Theses

none

Lazy Lagoon: What I Learn As A Person, Teacher, And Student Through Writing, Ashley Weber

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Madam Pele: Novel And Essay, Jud L. House

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Novel. My novel deals with the themes of obsession, jealousy, volatility, and revenge, while simultaneously dealing with the more benign theme of love within relationships, and holiday-mode pleasures. Divided into different narrative voices, it traces the interweaving stories of Madam Pele, Goddess of volcanoes and lava, a small lava rock, and Di and Paul, both during their past holiday in Hawaii, and in the present in Perth. Inadvertantly transporting Pele within the rock on their return from Hawaii, they unwittingly release her rage upon their city. Essay. In this essay I cover contemporary theoretical considerations, such as Modernism, Postmodernism and …

Misconceptions: Loss And Melancholia In Poetry Of Miscarriage, Stillbirth And Abortion, Donna Yannakis

Theses : Honours

This thesis argues that cultural and discursive attitudes towards miscarriage, stillbirth and abortion attribute maternal blame to these losses and silence the expression of grief over them. It further argues that, following pregnancy loss, this silence and blame, coupled with the veneration and discursive production of motherhood as a woman's biological and psychical destiny, produce 'symptoms' that, according to Freud, are a sign of a pathological melancholia. I suggest, however, that these symptoms - self-reproach and impoverishment of the ego as responses to pregnancy loss, do not necessarily indicate a woman's pathological failure to resolve loss but reflect the social …

Kids Will Be, Thomas E. Moran

LSU Master's Theses

This is the pilot episode of a television series, which explores a young girl’s descent into suburban drug culture. In this episode, the main character, Ally, follows her disaffected love interest, Marco, to the squat, an abandoned building inhabited by runaways and addicts.

The Story Of A Picture Book: A Process Analysis, Christy Evans

Honors Theses

Creating a successful picture book is neither an easy nor simple process. The illustrations must-harmonize with the text, move the reader smoothly through a story, and be, as Burningham puts it, "verdant." To achieve this, an author/illustrator must be prepared for constant revision. In my story The Fantastic Transformation of Frog the main character experiences some bizarre changes, but reverts to his normal state in the end. Through my process of creating a picture book, my story also went through numerous changes, but, unlike the main character's changes, these changes were not reversed. They led to other changes.

Ladies In Waiting: A Collection Of Short Stories, Anne Fox

Theses

The stories in this collection feature female characters, mainly grown women. The exception is "Ruby Begonia'· in which the eponymous main character is a little girl with a gift for seeing and believing in things others cannot see.

In "Homefront;· Peggy decides to leave her daughter with her mother-in-law in order to save herself. She suffers from depression. While leaving a daughter behind is not viewed as good mothering, it is infinitely better to having that daughter suffer the effects of her mother's illness.

In "Lessons Learned " the young teacher learns to work things out for the benefits of …

Other People's Country: A Memoir; And, Developing A Trustworthy Narrator: An Essay, Maureen Helen

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises two interrelated sections. The first section is a substantial piece of creative writing, which l have cailed 'Other People's Country: A Memoir, in the genre of travel memoir, and an essay. The memoir borrows techniques from fiction, drama and poetry to tell a story of a middle-aged, middle-class city nurse, who travels to a remote settlement at the edge of the Western Desert of Western Australia to provide health care for a fluctuating population of around 400 people, for whom English is a third or fourth language.

Writing that includes stories about vulnerable people from another culture, …

Land Whisperings And A Poetics Of Newplace And Birthplace, Glenly R. Phillips

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The creative component of this doctoral submission, entitled Land Whisperings, comprises a selection of seventy-five poems, ten short stories and a novella. The connecting theme of this body of work is the emphasis on the landscapes of three continents: Australia, my birthplace, Italy, my wife Rita's birthplace, and China, where I have visited and taught for many years. These locations have also been the subject of substantial research and field experience over the past four years. Since I am an Australian, there is a natural predominance of Australian settings for the poetry and short stories. The selected creative works also …