Creative Writing Commons^™

The Palimpsest Boys, Brandon Stump, Brandon Stump

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

These short stories deal with young boys and men who raise themselves in the absence of proper parenting. In particular, they wrestle with big questions about the family unit, sex, and love.

Late Bloomer, Allyson M. Nobles

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Play Dead, Ann Hackett

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Horse's Ass: A Survey Of Comediology, William M. Fisk

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

What is comedy? Can someone learn to be funny? Are there rules or guidelines for the production of laughter, the universal language? This paper, which outlines an investigation of successful comedians and the production of a short film, determines to aggregate as many of the relevant prerequisites of inducing giggles as possible, especially as they relate to the audiovisual medium of cinema.

Angel, Cole Connelly

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Though a new player in town, Amy isn't afraid to get her hands dirty. When she discovers a ruthless sadist named Angel is operating in her new home, Amy makes it her goal to stop Angel. Though Amy quickly finds her sense of justice is putting her at odds with her own survival when Angel takes her own interest in Amy.

There Will Be Time, Sherng-Lee Huang

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

Boiltown, Eric Layer

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Arc, Lisa Fountain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My collection, Arc, is about the struggle to become a human being and to find one’s own identity. Also, it is about how humans fall apart and come together on a regular basis – that we must find forgiveness – we must learn to love in even the most difficult circumstances – and we must, above all, continue to grow, and challenge our personal limits. Life does not contain us –it welcomes us – and that is part of the message I seek to convey through my writing. The imagery in my writing is grounded in my memories of my …

Afterparty, Patrick M. Werle

Creative Writing Programs

Afterparty is built on the question, “Can one overcome the past?”...I think. While the work flows on a loose timeline, I do not intend the manuscript to be a story. As the poems drift in and out of time periods; childhood, adolescence, fatherhood, I hope that this is also a collection that can be opened in the middle or paged through and still be successful. Of course, as the artist, I would love for people to take the journey beginning to end. And I also believe that poetry collections should be able to have a reader jump in at any …

Literary Language Revitalization: Nêhiyawêwin, Indigenous Poetics, And Indigenous Languages In Canada, Emily L. Kring

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the spaces of connection, overlap, and distinction between nêhiyaw (Cree) poetics and the concepts of revitalization, repatriation, and resurgence that have risen to prominence in Indigenous studies. Engaging revitalization, resurgence, and repatriation alongside the creative work of nêhiyaw and Métis writers (Louise Bernice Halfe, Neal McLeod, and Gregory Scofield), this dissertation explores how creative, literary applications of nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) model an approach to Indigenous language revitalization that is consonant with nêhiyaw understandings of embodiment, storytelling, memory, kinship, and home. Broadly, I argue that Halfe’s, McLeod’s, and Scofield’s creative practices encourage the ongoing use, valuing, and teaching …

Treasure, Karen M. Perkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Long after a brutal series of events resulted from her power exchange relationship, Treasure Montgomery’s recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder is hampered by relationships with family members and the legal difficulties of her foster daughter.

Carol And The Ugly Sisters: A Play In Three Acts, Judith Jones

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Carol and the Ugly Sisters, reflects the trajectory of two teenage African American girls growing up in 1960s Harlem. They met when Anita was 16, and Carol was 17. Anita, the protagonist, is from a lower middle-class family, and goes on to graduate Columbia University. Carol, her friend, dropped out of middle school, and is an unwed mother of three children, when she meets Anita. She remains mentally closed in a lower socio-economic mindset for the remainder of her life, and dies of the same alcoholism that killed her parents.

The Woods Of Wander, Stephanie Dinizio

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

The Woods of Wander is a children's novel about a young fox with a disability. The fox learns about mystical eggs that may heal him, and goes on a journey to find them. However, when he finds the eggs, the fox sees that healing is different than he expected.

Food Transitions: How Food Symbolizes Another Chapter, Josiah Peralta

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Through critical self-analysis of my life, I intend to answer the question, “How does food help us transition from one chapter of our life to another?” My purpose is to provide a personal viewpoint about related topics associated with food, like class, origin of food, religion or lack of, culture and tradition, obesity, food choice, and love. Through this viewpoint, I will demonstrate how food associations can encapsulate our past, memories, and identity in a way that moves us from the past to the present, and, hopefully, the future.

Capstone theme: Food, Ethics, and Politics

An Unstable Container, John Lapine

All NMU Master's Theses

An Unstable Container is a collection of short creative nonfiction essays and poetry, with influences from personal memoir, lyric essays, race and gender studies, and poetry. The work examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and the ways in which language, society, and the human body contribute to the construction of one's sense of self. Through the lenses of language, modern technology, medicine, and genetics, An Unstable Container explores blackness, queerness, masculine identity, growing up in rural Michigan, and the dangers and pleasures of corporeality. The collection also interrogates the social institutions of marriage and religion, gender roles, and …

In His Wake: Applying Life's Truths In Fiction, Joseph M. Balderas

Theses and Dissertations

The culmination of the creative work and its introduction attempt to delve into the psyche of what it means to lose someone you love. The screenplay explores the grieving process and the coping mechanisms that accompanies it, with an examination on how far some people are willing to go for closure.

To reach my conclusions, I draw from my own life experience, the experiences of others, and a fine amount of research. It also means to shed light on the impermanent mental strain that chaperon’s grief.

Brava & Gloria: A Mexican Counterstory Screenplay, Jose David Garcia Gilling

Theses and Dissertations

“Brava & Gloria: A Counterstory Screenplay” is a thesis work which combines the theoretical aspects of Latinx representation in films with a full-length, feature film screenplay. In this work I use speculative fiction aesthetics to address the matter of representation and I create a version of how I would like to see Latinxs represented on screen. The story of “Gloria and Brava” is a medium to achieve this. Even though it does not mimic my personal experience as an immigrant, the core of the story is my family’s and my own experience as a Latino in the United States. Consequently, …

Only The Earth Remains: Exploring The Machine In Selected Lyric Poetry Of Robinson Jeffers, Mark Hutton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, Leo Marx “evaluates the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience” (Marx 4). While Marx explores ways that pastoralism has been impacted by factors such as industrialism, it is the purpose of this project to explore Marx’s assertion regarding the presence of the figurative and literal machine within the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers’ poetry is generally located within the landscapes of California. His lyric poetry has a distinct connection to the land and is driven by inhumanism, which works to shift …

A Road Out Of Naknek Part One: The Tide Turns, Keith Wilson

All NMU Master's Theses

I make an annual summertime return to Naknek, a town on Bristol Bay where the salmon have made their own annual summertime return for thousands of years. My thesis is a series of nonfiction essays about my background there, both as a commercial fisherman and my upbringing. It is something I consider the “Part One” of a book still under the process of writing. It is a series of essays, alternating these two motifs of the salmon and of my experiences growing up somewhere like Naknek.

I constructed this thesis to read like the tide. Bristol Bay salmon go out …

Thinking Before You Act: A Constructive Logic Approach To Crafting Performance-For- Development Narrative, Angela Duggins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this thesis was to test the feasibility of constructing performance-for-development narrative using a constructive logic approach. I created an equation which expressed the sum of non-human-elements as the sum of a narrative with each element serving as a variable. I used a review of persuasion literature to provide insight into the selection and manipulation of each variable. I provided my family as a hypothetical example and used my knowledge of their preferences and communication styles in conjunction with the literature and the equation to craft a narrative which might increase pro-school attitudes in other families like my …

Peppermint, Anthony Isaac Bradley

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection contains poetry introduced in a critical way via a theory-based creative nonfiction essay. The work included is a meditation on what identity means on both an intimate and a larger scale, and how the two might be affected by the choices we are faced with from a young age. Elements of pop culture are used alongside rural elements of the surrounding areas to illustrate changing or stagnant viewpoints on topics such as masculinity, gender norms, and queer expression. Peppermint is a document of my mind as it once was, and how it has been shaped up to this …

Wonders For The Dead, Sarah Cook

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone project presents the first five chapters of a novel entitled Wonders for the Dead, which follows the lives of two sets of brothers whose lives intersect in an unexpected way. Ep Fairfax and his brother Francis are estranged, but when Ep finds himself in trouble and on the run he relies on Francis for help. Tom Mersy is a dangerous man, and when his brother Isaac is killed, Tom decides that Ep is to blame. He sets out to find Ep and have his revenge, but along the way both men learn more about themselves and the …

Moments, Tiffany Bouchard

Theses and Dissertations from 2017

Moments is a series of creative nonfiction essays depicting life with a child who is severely autistic. I compare events from my life prior to having children with life events after I became a mother. My goal is to present a side of autism that is not always seen – the meltdowns, the aggression, the injurious behavior. My desire is to show that, despite the obstacles this life has presented us with, I have been able to experience life with a beautiful, misunderstood human who has changed my life for the better.

Mechanical Parts, Kyle W. White-Mcginn

Creative Writing Programs

A collection of poems related to cancer, boxing, and a fictionalized Rochester, Minnesota (renamed Medicine City).

Sentinel, Bailey Merlin

Graduate Thesis Collection

Devastated by the mysterious death of her guardians, Elizabeth Davenport finds herself thrust into a new world that proves to be scintillating and dangerous. Can she trust those who claim to be her friends? Or will her trust lead her into trouble? When a mysterious letter presents itself and proves that her guardians might have been more than they ever let on, Elizabeth must gather her courage and pursue the truth, whatever the cost.

Everyhere, Everythere, Maxene Kuppermann-Guiñals

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Food and people are arguably the poetic commonalities among us all. We eat together; we dine together, we snack together. Wherever we are on the planet, we derive pleasure from the source of our singular and communal energy. We share our food in the most intimate process: what sustains me I give to you to sustain yourself. We love when people appreciate what we have given them, and we are grateful when someone gives their food, or their poems, to us. They become expressions of love.

Food, and poetry, has a complexity of understanding and acceptance. What do we eat? …

The Otherworlds Of Men, Aaron Morris

English Theses & Dissertations

The Otherworlds of Men is a collection of short stories that draws equally from the traditions of speculative science fiction dystopias and western noir. The stories often have a plot grounded in gritty realism, similar to the stories of Annie Proulx, Daniel Woodrell, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison; however, the main character typically is typically injured by a psychic wound that leads to a speculative, otherworldly occurrence. The characters experience time travel, out of body experiences, wormholes to other worlds, spaceflight, distortions of relativistic physics, and, in one case, a character is haunted by Geronimo’s ghost. The characters experience these …

No More False Heavens: In The Wake Of Campus Sexual Violence, Destry Sibley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project [https://arcg.is/0zy0eb] explores the crisis of sexual assault on college campuses. The project draws on a collective "biography" of women students and their experiences, as well as creative writing and data visualization. It exists on the web and uses a mix of media -- data interactives, photographs, writing, audio, video, and annotated text are all possible mediums. (Only audio is collected from interviewees.)

Through this project I seek to consider issues of gender and inclusion within a college institution, with a particular focus on the built environment of the campus as metaphor. How does the architecture of …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

The Body Mends Itself, Hannah Elizabeth Dow

Dissertations

The following poems were completed by the author between September 2014 and April 2017.