Creative Writing Commons^™

The Ones Abandoned, Thomas Dollbaum

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

Creating The Water Clock, Amy C. Laws

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss the making of my short film The Water Clock at the University of New Orleans from its inception to its final short film form. Part One discusses the balancing of content and style and explores the relation between time and water as inspirations for story. Part Two details the preproduction process and major crew members’ collaborations and contributions before filming. Part Three describes daily successes, struggles, and direction while in production. Part Four describes every phase of the post-production process as the film is completed. Lastly, I will analyze my personal growth as a filmmaker.

The Gloaming, Alyssa D. Davison

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Contact, Christine M. Stevralia

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A year after Alyssa Milano’s tweet launched the #MeToo movement, survivors of sexual assault are being called ‘accusers’ in the media, and public opinion is swinging in favor of guilty men. #MeToo raised awareness but not understanding. What is rape? What is consent? As evidenced by the #MeToo movement and the backlash against it, clearly, as a society, we don’t know. Contact is a work of Creative Nonfiction that uses scenes and details from the narrator’s personal experiences to illuminate the micro-negotiations that occur in sex and seduction.

In a world where women are still expected to stay small and …

The Black Mage Reader, Shaina Monet

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

Lords From The Desert, Caroline Mercado

Capstones

Lords from the Desert

This work explores a reality that is little talked about: how the most prestigious pre-Columbian art exhibits in the United States hide a murky origin. From looting of temples to illicit art trafficking, to smuggling and collectors’ affairs, the pieces gain value in proportion to the social prestige of their owner. Along the way, the most important is lost: research that provides context and allows us to know history. The First World wins a seductive, but simplistic story. The Third World, from which all these cultures emerge, loses patrimony and possibilities of understanding themselves. A pair …

Finding And Making Home: Poems And Reflections Of Undergraduate Children Of Immigrants, Gladys Perez

Master's Theses

The number of children of immigrants within the United States has grown over the past few decades and more so we are seeing a greater number of these children pursuing a higher education. With a growing number of undergraduate children of immigrants growing, there is a need to understand how they see themselves as a part of the United States. Previous studies take into consideration how these students navigate higher education, however, there is a lack of research on these students’ larger understanding of belonging within the overall nation. Poetry as data and a process was the grounding methodology that …

Try To Remember Breath, Rita Chapman

Theses

A collection of original poems.

Other Lives, Shawna J. Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations

This work is one of fiction, dealing with characters and concepts of ‘otherness’ and social displacement. This work is further sub-categorized as a work of fantasy or urban fantasy fiction where the standard rules of reality do not apply.

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

Tree Song, Amie Elizabeth Case

MSU Graduate Theses

The Grace that flows through the three realms is fractured, and it’s Mauhiyn’s fault. She is a Daughter, the only living and direct descendant of the line of women who are vessels for the Grace that sustains the realms in a state of perfect balance. Because Mauhiyn is the first Daughter unable to carry the Grace, she is blamed for the turmoil and darkness in the realms. King Darbrend of the western realm claims Mauhiyn’s Grace is simply dormant, not absent. Mauhiyn is sent to King Darbrend with the hopes that his dark power will restore the Grace within her …

Margin Matters: How To Live On A Simple Budget And Crush Debt Forever, Jason Brown

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

According to NerdWallet, 75 percent of Americans do not live off a budget and half of them cannot produce $400 in an emergency. But how much you make isn’t the main concern—it’s your margin that matters most. This capstone, which includes several chapters from the book Margin Matters: How to Live on a Simple Budget and Crush Debt Forever, provides practical strategies for creating and sticking to a simple budget, eliminating debt permanently, and managing expenses to create the most margin at any income level. It describes how the author erased nearly $75,000 of debt in just under three …

Gone To Ground, Brian Blair

Theses

Gone to Ground is a collection of short stories that explores the possibilities beyond the edge of the everyday. They are an attempt to peek beyond the imaginary boundaries we erect for ourselves in the name of danger or the unknown. Each story is an opportunity to see our own familiar humanity in others, no matter the accidents of fortune that separate us. Though the stories in Gone to Ground often touch the surreal or the magical, they are firmly rooted in what could be out there, on the other side of our walls, whether real or imagined. These are …

Media Guide And Strategic Plan, Ella Greer

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

An MAPW candidate composes a strategic plan and media guide for a local government office.

Exploding Aliens And Other Offspring, Jonathan Patrick Grant

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of Exploding Aliens and Other Offspring is to capture my specific surrealist world point of view provided by the closed-knit crazy community I grew up in alongside my love for cartoonish melodrama. The collection progresses in order of images and the evolution of such themes as the venture from childhood to adulthood, societal obligations, religion, parenting, death and the hereafter.

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …

For That What Didn't, Sue Britt

Theses

ABSTRACT The work of this book was pursued with the objective of exploring psychological and sociological causes and effects of the human condition with themes including family, love, solitude, loss, abandonment, estrangement, maternity, sex, and gender power dynamics--especially that of male dominance of women and varying female responses to this sociological organization--using characters, animals, settings and voices in the artistic medium of poetry. The assembly of the book is in the style of novel structure, but neither story nor chronology were considered in the order of organization as each poem is an independent piece. Epigraphs were used at the beginning …

That Said, Karl Alderic Schroeder

All NMU Master's Theses

That Said, a creative thesis of poetry and poetics in two parts, explores points of contact between human interaction, capitalism, consciousness, and the process of meaning itself. The collection appropriates the language of business, scholarship, and politics alongside philosophical substructures from such disparate traditions as Marxism, Existentialism, and Taoism to provide a several windows of perspective into anxiety, relationships, identity, and consumerism. Through the blending of both direct and experimental forms and processes, nontraditional and everyday diction and syntax, and multifaceted content of both personal and external significance, these poems may simultaneously amuse, alienate, and inspire philosophical and critical …

The Swallow Dance, Kristyn M. Gerow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Swallow Dance is a novella which examines the chronically ill body in a moment of crisis. The narrative draws on trauma theory to dissect the main character’s reactions to an ill body. Eve, the novella’s narrator, is thrust into this space where her mind and body are at a discord because of a chronic illness. As part of her treatment, Eve cannot eat or drink. This destabilizes her from her traumatized body. The farther Eve disassociates from her condition, the more she feels like something is watching her. Then, she is contacted by a messenger from a different place. …

Blazing Worlds, Bethany Kinney

Master's Theses

Blazing Worlds is a collection of short stories exploring themes of understanding, isolation, the world of work, and identity. These stories follow characters who are searching for connections to others, to their environments, to their work, and to themselves. The protagonists of these stories inhabit worlds that are slightly adjacent to reality, worlds cast into a near future, and worlds that operate by the logic of the campy and the fantastic. Through heightened technology, body horror, or blurred metaphysical boundaries, the residents of these blazing worlds pursue knowledge of their place in life and fight to establish and maintain their …

Things We Have In Common: Essays And Experiments, Willow Grosz

All NMU Master's Theses

Things We Have in Common is a collection of short stories, flash pieces, and image-text experiments that attempts, in the wake of the death of my mother, to excavate the relationship between memory and narrative, identity and belonging against a backdrop of the main forces that have influenced my familial group, namely generational poverty, a changing relationship with our Athabascan and Caucasian heritages, and the complicated ecology, geography, and culture of Alaska. Like many forays into memory, this project represents a joyous failure. Please read this collection as a love letter to Alaska.

Sunshine ‘89, David O'Connor

English Language and Literature ETDs

Sunshine ’89 is a coming-of-age-novel, set in Canada in 1989, this creative work explores the travel of a young adoptee from a remote outpost to the bourgeois center of the country in order to pursue a life in the theatre. What ensues is a mentor-apprentice story exploring art, race, sexuality, performance, aging, dementia, alcoholism, politics, Canada, and other theme. Above all, a page- turner and picaresque romp meant to entertain and challenge.

Reflecting On And Shattering My White Lens: A Critical Autoethnography On My Experience As A White Editor Working With Authors Of Color, Kelsey Medlin

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This critical autoethnography aims to reveal how the cultural biases of a white majority industry impact the stories they select for acquisition and how they are edited. As an editor, I came to this topic from my personal desire to see if my own whiteness affects the way I view writers of color, their stories, and the audience that the companies market to. Thus, the purpose of this project is to explore the current conversations on the topic of diversity within the publishing industry and whether the conversation is making a connection between the lack of diversity in the workforce …

Life: Told By Death, Shannan Rivera

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Life: Told by Death is the story of Sam, a reluctant reaper of souls who isn’t cut out for his fate. This novel follows him from his unwitting entrance into the life of a reaper to his struggle with his new existence and all the way through to his eventual escape into the afterlife.

Murmuration, Braeden Dillenbeck

Dissertations and Theses

The poems that comprise Murmuration are an act of vigilance in the face of loss. At certain moments in the distorted timeline of grief one searches the remaining world around them for signs of the beloved, signs that they are not simply gone but instead transformed or dispersed into another way of being. In this looking one's relationship to the external world undergoes a radical transformation of its own and demands a sustained attention from the bereaved that often draws from, but ultimately outruns cataloguing acts of memory. These poems attempt to render the movements of that attention as it …

Infants Of The Spring: Disrupting The Narrative, Ifa Bayeza

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis will document and codify how I as dramaturg, writer and director adapted and staged the classic Harlem Renaissance novel Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman. I walk the reader through how seeing as a director influenced my creative choices through key aspects of production: script development, design, and building the ensemble. The thesis will conclude with a post-production reflection and summary.

Bones I Found In The Garden, Alena Indigo Anne Sullivan

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This collection is a volume of small, intimate moments portrayed in both poetry and prose. Rather than grand, operatic plots telling convoluted stories, this work speaks of the magic in simple things, looking in at personal (and often difficult) moments—the process of finding the beauty in ugly things, finding the crumbs of human emotion that slip through the cracks—lending them the attention they are due but often fail to receive. This collection digs up potsherds of childhood trauma, bones of old romances, and ghosts of things that will never be, all presented to the reader through the lens of fantasy. …

I Was Thinking Something In The Car, But Now I Forgot, Olliemae Bartlett

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection consists of modern free verse poetry left around town, captured with an instant camera using a capitalist lens and developed in the bottom of a purse. Sometimes found, sometimes torn down, sometimes scribbled, riddled, pickled, stickled, belittled, embrittled and initialed, sometimes made by mistake but always left hungry and up for debate.

In I Was Thinking Something In the Car, But now I forgot, the voice is your voice, only from over here, somewhere you’ve never been but could imagine if you tried. The voice speaks to the machine we’ve made together: the florescent, 24hr signs, press 3 …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

Voices From Verse: The Power Of Poetry For Seattle's Homeless Youth, Savannah Grace Hadley

Honors Projects

This paper is a creative nonfiction essay combining research, interviews, and personal experience to discuss how and why poetry is helpful in a therapeutic context, specifically working with at-risk youth. Pongo, a program that provides incarcerated youth an opportunity to write poetry, under the direction of Richard Gold, has found through survey responses that with the Pongo Teen Writing Method “100 percent of youth enjoyed the writing experience, 98 percent were proud of their writing, and 73 percent wrote on topics they don’t normally talk about” (Gold, 21). I came to understand, through time volunteering with the writing groups at …