Creative Writing Commons^™

Texas Gothic, Taryn Uribe Turner

Art Theses and Dissertations

The emotional and the ecological combine to create my body of work titled, “Texas Gothic.” My thesis tells the stories of my oil paintings created through personal connections to a variety of landscapes, animals and experiences that share the setting of Texas.

Desire and regret take shape as animals and figures not fully formed or real. Unreliable narratives of the past are entangled with present tensions to create a painting that haunts and stalks.

And yet, there is hope!

Through nostalgia and sweetness and burdens, my paintings confront a shrouded future. The contradictions of time passing are explored in my …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

Coming Out, Letting Go, Getting Naked: A Community Engagement Arts Based Project, Tim Aumiller

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Creating a healthy sexual minority identity remains a challenge in the 21^st century, despite significant advances in social acceptance and civil rights. Sexual minorities are more likely than cis gender heterosexuals to be exposed to traumatic events, and experience shame and mental and physical health symptoms as a result. Despite this, sexual minorities do overcome obstacles to develop resilience. While the coming out process looks different depending on the background of the individual, many gay men find connection and build community through this often difficult process where even rejection may play a part. The author found connection and community …

Storytelling In Interior Design: A Hospitality Case Study Based On Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katelyn Isaacson Bauer

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Storytelling can function as a crucial element in interior design, offering a powerful means to captivate and engage individuals within a space. The allure of storytelling lies in its ability to evoke emotions, convey messages, and create memorable experiences. Humans are naturally drawn to narratives that transport them to different worlds, evoke nostalgia, or inspire. This fascination with storytelling has led to a notable increase in themed spaces across various industries, from amusement parks and hotels to restaurants and retail spaces. The integration of storytelling into interior design not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of a space but also serves …

In The Woods, Aron Liebig

Fiction MFA Theses

The anthology of 11 short stories delves deep into the intricacies of identity and the enigmatic landscape of the American South. Each narrative unfolds against the backdrop of the region, exploring the tangled webs of relationships, the weight of tradition, and the enduring struggle for self-discovery. In rural Mississippi, Kerry navigates the minefield of personal insecurities amidst simmering familial tensions, while Chris confronts the ghosts of his past, testing the resilience of their bond. Meanwhile, tensions escalate in a casino encounter between Javi and a predatory figure, unearthing deeper layers of trauma and prejudice, challenging societal norms and personal beliefs. …

Teleios, Sandra Edwards

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis is a collection of poetry that mixes formal and free verse in order to convey the speaker’s spiritual journey in content as well as form. The work introduces a speaker who is deeply religious and who expresses her spirituality in the form of formal poetry such as sonnets as she adheres to certain principles of faith. The use of form in the thesis represents her adherence to those principles, while breaking form is symbolic of her breaking away from those principles. Through the work, the speaker experiences a shift from frustration with the world and its apparent obfuscation …

Nonduality And Identity: An Exploration Of Form, Genre, And Perspective, Hannah Ritter

Honors Theses

This thesis utilizes hybrid forms of poetry and prose to examine questions of nonduality, perspective, and identity, simultaneously testing the boundaries of genre and form as a whole. The opening craft essay offers a more specific analysis of form and genre, particularly those of poetry / prose and fiction / nonfiction, while the creative writing demonstrates how such differentia are relevant to the art of creative writing.

My Daily Grounds: A Journal Of Creative Alchemy, Kathleen A. Donovan

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

My Daily Grounds: A Journal of Creative Alchemy is a project intended to renew artistic confidence and prepare a mindset for a writing retreat in Ireland in June 2024 by revisiting childhood memories and exploring the impact of early domestic abuse through a visual journaling process. This endeavor aims to stir up the creative voice and find authenticity in creation by gathering and clarifying personal data visually, following the Creative (CPS) approach to unlock new insights and ideas for writing. The resulting essays will illuminate the unseen effects of trauma and are intended for publication, reflecting a co-creative process between …

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

The Farm, Justin Morris

Master's Projects

Synopsis:

’The Farm’ is a psychological thriller series inspired by the recent folk horror revival. We follow a suburban family who begin to lose their trust in each other as they fall further into peril on a strange isolated farm. When Brian, the patriarch, repeatedly puts his family in danger to satisfy his own ego, he forms a rift between him, his wife Madison, and son Charlie that quickly spirals into delusion, blind accusation, and paranoia. Desperate, they seek the help of Elias, the owner of the farm with his own tenuous grip on reality, and his quiet daughter, Emma. …

Neo-Noir Investigations: The Art Of Directing And Writing An Interactive Experience, James Phillip Koehler Jr.

Honors Projects

This project intends to explore the process behind writing and directing for an interactive experience; video games, specifically. A team, including artists, programmers, and a musician, was organized to work toward the completion of a playable demo. Included in this project is a video of the playable demo, alongside various other completed materials that were unable to be included.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …

The Survivors, Abigale Ralston

Honors Theses

Set over 100 years in the future, this story follows the lives of teenagers Alex, Leon, and Paige. The world has been destroyed. In order to survive, humanity has had to learn how to survive in space, in a vehicle called simply The Ship. Lately, however, Alex and his friends have noticed problems occurring on The Ship, indicating a disaster may be imminent. Alex, Leon, and Paige are now tasked with finding the causes of the problems and saving the last of humanity from extinction.

Phoenix Rising: A Scout Is Born, Seth Hunter

Honors Theses

The Kingdom of Taris lies in flames, a shadow of what it once was, crippled by the Brutes of the Northeast. The King and Queen’s deaths, followed by their only daughter’s capture, cast a shadow over Taris, far darker than the depths of the Old Mines.

Emergent Narrative In Tabletop Role-Playing Games: An Application Of Concepts, Padraig Mumper

Honors Projects

This project examines tabletop role-playing games using concepts from narratology and ludology including emergent narrative and Roger Caillois’ categories of games by applying these concepts in the creation of an adventure zine for the game MÖRK BORG. The existing literature on emergent narrative primarily focuses on video games and Avant Garde texts but tabletop role-playing games provide a novel opportunity to explore emergent narrative in new ways. The dynamic of a collaborative game with multiple players and a gamemaster provides additional challenges for designers due to variance in interpretation of the game events and the lack of a digital program …

The Oracle Of The Pig's Head, Taylor L. Denton

LSU Master's Theses

The Oracle of the Pig’s Head is a collection of two poems, a short story, and a novel centered around themes of the role of the feminine body in society, monstrosity, disgust, divinity, and human impact on the environment. Inspired by other works of eco-criticism, gothic literature, surrealism, Appalachian folklore, and Greco-Roman mythology, this collection explores how marginalized bodies interact in a world forever altered by climate change.

Denton is primarily interested in how severe climate change has influenced not only human’s overall relationship to the environment, but also how writers are meant to engage with a world riddled with …

Words Without Faces: Anonymous Social Media On Campus, Evelyn Kelly

Language, Literature & Writing Student Scholarship

"A new anonymous social media app, Fizz, has announced intentions to launch on Messiah University’s campus. Anonymous social media apps allow users to post within a set community without their comments being traced back to them. One such popular app around campus is Yik Yak..."

Paul Celan And The Processes Of Survival In Post-Shoah Jewish Writing, Ari Savage

Theses

The following is a study of the poetry of Paul Celan as a representation of psychological and social processes present in the written works of Shoah survivors. It begins with an analysis of the place of writing in Jewish culture, then identifies three primary processes which operate in sequence: alienation, individuation, and integration. By examining Paul Celan’s highly personal and autobiographical texts in the context of his life experience as a Shoah survivor it is possible to discern the social and psychological forces at work which compel survivors to express their traumas in written form, and to gain a better …

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

Conjuring The Moon, Ariella Berkowitz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conjuring The Moon wrestles with the question of why we as women still submit to norms created by men who can't possibly understand our reality. Why should we support ideologies that claim to represent us while actively working against us? Why should we conform to a system that positions us as inessential Other? The speaker of this book aspires to liberate herself from such burdens. Conjuring the Moon encapsulates one woman's search for the feminine divine within herself, her religion, and her environment; but as empowering as this search may be, it remains inextricably connected to her social and historical …

Preserving Wonder And Welcoming Boredom: The Importance Of Quietly Incredible Adventures In Today’S Rushed Childhood, Amalia Hillmann

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

Once upon childhoods past, children’s early years were filled with exploration of and delight in the world around them. They learned through independent play and chasing curiosity without the micromanagement of intervening adults. Inter-generational relationships grew character and knowledge via shared stories and skills and encouraged collaborative experiences and tasks. Today’s culture is losing this inquisitive, play-filled heart of childhood. Children are increasingly pulled through their earliest years and pushed into adolescence prematurely by impatient communities, unrealistic academic expectations, and distracted parenting. The loss of slightly-wild, unstructured adventures and rooted parent-child relationships in pre-teen years should be of interest to …

A Constellation In Training, Marko C. Capoferri

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Capoferri, Marko, M.F.A., Fall 2023 Creative Writing - Poetry

Light, Loneliness, and Location

Chairperson: Sean Hill

In many better-known works by the 20^th century painter Edward Hopper, I find a locus of visual concerns that overlay the fixations of the majority—if not all—of the poems that comprise my thesis, what I like to think of as the three L’s: light, loneliness, and location (to which I could also add, as secondary colors, longing and landscape). Additionally, there are what Mark Strand identifies as “two imperatives” in Hopper’s work, “the one that urges us to continue and the other that …

The Art Of Healing From The Inside Out: A Memoir, Lauren Thelen

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

ABSTRACT

Name: Lauren Thelen Major: Health Care Administration The Art of Healing from the Inside-Out: A Memoir

Advisor’s Name: Anandita Mukherji, Ph.D. Reader’s Name: Melissa Bosworth, MS

The health care system is no stranger to many of us. From before we are born to our last days, we interact with health care settings and providers. This is a good thing--we receive care and feel better--or at least that is the case most of the time. What this statement does not acknowledge is that the health care system fails us, through inadequate communication, dialect barriers and inability to diagnose. The purpose …

Slipping Through The Sieve: Memories In The Eyes Of A Granddaughter, Ingrid Gingerich

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

My grandmother’s life, specifically during times of harvest, sewing, and her journey with cancer, have informed how I live my life and speaks to the division of men and women, specifically within rural religious communities. By looking back through my memories and her diaries, I have developed an understanding of how her sense of self is deeply involved with the domestic sphere and caretaking; in this gendered division, women’s work is undervalued but drives the community and influences how these communities interact with the outside world. In this creative thesis, I engage in the practice of creative nonfiction writing, applying …