Creative Writing Commons^™

Ricky & Grams, Berthold Brock Albin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

When his wife kicks him out of the house, Richard (Ricky) goes to live at his parents’ house where, it turns out, his pistol of a grandmother (Grams), is house-sitting. Ricky is incensed and imagines he will have to take care of her and clean her dentures. She is incensed and wants to be left alone to her debauchery. But the tables turn and ultimately Grams and the other women in his life help Ricky get back on his feet and find direction and love and Ricky helps Grams rethink her priorities.

Heaven On Their Minds, Rebecca Kate Robison

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Heaven on Their Minds is a novel written from the first-person perspective of teenage

protagonist Melody O’Malley. The plot details Melody’s attempt, along with two close friends, to undermine their conservative Christian theater camp’s summer production of Godspell via the edgier songs and theology of Jesus Christ Superstar. Though ostensibly a satire of the Evangelical Christian community, Melody’s insecurities are the true heart of the novel--her fraught relationship with her best friends, her concerns about her post-high school future, and her ill-advised crush on the most prominent RFC (Robot for Christ) in the camp, a crush that has terrible consequences …

The Edge Of Mercury, Aurora Brackett

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Edge of Mercury is a collection of stories inspired by myth, ritual and fairy tales. Many of the stories in this collection investigate the making of meaning and the construction of identity. Others directly reference Biblical stories or Greek and Roman myths, seeking to fuse contemporary realism with the numinous, and to create in the pairing, a narrative that is focused on the liminal, the silence beneath plot. In “Brother Death” two sisters create a ritual to revive their living-dead brother, only to lose him in the current of a river. In “Ambrosia,” the ghost of Pavarotti’s mother is …

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

Cycle Of Return, Clancy Gabriel Daniell Mcgilligan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An American reporter in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is fired by a local English-language newspaper after he and his lover, a copy editor at the paper, use drugs and she overdoses and dies. The reporter, whose name is Francis, feels partly responsible for her death. He also feels guilty about his life as an expatriate in Cambodia, a poor, developing country that has a large aid community and a history of communist killings and war. He decides to find whoever sold the drugs to his lover, Sara, and to exact some sort of punishment or revenge. However, he’s uncertain what he …

Las Vegas Paperboy, Matthew O'Brien

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I’m an author and journalist who has lived in Las Vegas since 1997. My first book, Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, chronicles my adventures in the city’s underground flood channels. My second book, My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs, and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas, is a creative-nonfiction collection set in off-the-beaten-path Vegas. These two books grew out of my eight years as a writer and editor for Las Vegas CityLife alternative-weekly paper.

I enrolled in UNLV’s MFA creative-writing program in the fall of …

A More Perfect World, Amy Katherine Mayo

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A More Perfect Worldis the story of Gabriel Garcia Levine Connolly, an intelligent, charismatic, and idealistic man who invents "Thing," which quickly becomes indispensable to virtually everyone in the world. His new-found wealth presents him with the opportunity to create a community that suits his values and his creative process, taking several friends and co-workers with him. Their search for a new home leads them to the idyllic island of Luu Saabhel; for Gabe, the opportunity to protect this small island and its indigenous people while creating "a more perfect world" for his own community is the ideal situation.

The …

Little Rituals, Bruce Johnson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following stories represent what I have accomplished in my three-and-a-half years in the Master of Fine Arts-Fiction program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They are all realist stories, most of them with a minimalist leaning. Together for the first time, they are more than a mere sum of the writing I've done in my time in the MFA program. They are the stories that, when I read them now, still occasionally delight me. Most of the stories that I wrote as an MFA candidate do not pass this test, and thus are not included here. If there is …

Pyramid Of The Sun, James Joseph Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Pyramid of the Sun is a novel which is experimental in structure. It weaves traditional prose with original poems based on Aztec creation myths. The narrative is not strictly linear, but approaches the plot from several angles - past, present, and future - simultaneously. It comes back to its starting point at the end, like a snake devouring its own tail. The novel takes the Aztec and Mayan belief that time is circular and never-ending and reinterprets it in a contemporary, hard-edged setting that touches down at various points across the globe, including Moscow, Seville, Seoul and Las Vegas. Pyramid …

In What Array That They They Were In And Participating Godlike Food, Thomas Jackson Wills

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I am submitting two manuscripts for my creative dissertation, In What Array That They Were In and Participating Godlike Food. The former is a sequence of odes followed by a brief epic, followed by a cycle of verse dramas, with an ode epilogue. The latter is a book-length excerpt from an epic poem/crime novel/Menippean satire/television show/Dada collage/historical document/vatic investigation that comes in 20 page sections that are supposed to approximate the 42 minutes of an average crime show.

On Our Way Out: And Other Stories, Benjamin Champlin Wright Morris

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

On Our Way Out and other stories is a collection of short fiction banded together with themes of the darkened strange, the missing and the moving, and a sense of place. The characters in these stories try to claw their way to newfound identities, whether it's through a financial transaction, saving a life, or putting a body in the ground. An action with a result is what's needed in these characters' lives. Though, often, the results are not intended. Despite the oddity inherent in these stories and characters, there is something familiar about their plight as ordinary people, something in …