Creative Writing Commons^™

House Of Grief, Megan Eralie

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This collection of essays examines how I house the grief for the losses of my religion and my grandfather. My first essay, “Body of Feathers,” looks at my body as a house of shame and how I transformed my body into something that could be mine instead. It explores a series of moments from my life where I felt disconnected from my body, usually because of rules or expectations set by someone other than me. In the essay, I move from feeling like I had no control of my body, to taking back control and experiencing my body as mine …

A Taste, Acquired, Anna Koester

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis was born as a memoir of sorts. Food is something for which I have an inherent curiosity, from a specific ingredient’s origins to how a dish makes me feel. In remembering and retelling stories from my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, I’ve discovered that my modes of eating have taken on different approaches and purposes throughout my life. I’ve done my best in the following pages to describe how I learned to eat and where my idea of feeling nourished came from, how food has played a part in forming my ideas about family and sharing, and how it …

Bodies, Memories, Ghosts, And Objects Or Telling A Memory, Natsumi Lynne Meyer

Honors Projects

I think it started in December 2017, when my Mama sent me to Japan to take care of my grandparents, Baba and Jiji, alone. I had been to Japan almost every year since I was eleven years old, and several times before that too, but this was my first time without Mama. When Mama was there, Japan was filtered through her. I could poke bits of myself through her editing and approval. I could read street signs because of the way she read them, and I could understand my grandparents’ sighs from the timbre of her translation. That December, though, …

Return, Shasta Hecht

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This capstone project is a collection of nonfiction essays that work in collaboration to provide a profile of place. The place of focus is White Pass, the mountain the author has grown up on and experienced for the last twenty-one years. This collection is made up of essays that explore her physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to the land and community of White Pass, while also examining themes of family and identity. Each essay gives a different perspective in regards to the setting. The ultimate purpose of this project is to navigate the complexities of White Pass in regards to …

The Lights In The Dark: A Covid-19 Journey, Kristen Justice Palado

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

My project is entirely focused on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, particularly when CSUMB moved to a virtual setting, and how a global pandemic brought a family closer together. COVID-19 was a terrifying disease that began in the Spring of 2020 and instilled in all of us fear, stress, and anxiety. Families were scared to go out and have family parties, schools shut down and abruptly moved to a virtual modality for teaching, and the mental health of the world began to decrease. For this project, I will be using my own voice and experiences to create …

[They], Mary Alsobrooks

Poetry MFA Theses

A poetry collection centered around the exploration of identity through the people and places that shaped the poet's childhood.

Mother Superior, Brandon R. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Prologue /The Lake Within

I am a fisherman. Every time I raise my arm to cast, I’m searching for an answer.

What is a lake?

I throw my lure at the lilies of my childhood, the sunken log of my crib. With every cast I hope the truth will follow it back, this little piece of me I offer to the mystery.

My earliest memories are at the bus stop, where a shroud of mist swirled about me and I listed side-to-side, six-AM eyes drooping while I waited for that big yellow ship to bust through the fog and …

A Soul's Shape Is Beautiful, Alondra Orozco

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A memoir engaged with the seminar's theme of Change, Transformation, and Transition. It follows my story and how I came to discover my true self. This is a coming-out story, with the purpose of sharing my experiences and potentially getting others to understand non-binary or transgendered people better. It delves into my personal thoughts and experiences, as well as transphobia from my parents. Since the story begins in my early childhood, the diction and writing style change throughout the story. I also incorporate the use of stream of consciousness to show my progression from cisgendered to a non-binary person.

Hidden In A Snail Shell, Zara Ana Kornfeld

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Snails are an often overlooked member of the Hudson River ecosystem, though play a critical role in supporting it. This Senior Project delves into the evolutionary history of freshwater snails as well as the roles they fulfill within their ecosystems. This project also considers the codependent nature of snails and the Hudson River and how that relationship will be impacted by Climate Change.

It Could Have Been Anyone, Mariel Ruth Cupp

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Chronic, Michelle Hart

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This piece of creative nonfiction explores chronic pain in American women. Through biased research, negligent medicine, and misinterpreted appointments, women are disenfranchised by the American medical industry. Specifically, women suffering from chronic pain face unprecedented challenges while trying to find a diagnosis or treat their pain. This thesis explores chronic pain and American medicine through the lens of nonfiction. By diving into the subjective nature of pain while working within the equally as subjective medium of nonfiction, Hart writes a story about living with an undiagnosed chronic pain condition. While presenting the faults of chronic pain treatment in America, she …

Last Call: I'M Never Drinking Again And Other Lies I'Ve Told Myself, Oona G. Oglesby

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This is a work of creative nonfiction documenting a girls journey with sobriety.

A Troop, A Raft, A Bed, Hanna Jane Guendel

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A Troop, a Raft, a Bed tells the interwoven fictional stories of three major animals (the mountain gorilla, the Adélie penguin, and the American eel) and four transitional animals (the white stork, the humpback whale, the common octopus, and the great white shark). The stories are told from the animals' perspectives, and are written with language that considers each animal's unique intelligence, mind, and behavior. These stories seek to communicate how animals around the world may be experiencing the various effects of climate change and global warming.

Softshell, Jamie Gray Chandler Gillette

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Softshell is a nonfiction project composed in hybrid forms. The narrative uses records produced by the body as well as those stored within the body — fossils, personal photographs, familiar sensations, instinctive gestures — to weave a story about a mother, as told by her daughter.

The Natural Mother Of The Child, Krys Belc

All NMU Master's Theses

The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir-in-essays about Belc’s experiences as a transmasculine birth parent. These essays use text and images to explore parenting on the margins of both motherhood and fatherhood. They also examine the ways in which legal and identity documents are limiting in their ability to describe gender and family. Topics explored include pregnancy, birth, lactation, masculinity, top surgery, medical transition, the meaning of biological relationships between parents and children, and microaggressions against transgender people.

We're Having A Moment, Sophia Pelosi

Honors Theses

Hi.

Thank you for being here, for reading this. Given that you’re here, I assume that you are a close friend, or a thesis advisor, or a relative, or maybe some nosy peer who just happened upon it, and found themselves curious. No judgement. I get it. I’d probably do the same to you, if it were your thesis, your heart, your soul, your memories on the page.

I wrote this because I wanted to. I wrote this because I knew it would be special for me, to get to unabashedly care about my writing and want to make it …

Growing Abroad, Emily Miller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For my Honors Project, I wrote a creative nonfiction essay about my study abroad trip to Le Mans, France last summer. In the essay, I broke up the narration with three sections, each highlighting a personality trait I gained from my experience: independent, overcoming fear, and adventurous. Because this is a creative work and something I may consider publishing later on down the road, I am not submitting the main essay. Following this abstract is my Critical Essay and Personal Essay.

To Feel Better: A Personal Account Of My Eating Disorder, Savannah Kate Woods

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Eating disorders are complex mental health disorders. The following stories and moments apply psychological skills, knowledge, and perspective to my personal struggles with bulimia. The personal narratives vary greatly in word count. Please be aware some scenes may be disturbing or uncomfortable.

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Amidst A Bottled Word: Poetry & Prose, Carlos J. Peralta

Honors Undergraduate Theses

"Amidst a Bottled Word: Poetry and Prose" includes a variety of different themes, styles, and genre—many reflecting a cynical or ironic tone. This eclectic thesis reflects the wide-ranging interest of its creator. The stories within this collection are a thriller and a work of speculative fiction, the former supernatural and the latter near future or science fiction. In one story, "The Man Behind the Curtain," Val, the older of two young sisters, must protect herself and her sister while enduring a weekend visit to her estranged Grandparents' house, while signs of a mysterious man keep emerging throughout their stay. The …

Les Mots Justes And Other Things Impossible To Find, Katherine Tasseff

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Communication can be hard enough when you’re speaking in your native tongue, but throw in a second language and something’s sure to get lost in translation. In this creative nonfiction piece, I trace my real-life journey from tongue-tied homebody to bilingual voyageuse over the stepping stones of four chapters, with each chapter linked by the themes of language and communication. In the first half of the project, a unique job offer brings love, friendship, and plenty of misunderstanding into my humdrum life, and inspires me to pick up a language that broadens my personal and academic horizons. In the …

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

In Post Memoriam: An Exploration Of Family And Grieving, Courtney A. Mauck

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of essays, poems, and fiction details the author’s exploration of familial trauma and grief. The author wrestles with the concept of “postmemory” as theorized by Marianne Hirsch and questions what it means to have the experiences of someone else passed down through generations. The collection includes essays on the connection between eggs and ovarian cancer, the exploration of animal magnetism, as well as a fictional recreation of a familial story. By braiding several forms of writing together, the work aims to create an interwoven narrative that questions the very concept of memory.

Growing Pains: An Honors Thesis Of Creative Writing, Angelica L. Santiago Gonzalez

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Most of the creative writing included in this thesis are nonfiction pieces; there are only a few that can be classified as fiction. They all connect to my own growth and development as a writer, and also as an individual struggling to find and establish my own identity. In the last four years I tried to make sense of my life and my struggles, especially my personal history of trauma. I can confidently say that I am in a much better place than I was when I first started my adventure at LC. Writing has been an important part of …

Stopped Before Beauty: Meditations On The Closed Door, Hannah Celia Harwell Fassett

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This project is an integration of nonfiction vignettes within a critical study of personal writer’s entryways into the beauty and meaning of the world. Using the religious metaphysics and aesthetic theory of Simone Weil, I will trace the intersections between beauty and shame in the genre of personal essay, diary-keeping, and memoir across various cultural moments. It will travel between Westerbork Transit Camp through Etty Hillesum’s diary, the outskirts of Bard College in Mary Gaitskill’s Lost Cat, and Virginia Woolf’s summer dwelling, St. Ives, through A Sketch of the Past. Finally, in echoing that process of writing-through, I will step …

Sins, Omissions, And Alibis, Johanna Marie Costigan

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Short stories, creative nonficiton, prose poems.

Del Otro Lado… Y Más Allá Colección De Crónicas, Oscar Iván Zapata García

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Del otro lado... y más allá. Colección de crónicas está compuesta por 13 crónicas o textos de no-ficción que a su vez se agrupan en dos partes. La Primera Parte (Del otro lado. Crónicas Fronterizas) está compuesta por 7 crónicas donde se relata la experiencia fronteriza (Estados Unidos-México) en sus dimensiones políticas y sociales desde la perspectiva de un chilango. Para ello hago uso de las técnicas de la crónica, en su acepción de periodismo narrativo y literatura de no-ficción, y del humor y la ironía del altiplano mexicano. La pretensión es hacer agudas y relevantes observaciones geográficas y sociales …

18 Dorset Ct., Allison Catherine Campbell

Dissertations

The following poems and essays were completed by the author between October 2012 and April 2016.

The Inversion Layer: Essays, Benjamin W. Kinney

All NMU Master's Theses

This essay collection examines the ways in which places with rich histories exist through time. Five sites are examined, four of them in the Upper Peninsula and one of them in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The sites in “The Best Souvenir” and “The Cloud Chamber” are official museums, the site in “Comfort in Buying Things” is an active mall, the site in “The Inversion Layer” is a tourist destination, and the site in “A Beautiful Piece of Nowhere” has no official memorial. All of these essays incorporate research but are grounded mostly in the author’s experiences at his visits …

The Trash Birder's Guide, Ashely Adams

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of essays details the author’s experience with birds and the bird watching sub-culture. The author grapples with obsession, exploration, and human-animal relationships. Essays include the search for peregrine falcons and ‘u’aus, navigating “The Biggest Week in American Birding,” and tending to owls and geese at a bird sanctuary. In addition, the essays seek to use the langue and images of birding to create an interconnected narrative that not only illuminates the birding sub-culture, but also the world of a transient young birder.