Creative Writing Commons^™

The Pinocchio Boy: A Collection Of Queer Creative Written Work, Lucas Olvera

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Pinocchio Boy is a series of short stories/memoirs and poems about my experiences as a Transgender and Gay man. Structured in five parts, I explore my childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood. My collection offers me an insight into what made me who I am today. There are drastic tonal shifts between the poem segments and the memoirs, I intended to act as the narrator of my story in which the poems and dialogue act as the characters in motion and the memoirs as my direct narration. A tongue-in-cheek fairy tale tone, but coming from a sincere place. My intent …

Traumatic Experiences Through The Queer Lens, Holden Guckenberg

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This is a collection of short stories based off of real trauma that LGBTQ+ individuals have experienced. I have interviewed seven people who identify within the LGBTQ+ community and listened to their traumatic stories. Based on their stories, I have written their accounts with trauma while expanding and taking creative freedom to better enunciate and bring-forth their stories. Trauma affects the LGBTQ+ community at a greater height than it does the general population. It’s important to recognize this fact so that we can support those people who have faced tremendous adversity in the form of trauma. In one form or …

Microaggressions Within The Lgbtq+ Community: An Autoethnography, Erika A. Perez Montes

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This autoethnography is about different points in my life where I committed microaggressions towards the LGBTQ+ community specific to different genders, sexual orientations and/or how people in the community present themselves. I use “thick intersectionality” ‒ an embodied exploration of the complex particularities of individuals’ lives and identities associated with their race, class, gender, sexuality, and national locations ‒ as a means of portraying my message, voicing the emotions that I felt, and the identity I occupied at that moment. I show that the intersectionalities of queer folks’ identities create unconscious microaggressions towards other queer folks. The purpose of my …

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