Creative Writing Commons^™

The Jubilant City Almanac: Stories, Azaria Brown

Graduate Thesis Collection

The Jubilant City Almanac is a collection of short stories set in the magical Jubilant City, a city founded by a group of Black women in 1736. These stories bridge the whimsical and magical with the realities of poverty, classicism, addiction, abuse and health disparities. “Got His Alligator” follows the journey of two codependent addicts as they try to get their fashion designs onto Jubilant City’s premiere drama, Girl, Please. The characters in “Carbon Copy” use a magical phone to bring Denzel Washington to the city. “Jeremiah the Conqueror” summons Black American folk legend, High John. THrough an exploration of …

The Perpetual Harvest, Joseph Cifelli

Senior Theses and Projects

My intention for this project was to create a fantasy setting that, in presenting pieces of itself, from oblique angles, opens up the world to stories and myths beyond those I’ve provided. The foundation is the introductory guide, which details the primary social, economic, and supernatural mechanisms of the setting. The following stories are meant to play off the guide, exploring tones, voices, and plots implied or ignored by its limited perspective. I was heavily inspired by Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher short story collections, which blend the magic and mundane aspects of fantasy beautifully.

The Dazzled Rope Of Lightning Against The Cloud Is Not The Downward Bolt But The Compelled Upstroke Through The Heated Ether: Stories, Jack S. Muth

Senior Projects Fall 2023

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

The Romanian Goodbye, Andrei Dumitriu

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Mosaico De Fantasía: A Collection Of Microrrelatos And Short Stories, Jennifer Gutierrez

Theses and Dissertations

Art is subjective, as is the art of writing. Creating a piece of writing out of a fleeting thought is truly the most frightening yet fulfilling feeling there is for a writer. Entire universes with their own unique worlds, aesthetic verses littered with imagery to paint an intricate mental picture; each representing a brief scenario that my mind decided to fabricate out of nothingness. Though not everyone will love my work, my goal is to reach someone that might. Even if it’s just one person. I want them to read my work and think “This is pretty cool.” My …

A Bag Of Marbles, Cora Saddler

Honors Theses

A short story collection that takes inspiration from the magical mundanities of everyday life.

To Be Haunted: A Collection Of Short Stories, Kallye Smith

Honors Theses

This thesis is a work of collected pieces of fiction that seek to explore what it means to be haunted. By exploring the concept of ghosts, the pieces in this collection attempt to take a fresh approach to the traditional paranormal story.

Life And Love In Young Adult Literature: A Critical Analysis Of Fragments, Lissette Monrroy

Theses and Dissertations

Fragments will be a series of short stories based on events that have occurred in my life and how they impacted me and my family. They will tell the stories passed down to me, beginning with my grandparents, their lives in Mexico, and their journey to the United States. It will go on to tell stories of my parents’ struggles with raising kids in a society that tries to suppress our Mexican culture, how other family members have struggled with their own families and identities, and how my life has been influenced by these stories.

Significance and Scope of Fragments …

Plastic Stars, Hilary Wheelan Remley

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This story collection centers on coming of age and childhood narratives. These stories challenge the use of memory as a framing device for such narratives, refusing larger biographical context. Instead, the stories within this collection focus on the immediate experiences of childhood and adolescence. Additionally, these stories focus on a specific time and place. Each story takes place within the American Southeast during the early 2000s. This specificity of setting, especially as it exists as a period piece, serves to further challenge the effect of memory and historiography of many childhood narratives.

Brides Of The Jasmine Land: A Collection Of Short Stories Exploring Womanhood In The Middle East, Batool Alzubi

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis includes four short fiction stories, introduced by a critical essay about rhyming action in coming of age narratives. I discuss the works of John Gardner, Milan Kundera, Charles Baxter, and Mohamed Makhzangi to explore techniques in symmetrical composition and narrative echo. My hypothesis is that rhyming action in coming of age stories can be used as an effective technique to highlight the characters’ change and realization by the end of their stories. When reading about a character’s coming of age, the reader is not able to spot rhyming action until completing the work and reflecting on motifs. …

The Butte, Natasha Bailey

Senior Theses

The Butte is a collection of short stories about a small town in the Pacific Northwest. In these short stories I explore idealistic small-town culture and blend it with the Pacific Northwest’s own (modern) paranormal mythology. This medley of different genre aspects in my stories makes The Butte difficult to label, but ultimately, my goal while writing was to explore various styles and points of view.

The nine stories set in The Butte shift styles on a variety of levels from character switching, point of view (1^st person, 3^rd person, and omniscient), and formatting (structure and linguistics). These …

Overgrown: A Collection Of Supernatural Narratives, Emily Dawn Cote

Honors Thesis

Overgrown is a collection of short stories stemming from nontangible anxieties, such as death, violence against women, and the queer search for acceptance. Each of the three pieces, including Thoughts of a Downed Oak Tree, Wrong, and For the Living, touches upon how individuals experience these anxieties and how they face them. I also selected Overgrown because all included pieces had to deal with a piece of reflection, overcoming or discovery. The Title Overgrown reflects both the sense of nature these pieces bring, but also the aspect of personal reflection they conjure. These characters engage with a degree of …

Child Ballads: Folk Songs And Stories From The New World, Brian Gabriel Watko

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

Chainwreck, Bailey Elizabeth Bowers

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

The Spinners' Tales, Sierra N. Offutt

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

“The Spinners’ Tales” is a loosely connected story collection exploring the lives of a variety of supernaturally gifted characters, referred to within their own community as Spinners.

Carpenters: A Short Story Collection, Grace Keir

English Honors Theses

This collection of four short stories explores the interfamilial dynamics and internalized traumas of womanhood across three generations of mothers, sisters, and daughters. In doing so, these stories confront the raw, painful, and beautiful lives and experiences of women and girls.

That Belongs To Me, Ellie Anne Greenberger

Honors Theses

A collection of fictional short stories and a novella that explores family relationships, specifically female family relationships that span across generational lines and what we inherit from our families whether intentional or unintentional. (Under the direction of Tom Franklin)

Pebblechild, Brenda Ochoa

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories depict life moments for people that are connected through the city of Peñitas, Texas. This manuscript begins as an origin story for the city of Peñitas. According to local historians both in the past and in present times, the city of Peñitas was founded by a priest and five other Spaniards. This idea is integrated into the storyline but with a focus on the impact of a young girl, Tala. She suffers immensely through the actions of a group she refers to as the Long Beards. She has to go through a series of discovery …

My Haunted Home: A Collection Of Short Stories, Victoria E. Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“My Haunted Home” is a collection of short stories that explores the way in which hauntings and memory find themselves implanted in the everyday lives of those who live without people in their families. These stories work through grief in the form of haunting and explore how hauntings can be embodied through people and places. These stories work to bend genre tropes of horror and surrealist fiction in hopes to find a merging of haunting and memory. The narrators of these stories are ever changing, although there is overlap in voice throughout some of these stories. Part two of “My …

Our Stories, Paige Wright

Honors Theses

My first memory of feeling absolute and utter horror stems from my father. You have to understand, my father is a large man who, in the right light, is terrifying to a small child. This first memory is from a few days before Halloween. My parents had just bought some of those colored, spooky bulbs (they may have been purple or orange or red, in truth, I cannot remember) and were trying them out in the living room. I simply remember coming down the hallway—I may have been four or five, we definitely still had the dark, 70s style paneling …

The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman

Masters Theses

Adapting fairy tales and folklore has been an ongoing endeavor by storytellers and artists since the very first story was repeated. The evidence can be seen in the many versions of fairy tales like those of the sleeping beauty, from Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to Walt Disney’s Maleficent. However, unlike their European counterparts, adaptations of American tales outside of children’s literature are not as ubiquitous. My writing rectifies this by adding to the resurging interest as seen in recent retellings like Matt Bell’s Appleseed: The Monstrous Birth (2019).

In an effort to reframe the American tall tale …

Eyes Shut : Stories, Danielle Epting

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This story collection focuses on a range of characters and explores themes/ideas such as loss, self-awareness, and abuse. These ideas are explored through the use of specific literary elements to help heighten the themes. These elements include point of view, characterization, and plot. Other elements, such as speculative or more fantastical aspects, are also used in several stories. These stories and themes hope to highlight the complex dynamics of both human relationships and our own inner struggles that we all must navigate throughout our journey.

Two Makes A Couple: Fictions On Intimacy, Alyssa C. Conner, Jessica Richardson

Honors Theses

This portfolio of fictional short stories was created through the inspiration from constraints drawn from various published short stories. Constraints are a literary technique in which the writer is bound to certain elements or inspires a pattern within a work of writing. Each short story takes place in contemporary society and within the pieces, intimate moments between two individuals are explored throughout. This portfolio, through symbolic language, examines the relationship between our identities and our closest alliances, whether those are our romantic partners, platonic partners, or siblings.

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 …

Things That Happened, Christian Chase

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a collection of short stories by Christian Chase.

• A Whole Lot of Nothing
• Grand Artistic Vision
• Architecture
• Hanging Around
• Silent Life
• A Special Dread
• Snowbound

Eulogy, Kim T. Allison

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Particular to the three short stories in Eulogyis the importance of place, as they are set in the fictional location of Potter’s Island, which is based on my childhood sense of Florida.Contradictions, complications, and disappointments can be uniquely tied to a sense of place. My own parents and grandparents moved to Florida when I was three years old, but where they lived, how they lived and worked, and what dreams they pursued was only partially an immigrant’s story of wanting a better life.

The past has weight—a weight that must be dealt with, for real people, and for …

Hand-Me-Downs, Hannah M. Warner

Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of linked short stories that take place in or in relation to the town of Henning, Michigan. The characters are interrelated, but there are two families at the center: Linnea Reynolds and her son, Truman, and Tessa and Ross Wilson and their seven children. “Hand-Me-Downs” explores inheritance within families—the desired and undesired inheritance, the inevitability and assurance of it.

No Net To Catch You, Will Yarbrough

English Theses & Dissertations

No Net to Catch You is a collection of nine stories. It is about loss, love, and loneliness. It is about men, women, and children who fail to understand themselves in ways that are often tragic, sometimes ironic, and make choices that usually end in self-defeat.

Mary Mcgovern: Adapting A Life In Three Genres, Kelly M. Pierce

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Fiction Of Women In Contemporary American Literature : The Borderlands Of Intersectional Feminism, Postcolonial American Studies, And Creative Writing, Skye Anicca

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A collection of nine short stories entitled THE TROUBLE WITH BRIGHT GIRLS is unified by women’s diverse coming-of-age experiences in late twentieth century transnational America. The story collection relies on techniques that highlight dislocation—temporal skips and wide temporal frames, fragmented and recursive narratives, borrowed genres, absurd premise, anti-heroines and anti-epiphanies—which gesture toward collective human experiences while troubling notions of universal knowledge and values and resisting redemption or closure. The critical introduction situates the collection through the theoretical lens of intersectional feminism, informed by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, and in relation to field of multiethnic/transnational literature of the U.S. …