Creative Writing Commons^™

The Secret Language Of The Desert: Poetry, Loss, And Awakening, Elisha P. Holt

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The speaker of The Desert Survival Guide is seeking to reconcile his own disconnection, from the natural world, the cosmos, his family, and from his sense of his own humanity. The poems in The Desert Survival Guide are a healing ceremony, to come to a place of acceptance regarding the loss of my father. The semi-autobiographical speaker of these poems has lost the immediate physical presence of his father in his life but still retains a deep memory imprint of the father and an unresolved need to process the absence of the father. He is gradually establishing a new connection …

Identity And Energy In Poetry Tiny House. Tell Me A Secret., Chance D. Castro Jr

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Tiny House. Tell Me a Secret. is a poetry manuscript that deals with establishing identity based on the relationships one is involved in, the loss of someone significant, and then coping with that loss. In the book, the speaker who grows up in the care of women becomes sensitive to their pains and questions the necessity of the overt ideas of machismo in his culture and deliberately cultivates chivalry in his romantic relationship as a result. The speaker loses his wife early in their marriage and must cope with her death while continuing to re-learn/establish the identity that she played …

Oscuridad Unraveled, Orlinda Pacheco

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Oscuridad Unraveled is a compilation of many stylistic poems. There are narrative poems interspersed with somewhat surreal poems that tell a story about the Oscuridad as a child and adult. As Oscuridad’s childhood story is unfolding so is her adult story causing a cyclical motion within reader and writer, or maybe a rollercoaster with many loops and turns. Nonetheless, it begins with poems that shaped a small innocent girl and leads to the creation of the adult woman who cannot have children, who embraces the passion of being “the other” and luxury of sex without consequence. This is a story …

Me Without You, Michelle Bracken

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ME WITHOUT YOU is an interlinked collection of short stories set in the blight of an urban housing project in San Bernardino, California. The stories follow the lives of three students in their year of fourth grade at a low performing school. Narrated from these points of view, the collection amplifies the voices of a community wrought with violence, poverty, and crime while also exploring how children brave the consequences of a world they cannot control.

Mesmerizing in its simplicity, and gripping in its detail, ME WITHOUT YOU intertwines themes of identity, family, loss, poverty, and longing for what is …

That Which Binds Us, Tracey M. Dover

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This novel follows three individuals struggling with isolation and loneliness. Rina, a twenty-two year-old college student is studying abroad in Japan when she learns of her grandfather’s death. As his last living relative, she decides to leave her studies and a burgeoning romance to take care of her grandfather’s final affairs. At his funeral she meets Marcus, a mysterious man whose past ties in with her own. Marcus gives Rina the opportunity to uncover secrets surrounding her family and forces her to question not only her grandfather’s past but also her own identity. Tilnu is an immortal with a foggy …

Glass Shoulders, Carol Jean Simpson (Eva Warren)

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Glass Shoulders is a collection of poems that embody events from my life which have served as catalysts in the process of integrating myself emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. In the poetry, the speaker searches for spiritual knowledge, and is guided toward meditation of Spirit as an internal reality to find healing. The narrative of the manuscript portrays the speaker’s deep introspection of self, exploring loss and resiliency through challenges surrounding grief, unrecovered abuses, and mood disorders. The inspiration for these poems arose from my contemplations on the incongruities between fate and free will, and how behaviors are influenced by the …

La Llorona Don't Swim The L.A River: A Trickster's Guide To The Poetics Of The Pit, Rosie Angelica Alonso

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

La Llorona Don’t Swim The LA River is a collection of poems that explore the issues of growing up in East LA as a young, bilingual Chicana. These poems are an attempt to capture my experiences through story telling by blending Spanish, English, street slang, and the casual spoken diction. The speaker embodies several versions of the trickster figure: linguistic tricksterism, cultural tricksterism, gender tricksterism, and religious tricksterism. She navigates linguistic tricksterism through the code switching of English and Spanish, using Spanglish as her main dialect, and often blending in slang, creating Slanglish. In cultural tricksterism, she focuses on the …

The Real Thing, Ruben T. Rodriguez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

THE REAL THING is a collection of short stories released from the confinement of the everyday. The stories allow characters to pop off the page from every angle. With an eye for anthropomorphism and ear for lyric, the collection is comprised of twenty-nine short stories, nineteen of which work in a flash fiction form.

Magical in its motions, and charming in its spirit, The Real Thing explores life’s losses and gains through the lens of the strange and at times the absurd. It invites its readers to cast away expectation, sit back, and watch the show.

Welcome To The Planet: Fort Living Room O Rotting Sun, Michael T. Cooper

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

O Rotting Sun is a pair of long narrative poems that leap, spanning over an epic-length manuscript—175 pages of prose block, lyrical verse, and projective verse. Its chief poetic-operational modes are: inclusion, fragmentation, textual destructions, intentional omissions, intentional misspelling, large narrative leaps; all of which engage a poetics of doubt and multiplicity. O Rotting Sun is a jarring and jangly poem of resistance, intended if possible, for being read aloud and argued with: a provocation of intense meditation, reflection, and when successful, disintegration of anger & agonism—followed by a reintegration of the reader back into a community of change and …

John Spaghotte, Peter C. Schuler

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Author Peter Schuler discusses his thoughts on how ideas of creativity, literature, and pedagogy helped to develop into his first novel, John Spaghotte of Crumb. Schuler is a native of the Coachella Valley in Southern California and writes from a middle-class appreciation of working and living in an area where everything is catered to the wealthy class. Through personal injury and his experience in undergraduate and graduate studies he fought to develop a healthy critical mind and a grasp as to the true nature of identity. As a result, his riveting debut novel about a young, nerdy California version …