Fiction Commons^™

Word Into Idea: A Creative Writing Exercise, Stephen Fried

Open Educational Resources

This activity begins from an aleatory technique that creates a list of 104 associatively generated words to provide each participant with a field from which they improvise, first a free-form poem using twenty of the words and then an experimental prose piece that uses all 104 words. The poem is written as a workshop activity and optionally shared in a “poetry slam” segment, following which the prose piece is done as a home assignment. The activity takes 90-120 minutes. A version for synchronous online application is in development.

Þorn: A Novel Excerpt Exploring Giantesses, Their Relation To Women's Bodily Expectations, And Patriarchal Control In The Literature Of Early Modern Britain And Contemporary America., Brady P Alexander

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This thesis will analyze examples of women of size in the literature of the British Isles throughout history, focusing predominantly upon the Early Modern Period, and will create a fiction piece in response to such attitudes. I argue that one of the most clear ways to dissect contemporary cultural attitudes about powerful women and women who occupy more space than men is to examine giantesses and other examples of women of size within this period of literature. From this, a novel excerpt will be written from the perspective of a time-traveling woman of size who engages with these texts and …

Sweat, Cigs And A Ball Of Noise, Tyler Jacob Hughes

Graduate Thesis Collection

Corduroy Jones is contacted by a local promoter to reunite his band Streetwise Preacher. Over a three week span, Corduroy and his bandmates Tony and Johnny go through a series of events leading up to their Halloween Night reunion show.

Sometimes I Think I’M Going Crazy, Connor Kesslering

Graduate Thesis Collection

"Sometimes I Think I’m Going Crazy" is a short story collection containing three stories of more or less equal length. Each of three main characters face conflict that tests their resolve and ultimately forces them to reevaluate who they are as human beings. Stress helps people to grow and evolve and the protagonists in these stories are forced to face their greatest fears head on and (with varying degrees of success) come out the other end better for it. But not before going a little crazy in the process.

Todd In Eternity, E. J. Pettinger

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work represents the first significant portion of a novel in progress. It is a first-person narration following a teenage boy’s involvement with a modern-day prophet. The story examines the nature of visionary belief systems and the ways in which they can degrade a person’s connection to the everyday world. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with the protagonist’s struggle to escape the dark dream of the prophet and reconnect to the plain givenness of the world. The narrative explores the religious use of horror and glory as visionary elements, and the role of humor and affection in the …

The Starsplitters, Aurora Stone Mehlman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A mysterious letter summons Helen Starbird, and her granddaughter, Laramie, to a dying mill town on the shores of Lake Umbagog. Together, the two women—who leave vastly different lives mired in similarly hopeless ruts—return to the Northwoods. A New Hampshire fire tower where Helen posted during WWII, and the sight of a forbidden romance and life-altering tragedy, pivots from secret to obsession, and getting there progresses from dream to necessity. On the way, they confront private traumas, and volatile forces of prejudice, oppression, and environmental despoliation that have smoldered for centuries. Will they uncover festering family wounds, end the legacy …

Gift For Burning, Di Bei

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Growing up amid one-child policy in Beijing, Zhi-Nan is pursuing her PhD in Houston while living at a birth tourism house. She receives a text from her adopted cousin who has joined a monastery in Idaho. Convinced that her cousin is in a cult, Zhi-Nan starts a road trip with a white colleague to rescue her cousin from God.

Miracle, Gabrielle Sullivan

Honors College Theses

This original, speculative fiction novella follows Miracle Beckett, a young woman raised on a dying, climate-change ravaged Earth in an isolated religious cult. While she eventually escapes, she finds herself trapped in another deathtrap, abandoned by her crewmates on a spaceship that is rapidly running out of air. Struggling to reconcile her past with her present and her imminent death, Mira cannot avoid remembering everything she has tried to leave behind.

Engaging with sexual identity, religious trauma, and the difficulty found in reconciling the complexities of a left-behind existence, Miracle highlights the power of memory, friendship, and knowledge in guiding …

Fragmented Worlds, Fractured Families - Narrative Levels In Graphic Memoir, Henry Wilson Essman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This collection of creative writing explores the dynamics of parent-child relationships, as well as the way time can cause these roles to shift and reverse, bringing into question who has the right to tell another’s story. The individual pieces are both in the mediums of prose and graphic narrative, often focused on themes of family and trying to reconcile fractured perspectives. These works are introduced through an essay demonstrating how graphic narratives are uniquely situated to show narrative levels, and how narrative levels are key to showing the shifts in parent-child relationships and the way perspectives can differ while still …

The Gender Epidemic: Intersecting Disease, Gender, And Sexuality In A Graphic Novel, Autumn Cejer

All NMU Master's Theses

For my thesis, I wrote a graphic novel set in a world where certain people possess powers that society tries to suppress by viewing them as a disease. The story focuses on two super-powered individuals on opposite sides of the law who handle this oppression very differently. Although these characters would easily be able to overpower the non-powered people in charge, they are too afraid to do so. Internalized guilt from possessing abilities they did not ask for adds an additional layer of conflict, just as women and disabled persons are constantly made to feel like they should apologize for …

A Home For Friendless Women With Critical Essay "But What Was She Wearing?", Kelly E. Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a historical novel accompanied by a critical lyric essay. Through a combination of scholarly research and creative activity, the novel reimagines the lives of the women who lived as inmates and administrators in the Home for Friendless Women, a charity home that operated in Louisville in the late nineteenth century. The critical essay draws from my interdisciplinary background to combine personal experiences, archival and scholarly research, and literary analysis to connect the U.S. dress reform movement in the 1850s, and its failure to change public perception about what was acceptable attire for middle and upper class women, …

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, And Pleasures, Singh Kaur Singh

All NMU Master's Theses

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, and Pleasures, a collection of poetry and prose (creative non-fiction and fiction), reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival is told through hybrid narratives. The writing arises from my own multiple migrations from Taunggyi, Burma, to India and eventually to the United States of America. Taunggyi Dreamer is inspired by: my exile from my birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962; my resettlement as a stateless citizen in my ancestral home in India during my teen years; and my arrival to the United States of America in my thirties as a …

Impression, Storm, Victoria Rego, Victoria Anne Rego

All NMU Master's Theses

This novel, set in a cypress swamp near Charleston, South Carolina, explores issues in gender, sexuality, the body, and place. An experiment in form, the novel is structured to replicate the passing of a hurricane over land. This model allows the narrative to expand its scope to encompass the swamp as a larger entity amidst the ecosystem of the coastal south. By weaving together the narratives of the plant, animal, human, ghost, and mythic members of the swamp, the narrative seeks to interrogate the ways that these different levels of an ecosystem intercede upon, assist, and redirect each other in …

Sundered: A Novel-In-Progress, Erik Renner

Honors Scholar Theses

Sundered: A Novel-in-Progress is a creative thesis that discusses the creative process involved in preparing for and writing a fiction novel. It is a thesis of four parts: a critical preface documenting the history of the project and breaking down the creative process involved; the prologue to the eponymous novel-in-progress; an annotated example of an in-progress first chapter; and an annotated transcript of a character sketch made of the book's protagonist. The novel itself is a post-apocalyptic western, with some additional steam-punk and historical influences. The core theme of the project revolves around finding a peaceful way to fix a …

Secondhand, Julia Grunes

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

A Perfect Day For Caiman Hunting, Nick Pattilio

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Life, Love, And Loss: Redefining The Trauma, Samantha Crystal Rae Barnette

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction analyzing the use of defamiliarization and the Dostoevskian hero in literature as a catalyst for a change in perception for victims of trauma. I create a relationship between the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin as applied to both my own and published works. Short stories from Carmen Maria Machado and Marly Swick and Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale help to situate my own writing within this theoretical approach. The basis of my hypothesis lies in the blurred effect that trauma can have on the individual, causing an automatic response to …

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

Artificial Magic, Tawny Ventura

Senior Theses

This novella by Tawny Ventury emerged from a short story written for a creative writing course on speculative fiction.

Who Is Neil Wells?, Colin Anderson

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis takes the form of a mystery novel by Colin Anderson.