Creative Writing Commons^™

What Ties Me To Blue Mountains, Deborah Lynne Downs

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis includes a collection of poems and a foreword discussing individual poems, the relationship of the poems as a collection, important themes, and concerns of craft. These poems comprise a narrative of place developed chronologically and are grounded in the context of regional storytelling and oral histories specific to Southwestern Virginia during roughly the first two thirds of the Twentieth Century.

History Has My Name examines culture, language, and geography—those things particular of place. In a larger social and cultural context this manuscript also focuses on the position of women and issues of racism within its stated time frame. …

Bad Girls Of The Bible, Dana Staves

English Theses & Dissertations

Bad Girls of the Bible is a collection of short stories set in the South and dealing with the themes, manners, and ideals of the region. Thematically, the stories are concerned with religion, family, gender, sexuality, and identity, exploring generational gaps and misunderstandings, working from, or beyond, Old South ideals toward New South diversity and progressiveness. Every story features a female narrator or point of view character who is greatly influenced by the Old South/New South dichotomy, the sense of obligation to those people who uphold the past, the momentum toward a better future, and each character's willingness to draw …

The Way Of Sinners, Mary Westbrook

English Theses & Dissertations

The Way of Sinners is a collection of short stories united by place and themes. The stories, most of which are told in first-person, take place in fictional and real towns around Virginia, in Tidewater, the Shenandoah Valley and the western part of the commonwealth, near Blacksburg. The stories concern women and girls who feel they have failed, who fear they cannot be redeemed. The characters want to be restored to dignity — to be whole again, good. Human nature stands in their way. The characters are keenly aware of slights and sins committed by and against them, and as …

What Did I Do To Susan Orlean And Other Stories, Brian C. Wilson

English Theses & Dissertations

From the seat of a bicycle, behind the stage of a lumberjack competition, atop a boatful of oyster shells, and from other unusual perspectives the nonfiction stories in this collection explore a variety of subjects. In some cases I position myself as an outsider, learning through research, interviews and observation. In others I begin as an outsider and then dive in personally, making myself the subject of the experiment. Through it all I hope to make readers, at least temporarily, as interested in online encyclopedias, fixed-wheel bicycles, replica schooners and hungry stingrays as I am.

The proper audience for the …

I Have To Tell You Something, Edmund E. Dowe

English Theses & Dissertations

The poems of I Have to Tell You Something will hopefully invoke the spirit of duende, that city of sinister images Federico Garcia Lorca so passionately described. They are my attempt to make sense of the reality I wake to everyday, and they are a challenge to my perception and my audience's perception of the realities that have been created by the technological and digital machine of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In these pages is a collection of highly imagistic poems, reminiscent of the imagist poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They live by the …

Autobiography Of A Mountain Lion, Christopher Allan Prewitt

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Caudill College of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Christopher Allan Prewitt on March 24, 2010.

Under Glass: The Girl With A Thousand Christmas Trees, Jen Hirt

University of Akron Press Publications

According to Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, when she went back to Ohio, her city was gone. For Jen Hirt, her Strongsville, Ohio greenhouses were gone. Her ancestry, bloodlines, memories, and her complete identity were replaced by a large-chain pharmacy store. Four generations taken away by the wrecking ball; fourteen greenhouses dismantled and shattered. Under Glass traces the rise and fall of the family business and the family itself.

Hirt is the girl with a thousand Christmas trees, growing up surrounded by life and vitality. She is the greenhouse filled with hope and growth. Then the rubble sets in—financial pressures, …

Court Green: Dossier: 1970s, Columbia College Chicago

Court Green

An annual poetry magazine with a different theme for each issue; printed from 2004 to 2015.

Faith In Fiction? Solzhenitsyn's One Day As A Practical Defense Of Fiction, Bob De Smith

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

The Eye Of A Whale In Tonga, Jeff Rasley

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Article for Real Travel Adventures about kayaking in Tonga and encountering whales.

Requiem For The Orchard, Oliver De La Paz

University of Akron Press Publications

These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place “where the Ferris Wheel/ was the tallest thing in the valley,” where a boy would learn “to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck/ with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.” Looking back, the poet wrestles with the meaning of labor in the apple orchards and “the filthy dollars we’d wad into our pockets,” or the rites of passage that included sinking a knife into the flank of a dead chestnut horse. In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties—or …

Vol. Xlvii, No. 1: Carrie Brown's Fiction: Always Compassionate, Always Surprising, Mariflo Stephens

The Hollins Critic

No abstract provided.

A Floating World: Stories, Karen Best

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Floating World is a collection of short stories inspired by fairy tales. Often set in worlds where the mundane and the fantastic come together, these stories explore moments of strangeness that slip beyond the bounds of realist fiction. Fantastical events intrude into mundane reality as characters attempt to reconcile the known with the unknowable.

We Will Make Your Head Explode, Jaclyn Sullivan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We Will Make Your Head Explode is a collection of short fiction stories that explore themes of friendship, family, love, lust, jealousy, loyalty, and disappointment. The characters in these stories are utterly human; they are pushed, pulled, and often fall victim to circumstance. A woman grapples between her love of roadside attractions and her boyfriend's grief. A son is forced to decide whether or not to honor his mother's final wishes. A college student is blind to her brother's evolution beyond their family. A woman discovers new possibilities while stalking graveyards to escape the memory of a man who left …

Contact, Brittany Osbourne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This fiction novel focuses on the Sankofa philosophy that we as human beings must learn from our past to better understand our current existence and future; however, sometimes we choose to ignore or suppress the past because remembering it may be too hurtful. When we forget what happened yesterday our outlook on today and tomorrow becomes distorted. Contact is a novel that attempts to explore how 'living in the now' alone becomes problematic because the past'if not remembered'will come back to haunt you. The erasure of the line between Diasporic Africans and their African past is the primary theme explored. …

Skunk River Review 2009-10, Vol 22, Austin Leeds, Kari S. Griffin, Ezmeralda Montemayor, Faith Burket, Jason Scholbrock, Hillary Ann Brighton, Eric J. Linn, Paul Richard Adam, Sage Devaney, Melanie M. Cox, Latroya Marie Sickler, Zach Dalaba, Andrew Kopaska, Sylvia King, Kristen Glick, Sara L. Roggemann, Jason Lighthall, Paige Sanders, Catherine Drahota, Jason Lee Borkowski, Douglas J. Meyer, Roselyn Harbart, Shelaine Harbart

Skunk River Review

Welcome to the 2009-2010 edition of The Skunk River Review!

We received a record number of entries this year, making this volume one of the best and most competitive! We even added a new category called Art & Literary Analysis to include a growing number of submissions dedicated to inspiration and critique. Each year we continue to receive many fine examples of student writing. Selection is a challenging process but enjoyable as the submissions range from a variety of topics and styles. Selected entries were only minimally edited for clarity.

The Skunk River Review focuses on students from various DMACC …

"Haunting Experiences: Ghosts In Contemporary Folklore," By Diane E. Goldstein Et Al., Linda Levitt

Faculty Publications

Review of Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas. Haunting experiences: Ghosts in contemporary folklore. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007. Paperback, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-87421-636-3.

Sequoya Review, University Of Tennessee At Chattanooga

Sequoya Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents (V. 18, 2010)

Intertext

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism, Melanie Springer Mock

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "This tension—between the romantic ideal of the road trip and its inability to meet high expectations— is clearly evident in Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism, by Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein. While the book’s concept is appealing, its content challenging and insightful, I felt an air of sadness throughout Girldrive; and this road trip to “redefine feminism” was, at its heart, disappointing."