Creative Writing Commons^™

Lessons In Persistence, Syble Heffernan

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

LESSONS IN PERSISTENCE is a thesis that operates within the tradition of writing about trauma and resilience, taking up themes of mental illness, class, colonialism, loss of a parent, navigating queerness in a conservative Christian context, and reckoning with gender-based violence and expectations directed toward people socialized as women. The use of ecopoetics highlights the relationship between traumas to the earth brought about by climate change, war, and worldwide suffering, and those brought upon the human body (specifically marginalized bodies) by grief, illness, abuse, and the loss of self. The collection ultimately aims to establish explicit connections between internal and …

Coffins And Conditioner, Mackenzie Scott

Graduate Thesis Collection

Coffins and Conditioner is part one of a modern fantasy story follows a latine, nonbinary hairdresser named Mura Saiz whose entire clientele consists of supernatural entities like werewolves, vampires, and fae. When a fight breaks out in their salon and catches the attention of a new surveillance program meant to destroy those very same supernatural entities, Mura realizes that they must give up their own peace of mind and physical safety to protect their clients. During their journey, Mura must learn how to juggle the secrets they keep within the salon with their now-suspicious chosen family while also making time …

Fling The Emptiness Out Of Your Arms, Kelsey Hennegen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of 121 pages of poetry, divided into five Books (Book I: Invocation, Book II: Jane Doe, Book III: Madwoman, Book IV: The Daughter, and Book V: For The New Year). It was developed over the course of my time in the MFA program at Boise State University.

Thanks For Watching, Hannah Lucille Phillips

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

These novel pages follow Dani, a twenty-seven-year-old middle school teacher whose life is uprooted when her high school best friend Gia—now a famous YouTuber—reappears, seeking refuge from her abusive, highly public marriage. As Dani finds herself pulled into Gia's online world, the key witness in a trial by social media, she struggles to make peace with her own buried past, as well as the devastating role Gia played in it. The novel explores a wide range of complicated relationships, both mended and torn apart at the hands of our modern Internet era, and asks: can we really forgive in a …

Lagos Will Be Hard For You, Ayotola Tehingbola

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Lagos Will Be Hard For You is a collection of short stories. The genre is literary fiction and it is about 40,000 words.

An almost-blind mother pawns her daughter off to save her. A grieving son must bury his Muslim father in twenty-four hours in the thick of winter. A doctor battles to save her partner from himself. Desperation makes a young businesswoman seek out a spiritual experience. Domi(natrix) wants to give life to her sexual kinks in her repressive household. The weight of the word “slave” is put to the test during a first date in conservative Idaho. Death …

In The Backyard, Daisy Clar Rosenstock

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems that explore the fluidity of the speaker’s rising and changing memories of their midwestern backyard.

The Generational Identity Crisis: A Novel, Hankun Chen

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis is a novel set in 2032 China, where people are experiencing huge social declines and identity crises, and additionally, a technology to digitize consciousness is gaining popularity. The protagonist of the novel lose contact with his friend in the digital world, and he receives an anonymous indestructible jar one day with a label that keeps changing to direct him to different locations. In his search for his friends and the secret of the jar, he realizes that the clues are all related to things he is familiar with from the old days. During that adventure, which occurs to …

Lake Mead: A Living Museum, Marley Salveter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Lake Mead, the largest man-made water project in the nation and a prolific source of electricity, irrigation, and recreation for much of the western population, is currently experiencing a drastic transformation. Amid the ongoing water crisis parching the west, the once overflowing reservoir is consistently shrinking, descending into depths historically uncharted.

While serving as a bleak demonstration of climate change’s effects, the body of water is simultaneously assuming an alternative role that may be less apparent to the public. As water levels decline, Lake Mead is actively metamorphosing into a “Living Museum”, by gradually unveiling previously submerged artifacts. As a …

Anti-Thesis: When Your Worst Moments Become Your Best Work, Abigail Williamson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

My honors capstone project expands the creative work of a major writing assignment in English 3170: Successful Freelance Magazine Writing, which was modeled after Susan Shapiro’s “Humiliation Essay.” Shapiro’s signature assignment encourages students to write about an embarrassing or upsetting moment with the aim to force sincerity and humility. She writes, “It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.” The humiliation essay, she claims, often leads to publication because the conflict of the assignment inspires writers, and the narrator’s self-insight that occurs during the process of …

Gertrude Stein: Autobiography And Play, Ryleigh Thornton

Honors Theses

By using Gertrude Stein’s two autobiographies, this thesis attempts to examine the use and evolution of play in writing. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, play stands within the language and games that Stein invites her readers to engage in. By using Roger Caillois’ characteristics of play, Stein’s writing can be seen as different from the high, serious modernism at the time with writers like William Faulkner and T.S. Eliot. After the publication of Toklas, Stein reverted into a crippling writer’s block because she could no longer find interest in the world to think and write about. However, after …

Instead Of Holding, Joyce Safdiah

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

In My Free Time I Haunt The Hurricane House, Kashi Bakshani

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Downstream, Jay Green

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Watershed/Waterspout, Kirry Kaufer

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Things That Bother Me, Lauren Royce

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Kristen Gentry’S Mama Said: A Review, Lili Gourley

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Blowing Apart In The Wind, Lainey Terfruchte

Vázquez-Valarezo Poetry Award

No abstract provided.

Elderberry Wine, Brianna Gamble

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Here (Toma): Translations Between Me And My Mother, Seth Courtad

Honors Theses

The lyric mode can be thought of as the engine of a piece, what drives its thinking and structure forward. Memoir writing most often refers to writing based on an author's own memories. For these two reasons, I've labeled my Honors thesis a lyric memoir. The memoir consists of poems, translated into Spanish by my mother, dual essays in which I share the page with another writer, and "after" essays which consider a wide variety of topics on identity, death, religion, and language. Critically, what makes the memoir lyric is its lack of direct narrative, instead relying on the layering, …

Nonduality And Identity: An Exploration Of Form, Genre, And Perspective, Hannah Ritter

Honors Theses

This thesis utilizes hybrid forms of poetry and prose to examine questions of nonduality, perspective, and identity, simultaneously testing the boundaries of genre and form as a whole. The opening craft essay offers a more specific analysis of form and genre, particularly those of poetry / prose and fiction / nonfiction, while the creative writing demonstrates how such differentia are relevant to the art of creative writing.