Creative Writing Commons^™

Finding Aid For The Gary Hawkins Multimedia Collection (Mum00705)

Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids (alphabetical)

Physical and digital files including moving image files, audio, photographs, small manuscripts, and ephemera related to the films Joe and The Rough South of Larry Brown created by filmmaker Gary Hawkins.

Timber Island: A Screenplay, Lucas Cunningham

Pomona Senior Theses

A screenplay about the legacy of land use in the Pacific Northwest:

A family from old timber money looking to sell their expansive Pacific Northwest island estate. Two Parks Service surveyors, a Native American scientist, and a developer competing for the bid. A forest with its own agenda.

Against a backdrop of cedar trees and saltwater, tensions boil, ideologies clash, and buried secrets bubble to the surface.

Who will walk away with the deed to Timber Island? And what will it cost?

Bouncing Back: Resilience And Its Limits In Late-Age Composing, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

This essay is one of a series on my mother’s late-age composing, studying a writing project she started at age 70 and worked on for more than 25 years. Her intention was to integrate extensive reading, personal experience, and cultural observations to explain changes in parenting (and, by extension, education and enculturation of the next generation) from her childhood in the 1920s through the 2000s. When she died at 97, she left behind a 75-page draft, but was unable to complete her plans for revisions and an ending. I focus here on identifying the multiple factors in the ecology of …

The Ways I'M A Fraud: Essays On Imposter Syndrome In Identity, Jack Friedman

Pitzer Senior Theses

In this day and age, great progress is being made in acceptance of all kinds of "alternative identities." With growing numbers of identities, imposter syndrome about identity rises with people feeling as though they don't fully belong to an identity group. What does it even mean to be a member of an identity group, and why do I, and many others, feel like an imposter in them? I offer two essays discussing the matter. The first covers alcoholism and how not committing fully to sobriety feels like it excludes my using the identity of alcoholic or addict. The other on …

My Backyard Garden, Hezekiah Smithstein

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis follows my attempts to create a new relationship with the land outside my house, through transforming my weed-choked backyard into a native plant garden. Through styles of memoir, essay, and literary journalism, I examine what it means to take care of the outdoor home, as a human family part of an urban ecosystem. This project explores ideas surrounding people and plants, the effects on a space of actions and interactions both past and present, and brings into conversation different ideas and philosophies from homeowner to ecologist, city park to indigenous author, that shape the way we think and …

Return, Shasta Hecht

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This capstone project is a collection of nonfiction essays that work in collaboration to provide a profile of place. The place of focus is White Pass, the mountain the author has grown up on and experienced for the last twenty-one years. This collection is made up of essays that explore her physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to the land and community of White Pass, while also examining themes of family and identity. Each essay gives a different perspective in regards to the setting. The ultimate purpose of this project is to navigate the complexities of White Pass in regards to …

Brave Spaces, Radical Openness, And Youth Loneliness, Taylor Curry, Mariah Thomas, Riese Munoz

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

It is no secret young adults, no matter where in the world they come from, face social pressures with the potential to be isolating. For today’s youth, not only are they feeling the commonplace anxieties about fitting in, finding success, and uncertainty of the future, but these anxieties are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Young adults from all over the globe report feeling more anxious, more depressed, and more lonely. However, it is also no secret that deliberate community building, creation of art and writing as a means of self-exploration, and participation in spaces designed for acceptance fend off these …

Vapr, Henry Knollenberg

Theses and Dissertations--English

vapr is a collection of short stories loosely interconnected via an anthropoid of smoke self-titled the Antimmanuel. vapr is an acronym for VOID & AUGURY & PRESENCE & RESIDUE; there is nothing else, and it is all ephemeral. The Antimmanuel is the guide; it is there with us even when god is not – within capitalism, within religion, within mental health crises, etc. Although very much not a work of Realism, this collection of eight stories grasps for, at the very least, its own author’s understanding of the real – what it feels like to live in middle America in …

Stick With Me: Essays, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

A small-town Appalachian deviant confronts the frequent, recurrent grief of the opioid crisis and its mortal, psychological, and communal consequences. This collection endeavors to explore substance use, addiction, geopolitical exploitation of Kentucky, central Appalachia, and surrounding areas, while also celebrating the lives of individual loved ones lost to deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism. Here, the common narrative of depravity surrounding addiction is challenged through the rendering of full characters capable of love, trust, friendship, humor, mental health management, and personal growth. Time and place factor fundamentally into the stories told here—whether based in central Kentucky or central Appalachia, …

Saprotrophic, Hailey Jean Pedersen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Using the foundational lens of poets like Carl Phillips and Louise Glück and philosopher Derrida, this poetry collection emphasizes the recognition and exploration of complex human experiences through the power of deconstruction. I occupy conflicting emotional spaces and multifaceted identities using the vehicle of poetry, challenging societal norms that villainize the open discussion of complex experiences like grief, sexuality, and addiction.

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …

The Razor And The Reel, Lee Mayes

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

“The Razor and The Reel” is a crime fiction novel focusing on the darker side of mass media, the corruption of ideals, and the nature of truth in an uncertain world. It is a nightmarish descent into an alternate history of the American 1920s, where the parallels to today's culture of prevailing despair, social collapse, and ruthless capitalism become increasingly obvious as the novel progresses. The plot follows a trio of gangsters as they attempt to rescue a runaway girl from a small but twisted southern town rampant with religious extremism and racism. This town (modeled after Orlando Florida before …

Picture Me Like This: A Short Story Collection, Anna Jones

Scripps Senior Theses

Picture Me Like This is a short story collection that explores our racialized imaginations surrounding Blackness and whiteness, and the implications those have for our intimacies with each other.

Creating Community In A Space Of Strangers: Sea Shanties In Theatre, Cassandra Merena

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Theatre is more than watching actors in the present. It can bring a magic into the room that connects us to a tangible ride of emotions. Sea shanties, a widely known variety of maritime singing, is purposely meant to bring its singers together. I wrote and directed an original one-act play structured around its repetitive beats, to create a communal feeling that will deem a sea of strangers a community for that day. The songs curated were specifically chosen to achieve that sense of community–songs that allow moments of reflection, toe-tapping, humming, and recognition. Phantom Pains is about a captain …

Milk Tooth, 2023, Macy Bernard, Victoria Bohney, Mathea Brink, Mackenzie Britton, Shawn Cruze, Madelyn Dakken, Jada Dokken, Isaiah Dunham, Liz Fisher, Brooke Froehle, Oak Greyson, Gordon Hess, Joseph Kettelhodt, Hannah Lewis, Marissa Marxhausen, Hunter Meland, Autumn Miles, Natalie Nelson, Emma Niessink, Lauren Winkelman, Luke Yartz

Milk Tooth

"Writings by Bemidji State University Students". Sponsored by the Bemidji State University English Department.

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.

Grieving Climate Change: A Psychological And Personal Exploration Of Emotionally Processing The Climate Crisis, Hava Chishti

Pitzer Senior Theses

The psychological concept of grief, although not typically associated with climate change, has strong applications to the emotional processing of climate change for human beings. Grief can be related to climate change in many ways, including the grief that individuals may feel over the anticipated loss of their future, losses that may be experienced due to climate-related disasters, and grief for the overall implications of anthropogenic climate change. A mixture of traditional literature analysis and creative nonfiction essays, which focus on personal narratives from interviews and the author’s experience, are used to outline the ways in which the psychology of …

Birmingham Poetry Review 50 (Complete Issue), Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

No abstract provided.

Resurrection, Paola Bruni

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 79

The Armchair, Michael Bazzett

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 69