Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Palm (Excerpt From Northern Flicker), Fiona Martinez

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Palm is a poem excerpted from the collection titled Northern Flicker. The collection traces themes of the pressing co-existence of violence and tenderness, entanglement with people and nature, and evolving ideas of home, language, and self.

Confronting Ptsd In The Aftermath Of Abuse, Ayla A. Bilyeu

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This narrative follows a young woman through seven clinical sessions with a psychiatrist as she confronts her diagnosis of PTSD following abuse sustained in a romantic relationship.

Fusion Dance: Exploring Identity And Social Possibilities, Katie Taylor

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

In this collection of personal essayettes about partner dance, particularly fusion dance, I explore themes of discovering social possibilities, evolving identity, finding connection, healing shame and celebrating joy. Fusion dance, besides being a partner dance, often seems to defy definition, but I sought to capture my experiences of attending fusion events, falling in love with the dance, navigating ups and downs on the path of becoming a dancer and allowing it to transform the way that I view myself and the world. In the interdisciplinary, exploratory spirit of the Honors College, I essay (in the original sense of “to try” …

Development, Line By Line: An Introspective Case Study On Narrative Identity And Development Through Poetry, Milla Miller

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Situated at the intersection of creative writing and psychology, this project analyzes the author’s adolescent poetry alongside her current work to explore psychosocial and narrative identity development. Specifically, the work contrasts poems written about developmental stages in process with those written in reflection of previous stages in order to reveal how the understanding of self evolves. In addition to the complexities revealed by these temporal differences, structural elements unique to the poems provide further levels of understanding: choice of form and figurative dexterity show cognitive and narrative advancement; themes reveal psychosocial conflicts; and repetition across a poetic lifespan identifies the …

The Call Of Muscari, Sophia Passarelli

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The following is a D&D 5e module made with a focus on the concepts of rumors and reputation within a society. It was created to encourage players to interact intentionally and thoughtfully not only as their characters, but also with each other as they play the game.

Honoring The Gift: An Epistolary Exploration Of An Alternative Approach To Learning Grounded In Reciprocity And Gratitude, Tegan Keyes

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

In this project, I explore what it means to honor knowledge as a gift. This document includes a selection of letters I wrote to my teachers to express my gratitude to them, along with a written narrative in which I describe my vision of an alternative approach to undergraduate education that centers gratitude, reciprocity, and self-determination. This narrative weaves together lessons from emergence theory, Indigenous systems of education, and gift economies to tell a story of a life-sustaining education system that is grounded in the understanding that knowledge is a gift.

The Foreign Earth: An Exercise In Speculative Biology, Aidyn Ruf

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Speculative Biology is the practice of examining hypothetical scenarios about the potential evolution of life. This project explores one such perspective timeline, utilizing scientific illustration, scientific information, and creative writing to estimate what the organisms of Earth might look like 250 million years into the future. Basic parameters were established, examining our current knowledge about geology and the environment to determine how the Earth itself might look. This included examining factors such as tectonic movement, adjusted ocean currents, and planetary heat cycles. Then, I studied mass extinctions and the animals which survived them, creating a baseline of ancestors the future …

All Patched Up!: A Collection Of Poetry And Prose Detailing Life And Personal Journey, Lukas Spring

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

"all patched up!" is a poetry chapbook compiling works from across the author's time at university, portraying a journey filled with ups and downs through mixed media presentation of written word. The result is a patchwork quilt of experiences including exploration of identity, gender, struggle, community, and mental health.

L'Esprit De Lascaux: Exploring Group Camaraderie In The Paleolithic Through Game Design, Logan Lemieux

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

An investigation into the challenges faced trying to capture the unique sense of togetherness present in humanity during the paleolithic as a tabletop game.

Derivatives, Mikayla Goodkin Et Al

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Derivatives, a multimedia and multi-authored project, accounts for the shapes and movements made visible in the epistemologies and ontologies of structural change and liberation/healing in two fields: Modern Elegy and Rhetorical Practices. In three distinct yet inextricably connected movements, this project relies on the chronology of the scholarly year, while leaning into its nonlinearity, to practice writing poetry and making visual art as mediums for thinking and feeling into various inquiries. Its collaborations ask the question of what conversations can be had and what works can be created when we are intentionally and organically in relationship with all the humans …

Mistletoe Blooms: A Proposal Of Method, Petra Ellerby

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The intellectual product housed within this two-part document is the result of an attempt both to engage with unaccustomed formats—fine art, design—and to do justice by a set of idiosyncratic methodological tenets that have played a pivotal role in my personal trajectory, my own internal history of ideas. In spite of its compound nature, the project remains faithful to a fundamentally humanistic spirit: it is an allusive study in cross-disciplinary thinking, an affective attempt to summarize, define, communicate, and defend one specific way of seeing and understanding. At its core, my capstone serves as a venue (even an excuse) for …

Not All Monsters Live Under Your Bed, Rebecca Davis

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This bestiary explores monsters and the folklore they come from. It includes the yara-ma-ya-who, the mylingar, the căpcăun, the ghul, the psoglav, the crocotta, the kushtaka, the ahuizotl, the pao xiao, the manananggal, the encantado, the jorōgumo, the langsuir, the mavka, lake monsters like the Loch Ness monster, the squonk, and brownies.

Perspectives On (In)Human(E) Displacement And Migration, Jordan Carey

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This interdisciplinary, multimedia document gathers various media pertaining to human displacement and migration. The collected perspectives take the form of poetry, academic research, books, photography, as well as un-sortable multimedia projects. Depending on the source, they are cited, introduced, quoted, summarized and/or analyzed. These sources are connected by their enactment of creative resistance, authenticity, proximity to lived experience with displacement and migration, and dedication to uplift the very truths silenced by colonialism and every intersecting mode of oppression that seeks to control and dominate. These truths are that every single human seeking asylum is a capable, resilient, intelligent, self-reliant, creative, …

She Who Seeks The Deep, Laci Bowhay

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

In this poetry chapbook, I explore themes of grief, wellness, interdependence, care-giving, and self-harm. The book is dedicated to my father, as many of the poems deal with my active grief of his living with Parkinson's Disease. I also explore selfhood and all the selves contained within one being. Diving into the murkiness of life and emotion, I seek the deep.

Writing Through Becoming, Becoming Through Writing: The Evolution Of Poems Through 2022 And Early 2023, Maya Miracle Gudapati

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This CEDAR submission offers a window into the writing process. The working products of poems written between 2022 and 2023 are presented alongside their previous iterations, brainstorming sessions, and other forms of their originating material. The purpose of this exercise is to destigmatize drafting and to embrace the vulnerability of allowing the work to grow and change alongside the author.

Frank Wins A Staring Contest With The Universe, Frank Depalma

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

In this full-length poetry chapbook, I explore themes of young adulthood, introspection, identity, and memory through a framework of parallel realities depicted with surrealistic, visceral imagery. In working on this project, I pushed myself to write more vulnerably and to embrace craft elements such as litany, line breaks, and space on the page. The result is a deeply personal collection of poems centering around my headspace in my final year of college as I look toward possible futures and reckon with impossible pasts.

In The Flowers: A Novella In Progress, Rachel Seick

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This is a refined and edited first section of the rough, novella-length draft. The project as a whole was very focused on generative writing and pushing myself to finish a longer project. Brief synopsis: Rebekah Houlihan recounts the events leading up her boss murdering her former friend. She explores changing friendships and feelings of guilt and resentment.

Untitled Novel On Indoctrination And Mentorship, Jacquelyn Ferris

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A young man is alone in the company of his people. He searches and finds council from a stranger in a long red coat and his own search for a beaten rabbit; a deserter to his distant cause.

This is the first chapter to that much larger work in progress. We see our main character in a more peaceful headspace than what will soon come to him.

A Field Guide To Jezero Crater, Mars, Lee Adair

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project aims to blend art, creative writing, and scientific inquiry to explore the possibilities of geology research on our neighboring planet, Mars. This exploratory field guide combines journals, notes, and images to inform the reader of what they can expect to see on the Martian surface.

Moira: A Star Wars Story, Sheila I. Richardson

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Moira: A Star Wars Story is a creative screenwriting project set in the Star Wars universe, with four characters introduced, and killed off, in the comic Star Wars: Republic #53, Blast Radius.

My final Capstone project includes a two-page treatment for the TV show, Moira: a Star Wars Story, the script of the first act, and the first scene of the second act, totaling eleven pages, from the Pilot episode which resides in the Archive of Our Own. The treatment and a link to the Archive of Our Own site are included here. Also included is fair use documentation for …

Dungeons And Disorders: Destigmatizing The Mental Health Conversation, Wren Hart

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Games, especially tabletop role-play games, have often been used by individuals to explore parts of their identities or concepts that are bigger than they are. Dungeons and Disorders is an adventure module detailing the quest of heroes destined to save a land plagued by debilitating problems. Dungeons and Disorders combines this tendency with psychological information on mental health disorders, in order to begin destigmatizing the mental health conversation. Players of this module will get to explore dungeons based on mental health disorders, starting with obsessive compulsive disorder and culminating with depression. The final boss of Dungeons and Disorders is an …

The Evolution Of 'Homo'-Nity: An A To Z From Erectus To Sapiens, Hailee Desrosier

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Androids and humans have lived alongside each other for a couple of centuries. However, in the 27th century, the United States began planning a contingency plan in case the androids decided to usurp the humans’ rightful place at the top of the food chain. Annie, a student in college, learned one day that what her government had taught her may not be the whole truth—it may not even be the best course of action. Determined to find a way to right that wrong, she enlisted the help of two professors to travel with her throughout time in order to save …

King Of Swords, Hannah Kimble

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

King of Swords follows five teenage friends on the precipice of beginning their adult lives who find themselves transported to a fantasy world inhabited by orcs and dinosaurs. Each major character reacts differently to this world, making their own allies and enemies, and come into conflict with one another, engaging in combat with magic swords and gay subtext. Some of them want to return to Earth, while others seek to find a place in this new world. In the end, they mature, learning to talk through their differences like functional adults, and accept the responsibilities that come with that.

An Honest Man: Short Fiction, Hannah Fraley

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A benign everyman, who avoids conflict at all costs, is sent a mysterious and shocking email about his workplace which forces him to make a decision: maintain the status quo or put the interests of others above his own. This is a work of short fiction exploring themes of trust, power, and friendship.

About The Dark Times: Poetry For The Miocene, Nadine Waggoner

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

About the Dark Times is a chapbook of seventeen poems documenting the author's experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically the Omicron wave which affected the Pacific Northwest from January 2022 to February 2022. Themes include the impact of isolation on the author's self-identity, academic success, and mental health. The chapbook is separated into three sections: 'Poetry for the Miocene,' 'Poetry for the Late Cretaceous,' and 'Poetry for the Permian.' Fossilized animals and periods of mass extinction throughout the earth's history are used in metaphor and comparison to the author's personal experience. The poems each include elements of ars poetica and …

Dust, Asher Didier

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Dust is a dystopian novel centered on the effects of inaction in our combat with climate change. Set in the future (around the year 2150), the world is a much different place. The Earth has turned into a hot and overused world which is devoid of most of the plants and animals that exist today. Desertification has occurred on much of the Earth and sand and dust have become prominent in place of grasslands and forests. One of the common motifs of the book is, as the title suggests, this dust. Dust is looked at in many different ways throughout …

The Author's Gauntlets: The Writing, Editing, And Publishing Process Of A Novel, Robert Clifton

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project details the actions I took in writing my first novel, editing it, and starting the pre-publication process for it. It describes everything from the origins of my idea for the novel all the way to where I am now (June 2022), at my second editing pass and having written the first draft of my query letter for an agent. My premise is that people often assume that authors just write a book and that's it, but there's actually a lot more steps in editing and publishing they have to take before their book is released to the world. …

Fair Folk, Jamie M. Good

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This is the outline for an upcoming novel centering retold Celtic fairy tales. The project includes research about fairy lore and Celtic mythology, as well as modern Irish customs surrounding cultural beliefs surrounding fairies. This story prioritizes the Pagan versions of folklore, rather than the more modern Victorian and Christian depictions of Celtic traditions and fairies.

The outline includes an introduction, short synopsis, short summaries and goals for fifty-four chapters (the full length of the novel), a list of characters, and a short reflection.

Synopsis:

Three children, Molly, Cal, and Jack, are abducted into the fairy realm. Molly and Cal …

The Utopian Range - Short Climate Fiction, Kai Broach

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project represents three work-in-progress short stories from a larger planned collection of short speculative fiction: The Utopian Range.

In the world of the Utopian Range, the hegemonic World Government and the Intronet Corporation use the Utopian Range technology to mine the collective subconscious of its citizens for visions of the future. Our narrator, Gavin, learns that there might be more to the ideas it filters out than he expects. Told through interconnected stories simulated from Gavin’s subconscious with the help of a friendly rogue AI, this is The Matrix meets The Illustrated Man. These stories tell tales of personal …

Kingdom Of Fear: A Dark Fantasy Novel, Katie Borley

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project is the first draft of a novel written over the course of half a year. It is a dark fantasy novel about three strangers who must stop a mage with the power to use peoples' fear to turn them into monsters. The novel in question is intended to be published at a later date, and so only the first chapter is available in the archive. Additionally, presentation slides are included that describe the process of brainstorming, outlining, and drafting the novel, as well as plans for future edits and publishing.