Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco

English Honors Theses

Set in the year 1980, "Good Girls Don't" is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy …

The Last Days Of Elder Mitchell, Jack Bylund

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The Last Days of Elder Mitchell is a novella following the eponymous Latter-Day Saint missionary as he narrates the miracles performed by his colleague, Elder Gibson, as well as his personal grappling with his queer identity as he serves a high-demand religion that condemns people like him. The narrative explores the intersection of queerness and faith, the form of the novella, and the healing nature of autobiographical fiction.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …

10-5, Avery Taylor

Forces

No abstract provided.

2024 Forces, Collin College

Forces

No abstract provided.

The Holding On, Lydia Price

English Senior Capstone

“The Holding On” is a work of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry that explores the tension that lies at the heart of growing up and departing the world as you have previously known it. Through the lens of reflections on home life and family, this project seeks to honor the unique blend of celebration and mourning that we meet with during the transitions of life. Joy does not undo sorrow, but neither does sorrow undo joy, and the ultimate purpose of these stories is to transport you to that threshold moment— the moment before leaving.

Irotas 2024, Xander Auman, Kat Beekman, Elizabeth Benfield, Jessica Grafe, Jed Nelson, Kate Nissen, Drake Onyx, Alex Peachey, Benjamin Rayburn, Mandie Schmidt, Kelly Stelzer, Kylie White, Jayde Yeates, Larissa Lopez, Alayna Majkrzak, Ashleigh Campbell, Alysen Endres, Lucy Severson, Kiera Norman, Samantha Bird, Keaton Riebel, Jaden Fleshner, Jaydon Wilson, Ian Mckinzie, Rachel Marzahn, Riker Weiler, Mushfiq Kabir, Taya Peterson, Mawatta Dukuly, Mal Bowman, Grace Guertin, Samantha Dischinger, Kieran Lombard, Ian Mckinzie, Grace Westphel

Irotas

Irotas is an annual student journal of the arts created and published by Winona State University students. Irotas is a sibling journal to the Satori Student Literary Magazine. This is the inaugural issue of Irotas (2024).

Student Editors: Xander Auman, Kat Beekman, Elizabeth Benfield, Jessica Grafe, Jed Nelson, Kate Nissen, Drake Onyx, Alex Peachey, Benjamin Rayburn, Mandie Schmidt, Kelly Stelzer, Kylie White, and Jayde Yeates.

Faculty advisor: Dr. Liberty Kohn

Satori 2024, Draconian Onyx, Xander Auman, Elizabeth Benfield, Samantha Bird, Elysia Beynon, Ashleigh Campbell, Lydia Domaille, Mawatta Dukuly, Alysen Endres, Jessica Grafe, Grace Guertin, Mushfiq Kabir, Nathan Kronbeck, Alayna Majkrzak, Rachel Marzahn, Noelle Mckinney, Ian Douglas Mckinzie, Dorothy Moore, Jack Mulvaney, Kaylee Nickisch, Kiera Norman, Alex Peachy, Sophia Porter, Sydney Porter, Keaton Riebel, Sophia Sailer, Lucy Severson, Kelly Steltzer, Celia Stern, Willow Swinbank, Jackie Velishek, Allen Wedekind, Riker Weiler, Jaydon Wilson

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

The Satori 2024 editors are:

Design and Technical Editor: Draconian Onyx;
Fiction Editors: Elizabeth Benfield, Jed, Nelson, Kate Nissen, Mandie Schmidt, Kylie White, Jayde Yeates;
Poetry Editors: Xander Auman, Kat Beekman, Alex Peachey, Kelly Stelzer;
Art Editors: Jessica Grafe, Draconian Onyx Benjamin Rayburn.
The Satori 2024 faculty advisor is Dr. Liberty Kohn, Professor of English.

The World Ends One Last Time, Winter Qiu

English Honors Theses

Two friends are reincarnated into alternate universes where they are destined to meet over and over again. Meanwhile, two otherworldly observers find themselves reflecting on their own bond with each other.

Norse Inspired Tales: Four Changes Of Fate, Pete Wille

University Honors Theses

Norse Inspired Tales: Four Changes of Fate is a collection of four original short stories meant to act as an introduction to a broader literary world where Norse myth meets late eighteen hundred's, San Francisco. The introduction gives background on my literary journey and explains some of the choices made within these stories. Each following story reveals the characters and the world they currently inhabit.

"A Narrative Is A Living Body”: Trans-Relations In Contemporary Transmasculine Fiction, Madison Rougier

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how recent novels are able to expand representations of transgender experiences and promote identification with these characters and their experiences, even if the reader is not trans themself. It begins by delving into a brief history of transgender narrative and the problems associated with these narratives having been primarily in the form of memoir. It then examines how Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country, despite being one of the first instances of a fictional narrative focused on a transgender man, reflects similarly problematic narrative characteristics to those found in memoir. Proposing a concept of trans-relational reading, which promotes identifications …

The River Flowing, Bailey Storm

English Literature | Senior Theses

This piece is set in Kittery Point, ME, where my cousins lived, a place in which I spent many summers growing up. I define these summers as pinpoints in my youth that helped me discover the first touches of independence away from my home in Pennsylvania. All of the time I spent alone was prominent for what I remember of this time. I was incredibly shy and detached from my cousins' friends. Though I loved being a young teenager in Maine, I could never quite grasp the social life similar to Wyatt when he is back home in Kittery from …