Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gandal Syllabus English 320, Advanced Fiction Writing, Keith Gandal

Open Educational Resources

Students in this course will learn the art of writing and rewriting short stories.

The Jubilant City Almanac: Stories, Azaria Brown

Graduate Thesis Collection

The Jubilant City Almanac is a collection of short stories set in the magical Jubilant City, a city founded by a group of Black women in 1736. These stories bridge the whimsical and magical with the realities of poverty, classicism, addiction, abuse and health disparities. “Got His Alligator” follows the journey of two codependent addicts as they try to get their fashion designs onto Jubilant City’s premiere drama, Girl, Please. The characters in “Carbon Copy” use a magical phone to bring Denzel Washington to the city. “Jeremiah the Conqueror” summons Black American folk legend, High John. THrough an exploration of …

The Perpetual Harvest, Joseph Cifelli

Senior Theses and Projects

My intention for this project was to create a fantasy setting that, in presenting pieces of itself, from oblique angles, opens up the world to stories and myths beyond those I’ve provided. The foundation is the introductory guide, which details the primary social, economic, and supernatural mechanisms of the setting. The following stories are meant to play off the guide, exploring tones, voices, and plots implied or ignored by its limited perspective. I was heavily inspired by Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher short story collections, which blend the magic and mundane aspects of fantasy beautifully.

The Dazzled Rope Of Lightning Against The Cloud Is Not The Downward Bolt But The Compelled Upstroke Through The Heated Ether: Stories, Jack S. Muth

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Hanakatsura: The Works Of Famous Literary Women In Japan, Tei Fujiu (Trans.), Kaho Miyake, Ichiyo Higuchi, Usurai Kitada, Otsuka Kusuo, Paul Royster (Ed.)

Zea E-Books Collection

Originally published in Tokyo in 1903, Hanakatsura (literally “garland of flowers”) features a biographical sketch of the activist and author Kishida Toshiko (Baroness Nakajima) plus four short stories by Japanese women writers of the Meiji era:

Akebonozome: A Cloth Dyed in Rainbow Colors, by Kaho Miyake

Ōtsugomori: The Last Day of the Year, by Ichiyo Higuchi

Onisenbiki: The Thousand Devils, by Usurai Kitada (Mrs. Kajita)

Shinobine, by Otsuka Kusuo

Compiled and translated by Tei Fujiu, four memorable and affecting stories depict women experiencing the frustrations of traditional family roles within an emergent commercial society at the turn of the century. …

A Bag Of Marbles, Cora Saddler

Honors Theses

A short story collection that takes inspiration from the magical mundanities of everyday life.

To Be Haunted: A Collection Of Short Stories, Kallye Smith

Honors Theses

This thesis is a work of collected pieces of fiction that seek to explore what it means to be haunted. By exploring the concept of ghosts, the pieces in this collection attempt to take a fresh approach to the traditional paranormal story.

The Butte, Natasha Bailey

Senior Theses

The Butte is a collection of short stories about a small town in the Pacific Northwest. In these short stories I explore idealistic small-town culture and blend it with the Pacific Northwest’s own (modern) paranormal mythology. This medley of different genre aspects in my stories makes The Butte difficult to label, but ultimately, my goal while writing was to explore various styles and points of view.

The nine stories set in The Butte shift styles on a variety of levels from character switching, point of view (1^st person, 3^rd person, and omniscient), and formatting (structure and linguistics). These …

Overgrown: A Collection Of Supernatural Narratives, Emily Dawn Cote

Honors Thesis

Overgrown is a collection of short stories stemming from nontangible anxieties, such as death, violence against women, and the queer search for acceptance. Each of the three pieces, including Thoughts of a Downed Oak Tree, Wrong, and For the Living, touches upon how individuals experience these anxieties and how they face them. I also selected Overgrown because all included pieces had to deal with a piece of reflection, overcoming or discovery. The Title Overgrown reflects both the sense of nature these pieces bring, but also the aspect of personal reflection they conjure. These characters engage with a degree of …

Shadows Of The Morning Twilight, Philip A. Lapadula

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shadows of the Morning Twilight is a collection of seven short stories and one novella about men who, facing transitions in their lives and in society, grapple with issues of sexual identity, residency, past traumas, and corruption. In the noir-influenced title novella, Nick Esposito, a mid-1970s journalism student, faces dangerous choices when he reports on the sale of a gay bar that is covertly owned by the mafia. Some characters see themselves as trapped. In “Final Score,” a former football player struggling with dementia finds a reason to live when he mentors a young gay man. In “Psyched,” “Phantoms of …

Et Cetera, 2019-2021, Marshall University

Et Cetera

Founded in 1953, Et Cetera is an annual literary magazine that publishes the creative writing and artwork of Marshall University students and affiliates. Et Cetera is free to the Marshall University community.

Et Cetera welcomes submissions in literary and film criticism, poetry, short stories, drama, all types of creative non-fiction, photography, and art.

Child Ballads: Folk Songs And Stories From The New World, Brian Gabriel Watko

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Chainwreck, Bailey Elizabeth Bowers

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Entire Issue, Kyra E. Blair, Rachel Sedgwick

TYGR: Student Art and Literary Magazine 2018-present

No abstract provided.

The Spinners' Tales, Sierra N. Offutt

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

“The Spinners’ Tales” is a loosely connected story collection exploring the lives of a variety of supernaturally gifted characters, referred to within their own community as Spinners.

Carpenters: A Short Story Collection, Grace Keir

English Honors Theses

This collection of four short stories explores the interfamilial dynamics and internalized traumas of womanhood across three generations of mothers, sisters, and daughters. In doing so, these stories confront the raw, painful, and beautiful lives and experiences of women and girls.

That Belongs To Me, Ellie Anne Greenberger

Honors Theses

A collection of fictional short stories and a novella that explores family relationships, specifically female family relationships that span across generational lines and what we inherit from our families whether intentional or unintentional. (Under the direction of Tom Franklin)

My Haunted Home: A Collection Of Short Stories, Victoria E. Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“My Haunted Home” is a collection of short stories that explores the way in which hauntings and memory find themselves implanted in the everyday lives of those who live without people in their families. These stories work through grief in the form of haunting and explore how hauntings can be embodied through people and places. These stories work to bend genre tropes of horror and surrealist fiction in hopes to find a merging of haunting and memory. The narrators of these stories are ever changing, although there is overlap in voice throughout some of these stories. Part two of “My …

Our Stories, Paige Wright

Honors Theses

My first memory of feeling absolute and utter horror stems from my father. You have to understand, my father is a large man who, in the right light, is terrifying to a small child. This first memory is from a few days before Halloween. My parents had just bought some of those colored, spooky bulbs (they may have been purple or orange or red, in truth, I cannot remember) and were trying them out in the living room. I simply remember coming down the hallway—I may have been four or five, we definitely still had the dark, 70s style paneling …

Somewhere Warm: A Collection Of Short Stories, Christy Ammons

Selected Undergraduate Works

“Somewhere Warm” is a collection of short stories about the journey of a middle-aged woman whose house is foreclosed. The collection focuses on the relationships between the woman and the people in her life and how losing her house affected not just her, but also her family, particularly her daughter.

The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman

Masters Theses

Adapting fairy tales and folklore has been an ongoing endeavor by storytellers and artists since the very first story was repeated. The evidence can be seen in the many versions of fairy tales like those of the sleeping beauty, from Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to Walt Disney’s Maleficent. However, unlike their European counterparts, adaptations of American tales outside of children’s literature are not as ubiquitous. My writing rectifies this by adding to the resurging interest as seen in recent retellings like Matt Bell’s Appleseed: The Monstrous Birth (2019).

In an effort to reframe the American tall tale …

Two Makes A Couple: Fictions On Intimacy, Alyssa C. Conner, Jessica Richardson

Honors Theses

This portfolio of fictional short stories was created through the inspiration from constraints drawn from various published short stories. Constraints are a literary technique in which the writer is bound to certain elements or inspires a pattern within a work of writing. Each short story takes place in contemporary society and within the pieces, intimate moments between two individuals are explored throughout. This portfolio, through symbolic language, examines the relationship between our identities and our closest alliances, whether those are our romantic partners, platonic partners, or siblings.

Traumatic Experiences Through The Queer Lens, Holden Guckenberg

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This is a collection of short stories based off of real trauma that LGBTQ+ individuals have experienced. I have interviewed seven people who identify within the LGBTQ+ community and listened to their traumatic stories. Based on their stories, I have written their accounts with trauma while expanding and taking creative freedom to better enunciate and bring-forth their stories. Trauma affects the LGBTQ+ community at a greater height than it does the general population. It’s important to recognize this fact so that we can support those people who have faced tremendous adversity in the form of trauma. In one form or …

Embrace The Moon, Natalie J. Havlina

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

EMBRACE THE MOON is a collection of six stories that explore how people respond when faced with the impossible. A young woman welcomes a visit from her recently-deceased grandfather in the title story, while the narrator of “A Unicorn in Paris” dismisses the magical creature as a side effect of heartbreak. Like the dark power in Truman Capote’s “Master Misery,” the reality of the ghost and the unicorn remains ambiguous. In other stories, the uncanny is dangerously real, as in Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. “The Norban Birds of the Count Bartello-Sauvigny” feast on the women they charm …

Things That Happened, Christian Chase

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a collection of short stories by Christian Chase.

• A Whole Lot of Nothing
• Grand Artistic Vision
• Architecture
• Hanging Around
• Silent Life
• A Special Dread
• Snowbound

Eulogy, Kim T. Allison

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Particular to the three short stories in Eulogyis the importance of place, as they are set in the fictional location of Potter’s Island, which is based on my childhood sense of Florida.Contradictions, complications, and disappointments can be uniquely tied to a sense of place. My own parents and grandparents moved to Florida when I was three years old, but where they lived, how they lived and worked, and what dreams they pursued was only partially an immigrant’s story of wanting a better life.

The past has weight—a weight that must be dealt with, for real people, and for …

Dandelion Wishes: Short Stories, Lucy E. Marcus

English & Creative Writing Students Scholarship and Creative Work

Lucy Marcus was Roanoke's Writer by Bus in 2019. This is a collection of short stories inspired by her bus rides.

Gone To Ground, Brian Blair

Theses

Gone to Ground is a collection of short stories that explores the possibilities beyond the edge of the everyday. They are an attempt to peek beyond the imaginary boundaries we erect for ourselves in the name of danger or the unknown. Each story is an opportunity to see our own familiar humanity in others, no matter the accidents of fortune that separate us. Though the stories in Gone to Ground often touch the surreal or the magical, they are firmly rooted in what could be out there, on the other side of our walls, whether real or imagined. These are …

More Than Skin-Deep: Reading Past Whiteness In Hemingway’S “Hills Like White Elephants”, Laura Valeri

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The author argues a much neglected element in the seminal Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephant." Reading the story by taking into context a subtext of racial bias lends new interpretation to the story.

Things We Have In Common: Essays And Experiments, Willow Grosz

All NMU Master's Theses

Things We Have in Common is a collection of short stories, flash pieces, and image-text experiments that attempts, in the wake of the death of my mother, to excavate the relationship between memory and narrative, identity and belonging against a backdrop of the main forces that have influenced my familial group, namely generational poverty, a changing relationship with our Athabascan and Caucasian heritages, and the complicated ecology, geography, and culture of Alaska. Like many forays into memory, this project represents a joyous failure. Please read this collection as a love letter to Alaska.