Creative Writing Commons^™

Fruit Fly, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

A fruit fly has been hovering around my face for days, though maybe it isn’t the same fruit fly, since I’ve been told that fruit flies only live for twenty-four hours, yet there it is ...

"That Irate Pornographist": Gender And Nature In Mina Loy's "Songs To Joannes", Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Hills Like White Elephants": Epistemic, Nonepistemic And Nonseeing, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

This essay, a though-experiment, explores the value of reading literary texts (with the example of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants") from the point of view of epistemic, nonepistemic and nonseeing. Epistemic seeing is defined as seeing with "belief-content" nonepistemic seeing without it. The technique is to examine each example of the word "seeing" (or one of the members of its family, "look, watch," "blink") and let it "lead" you to the object, its contest, and implications in the story as a whole..

The Man I Killed, Brian Duchaney

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Being [T]Here, Dustin B. Smith

English Faculty Publications

When you awoke from the dream, in your early thirties, you knew, as you’ve never known anything else in all your seventy-plus years, that what you’d found was real. The dream began with you sitting in a church, head bowed in prayer. Your eyes opened slowly, and you noticed that you were wearing brilliantly colored, beaded moccasins. You stood abruptly, pushed open the mahogany gate that separated the pew from the center aisle of the church, and began to run. The dream then proposed a seemingly endless and entirely quotidian set of difficulties in The City, and led eventually to …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …

R.A., Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sanguine, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

Health care in America: even my doctor lines up for the community multiphasic blood screening, rather than going to the regular lab.

It costs thirty-two dollars for the usual screen, plus ten dollars for thyroid, or PSA or B-12. The blood-drawing used to be held at the local rec park building. Now it’s at the county emergency services building, outside of town on a brand-new winding country road. They could just as well hold it at the public library, or firehouse, or agricultural center—any large room usable for voting, or the traveling reptile show, could be set up for phlebotomy. …

Wayward, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

It’s hard to imagine, now, how it was that I took up with that boy in South Carolina, but facts are facts. William Buchanan Redmond was lawless and drawling, full of sideways glances and outrageous proposals. He went by Cannon.

One night on Hilton Head Island, where I was staying with a friend’s family (thanks to private school I had friends with houses on Nantucket, etcetera, though I lived in a modest house with my mother and sister that we were renovating to resell), he approached me at an outdoor concert. A guitarist was playing a sing-along rendition of “Take …

The Exchange Student, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Out Cold, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

Walter had just completed his five-mile route on the treadmill and was headed from the gym to his car in a nearby parking lot - he was in fact circumnavigating a field on which a few idiotic teenagers were kicking a soccer ball at a field hockey goal, so as not to approach near their game - when he was struck in the side and back of his head by something large and forceful and solid and round, and it sent his glasses flying from his face and his bright white tennis cap skittering from his head and it flattened …

"The Long And Short Of It" And "Rsvp", Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Skylab, Cyan Abad-Jugo

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Just Man, Rica Remedios B. Santos

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Conception: A Personal History, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

November 19 is Remembrance Day in Gettysburg, the day that Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead in 1863. That year in July the dead lay on the battlefield, on the farmers’ fields planted with crops and in the summer-green woods where they had taken positions behind boulders and tree trunks. Some lay covered with dirt, and others just lay bare to the weather. When land for a cemetery was set aside, the townspeople moved the dead to proper graves.

As a citizen of Gettysburg more than a century later, I carry no …

In Transit, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

There is the birthplace and there is the deathplace. We are in the deathplace. The deathplace is Bad Aibling, in southern Germany, just north of the Austrian border. To get here, we have driven through the Tyrol, the Italian-Austrian-German alpine region in which gingerbread houses stack up on the green slopes of valleys.

Bad Aibling sounds fitting for a deathplace, a bad place, though in fact “bad” means “bath.” As we drive on a two-lane road, we see cars parked in bunches on the grassy shoulder, and it seems people might be bathing, dipping their feet in the country creeks …

Our So-Called Illustrious Past, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

I went to London not to see the queen, but to find the Dutch baronet from whom we were all descended. I went as my father and forefathers and foremothers had done, to turn the crackling pages of a parish register and put my finger on our name. I went with an image of Gualter de Raedt, a young Dutchman in 1660, boarding a ship to accompany Charles the Second back to England, where monarchy would be restored. The fleet of thirteen ships sailed from Schevinengen on a flat gray sea as fifty thousand people stood on the beach to …

Short Fiction By Women In The Victorian Literature Survey, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The first time I taught a Victorian Literature survey, fresh out of a curriculum integration workshop in graduate school, I taught ten authors: five male and five female. One student evaluation after the course was over complained that despite the promise of “great” Victorian writers, half of those on the syllabus were women. While this did take place in the dark ages of the early nineties, I still find myself, as I design my syllabi, caught in the familiar conundrum as to what to teach, what to cut, and why. In my case, it seems simple: The Victorian period is …

The Mill On The Floss, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The Mill on the Floss was the second novel Marian Evans published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Born in 1819 to a prosperous estate manager, Marian Evans spent her youth much as her heroine did, in reading and outdoor activities. In 1850 Evans moved to London where she worked as a translator and editor, and fell in love with the writer and editor George Henry Lewes, a married man. Contemporary marriage law prevented Lewes from obtaining a divorce from his adulterous wife; the law held that, having condoned the adultery previously, he now had no grounds for divorce. Knowing this, …

Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are my rooms now." The journey that Walcott makes from "houseboy" to master/ruler/owner of the house of literature (the Nobel Laureate is frequently acclaimed the greatest poet writing in the English language) is painstakingly detailed in Bruce King's tome Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.

We Are Not Friends, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

There is something about the way the phone rings that lets you know it's Them - a kind of glitter in the chime, a certain je ne sais quoi to the cadence, which seems to skip a beat as if it can't believe that They are calling. You pick up, heart throbbing, getting ready to move your mouth, a sly frisson of sweat striking your palms.

"They asked me to call," Their assistant says. "They want you at the house next Thursday. And then you'll all go somewhere. A plane will be involved. You'll want to bring a passport. Until …

"Under The Umbrella Of Black Civilization": A Conversation With Reginald Mcknight, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

Talking to Reginald McKnight is like scanning an imaginary worldwide radio dial. At any given moment he can transform his pleasant speaking voice into a raspy, aged, Middle Eastern-by-way-of-New York accent - or a deep Southern drawl. In an instant he can switch from a precise West African dialect to hip, urban street lingo, and then effortlessly segue back to his normal voice. McKnight says he "hit the ground running" as a mimic, and his talent was broadened as he lived all over the United States as the son of an Air Force sergeant. His time spent on the road …

Great Expectations, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens’s early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father’s bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe-polish warehouse. While the episode was relatively brief, it marked Dickens’s later life in many ways: in the development of his own ambitions, in his sympathy for the poor and …

Jefferson In Central Pennsylvania, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wuthering Heights, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), one of three sisters who literary productions caused a minor sensation when they began appearing in the late 1840s. Born to Patrick Brontë, a Yorkshire clergyman, and his wife Maria, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë were precocious readers and writers. The three sisters spent years writing for their own pleasure and amusement, then published a volume of poetry in 1846. Fearing that the volume’s reception would be biased if the authors were known to be women, the sisters adopted the names Ellis (Emily), Acton (Anne), and Currer (Charlotte) Brontë. Their …

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.

My Psychologist, My Psychiatrist, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I could not distinguish between them except by what we did. I was ten, then eleven. I would not ride the school bus. I always slunk home saying I missed it. I made my mother come to school with me every day, and sit in the lobby so I could wave to her during recess and class changes. In the evenings my father would come home from work, hear my mother's report, and storm upstairs, his weight pounding on the hardwood steps. I would be out of breath with crying, my head in the pillow, waiting to feel what he …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …

Hotel Room With My Brother, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.