Creative Writing Commons^™

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

Witness: The Modern Writer As Witness, Alex Berge, Andrew Bertaina, Andrew Collard, Miranda Dennis, Andrea Eberly, Emily Greenberg, Day Heisinger-Nixon, Sarah Helen, L.A. Johnson, Anne Liu Kellor, Mary Kuryla, Emmy Newman, Lara Palmqvist, Mary Lane Potter, David Lerner Schwartz, Michelle Sharpe, Nina Sudhakar, Kristina Ten, Eric Tran, Pamela Yenser

Witness Magazine

Editor's Note [Excerpt] Magic can mean many different things, especially for writers. Magic can be an illusion, a sleight of hand designed to trick onlookers into believing the impossible. Or magic can be a supernatural force in a world of harsh reality, a set of beliefs that sits just outside the realms of organized religion and advanced technology. Wizards and demons, Las Vegas entertainers and houngans --they all practice a kind of sorcery. For poets and prose writers, though, magic affords an opportunity for us to stretch the limitations of the physical world in search of new themes, settings, and …

Witness: The Modern Writer As Witness, Amitai Ben-Abba, Bruce Bond, Dakota Canon, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Kate Finegan, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Josef Krebs, Brandon Krieg, Cody Lee, Zining Mok, Aimee Noel, Martha Petersen, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Eman Quotah, Tim Raymond, Maxine Rosaler, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Fabian Severo, Sarah Mollie Silberman, Jean Thompson, Amber Weelerbacon, Amy A. Whitcomb, Caroline Wilkinson, Kristin Winet, Carolyne Wright

Witness Magazine

Editor's Note [Excerpt] The United States, as a society, is on the brink of profound and positive change. Demographically and culturally, things are improving, and the reason is obvious to people who study history: Conflict pushes us to be better, to strive for principled goals. Consider the inspired eco-advocacy of Greta Thunberg. Or the swearing in of most diverse class of lawmakers in history into the 116th Congress. Or billionaire Robert F. Smith’s pledge to pay off every Morehouse College (in Atlanta, Georgia) student’s debt. Indeed, there are many good people helping and great moments happening in spite of a …

The Skinny House, Leo August Jilk

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The title of my thesis is The Skinny House, a phrase which might indicate: 1) The body of a human or other animal, 2) A coffin or grave, and 3) A residence in Mamaroneck, New York built of recycled materials (e.g. railroad ties and a chicken coop) by an African-American carpenter named Nathan T. Seely in 1932. Seely and his brother ran a business that thrived for several years prior to the Great Depression, catering specifically to Southern blacks moving north. While only a few pages of my thesis are directly concerned with the Mamaroneck residence and its social implications, …

Heaven On Their Minds, Rebecca Kate Robison

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Heaven on Their Minds is a novel written from the first-person perspective of teenage

protagonist Melody O’Malley. The plot details Melody’s attempt, along with two close friends, to undermine their conservative Christian theater camp’s summer production of Godspell via the edgier songs and theology of Jesus Christ Superstar. Though ostensibly a satire of the Evangelical Christian community, Melody’s insecurities are the true heart of the novel--her fraught relationship with her best friends, her concerns about her post-high school future, and her ill-advised crush on the most prominent RFC (Robot for Christ) in the camp, a crush that has terrible consequences …

Tearing Up The Tallgrass, Brett Salsbury

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative thesis project is a culmination of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree at UNLV. The thesis—currently titled Tearing up the Tallgrass—was composed entirely during my graduate semesters at UNLV. As a book of poetry, it explores the dynamics of humans in nature, white privilege, objectivity, fact- and myth-making, and artistic practice. Written under the supervision of Claudia Keelan (committee chair) and Donald Revell (committee member), my committee further includes P. Jane Hafen (English) and Pierre Lienard (Anthropology). Their disparate subject and genre interests are meant to diversify the feedback received during this project’s composition. Some …

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

Maps On The Backs Of Our Eyes, Joan Paulette Robinson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A collection of poems related to places in the Mojave Desert and the Las Vegas area or in rural central Michigan. Most poems deal with history and memory and the overlapping nature of experience.

Word~River Literary Review (2013), Ross Talarico, Anne Stark, Susan Evans, Gary Pullman, Andrew Madigan, Christin Taylor, Jerome Melancon, Jennie Evenson, Judith Mansour, Mary Didomenico, Annie Lampman, Maureen Foster, M. V. Montgomery, Rowan Johnson, James Hanley, Michael K. Brantley, Brooks P. Rexroat, Deborah Stark, Rachel Rinehart Johnson, Joan Crooks, Jefferson Navicky, Ed Higgins, Mike Bezemek, Leatha Fields-Carey, Maria Winfield

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and fulltime instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges worldwide. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible.

We’re looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions.

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …

Tiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things, Ashley Mary Siebels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The stories in this collection revolve around a central theme which is expressed by my titleTiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things. All my characters feel guilt about decisions and experiences that haunt their past. In the present, they have come to a crossroads and are trying to decipher between what they were made to do as in vocation and evolution and what they are being made to do by the authorial pressures that loom over them (e.g. bosses, parents, loan officers, prison guards.)

In this way, my thesis pivots on the word made. Made (or to make) has many …

On Our Way Out: And Other Stories, Benjamin Champlin Wright Morris

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

On Our Way Out and other stories is a collection of short fiction banded together with themes of the darkened strange, the missing and the moving, and a sense of place. The characters in these stories try to claw their way to newfound identities, whether it's through a financial transaction, saving a life, or putting a body in the ground. An action with a result is what's needed in these characters' lives. Though, often, the results are not intended. Despite the oddity inherent in these stories and characters, there is something familiar about their plight as ordinary people, something in …

Word~River Literary Review (2012), Beth Mcdonald, John Hill, Micheline Mayor, Heather Duerre Humann, Ryan Leack, Anne Stark, John Baker, Lily I. Mackenzie, Judith Nichols, Meredith Devney, Marylouise Markle, Bill Bozzone, Tara Taylor, Tina Cabrera, Justin E. Kidd, Richard Foss, Kevin P. Keating, Justin P. Burnside, Matthew Swetnam, Sierra Jones-Yu, Kristen Conard, Star Goode, Andrew Madigan, K. W. Taylor, Allison S. Walker, Gary Pullman, Michael Zinkowski, Susan Nyikos

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and fulltime instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges worldwide. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible.

We’re looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions.

Strike Out Across The Shoreless Ocean, Julia Claire Paajanen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

What happens between a reader and a poem is none of my business. The world has always been yours; find your own way.

(1) Every choice is correct.

(2) Everything is true.

(3) What is anything, unless so far as it is enjoyed?

All you have to do is see the course, and when you see it, go.

The Watchmaker Series, Christopher Michael Seelie

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Watchmaker Series celebrates and inquires into time as a biproduct of consciousness and practices the application of this notion in poetry. The series begins with the numeral poems, all of which relate directly to the theoretical and polemical aspects. Along the way, other poems with individual titles are interspersed to reflect or redirect the abstract considerations to more concrete subjects. Gradually, as the series progresses, the interacting and recurring associations meld theory and practice into a compositional whole.

The central notion that contemporary poetry is not a machine made of words but rather, like the watch that gives itself …

To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying And Alone, Kathryn Kruse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Following is a collection of short fiction. The work comes out of the tradition of realism with influences from surrealism and the gothic grotesque.

While most of the work of creation centered around character and voice, several themes emerge in the final product. Death and its perception in American society play central roles in many pieces. Also, the collection explores the experience of intimacy in many types of interpersonal relationships. Several of the pieces focus on the effects environment and location have on individuals and how change of location impacts a character. In conjunction with these many themes, obsession as …

Prelude To Artifact, Jaclyn Costello

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The book is a place, a moral and intellectual site. With any luck, a well-written book calls the real condition of a reader's perception into question. Amid books written for leisure, instruction, or the sake of sheer indulgence, there are those books which can be classified as fated providers of Truth. The function of such books is not mere representation, but rather transformation and transfiguration of the reader's soul--and consequently, the world. As writer/scholar Henry Corbin illustrates:

All the elements [in a work of Symbolic Art] are represented in their real dimension "in the present", in each case perpendicularly to …

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

Moving Through Fear: A Conversation With Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Jennifer L. Fabbi, Amy L. Johnson

Library Faculty Publications

Prior to its release in August 2010, Susan Campbell Bartoletti's newest book, They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (2010), received an incredibly positive response in the form of starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Publisher's Weekly, Horn Book, and Kirkus Reviews. Through her impeccable research and ability to weave a compelling story out of the place "where darkness and light smack up against each other" (Bartoletti & Zusak, 2008), she has made it possible for children and young adults to access and understand the horror of the Third Reich …

Monarchs In Love And Other Stories, Matthew Swetnam

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Monarchs in Love and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories. These stories are structurally and tonally heterogeneous, and it is this heterogeneity of form that emerges as the collection's central concern. Present are stories which borrow other forms' organizational conceits (the almanac entries of "Excerpts from the Dwarf-Monger's Handbook"), stories which arrange themselves around arbitrary organizational conceits (the order of the letters of the alphabet in "26 Characters"), and stories which employ radically traditional formal models ("Blind Boy and Mammoth.") Present are stories narrated in the first-person point-of-view ("For a Walk," "Harem Girls"), stories narrated in the …

Word~River Literary Review (2010), Steve Street, Liam Murray Bell, Jeremy Beatson, Alex M. Frankel, Cyril Dabydeen, Patrick S. Mcginnity, Marco Fernando Navarro, Bruce Wyse, Kc Culver, Jason Mccall, Susan Nyikos, Gina Vallis, Allan Johnston, Harry Brown, Gavin Goodwin, Maureen Foster, Benjamin Smith, Ardis L. Stewart, Kathryn Kerr, Beth Mcdonald, Lollie Ragana, Dorothy Lehman Hoerr, Sara Shumaker, Jennifer Augur, Katherine Pennavaria, Isabella Wai, Robert Schnelle, Anne Stark, Rebecca Mears Duncan

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or …

The Breath We Walk On, Sean Matthew Tribe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

"The Breath We Walk On" is a collection of poems written during my time at UNLV, instructed by the poetic works of George Oppen, DH Lawrence, William Blake, Alice Notley, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and John Donne, as well as, The Greek Anthology, The Bible, and The Gnostic Gospels. The major ideas forming this collection detail issues of self in relation to the world. The poems that were most instructive from these books explore this idea in the best of their works. Other questions addressed are how can human beings live in a way that inflicts minimal harm to the …

Till, Jonathan Peter Moore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

till is a collection of poetry exclusively composed while the poet was a graduate student in the Creative Writing International Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The manuscript includes ekphrastic reflections on William Eggleston's Guide and confronts regionalism, religion and past/present subjectivity.

Circuit Rider, Kimberley Harris Idol

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An historical novel set at the end of the American Civil War focusing on the week between President Lincoln's assassination and John Wilkes Booth's death. The backdrop of the story is comprised of the historical events and political figures that shaped this period in time in America. The plot is also configured around the fictional histories of three young souls, the spirit of a murdered Chinese immigrant girl, and a brother and sister who's home in the Appalachians was destroyed during the war. All three are escaping the devastating consequences of the war and seeking a new start in the …

Wraith Walking, Jason Coley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With this work I wanted to explore the space between memory and imagination: namely, how much imagination fills the fissures that run though our knowledge of our past. The protagonist, Joshua, has been estranged from his family for nine years and learns of his father's death while in China. But without explanation, Joshua is awaken one morning by an old fabrication of his childhood imagination--a character now very real--who accompanies Joshua on his search for a fantastical object.

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing figures and faces in vague stimulus, such as clouds and wood grains. It is commonly believed …