Creative Writing Commons^™

The Mercury 2014

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Approach, Sharon L. Stephenson

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

This short nonfiction piece is about my interaction with a woman on the streets of Kiev.

The View From The Front, Kathryn M. Gittings

Student Publications

A creative piece detailing the personal and public history of a small Pennsylvania town, specifically dealing with its crimes and their effect on the collective memory and atmosphere of the area.

Latin-America, Mauricio E. Novoa

Student Publications

A poem describing the Prince George's County and Montgomery County Latin American communities in Maryland.

Shieldmaiden, Allison A. Taylor

Student Publications

"Shieldmaiden" is a poem that examines J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series from a feminist perspective, focusing on the character of Éowyn and her influence on female readers of Tolkien's novels.

Mountain Men, James O. Lincoln

Student Publications

This is a piece of fiction about love, drugs, death, and giants in no particular order. Todd and Heather, a young couple a year or two out of college, are camping in the woods and smoking a good deal of weed when the mountain they've pitched their tent on stands up and begins laying waste to the countryside. While the stoners are trapped on the body of the colossus and forced to work through some relationship issues and possible head trauma, an elderly widower and his dog on the forest floor have their home remodeled by a giant's foot.

Little Soldiers, Macy F. Collins

Student Publications

"Little Soldiers" is a poem that examines the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on a personal level.

Barbie, Alexandra C. Barlowe

Student Publications

This is a piece of poetry about self-imagery and beauty expectations.

Lessons In Tourism, Emily A. Francisco

Student Publications

A section poem in four parts that examines a number of experiences from the perspective of a female traveler, addressing themes such as dislocation of self, the remaking of identity, and the nature of female otherness within the global community.

Love You Much, Kathryn M. Gittings

Student Publications

This poem, written for my senior seminar class, is a personal poem about my grandmother, whom I both love and admire.

Ode To The Eye, Sophia K. Reid

Student Publications

"Ode to the Eye" is written in the form of an ode; whereby, it celebrates and praises the 'eye' for its ability to see the beauty of nature and its surroundings.

All Skate, Sharon L. Stephenson

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

Let me go back. I am in sixth grade, I am eleven. It is a springtime afternoon, I am the only child still wandering the halls of Mary Ida Raines Elementary School. My stepfather and all the other teachers are required to stay until some designated time, hemmed in by state guidelines.

A friend has lent me roller skates. I must have told her that I had never roller skated, never gone to the skating rink for a birthday party on a Saturday afternoon or with my family on a Friday night for a dinner of greasy cheese pizza. And …

Hold The Cracks, Chandra R. Kirkland

Student Publications

My medicine has its own special place in our downstairs bathroom. It rests on a little metal shelf by the shower, standing among the bright orange bottles of multivitamins, B12, vitamin C, and calcium chews. My mother is obsessed with natural healing practices – she slathers on bitter goldenseal for infections, feeds us capsules of powdery white willow bark for headaches, and strange clay mixed with water for stomach aches. My little bottle of pink goo looks lost and confused amidst the hand-written labels and bottles of earth-colored liquids.

I feel guilty taking it, but almost proud at the same …

Loki And Sigyn, Edward M. Lisovicz

Student Publications

Loki and Sigyn discusses love, pain, and dependency in the Norse myth of Loki’s Binding.

Precious Knowledge, Stephen Lin

Student Publications

An essay about my name and its true meaning...

Arizona, Edward M. Lisovicz

Student Publications

Arizona reflects on the beauty of that state through the sestina form.

Red Rose, Sara Lauren Purifoy

Student Publications

Red Rose follows the narrator’s innermost thoughts and feelings of abruptly being immersed into a culture very different from her own. While hiking with her brother, a second year environmental Peace Corps volunteer, to visit the home and garden of a Nicaraguan native, she reflects on the changes she sees in her brother and her inability to communicate in a foreign country. She struggles to overcome her feelings of linguistic isolation while still being fascinated by the culture around her. The piece ends on a lovely image of universal understanding.

Cultured, Cara L. Dochat

Student Publications

This memoir piece comprises three parts, each of which tells a humorous and perhaps slightly embarrassing story of interpersonal upsets the narrator experienced while studying abroad in Europe. Their telling exposes the narrator as a naïve American tourist, despite her conscious attempts to be culturally sensitive and respectful. The intent of this piece was neither to make a political statement about being American in Europe, nor to present yet another trite account “the best four months of [my] life.” While my primary goal was to share these stories for their entertainment value (if self-effacing), my hope was to transform the …

Chains, Marina K. Crouse

Student Publications

Chains is a poem that was inspired by the events surrounding the Steubenville Rape Case, and it is my interpretation of what the victim could have been feeling. The poem was written as a way for me to try to understand how something like this could have happened.

Dandelion Game, Marina K. Crouse

Student Publications

Dandelion Game is a poem inspired by a picture of myself when I played T-ball at age 6 and would spend most of my time picking dandelions in the outfield.

Compulse, Candise W. Henson

Student Publications

A short short story that looks at the details of a strange marriage between a minister with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and his pregnant wife as they attempt to exorcise five girls at a backwoods church camp.

What We Find In The Sea, David E. King

Student Publications

Personal essay in which the author recounts his struggle to come to terms with his lack of grief over his grandfather’s death.

Just Another Girl, Julia D. Marshella

Student Publications

A non-fiction piece that explores the causes of the author’s depression while in college. While she is able to pinpoint specific events that have led to her unhappiness, she realizes that accepting her life in spite of these obstacles will allow her to move forward.

Cold And Calculating, Kathryn E. Slezak

Student Publications

This nonfiction essay investigates the relationship between eye contact and power in different situations. It brings up the idea that animals and humans are less different than often thought to be, and how body language is transcendent. It uses this underlying theme to investigate the author’s changing relationship with her father.

Everything, Hannah M. Frantz

Student Publications

This is a memoir piece that details a tumultuous period in my life between departing for my study abroad experience in Rwanda and Uganda, struggling with what I encountered there, and then attempting to reintegrate into the same life prior to my departure. Specifically, it focuses on my time in northern Uganda, and a women I met in an IDP (internal displaced persons) camp who really made me think about what my role should be both there and at home. This piece explores a number of themes including guilt, blame, and, ultimately, a certain amount of forgiveness.

Abuelito, Margarita C. Delgado

Student Publications

An outsider’s perspective of the Spanish funerary process and the universal grappling with grief.

Pinning The Daffodil And Singing Proudly: An American's Search For Modern Meaning In Ancestral Ties, Elizabeth C. Williams

Student Publications

This paper is a collection of my personal experiences with the Welsh culture, both as a celebration of heritage in America and as a way of life in Wales. Using my family’s ancestral link to Wales as a narrative base, I trace the connections between Wales and America over the past century and look closely at how those ties have changed over time. The piece focuses on five location-based experiences—two in America and three in Wales—that each changed the way I interpret Welsh culture as a fifth-generation Welsh-American. Each travel experience contains characters, places, and interactions that shape my conception …

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 …

Dragica Rajcic: Writing Women And War In The Margins, Laurel Cohen-Pfister

German Studies Faculty Publications

Croatian-born Dragica Rajcic has received several awards for her poetry and short prose works. The author, who writes in German, permanently resides in Switzerland since fleeing war-torn Croatia in 1991. Rajcic's Heimat, she claims, is in language, not any place defined by geographical boundaries (Rajcic, 2009). Often praised for its sharp irony and cutting insight, Rajcic's language artfully deconstructs the reality it circumscribes. Defiant of the linguistic rules of grammar prescribed by High German, Rajcic's voice revels in its foreignness, in its ability to comment and critique precisely because it stands outside the realm of the familiar and expected. [ …

Mallory On Everest, Elizabeth J. Elliott

The Mercury

No abstract provided.