Creative Writing | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

For my honors research project, I investigated the techniques of established contemporary writers, took a specific look at their different ways of framing a story through the guise of recollected memory, and used their conventions and mechanisms to develop my own original work. I also studied the elements of noir, speculative, and realistic fiction, as those are the genres that I am primarily interested in. In the process, I examined my old workshop material, with revision in mind, and selected the pieces with the most potential for improvement. I then developed and polished these into two short works of fiction …

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Poison In Pink, Sydney V. Cook Jan 2017

Poison In Pink, Sydney V. Cook

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Humans slather, spray, mist, and cleanse their bodies with personal care products like lotion, hairspray, cologne, and shampoo every day. Our cupboards are stocked full of them, but few of us understand what is in those jars and bottles. We trust that if it’s on the shelf at the store, it’s safe. However, this is not always the case, and many personal care products contain chemicals that are harmful to human and environmental health.

My multi-disciplinary Environmental Studies thesis project combines evidenced-based research, interviews, nonfiction narrative, and science communication to create part of a book manuscript intended to educate general …

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Neon Is Trying To Tell You Something, Grace Arenas Jan 2017

Neon Is Trying To Tell You Something, Grace Arenas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The following is the manuscript of my poetry collection, “Neon is Trying to Tell You Something.” This manuscript represents my development of poetic voice and style over the course of the past two years. In these poems, images accrue and take on new meaning, while still retaining echoes of their original connotations. This is how the speaker’s mind makes sense of things: evolutionarily. As a collection, these poems do not attempt to world-build or use their foreign landscapes as the driving force of symbol, but rather they use these landscapes as the essential terminology for their logic puzzles, their syllogistic …

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The Keeping House, Anna J. Blackburn Jan 2017

The Keeping House, Anna J. Blackburn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This collection of poems and short prose is a meditation on questions of boundary and perception. The Keeping House is locus of loss and entrapment, resistance and desire. It embodies the irresistible gravity of the self—both its material and psychical spaces. The speaker grapples with the instability of a world where “shrouds become things, and things become shrouds.” Even knowledge is unreliable. These poems enact a quest for meaning through internal and external landscapes.

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Raise Up Lakefog, Dive, Joseph N. Duke Jan 2017

Raise Up Lakefog, Dive, Joseph N. Duke

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

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Ground Fires: Essays On Land And Scouting, Matthew R. Hart Jan 2017

Ground Fires: Essays On Land And Scouting, Matthew R. Hart

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Ground Fires is a collection of creative nonfiction probing the social and environmental complexities that marked the narrator’s long membership in the Boy Scouts of America. I grew up a Scout, part of a quirky, adventurous troop in a New England college town. After earning Eagle and graduating high school, I moved west, working for seven summers and a few more seasons at Philmont Scout Ranch in northern New Mexico. I led backpacking trips through the mountains and high desert, teaching teenagers about land I knew and loved, land that was changing fast. From bears to wildfire to challenging politics, …

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Body Language, Josh English Oct 2016