Creative Writing Commons^™

All Aboard The Succulent Wave, Oscar William Oswald

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

All Aboard the Succulent Wave is a collection of poems written over the past three years. It is the product of major shifts in my faith and trust in language. The manuscript is divided into three parts: "The Staccato Monsoon," "Today / / / A Poetics," and "Elliptics." Each of these sections concerns a particular theme about my language, my god, and my soul.

I wrote many poems that used language to find god. In these poems, those designated by "/ / / A Poetics," I write about what is holy to me in the moment and about how the …

Wobble, Said The Hedgehog, Mary Elder

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis is called "Wobble, Said the Hedgehog." However, there are also things in it that are neither hedgehogs nor wobbly. These include, but are not limited to, the body, kingship, Catholicism, cats, mice, betrayal between friends, jam, alcohol, badgers, love and the military. There is less actual discussion of sex than one might expect. For the purposes of describing my project as an assembled whole, however, this prospectus will attempt to transcend "badgers" as a summary. (This is not to say that "badgers" isn't a useful signifier. It should be referred to almost as often as "Catholicism.")

II. Image …

Love Is Just A Word For The Last Body I'D Like To Keep Vigil Over, Robert Jagger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Love is Just a Word for the Last Body I'd Like to Keep Vigil Over is a collection of poetry that was composed during my time spent at UNLV. Comprised mostly of prose poems, it was heavily influenced by the works of Richard Hugo, Robert Coover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and several French poets who are often categorized as being members of either the Symbolist or Decadent movement. At its best, the collection attempts to invoke a sense of Joseph Cornell's boxes--odd juxtapositions of everyday items and language that create new and uncertain circumstances. Unlike Cornell's boxes, however, the poems aren't …

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 …

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 …

A Turkish Dictionary, Andrew Wessels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The poems in this manuscript, A Turkish Dictionary, probe a number of related issues: What is the relationship between a word and its object? What is the connection between meaning in two different languages? How do we live in a city overwhelmed with history? What is necessary? How do we accept knowing that we cannot know? These and other questions constitute the investigative purpose of the manuscript as specifically and actively an exploration of the questions rather than an argument for a final, singular answer. Structurally, the manuscript uses two poetic forms: dictionary poems and prosaic poems. The dictionary poems …

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.