Creative Writing Commons^™

Carpe Noctum, Mark Andrew Turnage

Honors Program Theses

In movies, there are certain conventions that identify a film with a particular genre: a typical western has cowboys; a superhero movie may star a gifted protagonist; or an adventure film could feature exotic locations. Such is also the case with film noir, a movement characterized by storylines featuring criminal elements and their tensions with the police, stylized black-and-white cinematography, and a seedy, nightmarish cityscape. But just as an audience can easily identify genres like these, an author can also demythologize a genre by providing original themes within a familiar setting or inverting those themes that currently exist within the …

Swift's Shifting Satiric Strategy In Gulliver's Travels, Josh Mahoney

Student Writing Awards

According to Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, eighteenth-century English life contained cultural practices and attitudes that he felt needed to be confronted. In an attempt to call attention to these shortcomings, he uses entertaining and fantastical tales in Gulliver's Travels as a medium through which he injects a myriad of satiric techniques filled with subversive discourse that he hopes will vex and disconcert his readers out of their various iniquities and follies. However, Swift’s text presents several challenges to its interpretation, as "an analysis of Gulliver’s Travels can cruelly expose the writer’s intelligence and even character" (Brady 346). …

“Out From Gens Romulum Into The Weal-Kin”: Re-Locating Modernist Poetics In David Jones’ AnathéMata And Basil Bunting’S Briggflatts, Lucie Boukalova

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In the decades following its publication in 1922, T.S. Eliot's Waste Land has become an epitome of the modernist sensibility and situation. This thesis challenges the poem's dominance and dictate over the canon of modernist poetry persisting in the academic discourse and general cultural awareness. Focusing on two post-WWII sequences by Eliot's younger contemporaries, David Jones' s Anathemata (1952) and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966), this study explores alternative models and inspirative sources of the modernist poetic sequence. Through the constant comparison and contrast with Eliot's earlier articulation of the modern historico-cultural circumstance, Jones' and Bunting's specific foci and methods emerge …

A Visitation: A Collection Of Poetry And Fiction, Shelly Criswell

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

A Visitation is a collection of poetry and fiction created from interaction with other people: strangers, loved ones, and those lost. The theme of visitation is explored in four parts: strangers, impressions, acceptance, and departures. These themes are explored and constructed according to the progress of human interaction using the conventions and traditions of each form-free verse, the sonnet, senryu, the cinquain, the pantoum, the villanelle, the sesitna, the triolet, and the short story.

Iowa Multiverse: Stories, Darek James Benesh

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This work of creative writing consists of two stories, each of which concerns characters in closed communities in Iowa: an apartment building and a small town. The stories play with the concepts of interconnectedness, multiple perspectives, linearity, and "emergent meaning"-that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. The first story is comprised of interconnected third-person threads and alternate perspective views. The second story is concerned with multiple first-person vignettes dealing with interpretations of shared experiences. These stories imagine the concept of perspective as a moveable, free-floating "mind camera," able to follow any character at will, viewing …

Up Wau Hollow And Other Stories, Deborah J. Bloom

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The following thesis consists of five short stories. My work has a regional emphasis, with each story set in Iowa. "Up Wau Hollow" tells about Ginny, a girl whose family lives up Wau Hollow in the Loess Hills of southwestern Iowa. "Cabbie" focuses on a cab driver with an active imagination. He works hard at distancing himself from people and from life. "Letting Go" is the story of a mother torn between her maternal instinct and letting go of her daughter. "View from the Flying Wienie" brings together two characters that might not have met if it weren't for the …

Valley Of The Wave, Alissa Dian Burger

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Valley of the Wave is a novella about friendship, loss, and letting go. Anna and Samantha are best friends when Anna commits suicide, and the story follows Sam as she struggles to learn the truth behind her friend's death. This is a project I have been working on for several years, through several forms and formats, and it holds a special place in my heart.

Morbidity: Poetry And Prose, Robert P. Hansen

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The Freudian concept of thanatos, the death instinct, plays a pivotal role in the following collection of fiction and poetry, and also in the nonfictional introductory chapter. In the tradition of Poe, unreliable narrators of questionable morality are used to explore, through fiction, the psychological characteristics of this death instinct, while in the poetry, the subject matter and perspective has been strongly influenced by Ai's work. Each story reflects in some way death, destruction, or criminal activity, and, as might be expected, dead bodies tend to show up in various and sundry places, sometimes where they would be expected, and …

Waiting For Eve, Claire Elizabeth Davis

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The collection of short stories bound here have many threads in common-though they vary in significant ways. The mood of each story is somber, yet poignant. Characters and objects come together to create moments of subtle epiphany, or marry two opposites giving birth to a perspective both new and different. It would seem death, dying, and blood pervade the text when in actuality, the maternal, mothers, and mothering are what signal these stories as a complete collection. There is the mother that wonders if she is still a mother when her children are dead; the teenager who becomes both mother …

Poetry Experiences Across The Fourth-Grade Curriculum, Linda M. Nelson

Graduate Research Papers

The genre of poetry can.foster children's personal-social and thinking-language abilities. Poetry offers much pleasure for children, insight into their lives' and those of others, and models for their expression.

When teachers understand children's poetry preferences and ways to present this genre, it can add another dimension across the curriculum. Poetry experiences reported m this article were presented incidentally and in the social studies program of a fourth-grade classroom. Webbing conducted to identify important concepts in a social studies unit supported the fourth-graders poetry writing. Poetry forms were taught for children to use as structures for their writing.

The Development Of Technical Instructional Materials For Industrial Technology Students, David D. Bradney

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of the research was to develop a usable reference document for graduate students, graduate assistants, undergraduate students, and others who must write technical instructional materials.

Dead Letter, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1987 [Download Entire Issue]

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Dream Series [3 Photographs], Cheryl Roth

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 1 [Threw Away Two Yellowed Roses, Poem], Michael Swanson

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Lake Topelo, New Zealand With Mt. Cook [Photograph], Irving Herman

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 3 [I Sat At Your Desk Today, Poem], Sandy Reno

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 6 [Two Birds, Photograph], Linda Anderson

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Scraps For A Thesis, Craig Vala

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Mothers' Day In The District, Craig Vala

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 4 [Speaking Loudly, Poem], Michael Swanson

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 7 [Shadow Figure, Photograph], Pam Bunkofske

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Bone Shadow I [Photograph], Tim M. Mcaninch

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Reflections On The "In-Between:" A Romanian Expatriate In America, Michael J. Mckinlay

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Extinction [Photograph], Cheryl Roth

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Man Entering Body Bag [Drawing], Wes Yeoman

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 8 [R.I.P] [Photograph], Elizabeth Wheeler

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Untitled 9 [Man Smoking A Cigarette, Photograph], Todd Stenson

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Portrait Of Self [Photograph], Nicholaus Stewart

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

Ode To George Clinton, Pamela Lee

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.

The Puh-Puh-Puh Slap Of The Canoe Paddle Against The Water [Drawing], Nicholaus Stewart

dead letter: uni magazine of the arts

No abstract provided.