Creative Writing Commons^™

My Little Poetic/Prose Book Of Words, Sayings, And Stories In Broken Spanish And A Little Bit Of German / Mi Libro Chiquito De Poética / Prosa De Palabras, Dichos, Y Historias Español Fracturado Y Un Poquetito Alemán, Sharon Ann Lucero

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Jonathan Taylor and Sarah Thompson for the wonderful job they did in providing me with feedback. I took into consideration all their comments. Their comments aligned with Dr. Powers, and I really took a deeper look into my Spanish/English translations on whether I should have them or not. I found a happy medium for all of it. I also went back and looked at the rest of the class’s comments and made sure that I did not miss any of the details that were pointed out to me the first time …

A Muzzle For The Lamb: A Novel, Scott Beggs

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Iron Curtains: A Novel Of Germany, 1989, John G. Dodson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A work of fiction. A story of Love, Treachery, and Freedom on the East German border in 1989. Iron Curtains is a story of four individuals in East and West Germany brought together by an espionage investigation and the revolution in East Germany which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain on November 9, 1989. Their stories ultimately intersect as the year passes and culminate in an escape through a tunnel underneath the East German border. There are four main characters and several secondary characters who help drive the story forward by their interaction with the …

A Writer In Writing, Stephanie Lamas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As a writer and individual, I speak between many roles, presenting myself as “I” but also “her”. Inevitably, there is a gap between “who I am” and “who I am made out to be” that I am not always in control of. Similarly, there is a disparity in intention versus interpretation in writing. Since we don’t exist in a vacuum, I must account for these gaps, acknowledging my individuality while adapting to changing circumstances and needs. As an individual with several disadvantages and particularities, however, my sense of self is unstable and uncertain, reflecting the instability and uncertainty in my …

Our Author Is Crazy, Zani A. Meaders

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis delves into the realm of young adult (YA) fantasy literature, exploring how its meta-narrative elements, fast-paced story beats, and relatable characters can facilitate the acquisition of healthy coping mechanisms among its readers. In the preface, I discuss the importance of providing YA audiences with narratives that not only entertain but also serve as tools for navigating the complexities of adolescence. Drawing upon psychological theories and literary analysis, I argue that meta-awareness in YA fantasy can offer readers a unique perspective on their own struggles and encourage them to develop resilience and coping skills.

The accompanying YA Fantasy story …

Distant Suns: Eva Peng Part I, Daniel Monzingo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Distant Suns: Eva Peng Part I is the first part of a novel-in-progress. Eva Peng Part I covers the first half of one of four nested stories. It was written with a critical preface in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Deal With A Dead Man, Afton Reed

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Value of Fantasy in Exploring Intangibles

Often, a story is sparked because of asking the question, “what if?” which is what happened to create the hydra that is Deal with a Dead Man. Two percolating ideas happened to coincide, and eventually crashed together. Early on, it began when I was introduced to the Russian fairytale of Koschei the Deathless and his fear of death, but inability to enjoy life. Over the past year, my family experienced several deaths, one tragically early, and another of ripe old age. My fascination with the fairytale grew as I watched myself and family …

"Inwombed" Expressions Of Anxiety: Myhth, Humor, And The Absurd, Jonathan Taylor

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Abstract poetry collection.

Conjuring The Moon, Ariella Berkowitz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conjuring The Moon wrestles with the question of why we as women still submit to norms created by men who can't possibly understand our reality. Why should we support ideologies that claim to represent us while actively working against us? Why should we conform to a system that positions us as inessential Other? The speaker of this book aspires to liberate herself from such burdens. Conjuring the Moon encapsulates one woman's search for the feminine divine within herself, her religion, and her environment; but as empowering as this search may be, it remains inextricably connected to her social and historical …

A Million Little Griefs, Justine Hayes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Million Little Griefs is a poetry collection that explores themes of time, place and identity through personal experiences and observations of a young mother living cross-culturally in Malawi, Africa. The book is divided into the three sections, Embrace, Ground, and Release (EGR,) which create a cyclical trajectory that serves as a guide for walking through transitions and new experiences.

Coffee Black & Melancholy Bright, Lisha Elizabeth Mccurry

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A hybrid memoir encompassing a collection of personal essays and poetry that tells a story of depression, grief, and family intersecting in a journey through destruction and healing.

Illuminations, Kristina Michelle Thoman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Abstract: Illumination is the multi-general story of a Jewish family, and their oral traditions. The story will trace the family from just before the biblical exodus, through the holocaust, and follow them to modern day America. The family will face antisemitism at each place in history along the way, losing a child to the pharaoh's cruel decree to slay the male children of the Hebrew slaves, narrowly escaping a death camp in the holocaust, and finally facing growing anti-Jewish hate in America. In the last act of the story, the family will be faced with the question, if you are …

The Homecoming Game, Olivia Dorothy Daras

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Homecoming Game follows 16-year-old Ellie as she discovers that growing up is a lot more difficult than she thought it would be. To her horror, high school has become less about getting good grades and more about your popularity status — or so that’s what her best friend tells her. The growing pains of being a teenager and dealing with a not-so-perfect home life culminate when something utterly insane happens: she’s asked to the Homecoming Dance by someone other than the guy she’s been kind of dating. With her social life and personal life in flux, Ellie has to …

I Lie Awake, Pauline Juliet Ku

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Maggie Kim is a Korean American girl coming of age in Chicago and San Jose before moving to Pasadena, CA to study Biology at Caltech. Her struggles with her own sexuality, immediate family, growing up in an abusive church, traumatic memories and hallucinations and delusions make for a riveting read that validates her personal experience through trauma, stigma, and mental illness in the first-person point of view.

Incesante, Claudia Viridiana Flores Ramirez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

PREFACIO CRÃ?TICO

Manuscrito

Incesante, es un proyecto que a lo largo de tres años pasó de ser un concepto a un manuscrito. La idea surgió a finales de febrero de 2020, justo antes de que la variante SARS-Cov-2, mejor conocida como COVID-19, pusiera al mundo en pausa. El 9 de febrero de ese año, el caso de feminicidio de la joven Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, conmocionó a México debido a la brutalidad de su asesinato. Ingrid de 25 años al momento de su muerte, no solo fue asesinada a manos de su pareja sentimental, sino que fue desollada y destazada con …

Tabby Canyon, Jamie Rae Crowley Meyer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Critical Preface1.1 Scope

In Native American traditions, dreams are a significant part of their culture. They are believed to help one connect or communicate with the spiritual world. This ability is not limited to warriors or medicine men, anyone may contribute to the spiritual knowledge of the tribe. Many nations seek visions at a young age, and children are asked about their dreams. Each tribe across the country has a different way they may interpret the dreams. Typically, dreams often have a metaphorical/symbolic, literal, or prophetic meaning.

Whereas, in many non-indigenous cultures, individuals see dreams as something to be forgotten, …

Stray Bullets, Jesse Hanna

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Screenplay

She Poses On A Wailing Stage, Kara Marie Hollowell

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

She Poses on a Wailing Stage is a work of autofiction that is part epistolary and part bildungsroman. The main protagonist Charlotte is for me a vessel to channel my thoughts on the aftermath of an abusive relationship I found myself trapped. She Poses on a Wailing Stage is a story that, at its core, is about a woman overcoming the negative effects of loneliness and becoming an active agent in her escape with the help of a support system to obtain a more fulfilling and truthful life. My goal of this novel is to challenge the perception of abused …

Remnants: The Family Archive As A Foundation Of Historical Fiction The Match, Melisa A. Spencer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This work addresses the role of the family archive and how it serves as a basis for historical fiction.

A Screenplay With Critical Preface: 5150 Tarot Canyon, Jacob B. Phillips

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

5150 Tarot Canyon—a screenplay/dreamplay—anonymous twenty something, X, has left a deadend job, spent savings, and gone, in a last-ditch effort to follow a dream, to art school (in the middle of the desert and a pandemic) but struggles to cope once there with high stress and heavy deadlines. Exhaustion, fear, and loneliness begin to creep in—and, along with them, a stranger, a Walking Sam (possibly X’s double) always at a distance, but never far away. X can’t be sure, but it’s almost like someone’s started stalking them. X tries to ignore it, tries to focus, to grow—but things aren’t coming …

The Drive, Marisol Adame

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Drive is a hybrid-poetry collection containing lyric poems, as well as fiction and non-fiction prose pieces, that explores the impact of different types of misogyny and violence against women, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of digital violence. This collection presents different voices and stories that examine themes of violence against the female body.

A Life Of Work, David Labounty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Life of Work is an examination of workplace nonfiction where work is, for good or bad, a defining moment in a personâ??s life. This collection of creative nonfiction essays about the jobs that have shaped me was created to encourage people to tell their own tales. There is nothing groundbreaking about the work I have done (and continue to do); however, by sharing my experiences, I hope to spark other workplace remembrances, be they stories about slogging away for fifty years on one job or having multiple rewarding careers. The work we do has an enormous impact on the …

Shades Of Blue, Allison D. Thomas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

"Shades of Blue" is a confessional narrative that explores the ways in which our lives can be covered in a tinge of color. The experiences that shaped this collection are marked by the calm powder blues and rough midnight blues that change the way we see and think about the world. This narrative work took on a confessional voice because of the autobiographical nature of confessional poetry. Like other confessional collections this work is an exploration of the self and the truth of life. This collection was constructed by employing various poetic devices and forms. Several poems take on correspondent …

Encampment, Deborah Michelle Hutson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Novella about a German Jew, Frederic, who escapes Nazi Germany on the SS Columbus by concealing his religion after the arrest of his mother by the Gestapo. After the Columbus is torpedoed by the British while trying to run a blockade, he eventually ends up at the Fort Stanton German Internment Camp in New Mexico. There he falls in love with Elizabeth, a Mexican American nurse at the tuberculosis hospital, who is also dealing with grief and questioning her place in the world after losing both of her parents. The bombing of Pearl Harbor forces Frederic to deal with tightened …

Shooting Scars: A True Story (More Or Less), Trent C. Jonas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When putting together this collection, it made sense to me to view it as a carnival, or a variety show, in which each flight of fancy - or vignette - is accompanied by a kernel of truth, like a ringmaster who introduces a contortionist, or a magician, or a carful of clowns. Because of the "holes in [my] family history" (Sikelianos), this work is necessarily autofiction, but I wanted to ground it firmly in reality so as to create a blend of truth and fiction that is imperceptible to readers, who would likely see it as memoir. I don't mind …

Vatra: A Poetic Memoir, Ashley Nichole Stevens

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When I initially began researching for and composing this collection, the idea I had in mind was a simple one: tell my great grandfather's story, on many Lemko-American immigrants lived in the early 1900s. However, it took several months for me to realize this was not the complete story. It required refinement. While I had always felt a significant connection to this particular side of my family, I could never articulate why. The genealogical and historical research I conducted spoke for me. My great grandfather survived numerous traumas associated with being an ethnic minority in his homeland as well as …

Heart Of Golde, Joely Bowman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Heart of Golde is a female coming-of-age story centered around Jyn Taryn, who lost her mother and her early memories in a tragic car accident 15 years before the story begins. She struggles with feeling at "home" anywhere in the world. When she discovers her mother's name written in an old poetry book, her curiosities lead her to the home of Edward Golde, her father. While there, she is forced to come face to face with the past she never thought she would be able to remember. Room by room, memory by memory, Jyn puts the pieces of her past …

An Imaginary Man, Benjamin Bouvet-Boisclair

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Novella about an American expat nicknamed Tintin and his search for intimacy in all the wrong places. While teaching English in South West France, Tintin struggles to confront his mother tongue, the deaths of his grandfather and great-grandfather, and the end of his long-distance relationship with Ela. Brushes with violence, French history, and other lonely, wayward men, frame an exploration of masculinity, desire, and loss.

Indumentaria Contra La Mujer, Ines Gallo De Urioste

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A translation of Anne Boyer's Garments Against Women.

La Tumba Vací­A, Yoshimar Gerardo Maceda

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El presente proyecto consta de una serie de cuentos cuya narración principal son los crímenes cometidos en torno a una serie de eventos que ocurren en un lugar llamado La Cuadrilla. Cuando tuve la idea de comenzar a escribir estas historias, quería que cada personaje tuviera su momento narrativo por separado, aunque estuvieran ligados al mismo lugar. Relatos sin protagonistas, donde el asunto de los crímenes y las venganzas fuera el primer tema a explorar. Sin embargo, a medida que la idea se fue desarrollando en el manuscrito, las piezas comenzaron a tomar otra forma y me di cuenta de …