Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Creative Writing
Redwoods, John Joseph Hill
Redwoods, John Joseph Hill
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
To the outside world, Northern California might be trees, granola, hippies, rivers, snowboarders, environmentalists, farming, beaches, diverse wildlife, and wealth. Through a series of loosely interlocking fiction stories, this thesis explores the Northern California below the surface where people work as garbage collectors by day and attend community college by night, where teenage girls scam people in the park for free alcohol, where lovers spend their date night as part of a nude human-chain to protect an old growth redwood from being cut down, and where animal rights activists smoke cigarettes and seek love. Informed by personal experience and a …
Scenes From The Gaijin Life, Ian Rogers
Scenes From The Gaijin Life, Ian Rogers
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Scenes from the Gaijin Life contains eight interconnected stories about foreigners (gaijin in Japanese) living and working as English teachers in urban Japan. It recounts their daily lives and initial struggles, their jobs and their nights out, their formal conversations and their personal ones. The first five stories use a detached, neutral narration that forces readers to interpret sensory details on their own, while the latter three use an omniscient narration that helps readers understand the characters’ interactions with Japan. Though the eight scenes are all different, they’re connected by estrangement, longing, uncertainty, and the characters’ ever-present dissatisfaction with …