Creative Writing Commons^™

Lost Children: A Postmodern Novella, Seyedeh Mania Mohseni

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Lost Children" is a novella written based on common rules of the modern and postmodern detective fiction and how those rules can be replaced by alternatives.

Caelum, Alexandra Requena

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Caelum is a story about the hidden struggles of mental health told in an alternating chapter format that explores the journey of two characters: an angel, Tacenda, who seeks revenge on Mr. Mystical -an unloving God- and Dorian, a human, who is trying to find his place in life. The two

experience parallel situations where they explore their emotions and reactions to life while Mr. Mystical makes everything much more complicated. Tacenda, however, has other plans, and seeks Dorian for help defeating those who have turned against him, causing his demise. As the story progresses and alternates between Tacenda’s quest …

The Words. Or Holes. Or Both: Writing As An Integrative Methodology For Trauma, Daniel A. Castle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to identify methods authors have used to integrate their traumatic experiences. My work will analyze the genre of War Literature and specific authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Kurt Vonnegut to explore the way writers describe the trauma of combat. Using insights from neuroscience and psychology, I will expand the field of Cognitive Literary Studies from a focus on the reader to a focus on the writer by linking neurological functions with narrative tools.

Hattie: A Twin Territories Matriarch, Madison P. Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Hattie: A Twin Territories Matriarch” is a creative novel of vignettes in the vein of historical fiction set at the turn of the 20th century in Oklahoma/Indian Territory exploring the complexities of love and betrayal through generations of one Muscogee family as they battle the legal and personal implications of white-settler encroachment. With societal criticisms and Indigenous methodologies, this thesis aims to explore land ownership, resource allocation, and the complex governance of Oklahoma tribal reservations. The research of this novel focuses on primary documents from National Archive probate records, Dawes Commission enrollments, newspapers, and a familial collection of photographs, letters, …

They're Coming For Us: A Novel, Sarah Walker Caron

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

They’re Coming for Us is a feminist dystopian novel told in a non-linear format that explores an alternate timeline in which a series of mass shootings targeting women, queer and nonbinary people and allies have led to the removal of civil rights for women in the United States. Five years later, women and others who don’t fit the heterosexual male paradigm remain excluded from the workforce, education, driving and other basic rights. But an underground network is working to right the country and restore constitutional rights. As the story unfolds forward and backward, the reader is left to confront how …

“The Urgent Necessity For More Original Creative Works By Transgender And Gender Expansive Artists" Is Not The Title Of My Thesis., Alicia Fireel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a mix of personal reflection, academic research, and an examination of The Girl Crazy Queer and Other Fairy Tales, a play I wrote and performed in October of 2023, co-produced by The University of Louisville’s Department of Theatre Arts and Pandora Productions, a Louisville-based theatre company dedicated to Queer theatre. This thesis and the play mirror each other; both contemplate Queer experiences, Queer histories, Queer trauma, and Queer stories. In the thesis I accomplish this through examining four subjects: myself, my play, the connection between modes of storytelling and aspects of transgender Queerness, and the perils that …

The Red Deeps: A Retelling Of George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss., Emily Denton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The culminating project toward my Ph.D. in Humanities under the Public Arts and Letters track is a combination of creative and scholarly work composed of two parts: a retelling of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss and a critical introduction outlining the creative concerns to the project. The novel, The Red Deeps, reimagines The Mill on the Floss in the recent past—during the late 1980s in the Copper Basin, the former copper mines in Eastern Tennessee. The critical preface draws broader categories of adaptation, ecocriticism, and climate fiction and incorporates theorists from new southern and Appalachian studies …

Writing Young Adult Fiction: Reflections On Narration And Theme In Young Adult Literature, Kimberly Davidson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to Young Adult Library Services, “Young Adult Literature is a genre that is separate from Children's Literature. It emerged in the twentieth century when teenagers became a powerful force of the economy in the 1930s and gained prominence in the sixties.” Various sources list common elements that make YA literature a distinct category. 1) YA books appeal to the interests of readers from ages twelve to eighteen. 2) YA books typically explore a teenage character’s entry into an unfamiliar “world.” 3) YA books usually feature a protagonist’s self-reflection on events that influence their forays into the adult world. 4) …

A Frayed Edge: A Qualitative And Poetic Inquiry Analysis Of White Antiracist Protest In 2020, Emily Katt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This multiphasic study explored the narratives of five first-time Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating during the historic confluence of conflicts in 2020 America. After positioning the liminal 2020 circumstances within an antiracist research lens, the author analyzed, first through grounded theory and then secondarily through poetic inquiry, how these five participants described their protest experiences. The grounded theory phase yielded an overarching theory that first-time protestors experienced a dual process of unsuturing and of calling-out, with three subthemes categorized within each of these two processes. The author moved into analysis with the poetic inquiry phase, crafting poems guided by six …

Cry Wolf, Olivia Claire Acosta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cry Wolf is a confessional poetry collection told in three sections about at-work stalking. This collection also alludes to the Brothers Grimm fairytale, The Little Red Riding Hood. The sections of Cry Wolf include “The Wolf,” which introduces the speaker’s discovery of work-related stalking. The second section, entitled “The Fur,” is where the speaker empowers themselves to file a Title IX report about this dilemma, and Red cloaks herself in the wolf’s skin. The final portion of the collection, entitled “Red’s Home,” gives the audience a view of the speaker's self-love as they maintain it through trauma. This section also …

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. …

The Genuine Alacrity Of Things, Evelyn Hampton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Genuine Alacrity of Things” is a short story collection. Themes include personal identity, the Anthropocene, grief, family, and relationships. The story collection is introduced by a critical introduction.

Middle American Gothic, Jordan Heisler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though Gothicism has evolved since its inception in the eighteenth century, its most common tropes—such as deteriorating settings, supernatural figures, and foreboding atmospheres—have remained integral to the genre. While, the following fictional collection, Middle American Gothic, draws inspiration from these familiar Gothic tropes, it substitutes the grandeur of crumbling castles, monasteries, and sprawling estates for a common town within the rural Midwest. Similarly, while the collection nods to the existence of supernatural beings, none of its stories actually rely on anything otherworldly as a source of terror. Its setting, while not traditionally Gothic, features a series of decaying, outdated homes …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

Subliminal, Eric Arnold

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Subliminal is a novel which attempts to encompass literary, science fiction, and thriller genres by centering on two male narrators who portray similar but different thought processes and means with which to move through their respective social contexts. The novel centers on the dueling perspectives of Neiko Plemons and David Tremble, ex-convict and scientific researcher, as both proceed along a path of discovery involving an underground criminal enterprise. The juxtaposition of their voices is intended to highlight the similarities in discursive consciousness across class, occupation, and level of education. The novel is fundamentally an exploration of many such ideas which …

Explosive Family Dinners: Bipolar Disorder, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy & Me Critical Afterword Convulsive Family Dynamics: When Mental And Neurological Disabilities Entangle And Isolate., Elizabeth Lane Glass

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a memoir that is about my nuclear family. The themes within the memoir itself include my father’s bipolar disorder, my temporal lobe epilepsy, and how volatile the combination was as I grew up, but also how loving my family was, despite all the issues. It also looks at the ramifications of having temporal lobe epilepsy, growing up queer (bi+) in a time when being queer at all was not accepted and being bi+ was not understood, and the issues I’ve had with my sisters, which were caused in part by my father The memoir is accompanied by …

And Drop, Lydia Balestra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a thesis in poetry and poetics. The goal of the thesis was to develop a sense of my own poetics which could be articulated in a critical introduction and to put these poetics into practice by using them to create a collection of poetry. Through my exploration of past poets’s poetics for the critical introduction I was able to gain an understanding of several ways to approach writing poetry and develop my own methods based on the poetics from others that resonated with me. My critical introduction emulates Rosmarie Waldrop’s essay “Thinking of Follows” through the …

A Home For Friendless Women With Critical Essay "But What Was She Wearing?", Kelly E. Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a historical novel accompanied by a critical lyric essay. Through a combination of scholarly research and creative activity, the novel reimagines the lives of the women who lived as inmates and administrators in the Home for Friendless Women, a charity home that operated in Louisville in the late nineteenth century. The critical essay draws from my interdisciplinary background to combine personal experiences, archival and scholarly research, and literary analysis to connect the U.S. dress reform movement in the 1850s, and its failure to change public perception about what was acceptable attire for middle and upper class women, …

The Portal Of Orion, Lauren Elizabeth Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Portal of Orionis a science fiction novel that centers on Rigel Barnard, a novice inventor who has been in self-isolation for years after a failed college presentation caused his friend and work partner, Jericho Slate, to be transported into another universe. Rigel is currently trying to bring his friend back by recreating the device that went awry and sent Jericho into an unknown dimension. Along the way, Rigel teams up with Archer, a mysterious stranger he finds floating in space, and Lyra, a teenage girl with an interest in magical studies.They aim to help him as much as …

Mother/God, Sarah Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My collection, Mother/God, attempts to look at my own growing up and how it has affected my beliefs and self in the presence, while also looking at the choices my mother made in raising me. The central thread throughout the collection is my relationship with my mother and the love that's endured those hardships. It explores my mother's past up until the hardest parts of motherhood in section one, The Mother. Then, section two titled The Daughter focuses on my own rebellion of how I was raised and an exploration of existentialism that was, in a lot of ways, …

Hot Fruit, Erinrose Mager

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The creative component of this dissertation is a collection of short prose that investigates the longing for the self, the longing for another, and the longing for connection between the self and another during periods of mourning and transition. Hot Fruit, though vocally, stylistically, and perspectivally fragmented, finds its unification through attention to the minute, the quotidian, and the domestic. It likewise attends to small actions performed as acts of care, empathy, and discovery, foregrounding the minor exchange or the minor memory as a means of understanding. Transracial adoptee and Asian American identities; food, ritual, and home; potentiality and …

Lawthy: Holding Flowers, Bailey Pittenger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The research and design of this dissertation involves four parts: 1) Bridges to Care Work in the Sick Room, an essay that begins bridges across care genealogies, foundational literature on nursing and sick rooms, and applications of care work and care logic via local protest, civic, and community engagements; 2) “Writing Lawthy,” which is a process-based approach to literary and social sciences research on “writing on memory loss” and dementia narratives that center personhood and autonomy; 3) Lawthy: Holding Flowers, a fragmented novel created by first-hand accounts of caregiving, a 1981 journal, and fiction; and 4) appendices of local city …

Teachers Who Collaborate With A Professional Writing Organization: The Importance Of Critical Stance, Paul A. Viskanta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A wide body of research finds teacher preparation programs fail to address the complexity of writing instruction, especially for secondary English-language Arts teachers (Coker & Lewis, 2008; Graham, 2019; Wahleithner, 2018). Beliefs and knowledge about writing determine how teachers approach pedagogical practices (McCarthey & Mkhize, 2013). One of many contextualized social literacy practices, writing is always ideological (Gee, 2105; Moje & Lewis, 2007). Competing research philosophies complicate development of teachers' practices and impedes research dissemination (Coker & Lewis, 2008; Hillocks, 2008; National Writing Project & Nagin, 2006). Structures informing school-based writing limit the types of writing practices (Bazerman, 2016). Using …

As Close As I Can Get To It, Kathryn Leland Henricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems.

The Undoing, Mason Wray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems.

Philophilia, Andy Sia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems.

Dragon On A Dog Chain, Stephen M. Hundley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Fish lives on a barrier island of Georgia made locally famous by the atomic bomb that was dropped there by accident. He is in the care of two men, Reef and Nutzo, and the matriarch of the group, Whistle, who leads glass-bottom boat tours of the bomb and has also raised a tiger, Sugar.

Less The Light, Michael Martella

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of poetry.

Kind King Or Tyrannical Ruler? An Analysis Of Hilary Mantel’S Henry Viii In Wolf Hall And Bringing Up The Bodies, Amanda S. Nicholson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) served as King of England from 1509 until his death in 1547. A melancholic character, Henry was known for his many marriages, his temper, his bouts of tyranny, and his break with the Catholic Church. Most authors, even those writing contemporary accounts, portray Henry as a villain. Hilary Mantel paints Henry differently. In Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies, the King is as he has always been; argumentative, sardonic, and excessive. However, Mantel chooses to augment these parts of his character with some of his better traits, giving the …

A Poetic Ethnodrama: Discussing The Impact Of The Pressure To Publish On Creative Writers' Production, Abby N. Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the presence of the pressure to publish while in college as an undergraduate or graduate student, and the impact that pressure has on students’ ability to produce creative work. After interviewing participants, the researcher created an ethnodrama to best represent participants’ emotions and unique experiences with publishing while in school. An examination of the literature reveals that master’s-level students are often overlooked in scholarly research on the subject of publishing. This study uses a qualitative research method to identify key emotional experiences from students at the master’s and undergraduate level in the hopes of providing a platform …