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Full-Text Articles in Creative Writing
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
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 …
The Portal Of Orion, Lauren Elizabeth Owens
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 …
Hot Fruit, Erinrose Mager
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 …
A Poetic Ethnodrama: Discussing The Impact Of The Pressure To Publish On Creative Writers' Production, Abby N. Lewis
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 …
Poetically Composed, Educationally Imposed: Exploring Imagination And Poetics In Curriculum—A Memoir, Whitney J. Presnal
Poetically Composed, Educationally Imposed: Exploring Imagination And Poetics In Curriculum—A Memoir, Whitney J. Presnal
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Through the use of memoir, my work centers on how poetry is situated within public education curriculum. I explore the curricular context of poetry through the lenses of my lived experiences in early childhood, as a K-12 student, and as an early career classroom teacher. My dissertation draws upon a wide array of literature, honing in on the poetic perspectives of philosophers (Aristotle, 1996; Heidegger, 1947 & 1971/2013; Plato, 1955/2007), poets (Hall, 2003; Eliot, 1920 & 2009), and curriculum theorists (Leggo, 1997 & 2018; Pinar, 1994; Sameshima, 2007). The foundation of my work is drawn from my own circular experiences, …
Life Sucks: Classifying Transgressive Fiction, Jena Christianson
Life Sucks: Classifying Transgressive Fiction, Jena Christianson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the genre of transgressive fiction and locates my own creative work within this genre. Los Angeles Times writer Michael Silverblatt popularized the term transgressive fiction in 1993 and associates authors such as Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Roland Barthes, Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Foucault, William Gass, Jean Genet, and William Burroughs with the genre; however, the definition of transgressive fiction remains elusive. Therefore, in my first chapter, I analyze three transgressive novels—Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and Tony Tullamuthe’s Private Citizens. My second chapter consists of selections from my creative work, a transgressive novel …
Retellings : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays., Jennifer Kiefer
Retellings : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays., Jennifer Kiefer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is a collection of nonfiction essays, extending both into the realms of journalism as well as into more traditional creative nonfiction essays. While each piece is based in true stories, each piece has its own style. As such, this collection is an exploration of different forms of and takes on the nonfiction essay. It is divided into four chapters, one for each essay. The first half encompasses journalistic pieces previously published in Louisville Magazine, one in the August 2016 issue and one in the February 2017 issue. The first piece is a literal retelling of three medical stories, …
The Lightbringer: A Novel, Brett L. Butler
The Lightbringer: A Novel, Brett L. Butler
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Lightbringer is about a collision of two worlds: the world of a contemporary South Florida town and the magical world of Zariel, bringing with it the universal threat of the Terra. Childhood friends, Breck and Tom, are thrown into the middle of an ancient conflict between the Terra—a collection of alien races that have been transformed by darkness—and the forces of good. After an encounter with a magical pool of golden water, the boys must learn to use their new abilities to protect against the growing Terranox army. In the midst of their struggle, however, a mysterious companion—the Lightbringer, …
This Sleep Of Reason., Brit Thompson
This Sleep Of Reason., Brit Thompson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This creative thesis encompasses two features: 1) a critical component that contextualizes and supports the second component, 2) a short Southern Gothic novella. Critical analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and discourse about the genre illustrate where inspiration was drawn, and how the project’s creative component contributes to this genre. The project explores anxieties of displacement, isolation, and a stuck-in-the-past-temporality, as shown through the vessel of characters’ houses. The novella is decentralized in form and point-of-view—fragmentary excerpts of technological communications are utilized to illustrate how the protagonist’s problems are literally always on hand. The project argues that because the south remains …
Road Stories, Louis Mindar
Road Stories, Louis Mindar
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Road Stories is a collection of three novellas that explore the pull, allure, sanctuary, serendipity, and adventure of life on the open road. The novellas examine how for some, the road holds the promise of a new day, an improved life, a better opportunity, or a deeper love; while for others, it is nothing more than an assortment of jumbled blue lines on a map. In Tierra del Fuego, a man takes to the road to figure out how to deal with the grief and sense of betrayal he feels following the death of his wife. Lake of the Falls …
What We Hide, Ashley Bowcott
What We Hide, Ashley Bowcott
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
What We Hide is a collection of memoir essays that explores the themes of mystery and deception in personal relationships, specifically within familial and romantic ones. Though the essays in the collection explore the decades from early in the narrator's childhood through her move to Florida for graduate school, the narrator's keen discernment of the world around her and her curiosity for what experiences shape a person's character remain constant. Many essays explore the extent of her father's alcoholism and the consequences of it, as well as the narrator's obsession over the possible sources of his addictions. Other essays examine …
Composing A Literary Adoption Memoir And Self Through Creative Nonfiction Memoir Writing, Jamie K. Nagy
Composing A Literary Adoption Memoir And Self Through Creative Nonfiction Memoir Writing, Jamie K. Nagy
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Adoption writings span across various forms, such as fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry, theatre, and scholarly fields of study. While many of these adoption writings speak to the complexities of adoption, the general public still tends to see adoption “such a beautiful thing” to do—as the best plan for the child, a noble act, a selfless decision, and a solution to a long-standing social issue. This thesis explores the “literary adoption memoir”—artful writings about real life happenings; my contribution to this genre addresses the complexities of the closed adoption era, transnational/transracial adoption, and parenting an adoptee as an adult adoptee. For …
These Romantic Dreams In Our Heads, Sean Ironman
These Romantic Dreams In Our Heads, Sean Ironman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
These Romantic Dreams in Our Heads is a collection of linked essays that study how key relationships in the narrator's life intersect. The essays attempt to show the complicated nature of relationships and how multiple lives are affected by one's decisions. Taking place over two years, the relationships in focus involve the narrator's parents, his girlfriend, and his dog. The essays deal with themes of manhood, parenthood, gender roles, religion, and memory. The characters deal with discovering their limitations and searching for a balance between responsibility for others and responsibility for their own lives.
Last Kind Word, Dianne Richardson
Last Kind Word, Dianne Richardson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Last Kind Word is a novel that explores the ways people seek control and power in the face of the unknowable. Set in the fictional town of Thorpe, South Carolina, the story follows four main characters-Donna Neese, Melissa Burnside, Anthony Washington, and Jill McManus-struggling in the aftermath of biracial teenager Micah Burnside's disappearance. They search for a replacement for the lost connection to Micah and for a sense of control at a time when their lives seem to lack it, when other forces, be they people or circumstances or spirits, hold power over them. In the midst of this, the …
Mercury, Adrienne Gaines
Mercury, Adrienne Gaines
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Mercury is a collection of short stories based in the fictional town of Mercury, Georgia. Set over the course of several decades, the stories trace the events that changed individuals, families, and a whole community for decades. Loosely based on the author’s real-life family history, the stories, both humorous and heartbreaking, show characters caught between the past and the present and searching for a way forward. A girl who makes friends with a ghost, a woman who can’t help but run from crying babies, a man forced to face the town’s darkest side—these and other characters respond in surprising ways …
Drops Of Light In The Dark, April Urban
Drops Of Light In The Dark, April Urban
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The short stories in this collection focus on young individuals’, especially women’s, experience and development as they navigate personal relationships and search for a place in the world. Both longer stories and flash fiction are included, and stories are told in past and present tense, and from first, second, and third person point of view. However, the narration of all of these stories stays close to the characters’ points of view, inhabiting their visceral experience. These stories take place in a variety of settings, including a beachside motel, college campuses, bars, and offices. All of these characters, though, struggle with …
Toward The Red Shore, Gary Bomhoff
Toward The Red Shore, Gary Bomhoff
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A fictional novel utilizing third person limited narration from the perspective of the primary character, Ilya Kollide, who narrates the story as though it were happening in his head as it occurred, with frequent embellishments. He has come to live near an old mansion on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, named Neimasaurus, to find an antiquated, dusty world of faded aristocracy. Temporarily orphaned at the age sixteen by the recent death of his parents, he has traveled four thousand miles to live with his last living relative, an uncle named Demetri, whom he has never met. The year is 1990, only this …
Eruv, Eryn Green
Eruv, Eryn Green
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Eruv is a collection of poems exploring the interstices between the Judaic concept of Eruvin and the poetic traditions of dictation, field and personist poetics. The poems that represent the body of this work are explorations of the ways in which poetry empties and fills a space, and what might be implied for our shared conceptions of ‘Home’ and ‘Self’ by these tendencies.
Renovations And Other Stories, Amanda Rene Lager
Renovations And Other Stories, Amanda Rene Lager
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Renovations and Other Stories is a linked collection of ten fiction stories that examines the ways by which women renew or restore themselves. The collection is set in the imaginary city of St. Clair, South Carolina, a town balancing historical accuracy with the sensational tourist industry; Carolinians who trace their ancestries back to the American Revolution with suburban newcomers; and the notion of cherishing the past with moving forward. Many of the characters struggle with identity, whether it is regional or feminine individuality. The protagonists must challenge self-image when faced with situations that make them reconsider their places in their …
Stuffmobile: A Novella, Ted Greenberg
Stuffmobile: A Novella, Ted Greenberg
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The leitmotif of Stuffmobile, a modern day Florida-based novella, is that of relational healing: a son with his father, ex-lovers with one another, and, even more challenging perhaps, a son making peace with his dead mother. New beginnings are explored, both as resurrection of long dead feelings and as starting afresh after loss. A husband finds distraction in a covert project after his wife’s death, so much so that his preoccupied isolation worries his two adult children. The son comes to investigate, and his malfunctioning car leads to a reunion and the beginnings of reconciliation. Hours later, an accident nearly …
Trade Secrets, Rachel Kolman
Trade Secrets, Rachel Kolman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Trade Secrets is a collection of fourteen short stories that explores characters falling in and out of relationships and coping in unusual and even comedic ways. These characters are often obsessive and do not trust one another. They think life is funny, and discover that love is funny, and yeah, sex can be funny too. They don’t feel the right things when they’re supposed to. They find love, and lose love. They find hope, and lose hope. They escape sometimes, but more often are unable to go anywhere. These stories consider relationships through the disconnection between reality and fantasy, exploring …
Mild To Moderately Severe, J D. Valencia
Mild To Moderately Severe, J D. Valencia
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Mild to Moderately Severe is an episodic memoir of a boy coming of age as a latch-key kid, living with a working single mother and partly raising himself, as a hearing impaired and depressed young adult, learning to navigate the culture with a strategy of faking it, as a nomad with seven mailing addresses before turning ten. It is an examination of accidental and cultivated loneliness, a narrative of a boy and later a man who is too adept at adapting to different environments, a reflection on relationships and popularity and a need for attention and love that clashes with …
Half-Virgin, Alexander Gregory Pollack
Half-Virgin, Alexander Gregory Pollack
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Half-Virgin. (Under the direction of Jocelyn Bartkevicius) Half-Virgin is a cross-genre collection of essays, short stories, and poems about the humor, pain, and occasional glory of journeying into adulthood but not quite getting there. The works in this collection seek to create a definition of a term, “half-virgin,” that I coined in the process of writing this thesis. Among the possibilities explored are: an individual who embarks upon sexual activity for the first time and does not achieve orgasm; an individual who has reached orgasm through consensual sexual activity, but has remained uncertain about what he or she is doing; …
Contact, Brittany Osbourne
Contact, Brittany Osbourne
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This fiction novel focuses on the Sankofa philosophy that we as human beings must learn from our past to better understand our current existence and future; however, sometimes we choose to ignore or suppress the past because remembering it may be too hurtful. When we forget what happened yesterday our outlook on today and tomorrow becomes distorted. Contact is a novel that attempts to explore how 'living in the now' alone becomes problematic because the past'if not remembered'will come back to haunt you. The erasure of the line between Diasporic Africans and their African past is the primary theme explored. …
The Natural Order Of Things: Stories, Gene Albamonte
The Natural Order Of Things: Stories, Gene Albamonte
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Natural Order of Things is a collection of unrelated short stories that focuses on the love, despair, happiness and sorrow prevalent in relationships. Another common thread is how the lack of communication between family, friends and lovers can create burdens that, in some cases, are simply too heavy to lift. Some of the stories have a humorous voice while dealing with those burdens. Many others deal with the complexities of those emotions in a more somber tone. These fictional stories are completely unrelated to each other, and yet they all aim to shine a light on life's conflicts--and on …
Flaming Red Wig, Carla Christina Howl
Flaming Red Wig, Carla Christina Howl
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"Flaming Red Wig" is a collection of short stories and prose poems with a critical preface. Both the preface and the creative work explore notions of artifice, apposition and entering into a text (both written and character) with stillness or intrusion. I try to create an examination and communion with language on much the same level, ultimately yielding a musicality that creates a rhythmic discourse and dynamic between the significance and the notion. The title of my thesis refers to the obvious motif of artifice and the reoccurring theme of emotional pain attached to gender and humanistic role within specific …
Broken Open, Taylor Kistler Stannard
Broken Open, Taylor Kistler Stannard
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Broken Open is a collection of short stories, four of which deal with culpability and the unexpected transformations that occur when blame, either unintended or deliberately invoked, is exposed and finally understood. The remaining two stories concern relationships that turn out to be gifts, as well as painful learning experiences. In "Other Living Creatures," one family contends with post traumatic stress disorder as another implodes following the death of a young soldier in Vietnam. "Hunters" deals with the unconscious motivations that leave a father resentful and unable to forge a relationship with his son. In "Bardenbrook," an accidental death is …
Moonflowers And Other Stories, Sarah Bethany Prevatt-Harris
Moonflowers And Other Stories, Sarah Bethany Prevatt-Harris
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Moonflowers and Other Stories is a collection of short stories focusing on complex relationships among characters who are estranged from their families and their pasts; some seek to reestablish connections, while others decide to simply walk away. All of the stories are set in Florida. In "Stained Glass," Abby returns home after seventeen years to help care for the father who disowned her. In "Blue Green Red," Melaney is compelled to find her brother after years of lying about his existence. Selina, the protagonist of "Fatty Walsh" is so embarrassed by her family she will not tell her friend Alucia …
Two Blades Come Together: Stories, Mark Edward Pursell
Two Blades Come Together: Stories, Mark Edward Pursell
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection of seven short stories details the emotional triumphs and complications of characters whose lives are altered by issues of sexuality and disconnection. An adolescent girl feels her father slipping away from her and, in turn, willfully destroys the imaginary world of the boy she babysits; a speech therapist struggles to make headway with a young patient while finding himself unable to communicate with his ex-lover; a gay poet cheats on his boyfriend in a desperate attempt to fuel his failing art. The dramatis personae of Two Blades Come Together is comprised of individuals who struggle towards grace and …
In Search Of: Stories From The Ones Left Behind, Mayra Lizzette Velez
In Search Of: Stories From The Ones Left Behind, Mayra Lizzette Velez
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In Search Of: Stories from the Ones Left Behind introduces five young women-- June, Leila, Kiss, Marianne, and Alma-- who struggle to impede loved ones from abandoning them. One woman confronts her worst fears when she finds out about her husband's affair with a mutual friend; one comes to terms with her sister's poor lifestyle choices; another copes with her mother's sudden marriage; and yet another figures out that in order to keep her fiance, she must be willing to take on responsibilities foreign to her. And then there is the story of Alma, a contemplative but naive seventeen-year-old girl …