Creative Writing Commons^™

Naturify 2300, Yarina Yiwei Dai

Masters Theses

In my art practice, I explore the interplay between human desires to manipulate and anthropomorphize nature, as seen in the technological augmentation of plants and living entities. This investigation delves into how this intersection, alongside empathy towards these creations, contributes to fears of uncontrollability and the risks of addiction and excessive dependence on technology.

Bioengineering and genetic modification have cultivated unprecedented developments, allowing humans to manipulate the fundamental building blocks of life. My research speculates on this technology further, modifying the genetic code of organisms and creating bioengineered wearable entities with enhanced traits or entirely new functionalities. The primary objective …

Naturally: Memory In Verse, Heather L. Drouse

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is a collection of free verse poetry that I have written that share a common theme of nature and family. This is a creative work that explores my personal memories and the feelings associated with them with the intention to spread joy and cause readers to reflect upon similar experiences they might have had as children. It consists of four major sections -- mother, father, love, and bridges -- and 18 poems, with "love" having 7 minor sections.

I Have News To Tell You, Jeanne M. Allison

Theses

I Have News To Tell You is a poetry collection that reckons with grief, survival, and mortality through the exploration of harrowing life experiences and contemplation through nature and relationships. The collection contends with what it means to be a human shaped by scars.

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

Stasis, Eric Pahre

Theses and Dissertations

Stasis is a collection of three short stories and a long novella. These stories examine settings parallel to our own lived reality and history.

“Verdugris” follows an infestation of vermin in a 20th century setting linked to European colonialism. Power dynamics and attitudes towards cleanliness are contrasted with natural beauty, habitat loss, parasitism, and the ‘fixed’ nature of the colonial town.

“Alpentraum” describes two foreign hospice caretakers seeing to an old woman in her small home in the mountains. This short story investigates uncertainty and acceptance, as the caretakers must change their plans when the mountain is struck by a …

Other Orchards, Sam B. Robison

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Other Orchards is comprised of poems each suspect in their own way of those boundaries that might separate humans from nature, rural from urban, worker from scholar, or human from beast. Using the figure of the orchard, a kind of “false forest,” this collection studies the ways we map ourselves onto our work and the way work might inform an understanding of the self. Ultimately, these are poems that emerge from the seams of things—the shoulder of highway strewn with dead antelope, the feral apple tree lost to the woods, the farmer lost in their work, slowing becoming less and …

Tsiyim, A Hiding, Aaron Lopatin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Tsiyim is a collection of poems and poetic sequences that investigate faith, doubt, and the natural world. The poems draw on the stories of martyrs, saints, prophets, and pilgrims, entering a mimetic chain that sets language and poetry as the placeholder for a contemporary faith to take place.

Forgotten Things: A Historian's Tale, Mary Jackson

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Forgotten Things: A Historian’s Tale is a story of a post-human world where magic and creatures of lore have taken sovereignty over the land, following the adventures of Aster, a small flower elf whose job is to travel and document the residual traces of humanity. Every crumbling building, decaying record, and seemingly useless bauble of humanity tells a story, one that Aster is trying to find the conclusion to. One day, rumors start to circulate. Whispers that there might still be humans hidden away somewhere. Aster is thrilled about this, hoping that she might be able to talk with a …

Portrait Of Rich County, Adrian Thomson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Portrait of Rich County presents the small town of Randolph, Utah in poems describing its wildlife, recreational activities, and the perspectives of citizens in the contemporary rocky mountain west. Special attention to the imagination of the poems’ speaker toward the more dreamlike qualities of Rich County establishes itself throughout, in order to convey a feeling of hope within harsh terrain. This collection examines the theme of salvaging items not often considered, such as rusted junk, ancient houses, or roadside garbage, both in the actions of the speaker and through the act of naming these items upon the page. An over-arching …

Orphans, Ryan Burden

Theses and Dissertations

This novel explores the ways in which our concepts of children and family shape our larger perceptions of reality, and vice-versa. It tells the story of a family in rural, upstate New York, using three different perspectives: Grace (the head of household), Eve (her foster child), and Bo, a recent addition to the family. Eve has lived with Grace since childhood, while Bo was taken in after attempting to escape from a rehabilitation camp for boys. Over the course of two days, the children try to manage their own internal conflicts, while Grace does her best to help them. The …

Debating Birds Upend The Hierarchy Of Nature In The Owl And The Nightingale And The Parliament Of Fowls, Caragh Vasko

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

A Gift For Nature, Lagan P. Ananda

Senior Projects Spring 2021

I love nature.

A Small Bird Sings For Miles, Sophie M. Gregory

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

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.

Day Trips, Life In Camp, And Dogs: An Alaskan Memoir, Karen Reed

Masters Theses

Day Trips, Life in Camp, and Dogs: An Alaskan Memoir is a collection of essays reflecting the narrators immersion in life above the Arctic Circle.

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

No Stranger Than You, Rebekah Rose Sicari

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Cicadas & Other Hauntings, Miriam J. Anastasi

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Asteraceae, Rachel G. Lyons

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Sugarcane Crossroads, Sean Carrero

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a collection of lyric poetry that touches on themes of family history, love, and labor in the service industry. It is divided into three sections. The speaker in the work dwells in mostly private spaces and deals with private symbols such as, water, to represent the father figure in the poems.

This To Which We've Come., Holly Tabor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of works explores the linkages between moments, the connective thread that accumulates over time to create for each of us a unique present. The title, “This to Which We’ve Come,” attempts to convey that each moment is a point of arrival colored by the smallest of temporal fibers, our most interior histories that stretch and bend and fold back onto themselves when the present forces us into action, or inaction. Through these characters and their stories, I attempt to examine that moment of arrival. A secondary thread explored in this collection is the idea that humans are still …

From The Dirt Up: Layering Story, Place, And Environmentalism Within Three Picture Books, Lucinda Rowe

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

The world is changing before our eyes – species are going extinct, the amount of habitat available to wildlife has decreased, and children are spending less time outside than in the past. Through analyzing environmental ideology within early childhood education and children’s literature, I demonstrate that picture books can inspire nature conservation, appreciation, and stewardship by encouraging outdoor play and exploration. I compare picture books that successfully demonstrate eco-consciousness without being didactic, how my thesis fits within the current environmental movement, and how it helps stretch the definition of what is considered eco-writing.

This thesis consists of three illustrated picture …

Nature's Paths, Chloe Switzer

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a lyric essay, short story, and poetry by Chloe Switzer.

• Love of Place
• Lost in Venice
• The Willow's

Bramble And Knife, Sara Ryan

All NMU Master's Theses

This thesis is a collection of poems that center on the themes of extinction, family, the female body, and the presence of the animal. During my time in the Upper Peninsula, I found a connection with the natural world around me, and this led to my fascination with animals and extinction, both of which manifested in my poetry. As I struggled with the residual effects of toxic relationships, as well as the bleak romantic landscape of the UP, I saw my own body reflected in the bodies of animals. I specifically noticed this reflection while studying the art of taxidermy; …

Juneau: Notes From The Bus, Cara Makuh

Senior Theses

This creative writing project is about a week I spent alone in Juneau, Alaska. All time and travel was spent on foot, bus and boat. Alone, I had many different experiences, and every time I interacted with a new person, that isolation became a shared experience, if even for a minute. Each day started out a blank slate, and eventually wrote itself into a story with a unique identity of its own as each day does as we travel through seconds and minutes that build up into completed days. Social interactions with so many different people turns them from strangers …

Damar On Fridays, Maja Sadikovic

Theses

Abstract

These poems are about the first hand witnessing of the Balkan war and its visceral repercussions, ripping of families across generations and continents due to religious intolerance, and an identity crisis within the diaspora of the former Yugoslav people. They interact with appeals of loss, in terms of bodies, memory, and material, despair within the identity of the self in and outside of religion, and the perception of love and belonging, but not necessarily in that order. They are largely inspired by victim story-telling, translations of conversations with natives of the former Yugoslavia and their children, and ramifications of …

Ghost, Moving, Andrea Wuorenmaa

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of creative nonfiction essays weaves a journey through local history, genealogy, physical landscape, and personal memoir. The essays therein investigate the past through the lens of the present, and the present as informed by the past. Written from a first person perspective, many of the essays directly address individuals or time periods long gone, while all of them are constructed with the memory, research, and imagination of the author.

Though this collection is rooted in history, it also relies on the metaphysical to create a vision of the past. Intangible themes—life, death, a farewell to things and people …

Guiding In And Away, Terry Belew

MSU Graduate Theses

“Guiding In and Away” is a collection of poems exploring shifts in contemporary American culture. Major themes include technology-induced anxiety, human connectivity, isolation, and the importance of nature in a man-made world. These themes are demonstrated throughout the collection through the use of speakers set into situations that reflect what is lost with the recent digitalization of human interaction, the isolation and loneliness caused by these losses, and how natural settings are encroached upon because of digitalization.

Natural Predators, Marie-Claire Churchouse

Theses and Dissertations

Natural Predators is a collection of short stories that take place in various countries including Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, and England. Though the stories are not explicitly linked, they share themes of violence, power dynamics, and the failures of community. The collection begins with the story that features the youngest protagonist, and ends with the eldest. Food, animals, and the human relationship with nature are also major themes throughout the collection.

The Lemon Tree: My Tree Of Life, Meghan E. Mccarthy

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Lemon Tree is a collection of poems that arose from my attempt to capture memories of influential experiences in growing up. The poems are written in prose blocks and move in and out of childlike and adult sensibilities, creating the disillusion of time and memory. The poems themselves are comments on the unreliability and limited scope of memory and compare remembrance to dreams. This suggests that time moves more fluidly than the waking world accepts. Through looking back, through prisms, the speaker remembers experiences that impacted her development as we follow her on a journey to coming-of-age. The Lemon …