Creative Writing Commons^™

Writing With Faith, Charles M. Mclean

Theses

Faith is the belief in something larger than oneself. It is not provable; it is not necessarily logical. It is a feeling, an intuition. Faith can be a belief in a god or a set of ideals, but the important part is the believing. If a person is without faith, that person is lost and remains so until such time a belief is born again.

TI1is culminating project strives to look at faith through essay and short fiction. A preface essay speaks to what I think faith is and why every human being requires it. The introduction has three purposes. …

Catholics, Curses, And Cousins In A Cracker Box, Kathryn Wallace Iffrig

Theses

In a small sitting room of a mortuary in a rural Missouri town, the author considers the life of her recently departed cousin. Having shared a family home early in their childhood, and despite similar upbringing, their lives had ultimately diverged, with him choosing a path that many would consider self-destructive and bound to lead to an early death.

Contemplating the circumstances of her cousin's death, the author falls into ruminations on their childhood, family, and common experiences they shared during those early years. Considering the disparate paths their lives ultimately took, the author questions the influence of nature versus …

Prairie Suite: A Celebration, Twyla Hansen, Paul A. Johnsgard

Paul Johnsgard Collection

25 poems by Twyla Hansen, with illustrations by Paul A. Johnsgard, including:

Walk on the Prairie

There is mystery here, in the shapes of grass,
in the dim movements of an inland sea,
connections to an earlier time. Wander barefoot,
hypothesize the dance of millennia, the unbearable
carvings of the built environment, this ragtag escape.

Let its divine simplicity ooze into your pores.
Comb the steel from your hair, blanket your
tongue with orange. Your breathing will slow.
Breathing slow, unbutton the child within.
Give her permission to go fly a kite.

Iowa Multiverse: Stories, Darek James Benesh

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This work of creative writing consists of two stories, each of which concerns characters in closed communities in Iowa: an apartment building and a small town. The stories play with the concepts of interconnectedness, multiple perspectives, linearity, and "emergent meaning"-that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. The first story is comprised of interconnected third-person threads and alternate perspective views. The second story is concerned with multiple first-person vignettes dealing with interpretations of shared experiences. These stories imagine the concept of perspective as a moveable, free-floating "mind camera," able to follow any character at will, viewing …

From Below Table Mesa, Cynthia Grier Lotze

Theses and Dissertations

I lived in Boulder, Colorado longenough, and I dreamed low-resolutiondreams, sharp only at eyes and slow movinghands.Kate's hair was a cloud of insurrectionon the tarmac, then I would watch the hoursmelt off the wings of her plane as eachstate became not-Tennessee, not-Kansas.I wanted to meet her in the air; Icould will this without a plane, with sadness,with need, I would enter the plane in flightand I would say, "Kate, take me home," and shewould turn the plane around. Everythingwould become not-Colorado, not thisstaticky dream, hard breath miles up from the sea.

Welcome To The Branch, Turia R. Pope

Theses and Dissertations

Welcome to the Branch is a two-act play that investigates issues of cultural differences in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or LDS church), more commonly known as the Mormon Church. Set in modern-day, downtown Richmond, Welcome to the Branch follows two very different members of the LDS church as they examine and try to understand both their religion, in the context of its cultural and social history, and their place in it. One is Molly, a Caucasian, middle-class young woman from Utah, in Richmond temporarily for her husband's graduate school; the other is Aina, an African …

Kids Will Be, Thomas E. Moran

LSU Master's Theses

This is the pilot episode of a television series, which explores a young girl’s descent into suburban drug culture. In this episode, the main character, Ally, follows her disaffected love interest, Marco, to the squat, an abandoned building inhabited by runaways and addicts.

Dead Man: And An Accompanying Exegesis: `Labyrinthine Modes In Dead Man And The Castle By Franz Kafka.', Anna Green

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Dead Man is a novella about four brothers. They live an unrestricted life until their mother decides that they lack fear and this lack could make their lives difficult when they are adults. To combat this, she recruits the help of another boy to create a sense of fear and threat that remains endlessly elusive, that will make her sons more wary and alert than she thinks that they would otherwise be capable of. Neuroses always seek their source and Dead Man explores this notion. The source of neurosis for the brothers in Dead Man is a real person; a …