Creative Writing Commons^™

Letter From Editor, Alex Muller

The Anthology

This is the introductory letter from Editor-in-Chief Alex Muller.

Letter From Editor, Rebecca Jacobs

The Anthology

This is the introductory letter from Assistant Editor Rebecca Jacobs.

Full Issue, The Anthology

The Anthology

This is the entirety of the 2014 Winthrop Anthology issue.

Stellar Works: Searching For The Lives Of Women In Science, Jennifer Elizabeth Woodman

Dissertations and Theses

While women have had a profound impact in the world of science, they struggle to gain an equal foothold in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields today. This has led to considerable public and private sector efforts to recruit women into these arenas. In order to understand how schools and nonprofits engage today's young women in STEM studies, this account includes time spent both in high school science classrooms and with ChickTech -- a Portland-based organization that works to provide a pathway into tech careers for high school-aged girls.

A historical perspective reveals that modern women aren't treading …

Golden Fantasy: An Examination Of Generic & Literary Fantasy In Popular Writing, Zechariah James Morrison

Honors Projects

This essay attempts to analyze critical theory concerning the division between generic fantasy fiction and higher fantasy literature. In examining how these two different types of fantasy writing are identified by popular criticism, the space in-between is defined and labeled "golden fantasy". This kind of fantasy is identified by maintaining a balance between subversive originality, and derivative reproduction, and is generally popular among consumers and academics as a source of both entertainment and scholarly research. The essay is then followed by 3 original chapters by the essay writer, in an attempt to demonstrate some of the elements of golden fantasy …

A Trip Through Space And Time, Alvaro Gonzalez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

Alvaro Gonzalez tells his personal narrative through an omniscient third person narrator. Gonzalez takes the audience on a journey through space and time to Mexico, the San Fernando Valley, and Downtown Los Angeles as he identifies important moments that shaped his life.

Running The System: From The 661 To The 310, Alexis Hall

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

The title, “Running the System: From the 661 to the 310” refers to former LMU Basketball Coach Paul Westhead’s run ‘n gun style of play, and the area codes of Palmdale and West Los Angeles. In her narrative, Alexis Hall finesses the connection between her preeminent past and promising present. The narrative tips off with Hall illustrating her upbringing and the lessons learned that come to symbolize her being. She then slams and jams through moments of time in her life that proved to be game changers. However, once the arena is empty and the fans are all gone, Hall …

Voices To Truth America! Exploring Hapa-Ish, Jonathan Ishii

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

In his narrative, author Jonathan Ishii delves into the experience of growing up as a hapa. This narrative reflects on some past building events and realizations, as well as his search for identity and drive for success. Ishii provides a glimpse into his life through various experiences and his discovery of identities in Los Angeles and abroad.

Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, Shawn Jones

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

A daughter’s love, and a mother’s absence—that is the theme the author, Shawn Jones, shares in her bittersweet story. This narrative reflects on the challenges, conflicts, and feelings that a child goes through when coping with not having a mother physically present. Jones describes how as a child she saw things a lot differently compared to her thoughts now as a young woman. She struggles with the idea of accepting her situation and resenting the mother who brought her life. However, through the help of her family, she realizes that she is no different than those she grew up with. …

Stuck In The Middle, Loreto Lopez

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

After a trip to Mexico for her cousin’s wedding in February 2016, Loreto Lopez gets consumed by her thoughts and experiences of being a Mexican-American. Through her experiences in Guanajuato, memories of her adolescence are triggered as she contemplates what her life has been like as a first-generation student living in Los Angeles. She realizes that her circumstances have left her feeling not completely American nor Mexican. By writing her narrative, Lopez attempts to find out what to do when she feels she is stuck in the middle between two different worlds.

First To Everything, Sarah Poblano

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

Sarah Poblano is a first generation sophomore Sociology major from Glendale, California. As the eldest sister of three, she struggles to find her place at Loyola Marymount University as well as keep her place at home. With symptoms of culture shock and imposter syndrome, she realizes the realities of being a First To Go student. However, recognizing her privilege as a student at LMU, she is determined to honor the many sacrifices that were made that got her to where she is now.

There Is Beauty In Struggle, Brenda Quintanilla

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

“There is Beauty in Struggle” tells the story of a young woman trying to navigate the world while having certain circumstances pull her back from reaching her dreams. These stories show the development of growing up, learning to accept the struggles one goes through, and learning to use those struggles as a catalyst for change. The narrative begin with Brenda Quintanilla living in El Salvador, then immigrating to the United States at the age of eight, and having to adapt to American society when clearly she is not welcomed here. This narrative explores the way in which Quintanilla finally came …

Wanting Out, Melissa Sandoval

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

Melissa Sandoval struggled to find her identity and feel a sense of belonging growing up as a U.S. citizen and being raised by parents who migrated from Mexico. Her story consists of different events in her life that have made her feel unwanted by the Mexican and American cultures she has been exposed to. What Melissa realizes as a college student is that she must find a way to live with her struggles and embrace who she is and where she belongs.

Faceless Sculpture, Carla Ventura

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

After embarking on her college career, Carla Ventura is forced to come to terms with an internal war. She reconciles her battles with depression, suicidal loss, and addiction, as she learns to reconnect with her inner child. Throughout all her semesters in college, she eventually begins to open a dialogue with herself and others in an attempt to resuscitate her childhood dream.

Westview: Vol. 32, Iss. 2 (Summer/Fall 2016)

Westview

No abstract provided.

June 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Shavout; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Communit Notices

La Folie Comme Aliénation Et Dissidence Chez Mongo Beti Et V.Y. Mudimbe, Florian Alix

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Le pauvre Christ de Bomba and Entre les eaux, the narrator’s evolution seems a kind of madness, as Ambroise Kom defined it: a process of social exclusion based on alienation because of norms told by dominant discourses. Individuals can’t find their right place in front of “languages in madness” which rule the colonial thought and hide part of reality. Therefore novel becomes a space where individual madness appears as a dissidence against dominant discourses.

Vol. Liii, No. 3: The Hard Part Is Knowing What To Say: The Poetry Of Jerry Mirskin, Howard Nelson

The Hollins Critic

No abstract provided.

J4ck Mered34th, Edgar Hernandez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ESCRIBO ERGO SUM is an analysis of my writing methods, and it seeks to understand the meaning and purpose behind my novel, J4CK MERED34TH. Through this explorative piece, I create parallels between my own life and my work in order to show a much closer history and context for the novel. In it, I ultimately conclude the importance of identity and its acceptance in my writing process.

J4CK MERED34TH follows 19-year-old gamer and hacker Jack Meredith in a near distant future in which virtual reality has been achieved. After a small routine job, someone breaks Jack’s security and steals his …

Desirable Difficulties: Toward A Critical Postmodern Arts-Based Practice, Gloria J. Wilson, Sara Scott Shields, Kelly W. Guyotte, Brooke A. Hofsess

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four …

Vs, Bolin Jue

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

VS is a poetic exercise in rhyme and rhythm. An exercise attempting to camouflage ideas in humor, in song, in lyrical overtures, and in social media pop culture lingo to highlight the damaging effects technology and social media have on the human relationship with the earth. VS is a mirror, is an attempt to selfie the world we have lost touch with by contemplating where our role as caretakers for our planet lies. Through varying poetic forms, VS displays and critiques the limited perspective forced upon us when we socialize and experience life solely through phones and screens.

In this …

Crafting The Fever, Andrea Nikki Harlin

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Hibiscus Snake is a collection of poetry investigating the female experience encountering danger. She explores psychic landscapes descended in the unconscious uncanny, the feminine body within the context of horror, and lyrical poems about living in working class communities in San Bernardino. The collection attempts to subvert the presentation of the female body in Horror genres, moving it from a position of victimization to empowerment. In other poems, the speaker ventures into horror-like psychic landscapes filled with images representing the anxiety experienced growing up in a city where danger is quite real. The protagonist risks these journeys to overcome …

Goodbye To All That Again, Charles Bradley Von Nordheim

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Goodbye to All That Again concerns the odyssey of an Iraq War veteran who must complete his journey past desert combat and academic strife in order to reclaim his heroic identity. The novel uses a fragmented storytelling mode that offers readers thirteen years of the protagonist’s timeline in a nonlinear sequence. Through this technique, the novel evokes the cognitive disassociation experienced by individuals who suffer Post Traumatic Stress and echoes the postmodern practices employed by American military novelists such as Joseph Heller and Tim O’Brien for the last sixty years.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT AGAIN seeks to intervene in the …

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking Multifarious Prose Performance, Alex Avila

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Bronx Cocked Back And Smoking is a collection of multifarious prose performances recounting the historical, personal, social, political and cultural constructs of a city birthed by violence. This body of work is accompanied by video, audio, photography, and theatre performance texts. St. Mary’s Housing project, in the Bronx, is the foundation where most of this literary work takes place. The modern day Griot (storyteller) is a Poet, guiding his audience through the social inequalities and disparities that plague St. Mary’s community. The Poet shares personal traumatic insights while simultaneously utilizing writing as a form of survival to the conditions …

Wild Embrace, Timothy Hatch

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

WILD EMBRACE is a collection of poetry that explores the themes of abuse, survival, and fragility. The speaker of these poems, older and distanced from the abuse, asks what it means to be a survivor, and explores our obligation of compassion that, as human beings, we owe one another.

While much of the work in this collection is rooted in personal experience, it is not intended to be read as memoir or autobiography. Many of these poems may have begun as lived experience, but between memory, the transcription of memory, and their final form on the printed page, they have …

A Meditation On I, We, And Consciousness In "Only We Can Pull", Allyson Elizabeth Jeffredo

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In a society focused on the individual, how is community formed? As individuals predisposed to the built-in barrier of our body, our skin, how do we mediate between the self and the external? During this mediation on the barriers between our body, ourselves, and the outside world, how is consciousness simultaneously conflicted and built upon? What does it mean to be alive, to be a complex individual surrounded by a multitude of complex individuals? Can we, as a society, learn to focus balance the community and the individual? ONLY WE CAN PULL attempts to answer these questions through a series …

The Chronicles Of Autzen, Trayevion Maurice Satterwhite

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My statement of purpose covers the story I have been writing as well as my journey on how I got to where I am today. The beginning is an introduction to the entirety of my work. From there, it goes into my personal life, and what inspired me to write in the first place. As it is read through, the reader will get hints of harsh times in life, the elements of history, and the inspiration of the literature of video games. With all of these elements combined, it explains the purpose of my writing being closely entwined with dealing …

The American Nightmare: Land Of The Incarcerated, Jamara Bernard

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A collection of poems focusing on the mass incarceration of African-American men and how the prison industrial complex is designed to legally exploit prisoners specifically for profits. Along with a reflective essay about the history of legal discrimination and the creative process by which the poems were created. Then how it ties in with the capstone course theme of race, gender, class, feminist theory, and social justice.

A Beautiful Apocalypse: A Collection Of Poems, Emily M. Kesler

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

My project consists of three poems on the subject of life in the year 2050. These poems explore and speculate the effects that air pollution, water contamination, deforestation, the government, and the economy will have on humans living in 2050.

The Sword And The Dove, Natalie Grazian

Canterbury Scholars

The opening chapters of a young adult historical fiction novel set in 16th-century Spain. Drawing on the tradition of Spanish picaresque literature, The Sword and the Dove is the story of a young girl who runs away from home. On the road, she makes friends and finds adventure, but also witnesses the corruption and cruelty that has taken root in her country. She must both disguise her identity and find strength in it to stay a step ahead of the evil forces that surround her.