Creative Writing Commons^™

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 …

Reparations, Jhedienne Adams

Honors Theses

This collection of original poems is a testament to the tenacity of Black American women. It deals with the connection between personal and collective identities, and attempts to make tangible the pervasive themes of racial oppression, familial tension, societal vulnerability, and hope that are uniquely found in the experiences of southern Black women. This collection began as an exploration of transgenerational trauma, and while the final project addresses that theme, it is primarily an exercise in grappling with the modern manifestations of a complex history, a process with an importance that grew exceedingly more obvious as the nation faced a …

The Legend Of Neptune: A Portrait Of Enslavement And Emancipation In 18th-Century Worcester County, Massachusetts, Brigitte Lewis

Honors Theses

“The Legend of Neptune” tracks the life of a man named Neptune, who was enslaved at my childhood home in Still River, MA 01467 for fifteen years during 1742-1757. The general topic of this undergraduate thesis is slavery in seventeenth and eighteenth-century central Massachusetts; the main topic is uncovering the voice, history, and stories of an identified enslaved and then free Black man named Neptune. The project uses a vast array of primary sources to construct a narrative that centers Neptune’s life and experiences, supported by secondary historical research. This project also tells a counternarrative to the official history of …

Þorn: A Novel Excerpt Exploring Giantesses, Their Relation To Women's Bodily Expectations, And Patriarchal Control In The Literature Of Early Modern Britain And Contemporary America., Brady P Alexander

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This thesis will analyze examples of women of size in the literature of the British Isles throughout history, focusing predominantly upon the Early Modern Period, and will create a fiction piece in response to such attitudes. I argue that one of the most clear ways to dissect contemporary cultural attitudes about powerful women and women who occupy more space than men is to examine giantesses and other examples of women of size within this period of literature. From this, a novel excerpt will be written from the perspective of a time-traveling woman of size who engages with these texts and …

Sweat, Cigs And A Ball Of Noise, Tyler Jacob Hughes

Graduate Thesis Collection

Corduroy Jones is contacted by a local promoter to reunite his band Streetwise Preacher. Over a three week span, Corduroy and his bandmates Tony and Johnny go through a series of events leading up to their Halloween Night reunion show.

Sometimes I Think I’M Going Crazy, Connor Kesslering

Graduate Thesis Collection

"Sometimes I Think I’m Going Crazy" is a short story collection containing three stories of more or less equal length. Each of three main characters face conflict that tests their resolve and ultimately forces them to reevaluate who they are as human beings. Stress helps people to grow and evolve and the protagonists in these stories are forced to face their greatest fears head on and (with varying degrees of success) come out the other end better for it. But not before going a little crazy in the process.

Todd In Eternity, E. J. Pettinger

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work represents the first significant portion of a novel in progress. It is a first-person narration following a teenage boy’s involvement with a modern-day prophet. The story examines the nature of visionary belief systems and the ways in which they can degrade a person’s connection to the everyday world. The bulk of the narrative is concerned with the protagonist’s struggle to escape the dark dream of the prophet and reconnect to the plain givenness of the world. The narrative explores the religious use of horror and glory as visionary elements, and the role of humor and affection in the …

The Starsplitters, Aurora Stone Mehlman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A mysterious letter summons Helen Starbird, and her granddaughter, Laramie, to a dying mill town on the shores of Lake Umbagog. Together, the two women—who leave vastly different lives mired in similarly hopeless ruts—return to the Northwoods. A New Hampshire fire tower where Helen posted during WWII, and the sight of a forbidden romance and life-altering tragedy, pivots from secret to obsession, and getting there progresses from dream to necessity. On the way, they confront private traumas, and volatile forces of prejudice, oppression, and environmental despoliation that have smoldered for centuries. Will they uncover festering family wounds, end the legacy …

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

Gift For Burning, Di Bei

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Growing up amid one-child policy in Beijing, Zhi-Nan is pursuing her PhD in Houston while living at a birth tourism house. She receives a text from her adopted cousin who has joined a monastery in Idaho. Convinced that her cousin is in a cult, Zhi-Nan starts a road trip with a white colleague to rescue her cousin from God.

Miracle, Gabrielle Sullivan

Honors College Theses

This original, speculative fiction novella follows Miracle Beckett, a young woman raised on a dying, climate-change ravaged Earth in an isolated religious cult. While she eventually escapes, she finds herself trapped in another deathtrap, abandoned by her crewmates on a spaceship that is rapidly running out of air. Struggling to reconcile her past with her present and her imminent death, Mira cannot avoid remembering everything she has tried to leave behind.

Engaging with sexual identity, religious trauma, and the difficulty found in reconciling the complexities of a left-behind existence, Miracle highlights the power of memory, friendship, and knowledge in guiding …

Poems And Translations, Rome Hernández Morgan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is separated into two parts, a collection of original poems and a collection of translations of the crônicas of Rubem Braga. The collection of poems, titled, “Because I Never See You,” attempt to parse the complexities of familial and intimate relationships, addiction, and BIPOC experience. The collection of translations attempts to offer a small sample of the crônicas of Rubem Braga (1913-1990), a Brazilian journalist who is known throughout Brazil for “elevating” the form of the crônica from ephemera to the literary.

Fragmented Worlds, Fractured Families - Narrative Levels In Graphic Memoir, Henry Wilson Essman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This collection of creative writing explores the dynamics of parent-child relationships, as well as the way time can cause these roles to shift and reverse, bringing into question who has the right to tell another’s story. The individual pieces are both in the mediums of prose and graphic narrative, often focused on themes of family and trying to reconcile fractured perspectives. These works are introduced through an essay demonstrating how graphic narratives are uniquely situated to show narrative levels, and how narrative levels are key to showing the shifts in parent-child relationships and the way perspectives can differ while still …

Mineral Rites, Emma Van Dyke

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of original poems written between Fall 2017 and Spring 2021.

How Would You Have Him Understand Her, Jade Pagasa Basconcillo

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Slide, Misty Yarnall

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Spring Onions, Kiley Kerns

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Freshman 15 // White Wash // The High Place Phenomenon, Aliyha Gill

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Old Friend, Miranda Phillips

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

The Gender Epidemic: Intersecting Disease, Gender, And Sexuality In A Graphic Novel, Autumn Cejer

All NMU Master's Theses

For my thesis, I wrote a graphic novel set in a world where certain people possess powers that society tries to suppress by viewing them as a disease. The story focuses on two super-powered individuals on opposite sides of the law who handle this oppression very differently. Although these characters would easily be able to overpower the non-powered people in charge, they are too afraid to do so. Internalized guilt from possessing abilities they did not ask for adds an additional layer of conflict, just as women and disabled persons are constantly made to feel like they should apologize for …

Self-Portraits Of The Byelingual Immigrant, Sujash Purna

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The following poems chronicle the journey of a contemporary Bangladeshi-immigrant poet living in the United States of America. Divided in three sections, the poems serve as self-portraits that peek into the complex psycholinguistics of the immigrant writing in a second language. The poet offers sketches of different aspects of his immigrant life through self portraits. While mostly autobiographical, the collection offers poems that serve as commentary on the socio-economic reality of workaholic American life. Through exploring the self as a bilingual poet, the poems serve as critiques of the socio-political systems of this country. “Self-Portraits of the Byelingual Immigrant” also …

Young Adult: A Poetic Exploration Of Modern American Life, Ellie Bixler

Honors Theses

Adrienne Rich, in her 1993 essay “Someone Is Writing a Poem,” writes “In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode.” In this collection, I make my own attempt to part with the prevailing mode. I use my poetry as a means of engaging and contending with the American socio-political dialogue that often feels both deeply pervasive and largely inaccessible. Grounded in the thematic conventions of political and ecological poetry, this collection is an exploration of what it means and how it feels to come of age …

American Sissy: Original Poetry, Jonah Stokes

Honors Theses

The creative art of poetry is a complex form, yet the fundamental aspect of the poetic form is of experience. The experience of the poet as well as the experience of the reader reading a poem is what is defined as the crucial element of poetry in this creative endeavor. This study analyzes works of contemporary poets who successfully portray the art of experience in their work. Looking at Romantic and marginalized poets, this study seeks to understand the complexity of poetic experience. The introduction is followed by a series of poem's that emphasize the experience of the author.

Developing The Facilitative Health And Well-Being Tool: Freeing Writing, William O. Fogarty

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Research into processes of self, including self-concept clarity, identity, and meaning and purpose in life, has demonstrated that human beings that feel they know themselves tend to experience positive health and well-being outcomes, while people who feel they don’t know themselves tend to experience more negative health and well-being outcomes. These findings indicate that knowing oneself is essential. Thus, the facilitative tool I am creating with this Master’s Project, Freeing Writing, combines the power of self-knowledge and self-discovery with the healing power of expressive writing. In this manuscript, I synthesize the scientific research, Design Thinking process, and real-world experiences which …

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, …

Life And Love In Young Adult Literature: A Critical Analysis Of Fragments, Lissette Monrroy

Theses and Dissertations

Fragments will be a series of short stories based on events that have occurred in my life and how they impacted me and my family. They will tell the stories passed down to me, beginning with my grandparents, their lives in Mexico, and their journey to the United States. It will go on to tell stories of my parents’ struggles with raising kids in a society that tries to suppress our Mexican culture, how other family members have struggled with their own families and identities, and how my life has been influenced by these stories.

Significance and Scope of Fragments …

Be More Than Human, Carson Schaefer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative thesis is a collection of short stories involving humanoid androids and robots in positions of performance, art, creation, and employment. This collection works to imagine potential sentience within the field of technology and robotics and bring into question perceptions of agency, control, and, ultimately, humanness.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

Refugio En Familia, Edgar Aguilar Araoz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Novela fragmentada, construida a partir de crónicas cortas y 31 imágenes, de manera no ficcional cuenta el contagio de COVID-19 de una familia en Tijuana. Algo en los recuerdos del narrador lo llevan a conectar la muerte de su suegro con los de su abuelo que ocurrió hace 35 años. Cómo conectan cada pieza de este rompecabezas es lo que pareciera estar en la cabeza del narrador, ordenar quizá. Además la manía de acumular compulsivamente frases, imágenes, relatos, momentos que parecieran innecesarios e intrascendentes.

Collateral Damage (A Novel), Kimberlee Bethany Bonura

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Collateral Damage (A Novel)

Josue, Eraldo Enrico Chiecchi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A 14-year-old El Paso boy is in the prime of his life by all appearances. He is surrounded by a close group of friends, a family that loves him and had aspirations of joining the military once he graduated from high school.

But to everyone's shock, he walked up an Interstate 10 overpass and leaped to his death.

We tell his story and his family's as they deal with his unexpected death.