Creative Writing Commons^™

Drift, Pilar Randolph

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Editorial: Creative Writing In Literary Education, Catalina Millán Scheiding, Tzina Kalogirou, Xavier Mínguez López

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

迷霧, Long Yi Chan

Dissertations from all years

小說主要講述在傳統家庭成長的阿欣如何逐步擺脫桎梏，面對自己內心的情感和想法。阿欣從小被母親用傳統方法教育，以情緒勒索的方式教養出千依百順的她，用語言和行為操控女兒。阿欣即使已經踏入社會，仍逃不出母親所置的無形枷鎖，不斷被母親和上司、同事等人情緒勒索而感到窒息。有着敏感個性的阿欣，為了不令任何人失望，往往妥協、忍讓，以至忽略甚至壓抑自己的想法和需要，只用不治本的方式排遣不快、逃避問題。阿欣在父親去世後面對生活，慢慢明白要為自己着想、為自己的情緒、行為負責，而非單單將所有問題歸咎於同樣缺乏安全感的母親，不再逃避，逐步走出陰霾。

你，作為小說拼圖的一塊, Ka Tsun Cheung

Dissertations from all years

你就要開始閱讀〈你，作為小說拼圖的一塊〉。倒不是你期待從這這篇畢業論文獲得什麼，它只是茫茫小說中的其中一本，你聯想到閱讀經驗中那些偉大的小說，覺得它絕不會比他們優勝。所以你坐在屏幕前，以抽離、隨意的目光展開閱讀，懶洋洋地搜索論文中的一絲價值。

而當你一如既往，淡然地讀著小說開頭，你很快就糊塗了。嘮叨的敘述者聲音、任由作者擺佈的人物、唐突的觀點轉換，無一不在告訴你——故事是被人虛構的。作者想表達些什麼？我又為何必須置身小說當中？你再次翻開小說，但今次的目光，變得稍為不一樣。

蟾蜍記憶, Lok Yi Lam

Dissertations from all years

一次蝌蚪的失蹤事件，一碗不尋常的湯。

家族突然開始發生一連串的事故——爸爸後背長了一顆腫瘤，族人開始生病，嫲嫲驟然離世……

親戚們甚至開始蛻變成一副蟾蜍相貌！

幼時被迫喝下奇怪湯水的我，會不會隨他們一樣，最終變態成嘔心醜陋的蟾蜍呢？

這篇小說是一個家族變異史，也是一個都市寓言故事。

因為我相信現實世界所發生的一切，遠比故事內的情節更荒謬。

城市是冰冷的，人的心也是冷漠的。在社會的大環境下，人們逐漸異化，貪婪自私的本質暴露無遺。

即便是最親近的家人，面對物質上的爭奪與搶掠，人性自私的那一面就會顯露。

「貪婪仿佛是都市人深入血髓的記憶。」

或許一天，我們也終會在社會的泥潭裡異化成一隻隻醜陋不堪蟾蜍。

安樂, Kiu Tim Ma

Dissertations from all years

講述一喜愛規則的人，機緣巧合下前往另一個世界得到自己夢寐以求的生活，得到安樂。希望藉此故事，反思一下何謂有意義的人生，順便把自己對過往反烏托邦小說做一個小反思：衷心喜歡「烏托邦」生活的人到底是多麼令人討厭，到底算不算人。算是老生常談，但這種甘心受制於某種「無上意志」的人，挺切合中國社會，可能是過往帝制吧！假如讓人討厭小說中的人物從而反思自己有否近乎病態地遵守規則，我就當成功。

No Diving From Bridge, Lia R. Mendez

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lia Mendez grew up on the frontlines of America's breadbasket in the great Central Valley of California where Big Ag and Big Oil reign supreme. When Lia returns home after a long absence and joins local activists in her hometown's fight to reclaim its dying river from agribusiness, she discovers that the land holds secrets whose truths have been long hidden in plain sight. As Lia's love and concern deepen for the very place she promised herself she'd never wind up in, so, too, does her understanding deepen of the systems of oppression and extraction which rule her world. In …

Trailing Fire: Working In The Woods And The Future Of Forests In A Chaotic Climate, Claire Kilchrenan Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Our national conversation about wildfire is shifting. As wildland fires become larger, more frequent, more severe, and more expensive—and as climate change and land-use patterns drive the trend toward more fire—we’re scrambling to find a different paradigm for engaging with fire. Scientists now call this age of increasingly extreme burning the Pyrocene, and we’re just beginning to grapple with its impacts on the way we work, play, and live on the land.

As a longtime trail worker for the U.S. Forest Service, I’ve spent hundreds of days clearing trails in burned forests. In Trailing Fire, I draw on these …

Religion, Reason And Reconciliation In Louise Gluck’S The Wild Iris, Vincent Sergiacomi

Capstone Showcase

In a world where reason is king, what is the role of faith? Louise Gluck does not claim to have an answer, but she does explore the question. The Wild Iris gives us a god who is utterly convinced of the singular appeal of faith, countered by a worshipper who finds their rational worldview too reasonable to abandon. Yet over the course of the text, neither is able to demonstrate the singular primacy of their point, both arguments leaving their arguers unsatisfied in one way or another. This paper will explore the debate between the human and divine speakers of …

Seaglass: An Animated Rejection Of Narrative Permanence, Alejandra Louise Blackmore

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how popular narrative structures imply that our reality should be stagnant, thereby leaving us as viewers unprepared for the notion of change. I introduce the term “narrative permanence” as a story structure that assumes the foundations of a narrative are absolute. These stories therefore consider structural change as a threat or abnormal. I analyzed examples such as The Simpsons and news coverage of the BP oil spill to demonstrate how popular media frames change as an unnatural occurrence that must be neutralized. My thesis then culminated in an animated short about a person living in a seaside …

The Tree Of Life: Observations From The Olive Grove, Kendall Lowery

Scripps Senior Theses

Scripps College is famous for its olive trees and the award-winning olive oil that they produce. However, despite the considerable age of the trees, the campus community has only harvested the annual crop of olives for the past decade. In this thesis, I set out to learn why the trees were planted on the campus in the first place. To this end, I immerse myself in the history, culture, and commerce of the olive oil industry, and ultimately use the fruit as a lens through which we can explore the colonial history of Scripps College and Southern California. In order …

Radio Rebel, Elizabeth Sperring

Scripps Senior Theses

A girl running an illegal radio station is caught and imprisoned for her crimes.

Word Into Idea Online, Stephen Fried, Sam Tamburri

Open Educational Resources

This creative writing game, an online version of the pen-and paper activity "Word into Idea" -- https://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_oers/24/ -- can be played solo or in a group. Proceeding through a series of screens with word-association prompts, players compose a downloadable poem within the game and obtain a player-generated constellation of their words for additional creative work.

An Exploration Of My Undergraduate Poetry Works, Clover O'Mordha

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Throughout my years at the University of Akron, I have explored my creative writing, focusing on poetry, and developed a distinct style. There have been many influences on my poetry and I utilize several poetry aesthetics, conventions, and styles. My honor project will explore my poetry by referencing a 30-page portfolio of my collected undergraduate works.

The Curiosociety, Luke G. Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Changing, Sabrina B. Black

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In poems that center on experiences of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, The Changing explores the formation of identity and the malleability of the self. Sabrina Black writes into the spaces between people—at times finding connection there and at times isolation. Throughout the collection, the speaker reflects on complicated relationships with family members, classmates, and friends; on the ways those relationships have shaped her; and, most of all, on her relationship with that elusive thing called the self.

In a series of “Dear Advice Columnist” poems scattered throughout the manuscript, Black shifts focus away from personal experience, adopting the persona …

Sexual Whatever, Madeline Rose Tecmire

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A rerouting of gendered power, Sexual Whatever unleashes femininity repressed in America’s nuclear families. This collection of narrative poetry puts pressure on patriarchal traditions of Christianity through persona, Madonna—a radical culmination of the Madonna-Whore Complex—resisting systemic domination of female sexuality in both public and private spaces. While Madonna dismantles the patriarchy, she investigates the mechanisms of domestic violence, emotional manipulation, the very value of a proper Christian woman.

This book dares to demean female characters through love, sex, and family, while still giving voice to abusers, creating webs of confusion around the many definitions of domestic violence. More characters question …

A Study In Transparency, Rachel Wilson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In a generation that feels more lost than ever, we need transparency in order to feel less alone. We need to see others, and we need to truly see ourselves. This is my way of being seen, and in turn, helping others to feel seen and understood. When I was in middle school I began to record my daily life and thoughts in journals, which evolved to help me cope as I grew up. In putting these pages on display, I’m presenting myself. That’s Rachel Wilson. I’m a writer, a designer, an artist, maybe a song writer. Maybe a lot …

What Is The Female Gaze In Literature?, Cadence Dangerfield

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Just as Laura Mulvey defined the male gaze, feminist scholars are constantly working to identify a female gaze in visual arts and literature. Does it exist? This project works to answer the following questions: What is the female gaze? Is it simply the male gaze in reverse, or is it something more, a lens encompassing the desire of intimacy instead of an inherent sexual desire? To find the answer, or at least one possible answer that I can situate myself and my writing into, I plan to read both fiction and scholarship and write utilizing a female character as she …

[Slate], Kate Weaver

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

The Spicy Girls: Writings On The Lived Experiences Of Latinas As The Exotic "Other.", Nina M. Lopez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The Other in mainstream U.S. society—in this case, the Latino Other—faces oppressive forces in the journey to find belonging. Latinos are marked by stereotypes, regardless of whether such stereotypes have a factual foundation. Latinas specifically are labeled as submissive servants, maids, or nannies. On the other end of the spectrum, Latinas are exotic and enticing sexual beings that must satisfy white men’s fetishes and lechery. Through this thesis, I will explore what Latina women face as an Other that is paradoxically both rejected and desired and evokes aversion as well as awe. In this creative thesis, in creative nonfiction, poetry, …

A Strange Object That Breaks Your Heart: Short Stories, Annie Sheneman

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Riverrun 2022, Saint Mary's College Of California

Riverrun Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Veil, Alyssa K. Malloy

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Three centuries after the Veil’s destruction reunited the land of Mishnal, archaeologists make a discovery in the wild Veiled Lands that will shed light on the cataclysmic event that changed the world forever. Through their analysis of the unearthed memories in the Veiled Lands and remnants of manuscripts penned by key governmental figures, we learn about Mina, a woman with demonic heritage who knows the only way to free herself of her oppressors is by her own clawed hands and the sharpened teeth that she knows can rend flesh from her victims. The first book of the Beyond the Veil …

Their Eyes Were Always Watching And Other Stories, Steve A. Booker Jr

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In this thesis, I cover discrimination in multiple forms, mostly racism and classism, through six short stories. The critical introduction includes my thought and revision process for each story. I discuss the academic works of Eugene Arya, Maggie Bowers, Lindsay Moore to explore the concepts of magical realism in my work and how it relates to the fiction of Carmen Maria Machado and N.K. Jemisin. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of skaz and Lubomir Dolezel’s concept of the alethic alien are used in two of my shared world stories. It is my intention to show how discrimination affects multiple types of people …

England's Fairest Creatures, Madison Hart

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Set in 1616 Jacobean England, surrounding a tragic chamber pot incident, the place setting of the small fishing town of Lechlade, England, begins our story. From generations of fisherman, Elias Eaton, is the first Eaton not to bear a son. Instead, his fierce daughter in her mid-twenties, Julia, our protagonist, helps her father at the docks daily. Although Julia is a champion for women of her time, she dreams of there being something more out there for her than the town that has shackled Eatons for centuries. Julia’s mother, Sybil, is the daughter to the town baker. Her literate father …

Splitleaf, Sean M. Turlington

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Set in the fantasy world of Vriim, Splitleaf follows the story of the protagonist Dellum Lovira as he journeys to regain his freedom, find purpose in his life once he has freedom, and develop into a self-actualized person beyond the shadow of his mother and the societal judgement for his multiracial status. Raised on the island chain of Riitol, Dellum is a half-blood between a human father and a Nifaren mother, a race of scaled and feathered people whose emotional investment struggles to move beyond self-interest. He must in the early chapters included here travel back to his original home, …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

The Me [Unnamed]: Essays, Rebecca Ann Harris

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis includes six flash nonfiction pieces and four essays exploring my relationships with my father, mother, and older sister; this exploration is filtered through the lenses of trauma and mental illness. Notably, five of the six flash nonfiction pieces are written in the literary mode of magical realism, which are analyzed in this thesis’ critical introduction. By evaluating magical realism’s origins in German surrealism and its development within Latin-America—as well as its theoretical correlation to Charles Baxter’s defamiliarization and Milan Kundera’s appeal of dream—I acknowledge magical realism’s literary techniques and cultural motivations within published fiction. I analyze magical …

To The Bone And Back, Noelle Christine Thomas

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

To the Bone and Back, a memoir by Noelle Thomas explores Thomas’s college journey while struggling with mental health conditions. To the Bone and Back primarily focuses on how anxiety, depression, and eating disorders can impact friendships. Thomas documents her journey through college and grad school in four parts. In a way, Thomas’s memoir is a story of self-assembly.

Part one, made up of poems, narratives, letter excerpts, YouTube transcripts, and text messages, mirrors the clutter and chaos of Thomas’s brain at that time. Part one establishes the friendship between the main characters: Thomas and Jenna.

Part two begins to …