Creative Writing Commons^™

We Take Back The Moon, Zoey Jean Adam

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

My creative manuscript, tentatively known as We Take Back the Moon, is an in-progress fantasy novel in verse. Set in a world not like our own where the only bipedal inhabitants are elves, it is a tale of two best friends contending with a society where those who lack the ability to use magic are sentenced to the Colony—essentially a prison camp. Chkal, one of the protagonists, was a child prodigy in magic and still lives in the Capital, while her best friend, Esari, was sent away at age thirteen to the Colony. The story follows Chkal’s struggle with her …

Fasciotomies, Gabriel Bass

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This collection of poems follows the disjointed and never complete trajectory of personal recovery from trauma and alcoholism. The poems and their arrangement trouble the notion of a person ever being fixed, even as they make progress toward a better version of themselves. The collection illustrates how the past can impose itself on the present, creating dissonance and complicating the speaker’s understanding of time and recovery.

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 …

V.1 Winter 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2022 issue is a special edition "art writing capsule," with three zines that each feature a student writing about a work of art, and a fourth zine with an editor's note and postscript. Writing 1 is Angelina Rogers on Salman Toor's "Two Boys with a Dog," Writing 2 is Maxwell Fertik on Shahzia Sikander's "Epistrophe," and Writing 3 is Sabo Kpade on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's "Any Number of Preoccupations."

Elliott, Brian Nierman

Masters Theses

Elliott is a chapbook that shares the pain and triumph of raising a child with special needs. From the perspective of a father, the poems are centered on reanimating moments that illuminate the love and loss of parenting a son who is living with unique challenges.

Liberated, Lonely, Tyler Slade

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Our Foremothers' Offering Of Salvation, Taylor Johnston

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Shoulders, Joseph Rowley

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Mother Superior, Brandon R. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Prologue /The Lake Within

I am a fisherman. Every time I raise my arm to cast, I’m searching for an answer.

What is a lake?

I throw my lure at the lilies of my childhood, the sunken log of my crib. With every cast I hope the truth will follow it back, this little piece of me I offer to the mystery.

My earliest memories are at the bus stop, where a shroud of mist swirled about me and I listed side-to-side, six-AM eyes drooping while I waited for that big yellow ship to bust through the fog and …

Gigi, Helen Wesley Kapp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Francis’s grandpa taught her how to wrestle alligators. By the time Francis was sixteen, she could hold her own, but all it takes is one gator. Just one gator who almost gets the best of you, and suddenly you’ve got a dead animal; somebody’s getting stitches; you’re getting haunted by the ghost of the alligator you just killed; and your mom’s making you move to Charleston to attend a swanky prep school where the kids don’t wrestle gators, but surviving the gossip is even harder.

Squatters, Alina Cerisse Cohen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Kid Gloves, Anne North Kolle

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Kid Gloves is an excerpt from a novel in progress that follows the lives of three generations of women—Dorothy, Lydia, and Maisie—and explores the privileges and traumas they hold onto and pass down. The novel takes place in wealthy Baltimore society in the week leading up to Maisie’s debutante ball, but it is interspersed with stories from the past that inform the lives of the three women today.

Into The Tidy Shape Imagined, Hope Isabella Ruskaup

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Traversing Paradigms: An Environmental Journey To Body And Mind, Martin Ceja Mejia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traumatic life experiences altered the way I perceive the world. As a result, I embark on a journey to reshape my relationship to self, the built and natural world; to environment. In this thesis I ask: How do I want to relate to the environment? Considering I am a doubly colonized agent, I also aim to decolonize my relationship to environment along the process. Therefore, this work aims to formulate a new, personal, relationship to environment through academic literature, history, psychology, Indigenous knowledge and science, and literary studies, among other fields of knowledge. This work is interdisciplinary in nature; life …

The Waning Days Of Projection In The Mountain West, Samuel Gwinn Dunnington

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Waning Days of Projection in the Mountain West is a novel featuring a young narrator named Argus, who worked for years as an apprentice and assistant to a documentary filmmaker named Max Morgen. The novel begins years after Argus and Max have gone their separate ways. Max has recently died, and his final wish was that his son send Argus all the footage they’d acquired over their years together in order to edit and complete the film Max originally set out to make. Argus must decide how to proceed.

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

Volume 155, Issue 155 (2022), Khem K. Arya, John T. Battaglia, Soramimi Hanarejima, Cora Lewis, Aeriel Merillat, Mohamed Shalabi, Ocean Vuong, Yiru Zhang, Marjan Kamali, Rashad Hosein, Suzanne Rico, Kirsten Reneau, Jerilynn Aquino, Katie Culligan, Susan Dambroff, Max Dorfman, Sean Enfield, Leah Kuenzi, Kazim Ali, John Blair, Tom Bennett, Partridge Boswell, Dante Di Stefano, Jonathan Greenhause, Lynn Hoggard, Leslie Anne Mcilroy, David J.S. Pickering, Noelani Piters, Kait Quinn, Henry 7 Reneau Jr, Danielle Roberts, Leona Sevick, Terry Tierney, Brendan Todt, Pamela Wax, Erin Wilson, Maggie Wolff, Xiadi Zhai, Matty Heimgartner, Antara Gangwal, Lance Fung, Caroline Dejeneffe, Koko Alexander, Dottie Lo Bue, Timothy Edward Cech, Jerome Chia-Horng Lin, Doug Edwards, Brittany Fanning, Irina Greciuhina, Roy Huerta, Le Joe, Hana Lock, Loren Marie, Nelson Muff, Shubham Sharma, Heather Perrine Shreve, Rachel Silva, Soap Soap, Kelly A. Harrison, Persis Karim

Reed Magazine

No abstract provided.

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Dungeons And Devised Theatre: A Study Of Tabletop Gaming And Its Application In Playwriting And Character Development, Sabrina E. Becker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the connections and application of tabletop gaming in theatre. It looks at the initial process that was used in devising a play from tabletop gaming and also the applications of using tabletop gaming to further character development. This paper serves as a journal of first-hand accounts and interviews during this process so you may be inspired to build your own process either based in what you read here or discovering your own. There is a sample excerpt of the play to show what can be accomplished as well as other artistic works that came …

It Takes A Muscle: Wholes, Holes, And Other Voids, Saar Shemesh

Theses and Dissertations

IT TAKES A MUSCLE¹

In the BELLY of the BEAST, the HUMAN

in the deep end of a SWIMMING POOL

in a GRAVE, looking up/out from within

at the base of a CRATER, ABYSS, PIT

the room as a CRADLE, INCUBATOR

architecture as MOTHER MOULD.²

____________________________

¹ Title is borrowed and abbreviated: Spectral Display, “It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love,” 1982.

² For what American-English delineates as ‘mold,’ British-English uses ‘mould’ and is more specific in its technicality. The former doesn’t distinguish in spelling between mold (fungus) and mold (mould). I’m not particularly a fan of …

Life In Utah As An Apostate Plural Wife, Markelle Jensen

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Botchan, Natsume Sōseki, Yasotaro Morri , Trans.

Zea E-Books Collection

This English translation of 坊っちゃん (1906) was published in Tokyo by Ogawa Seibundo in 1918. It is a first-person narrative of a young man’s two-month tenure as assistant mathematics teacher at a provincial middle school in 1890s Japan. A native son of Tokyo, with all its traits and prejudices, he finds life in a narrow country town unappealing — with its dull and mischievous students, scheming faculty, bland diets, stifling rules, and gossipy inhabitants. Impulsive, combative, committed to strict ideals of honesty, honor, and justice, he is quickly enmeshed in the strategems of the head teacher, “Red Shirt.” His sufferings …

Kokoro: Hints And Echoes Of Japanese Inner Life, Lafcadio Hearn, Koizumi Yakumo

Zea E-Books Collection

The works of Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) played a critical role in introducing his adopted Japan to a worldwide audience. In Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, he writes, “The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan, — for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro (heart). This word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning, — just as we say in English, ‘the heart of things.’” After centuries of isolation Meiji-era Japan was forced to adjust …

Sunbaby, Katelyn Eva Garcia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Above all else, Sunbaby is a project concerned with that which is passed down from a mother to her daughters. Less interested in writing into the center of violent acts, this series of poems aims instead to consider all the things – both physical and psychological – that exist of the edges of violence. What happens to a body in the wake of violent acts? What informs the trauma of families? These are questions Sunbaby asks its reader to grapple with.

Set to background of the desert and mountain West, Sunbaby lingers on bodies (human and other) subjected to environmental …