Creative Writing Commons^™

Trapped Inside, Maya Benham

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Motherly Love, Samuel Rothstein

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Sun Dance, Grace Gillio

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Discovering Identity, Gabriel Torres

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Author Bios, Author Bios

Intertidal

Intertidal Vol. 3 Author Bios

36,572 Feet Above The Pacific Ocean, Alyssa Levin

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Viewpoint, Year Unknown, Alan Reedy, Bob Dowdy, Bob Porter, Gretchen Hoover, Mike Proctor, Tom Landell, Al Stone

Literary Reviews Through the Ages

No abstract provided.

The Norman, Year Unknown, Sheila Dwight, Linda Ellis, Charles Elliot, Nathan Sawyer, Andy Hotz, G. D. Mcewen

Literary Reviews Through the Ages

No abstract provided.

Discarded People, Amber Harris

All ETDs from UAB

ABSTRACT This is the first chapter of the novel, Discarded People, a character-driven story about a group of young Black friends navigating love, identity, and community. As they form deep connections with one another, they face personal struggles that challenge their sense of belonging and self-discovery. The narrative explores themes of family, friendship, and the search for purpose, while highlighting the complexities of building a chosen family amidst personal and societal pressures. In chapter one, the main characters are introduced; Winnie, Franklin, Jelani, Adanna, Eban and Chance. As the characters prepare for their final year in high school while navigating …

On The Edge Of Duality, Manuel F. Medrano

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Threadbare Saint, Lucas Khoo

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

There are roughly 280,000 migrant domestic workers living in Singapore. Many of them come from the Philippines, Myanmar, and Indonesia to work as live-in maids. About 20% of households in Singapore employ domestic workers to assist in household chores and to help care for children and the elderly. Their work is multi-faceted: they are the cooks, the dishwashers, the car-washers, the baby-sitters, the pet groomers, and the laundrymen of many Singaporean households. They play a central role in the domestic lives of thousands of families in Singapore and are undoubtedly a part of the country’s social fabric; nevertheless, they have …

From The Heart: Writing Love Poetry With Ai, Dan Ryan

Open Educational Resources

The chief reason our writing students turn to AI is not "laziness.” It’s fear. This lesson plan helps college students overcome their fear of a first-time poetry assignment by empowering them to partner with “collaborators”—first AI, then each other—to co-write a love poem before finally writing a poem on their own. This 4-hour lesson plan for a college-level Introductory Creative Writing course includes three low stakes drafting and revision assignments, and culminates in a high stakes poetry assignment.

Nola 2150, Kristopher Ferber

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Abstract

Speculative fiction often takes a dystopic approach where authors envision what will be lost from books being banned in Fahrenheit 451 to us losing our civil liberties in 1984 to most of humanity being wiped out by an engineered virus in Oryx and Crake. This creative thesis takes a more optimistic approach by the act of preservation. In this case the city of New Orleans thriving as an underwater city protected by a glass dome in the year 2150. The city’s vibrant culture remains the same despite being almost too close to comfort to marine life. This work …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Calliope, Georgia Southern University

Calliope Magazine

Volume 43

An Unlikely Burden, Kendall J. Aufmuth

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

An Unlikely Burdening follows the story of twins, Madeline and Isaac Blake. The harrowing story explores the adversities faced by these high achieving siblings, uncovering deeper truths and depths of pain far seen from the surface. It takes place in various settings, beginning in a mental health inpatient facility after Madeline’s failed suicide attempt, uprooting the entire family’s world as they knew it. Uniquely written in diary form, it provides prospective to the reader from Madeline, Isaac, and both parent’s viewpoint as well. An Unlikely Burdening addresses real world issues such as mental health, and assault. Can Madeline overcome her …

“Broken Things: An Archive”, Kristen Mccallum

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This creative thesis starts from the idea that memory is shaped as much by the present as by the past. It explores the emotional and personal complexities of family estrangement, grief, survival, and love. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s idea that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past,” the project moves away from more traditional storytelling and instead is constructed as a collection of archival elements, that includes prose. What originally intended to be a collection of short stories gradually became a fictional family archive—made up of letters, text messages, and other everyday items—that reflects the messy, often conflicting …

Nothing I Said Was Enough: Writing As Self-Validation, Michama M. Dorvile

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores the process of using writing as a coping mechanism to heal from trauma by portraying how personal narratives confront pain and reclaim agency. This thesis also explores how writing serves as a means of survival and sharing testimony. The thesis starts with a critical analysis essay, drawing on literary criticism and trauma theory. I explore how Roxane Gay, Kathryn Harrison, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Maya Angelou have used writing to challenge societal perceptions of trauma, and how through writing, they have resisted erasure.

The heart of this thesis is an original creative work, which involves an …

Phantasma, Grace Wright

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Ever since the infamous Ides of March, scholars have been debating the true psychology behind Brutus’s betrayal. The purpose of this project is to take a step back from the politicized motivations and explore the emotional, strenuous conditions of Julius Caesar’s assassination. This project will transform William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into a novella with its central focus on the relationship dynamics between the key figures of Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius. The intention of the novella is to not only analyze the play through a critical queer lens, but to interrogate the themes of violence and desire that surround male relationships …

Mythopoesis And Gendered Power: An Akan Perspective On Stacy Waite’S A Real Man Would Have A Gun, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Review of Stacy Waite’s A Real Man Would Have a Gun, challenges traditional Akan gender roles and critiques the societal structures that limit women’s power.

Poetry And Fiction Reading From Introduction To Creative Writing, Cara Dees, Conrad Ligasan, Justice Jackson, Hannah Wagner, Sammi Matias, Mathias Stewart, Reagan Lane, Claire Carrillo, Zander Schirmer

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This poetry and fiction reading features several student presenters from "English 2430: Introduction to Creative Writing" – many of whom are performing their creative work to a live audience for the first time. Whether through poetry or prose, these students' inventive use of language and storytelling will hook you from beginning to end.

The Masa That Holds Us: Indigenous Epistemologies And The Food We Share, Necahual Gamboa

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The U.S. higher education system is built on histories and infrastructures of colonization, white supremacy, and western imperialism. Among many of the institutions produced from a history of domination and genocide, the systems of higher education need to shift their focus to decolonial frameworks including Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing and being) in order to work toward true reparations between these imperial systems and the Indigenous people they have displaced and disregarded. This project brings these systems into question, but also uses art, prose, and storytelling to better align with what it means or what it could look like to …

The Intersectionality Of Dance And Poetry, Isabelle Howerton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Often times, a creative work utilizes multiple creative mediums. For example, many poetry books feature visual art to enhance the original work. Dance performance is, arguably, always multidisciplinary This leaves room for many questions regarding unique ways that creative work can be developed and what sources of inspiration can be used as contributors. The final project comprises a collection of five choreographic works and five poems that correlate with each other in various ways. These five creative works were created using multiple prompts that dictated the correlation level between the two mediums. These works were then filmed to transform the …

Zippymania: A Multimedia Record Of The 2024-25 Akron Zips Men's Basketball Team, Drew Bailey

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will involve the production, promotion, and distribution of a weekly 30-minute live radio show focusing on the Akron Zips men's basketball team. After the airing of each show, the recorded episode will be published as a podcast. Additionally, a weekly column or sports blog (written by myself) will be published and serve as a companion work or supplement to the radio program.

Something Different Like Us: A Children's Book Project, Isabella B. Gonzalez

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to write and begin illustrating a children’s book. The end goal is to complete the full script, finish rough sketches of the entire book, fully illustrate the cover and first two pages, and present the project in the form of an exhibition.

This story follows three little chicks (Dixie, Charlotte, and Phoebe) around a small farmyard as they encounter a new type of animal, a family of rabbits. For the majority of the book, the chicks fear the newcomers since they look so different. The sisters judge, avoid, and suppose the worst of the …

Nonfiction Forms In Contemporary Poetry By Black And Asian American Writers, Elizabeth J. Mitchell

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Writers experiment with form inside poetry for various reasons, including a desire for play. Creating poetry is a creative process that involves experimentation. This research highlights poetry that adapts established nonfiction forms into poetry forms, examining poetry published in 2000-2024 by Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander American (AANHPI) writers and Black writers (writers of African ancestry) within the United States. For writers of color especially, nonfiction forms can provide a different way of entering into conversations about race, ethnicity, gender, identity, power, privilege, and authority. This research examines poetry by A. Van Jordan, Franny Choi, Alison C. Rollins, …

At The Mercy Of All Things: Nurturing Experimental Queer Writing On Embodied Mothering, Charley Koenig

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of the ability of experimental queer writing to grow and transform expressions of mothering and care. The moves made here—both in the scholarship and anchor texts examined herein and in my own contributions to this effort—work to dethatch those toxic dominating narratives on motherhood, enforced and reinforced by our current Western society and culture, that contaminate and restrict our constructions of what it means to be and do mother. The collective work of experimental queer writers makes possible more nuanced, realistic, messy, complex, varied, embodied, liberating, and literally and figuratively dirty renditions of mothering and …

Workable Seams, Jackson Mills Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In Jackson Mills Smith’s Workable Seams, readers encounter the stories, landscapes, and lives of rural Knox County, Indiana, from the oscillating vantage of a Hoosier boy raised with a Cajun sensibility. After relocating from Louisiana to the river bottoms of the crossroad state at a young age, the speaker gradually uncovers a local history only previously understood in fragmentary shards and fading glimpses.

Alternating between semi-lyrical embodied experiences and memories, documentary pieces in conversation with the state’s historical archive, and the retelling of exaggerated local yarns, poetry is a means of inquiry in Workable Seams. Topics range from …

Threshold: Stories & Graphic Memoir, Emily Kay Lewandowski

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Threshold: Stories & Graphic Memoir, a collection of fiction and graphic memoir, explores the in-between stages of loss and grief. Both the fiction and graphic memoir pieces utilize the technique of the “narrative echo,” coined by John Gardner, to stylistically explore and interrogate these stages of in-betweenness. The final piece in this collection, “I Hope You Find Me On Mars,” is a queer expansion of Octavia Butler’s trilogy Lilith’s Brood. Each piece uses unique voice and styling to contribute to the larger literary community by interrogating manifestations of identity, queerness, and grief.

The Filament, Elena Skibicki

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Filament weaves together the results of a neurodivergent person exploring their universe, in all its harrowing beauty and familiar tragedy. The speaker traverses oceans and thunderstorms, wades through the swampy shallows of their high school, participates in a pharmaceutical supply chain and its subsequent ransacking, floats through altered mental states, and retells legends, spanning many styles while still using the lyric “I”. Scrying into a nebulous future, the speaker returns with stories of the planet and its people, and the kind of world they want to build.

The speaker exposes their ghosts throughout the collection, hoping that the adage, …