Creative Writing Commons^™

The Sins Of The Mothers, Sylvia Johns Schneller M.D.

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In The Sins of the Mothers, the main character, Bridgette, suffers a mental breakdown after the death of her three-month-old baby, Celeste, from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). She develops severe obsessive-compulsive disorder with the delusion that the child is trapped in Limbo because she was never baptized. The delusion haunts Bridgette, and she suffers brief dissociative episodes with visual hallucinations. Bridgette hears of a church in Provence where, according to a seventeenth century legend, children who died without baptism returned briefly to life under the intersession of Saint Pantaleon were baptized and gained heaven. She decides to exhume Celeste’s …

Flying Carpets, Hedy Habra

Hedy Habra

Surveying what appears as familiar ground, Hedy Habra's Flying Carpets plunge deep into the bygone and the irrecoverable. Steeped in childhood memories of Egypt and Lebanon, and intensified in the act of fictional recollection, Habra's stories are at once joyous and tragic, witty and profound. In Habra we have a Shehrazad of our times, not one trying to save her life, but one intent to bring enchantment, gravitas, and sensitivity to ours. This is a book full of marvels, beautifully written. --Khaled Mattawa, author of Amorisco and Tocqueville

Hedy Habra's Flying Carpets is a collection of enchantments and wonders charmingly …

An Unnamed God., Luke Cash Mansfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is the story of a man returning home at the behest of a friend who is undergoing great difficulties in her life. While Docent Americana ostensibly travels home to help his friend, he is also trying to cope with challenges in his own life. He suffers from bipolar disorder and although he is receiving treatment for it the stresses of the experience trigger a manic episode that threatens his personal stability and his relationships with those around him. An Unnamed God is set in western Kentucky, affording a glimpse at the slow decay of rural communities as …

Achieving Relationships, Frederick C. Melancon

Master's Theses

These stories attempt to follow John Gardner’s instruction to create a dream that will engage the reader. Mirroring the goal that an author has to create a relationship with his audience, each story in turn focuses on emotional details that convey the characters’ feelings of isolation or, alternatively, inclusion in their communities. In the first story, a young man tries to recreate his father’s king cake. In the next, a middle school girl fixates on her relationship with her sister. Trying to recapture the memory of a lost daughter, a man searches for the perfect nectar snowball. A mom, then, …

Easy Hearts: A Novel, Andrew J. Olsen

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Easy Hearts is a novel set in contemporary Texas. Justin Borchard, just paroled after three and-a-half years in prison, returns to his hometown in East Texas where his wife, Melinda, has been tending bar at the Shortleaf Inn. After Melinda confesses to a brief affair with a local oil executive named Waylon Goodwin, an affair she has ended, and facing limited prospects in their hometown, Melinda and Justin make the hard choice to accept a proposition from Waylon: they will leave home for Hearts County, a desolate swatch of hardpan in the Permian Basin of West Texas, where Waylon has …

Calle Panadero, Giselda Aguiar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of nine short stories follows Adelia Villalobos and Isidoro Belmonte, two Cuban Americans solving crimes in present-day South Florida. The former best friends have grown apart during college, but when Adelia is drawn into a murder case, the outcome leads Isidoro to return home and the pair to found the unlicensed detective agency, Calle Panadero (Spanish for Baker Street). Their cases explore the underside of many facets of the community, including bigamy, fraud, and criminal organizations. Along the way, they deal with love, death, and family obligations, and arrive at a new understanding of how their destinies are …

Kowalski Lives, Jaymie-Rae Martin

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Him., Brenden M. Kleiboeker

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Cooking In Stride, Bret Lundstrom

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Creating A Monster, Taylor Johnson

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Soulmates, Taylor Johnson

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Funerals Are For The Living, Taylor Martin

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

A Trudge In The Snow, Bret Lundstrom

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

The Ones Who Disappeared, Kristine Wagner

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Welcome To The Show, Jaymie-Rae Martin

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

The New Writing Series, Spring 2016, The University Of Maine Honors College

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

In its thirty-fourth consecutive semester of programming, the New Writing Series will host six readings featuring four poets (John Keene, Prageeta Sharma, Divya Victor, and John Yau) and two fiction writers (Emily Fridlund and Joanna Walsh).

These writers are all highly active across the full spectrum of literary activity. They are editors, publishers, and anthologists; translators and tale-tellers; art-makers and trail-blazing scholars.

The New Writing Series brings innovative and adventurous contemporary writing to the University of Maine's flagship campus in Orono on selected Thursdays at 4:30pm.

2015 Fall Micro Chapbook, Otterbein English Department

Quiz and Quill

No abstract provided.

2015 Fall Chapbook, Otterbein English Department

Quiz and Quill

No abstract provided.

The Abandoned, Elizabeth Ivey

Faculty and Research Publications

I didn’t always know what I was, but I knew I was different.

Father And Mother Songs, Heather Fowler

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A collection of stories submitted by Heather Fowler for receipt of an MFA degree in Summer 2015.

Blackletter: Fiction And A Wall Of Precedent, Louis Anthony Di Leo

Dissertations

The eight stories that make up Blackletter explore situations in which people are forced to challenge the legitimacy of authority, rethink and rebuild their own identities, or confront their own involvement in human and environmental degradation. A central theme running throughout the collection is law, broadly, and the ways in which people adhere to or sometimes break from a particular rule, be it social or legislative. In each case, the role of law and its correlation to place and identity—either overt or veiled—serves as a major component of each story. In this way I locate these stories within a sociolegal …

The Topology Of Absence, Nora E. Culik

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

“The Topology of Absence” literalizes triangulations, hyperbeloids, and the concept of the limit in the story of “locating” a lost mother. This story, like “The Physicist’s Basement” in the July 2014 issue, is part of a series that worries about competing notions of mathematics, i.e., mathematics as some sort of disembodied configuration or as emergent in the material reality of human life.

Diario De Perla Jimenez, Brenda Dorantes

World Languages and Cultures

The aim of this project is to present the effect of the immigration issue in the United States, with a direct focus in San Luis Obispo, and including a spread of intercultural knowledge between the Hispanic and the Caucasian community. Through a fictional short story, the manifestation of these ideas will relate to current events occurring in our society today. These events focus primarily on immigration in California, deportation issues, socioeconomic issues in Mexico, and the cultural barrier seen in Mexican and American cultures; expressed through the main character: a young college student named Perla.

My primary goal in completing …

That Which Binds Us, Tracey M. Dover

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This novel follows three individuals struggling with isolation and loneliness. Rina, a twenty-two year-old college student is studying abroad in Japan when she learns of her grandfather’s death. As his last living relative, she decides to leave her studies and a burgeoning romance to take care of her grandfather’s final affairs. At his funeral she meets Marcus, a mysterious man whose past ties in with her own. Marcus gives Rina the opportunity to uncover secrets surrounding her family and forces her to question not only her grandfather’s past but also her own identity. Tilnu is an immortal with a foggy …

The Real Thing, Ruben T. Rodriguez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

THE REAL THING is a collection of short stories released from the confinement of the everyday. The stories allow characters to pop off the page from every angle. With an eye for anthropomorphism and ear for lyric, the collection is comprised of twenty-nine short stories, nineteen of which work in a flash fiction form.

Magical in its motions, and charming in its spirit, The Real Thing explores life’s losses and gains through the lens of the strange and at times the absurd. It invites its readers to cast away expectation, sit back, and watch the show.

Notes On Narrative, Bryan Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

"What happened is an anecdote. What someone felt about what happened is a story."

Winesburg, Indiana: Fork River Anthology, Michael Martone, Bryan Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

In the mythical town of Winesburg, Indiana, there lives a cleaning lady who can conjure up the ghost of Billy Sunday, a lascivious holy man with an unusual fetish and a burgeoning flock, a park custodian who collects the scat left by aliens, and a night janitor learning to live with life’s mysteries, including the zombies in the cafeteria. Winesburg, Indiana, is a town full of stories of plans made and destroyed, of births and unexpected deaths, of remembered pasts and unexplored presents told to the reader by as interesting a cast of characters as one is likely to find …

Second Coming, Bryan Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

Brian Furuness' contribution to the Fall 2014 volume of Fourteen Hills.

The Lost Episodes Of Revie Bryson, Bryan Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

Revie Bryson, a precocious and dreamy kid from Paris, Indiana, has decided he's the second coming of Christ. His mother, an inventive storyteller, likes to tell him made-up Bible stories which she claims are "lost episodes" from the King James version. When Revie's mother suffers a crisis of identity and leaves home to pursue her dreams of stardom in Hollywood, Revie must learn to sacrifice and forgive in order to be born again.

Advice Advice, Bryan Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

Bryan Furuness on why you should ignore writing advice.