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Personal essay

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Full-Text Articles in Creative Writing

Anti-Thesis: When Your Worst Moments Become Your Best Work, Abigail Williamson May 2024

Anti-Thesis: When Your Worst Moments Become Your Best Work, Abigail Williamson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

My honors capstone project expands the creative work of a major writing assignment in English 3170: Successful Freelance Magazine Writing, which was modeled after Susan Shapiro’s “Humiliation Essay.” Shapiro’s signature assignment encourages students to write about an embarrassing or upsetting moment with the aim to force sincerity and humility. She writes, “It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.” The humiliation essay, she claims, often leads to publication because the conflict of the assignment inspires writers, and the narrator’s self-insight that occurs during the process of …


Reflections From A Maternity Leave: The Complex History Of Beaver Dam Flats And Refinery Park, Emily Ursuliak Nov 2023

Reflections From A Maternity Leave: The Complex History Of Beaver Dam Flats And Refinery Park, Emily Ursuliak

The Goose

A personal essay reflecting on my relationship with Refinery Park and Beaver Dam Flats in light of its complex history.


Return, Shasta Hecht Jan 2023

Return, Shasta Hecht

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This capstone project is a collection of nonfiction essays that work in collaboration to provide a profile of place. The place of focus is White Pass, the mountain the author has grown up on and experienced for the last twenty-one years. This collection is made up of essays that explore her physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to the land and community of White Pass, while also examining themes of family and identity. Each essay gives a different perspective in regards to the setting. The ultimate purpose of this project is to navigate the complexities of White Pass in regards to …


Kept Things, Caroline J. Tuss Jan 2023

Kept Things, Caroline J. Tuss

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The things that occupy our lives tell human stories. They often go beyond literal interpretation, leaving space for places, people, desires, dreams, and ideologies to be signified and examined. Personal history is a well-traveled source of inspiration, and it provides significant, meaningful symbols for the concepts I’m engaging with in my newest collection. My project, titled Kept Things, is a collection of three nonfiction pieces examining why and how things are kept, lost, and discarded, whether we have a choice in the matter or not. The significance of symbols to identity and memory acts as a through-line between each …


Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault Jan 2023

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …


Chasing Peacocks, Jennifer Watkins May 2020

Chasing Peacocks, Jennifer Watkins

Creative Nonfiction MFA Theses

Chasing Peacocks is a collection of personal essays that explores the author's life through her travels, interactions with family, and struggles with teaching.


Wild Rice, Amanda Gokee Aug 2019

Wild Rice, Amanda Gokee

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.


Growing Abroad, Emily Miller Jan 2019

Growing Abroad, Emily Miller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For my Honors Project, I wrote a creative nonfiction essay about my study abroad trip to Le Mans, France last summer. In the essay, I broke up the narration with three sections, each highlighting a personality trait I gained from my experience: independent, overcoming fear, and adventurous. Because this is a creative work and something I may consider publishing later on down the road, I am not submitting the main essay. Following this abstract is my Critical Essay and Personal Essay.


Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite Sep 2017

Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite

Creative Writing Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the second decade of the 21st century, academic comics studies is well established as a serious intellectual subject, but for many non-specialists, including university administrators, a sense of frivolity still attaches to comics. This brief essay braids together personal history and intellectual analysis: 1) it compares the cultural position of comics today to the position of novels in the 19th century; 2) it analyzes the complementary nature of the verbal and visual channels; 3) it argues that neither words nor pictures should be considered primary in a narratology of comics; and 4) that comics are eminently well suited to …


Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite Sep 2017

Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the second decade of the 21st century, academic comics studies is well established as a serious intellectual subject, but for many non-specialists, including university administrators, a sense of frivolity still attaches to comics. This brief essay braids together personal history and intellectual analysis: 1) it compares the cultural position of comics today to the position of novels in the 19th century; 2) it analyzes the complementary nature of the verbal and visual channels; 3) it argues that neither words nor pictures should be considered primary in a narratology of comics; and 4) that comics are eminently well …


Wingspan: Living With Birds, Lauren A. Smith Jan 2016

Wingspan: Living With Birds, Lauren A. Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Wingspan: Living with Birds is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that intertwine the author’s personal experiences and reflections with her knowledge of the natural world and ornithology. The six essays explore themes of family, self-reflection, understanding a sense of place, rock climbing, and dealing with grief. These themes are combined with natural histories of different bird species and the author’s experiences working with birds, especially as a bird bander.


Nothing Normal Happens To Me: True Stories Of A Journey From Madness To Motherhood, Esther C. Martinez Mar 2015

Nothing Normal Happens To Me: True Stories Of A Journey From Madness To Motherhood, Esther C. Martinez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Written in first person, NOTHING NORMAL HAPPENS TO ME is a memoir in essays that traces the narrator’s journey from self-destruction to creation. Part one encompasses the narrator’s lost years, after she breaks free from the tyranny of her mentally ill mother and goes to live on her own at 17. Part two provides context for those bad girl years, exploring her childhood when she identified with her histrionic mother. Part three comprises stories about the narrator’s years of awakening when she seeks out transcendence, faith, and a family of her own. The pieces vary tonally and stylistically as they …


What We Find In The Sea, David E. King Apr 2013

What We Find In The Sea, David E. King

Student Publications

Personal essay in which the author recounts his struggle to come to terms with his lack of grief over his grandfather’s death.


Mirrors And Vanities, Leslie Salas Jan 2013

Mirrors And Vanities, Leslie Salas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mirrors and Vanities is a multi-modal collection which showcases the diversity of working in long and short storytelling forms. Featured in this thesis are fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, and screenplay. Using unconventional approaches to storytelling in order to achieve emotional resonance with the audience while maintaining high standards for craft, these stories and essays explore the costs inherent to the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships. The fiction focuses on the complications of characters keeping secrets. A husband discovers the truth behind his wife’s miscarriage. A girl visits her fiancé in purgatory. A boy crosses a line and loses his best …


Journey To The Scars: A White Trash Epic, J. Patrick Rader Jan 2007

Journey To The Scars: A White Trash Epic, J. Patrick Rader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by the work of writers Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and motivated by celebrity prevaricator James Frey, Journey to the Scars: A White Trash Epic is a memoir that attempts to redefine the genre by applying the ideals and themes of gonzo and new journalism. The opening chapter, "The Diary of John Doe Frankenstein" tells the story of a pivotal event in the author's life. Immediately following this narrative of a near fatal motorcycle accident, the author/narrator's reliability is called into question and the remainder of the memoir is the story of the author's efforts to uncover the …


Front Matter Jan 1997

Front Matter

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Gaman, Derek Otsuji Jan 1997

Gaman, Derek Otsuji

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Odds And Ends, Dana Anderson Jan 1997

Odds And Ends, Dana Anderson

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Contributors Jan 1997

Contributors

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Full Issue Jan 1997

Full Issue

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Front Matter Jan 1996

Front Matter

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Falling Down, David Pace Jan 1996

Falling Down, David Pace

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Desert Phoenix, Janet Lynn Garrard Jan 1996

Desert Phoenix, Janet Lynn Garrard

Inscape

No abstract provided.


End Matter Jan 1996

End Matter

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Full Issue Jan 1996

Full Issue

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Happy Birthdays, Shannon Keeley Jan 1996

Happy Birthdays, Shannon Keeley

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Cemetery Day, Paul Rawlins Jan 1991

Cemetery Day, Paul Rawlins

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Front Matter Jan 1991

Front Matter

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Catfish, Alex Faletti Jan 1991

Catfish, Alex Faletti

Inscape

No abstract provided.


Rhythms, Marni Asplund Campbell Jan 1991

Rhythms, Marni Asplund Campbell

Inscape

No abstract provided.