Creative Writing Commons^™

Castle Building: Contemporary Poetry And Flash Fiction From Appalachia, Sharolyn Shae Johnson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Appalachian writing brings a voice to the region that is often obstructed or excluded by popular culture throughout the United States. Crowded with stereotypes, many stories of Appalachian culture are misconstrued or never heard at all. This makes the work of modern Appalachian writers especially significant. Perhaps one of the best ways to reach a broader audience of people in this fast-paced digital time is through shorter writings, and in this thesis I will be presenting my process of writing modern flash fiction and poetry and of sharing the truths of working class, Appalachian people.

A Collection For A Better Misunderstanding, Mark Smeltzer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

What if being understood becomes even more dreadful than being isolated? This collection of poetry stands between two extremes, using form and language to reflect the struggle of living on a continuum between being understood and being alone. By echoing the direct style of poets like Charles Bukowski and Mark Strand, as well as more abstract figures like May Swenson and Sylvia Plath, this collection asserts that the contradictions we carry can coexist, and even complement one another. Part One features original poetry that relies on the senses to recover old memories. A direct style in Part One seeks to …

Skateboard Jesus, Kenley Alligood

All NMU Master's Theses

Skateboard Jesus is a collection of poetry written in mostly first and second person free verse, containing in addition some prose poems and other forms harder to categorize. The poetry in this collection is largely narrative in structure, and engages with themes of identity and performance as objects of its larger concern, often filtered through the lens of music. In addition, my work often focuses on religion, mental health, and gender and sexuality. This collection, by the very nature of its concerns, engages in discussions of performance theory. Performance and narrative are inseparable entities, permeating every facet of our existence …

Subversion Of Form: Mixing Poetry And Prose, Darby Alexandria Brown

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

My honors thesis project is called Subversion of Form: Mixing Poetry and Prose. The purpose has been to research how writers have interwoven poetry and prose, to write a creative nonfiction piece that uses both genres, and to improve as a writer through committing myself to this piece and solidifying writing as a daily practice. In my introduction, I outline the research I conducted on poetry and prose and my takeaways from the writers I read. I conclude that the purpose of prose is to tell, while the purpose of poetry is to search.

The piece that I have worked …

Poem No. 125, May 2021, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Word Into Idea: A Creative Writing Exercise, Stephen Fried

Open Educational Resources

This activity begins from an aleatory technique that creates a list of 104 associatively generated words to provide each participant with a field from which they improvise, first a free-form poem using twenty of the words and then an experimental prose piece that uses all 104 words. The poem is written as a workshop activity and optionally shared in a “poetry slam” segment, following which the prose piece is done as a home assignment. The activity takes 90-120 minutes. A version for synchronous online application is in development.

Portrait Of Rich County, Adrian Thomson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Portrait of Rich County presents the small town of Randolph, Utah in poems describing its wildlife, recreational activities, and the perspectives of citizens in the contemporary rocky mountain west. Special attention to the imagination of the poems’ speaker toward the more dreamlike qualities of Rich County establishes itself throughout, in order to convey a feeling of hope within harsh terrain. This collection examines the theme of salvaging items not often considered, such as rusted junk, ancient houses, or roadside garbage, both in the actions of the speaker and through the act of naming these items upon the page. An over-arching …

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

Mineral Rites, Emma Van Dyke

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of original poems written between Fall 2017 and Spring 2021.

Young Adult: A Poetic Exploration Of Modern American Life, Ellie Bixler

Honors Theses

Adrienne Rich, in her 1993 essay “Someone Is Writing a Poem,” writes “In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode.” In this collection, I make my own attempt to part with the prevailing mode. I use my poetry as a means of engaging and contending with the American socio-political dialogue that often feels both deeply pervasive and largely inaccessible. Grounded in the thematic conventions of political and ecological poetry, this collection is an exploration of what it means and how it feels to come of age …

American Sissy: Original Poetry, Jonah Stokes

Honors Theses

The creative art of poetry is a complex form, yet the fundamental aspect of the poetic form is of experience. The experience of the poet as well as the experience of the reader reading a poem is what is defined as the crucial element of poetry in this creative endeavor. This study analyzes works of contemporary poets who successfully portray the art of experience in their work. Looking at Romantic and marginalized poets, this study seeks to understand the complexity of poetic experience. The introduction is followed by a series of poem's that emphasize the experience of the author.

Modern Ancient: A Thesis Of Poetry, Timothy Brian Dodd

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This collection of poetry examines the ontological dialectic outlined in the scholarship of Mircea Eliade. Three sections of poetry (Dissolution, Navigation, and Hierophany) explore the connections and disconnections between modern and ancient ontology and experience.

The Correlation Between Traditional And Modern Day Performance Poetry: Where Music And Poetry Collide, Jaya Hodges

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

"Music and poetry have similar roots that have made them both into what they are today. From chants to church hymns, they both have kept the Black community intact during times of sorrow and grief. The words that ride along the rhythm and structure of any song brings an unforgettable emotion out of these art forms. This paper will discuss how they have merged themselves together along with the influences they have made within Jame Weldon's "Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing" and Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)".

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, And Pleasures, Singh Kaur Singh

All NMU Master's Theses

Taunggyi Dreamer: Exiles, Diasporas, and Pleasures, a collection of poetry and prose (creative non-fiction and fiction), reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival is told through hybrid narratives. The writing arises from my own multiple migrations from Taunggyi, Burma, to India and eventually to the United States of America. Taunggyi Dreamer is inspired by: my exile from my birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962; my resettlement as a stateless citizen in my ancestral home in India during my teen years; and my arrival to the United States of America in my thirties as a …

The Sound A Body Makes : And Other Ruminations On Navigating Roadkill, Olivia Kingery

All NMU Master's Theses

Using poetry, creative non-fiction, and watercolor paintings, this thesis interrogates my personal relationship with roadkill, as well as society’s relationship with roadkill. The lens of the collection is hyper-focused on roads, the treatment / beliefs surrounding roadkill, and the treatment of more-than-human bodies. Combining image and text, the reader is immersed in a unique conversation about our environment. The Sound a Body Makes utilizes a variety of poetic forms, as well as essay forms. Altogether, the collection is a call to action for radical change regarding how society views and treats more-than-human bodies.

Heavy Is The Head, Elizabeth Wiles

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

"Heavy is the Head: how my mental illness made me a writer" is a collection of poetry about a journey in and through mental illness. It engages the social action issue of mental health awareness. "Heavy is the Head" tells a story of mental illness, how it was accepted, how it was used to improve, and how it can pave the road to self-acceptance.

Love Paint And Other Private Vegetables, Victoria Hudson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite her remarkably low score on the Morse Fall Scale, Dolores shattered her femur in August of 2018. Some studies suggest that grief began there: a fracture, a wail—but the mechanism by which we came to recognize it, to plant it in our beds, remained unexplained, and the role of the daughter was controversial. Who gardens? What is the optimal depth for this sort of burial? Rootbound women with a clinical presentation of imminent loss were eligible to participate; we had thought to control the study but found no suitable placebo. The vegetables were necessarily randomized, the paint stratified according …

The First Flowers Of Spring, Gretel Valdes

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a series of poems by Gretel Valdes.

I.

• Pillowtalk
• Autumnal Hues
• Mis Cejas
• Intimacy
• Without You, in San Francisco
• Sundown of Person

II.

• drinking honey with the bees
• The Lady of Crescent Lake
• A Collection of 2 am Thoughts
• Cold Feet
• Another Year of Thankfulness
• My Grandfather’s First Time in the ICU
• For Oregon Where I Have Yet to Fall in Love

III.

• The First Flower of Spring
• A Dandelion Before the Wind
• Weightless
• Aubade to the Other Woman
• To Denica
• Someday Soon

IV.

• Recovery
• Anxiety
• On the first girl I ever kissed
• Drinks I …

Properly Unhinged: A Collection Of Poems, Madison Everett

Honors Projects

This is a collection of poems that explores the identities I possess and am a part of. These identities include being half black and half white, clinically diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Generalize Anxiety Disorder, pansexual or bisexual or something altogether different (depending on the day), and cis gendered womanhood. I also explore what a poem is and what a poem is not, and how there is very little difference between the two. In a lot of ways, this is an exploration into myself and what it means to be within the world. What does it mean to …

Unraveling Lessons From Mary Oliver, Sarah Audsley

Appalachia

A young poet describes the ways Oliver’s commitment to the craft inspired her.

Metamorphosis: An Exploration Of Transformation In Artmaking, Scarlet Sevits

Honors Projects

My creative project begins with wanting to know how the art making process relates to the process of metamorphosis and the extent to which this process can achieve realism. To explore this question, I chose related subject matter that is the female mythological figures of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses who undergo transformation of the human body. I also chose a methodology that relates to my question. The acts of painting and writing can be explored as processes of transformation and both processes attempt to convince the viewer or reader of reality: the reality of a living figure or the emotional …

00. Campus Poetry Walk 2021 Brochure & Map, Holy Cross Libraries

Campus Poetry Walk 2021

This brochure describes a poetry walk installed throughout the campus at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. It includes a map indicating the location, title and author of each poem along the route.

A virtual version of the poetry walk can be found at crossworks.holycross.edu/poetry2021

Mother/God, Sarah Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My collection, Mother/God, attempts to look at my own growing up and how it has affected my beliefs and self in the presence, while also looking at the choices my mother made in raising me. The central thread throughout the collection is my relationship with my mother and the love that's endured those hardships. It explores my mother's past up until the hardest parts of motherhood in section one, The Mother. Then, section two titled The Daughter focuses on my own rebellion of how I was raised and an exploration of existentialism that was, in a lot of ways, …

To My Beloved Body,, Hanna Carstensen

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Watering Stones, Madeline Kelly

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Waiting, Will Clark

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Sister, Cass Sissel

The Oval

No abstract provided.

The Garden, Abigail Hogan

The Oval

No abstract provided.

Say My Name, Gwen Nicholson

The Oval

No abstract provided.

An Ironist, Caelan Cummings

The Oval

No abstract provided.