Creative Writing Commons^™

Creative Fiction Piece, Grace Maier

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My proposal for my senior honors project is to produce a completed work of fiction. Specifically, this will be a short story consisting of around twenty double spaced pages, minimum six thousand words, of original writing accompanied by an eight to ten page critical essay exploring my literary influences as well as a five to seven page self analysis of my individual writing process. It is my intention to produce a work within the gothic-thriller genre, deriving inspiration from authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O’Connor.

Teaching Materialism Through Storytelling: A Collection Of Short Stories And Learning Materials, Zoie Zvonar, Katherine Arnold

Honors Projects

This collaborative projects seeks to combine the disciplines of psychology and writing into a collection of short stories and learning materials dedicated to teaching young students the psychological concept of materialism. In order to accomplish this goal, Zoie Zvonar and Katherine Arnold have designed and created a set of materials that seek to inform, educate, and instill in those young students what materialism is, how to recognize it in our own lives, its consequences, and potential strategies to lower high materialistic tendencies. Zoie Zvonar created the companion guide, learning activities for both students and instructors, and an additional resources list …

Stray Thoughts And Desire Paths—A Dialogue, Jenna Butler, Yvonne E. Blomer

The Goose

In this dialogue, authors, teachers, and environmentalists Yvonne Blomer and Jenna Butler discuss the ways in which our desire paths—our intents for our lives—have changed since the start of the pandemic. Covering women's writing, feminism, daily life during the pandemic, environmentalism, and race, this dialogue is an act of allyship from two women of different backgrounds writing together.

Movement Upstream, Downstream: A Lyric Essay, Mong- Lan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Early on, without knowing I was part of a movement, I was part of the movement of the Asian American cultural and literary phenomenon.

Because it was necessary to bear witness, to tell my story, my stories, our stories, the collective story, my observations, which keeps on unravelling, I began to write.

Some Thoughts On Aiiieeeee! In 2019, Shawna Ryan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A creative writer reflects on the legacy of Aiiieeeee!

Mountains To The Sea: How Climate Change Influences People, Cultures And Communities, Stephanie L. Maltarich

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

This Book Is A Book Of Secrets: Part One (Capstone), Keith Stillman

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Horror novel excerpt. A recent murder sets FBI agents on the trail of Emma "Mink" Merchant's father. Mysterious outcast Chester Forrest might hold the answer to Mink's salvation--but is salvation what she needs? And is Chester more dangerous than he appears?

Introductory Workshops In Creative Writing: Writing Prompt Phase 2 - Relearning The Craft, Noelle M. Nagales

Open Educational Resources

For this assignment, you will be required to do two things. One: visit a specific place of your choice. It can be anywhere, on own your free time (either on the train, at a museum, a restaurant, at the movies with your friends, or even at your local cafe). There, you will jot down on a sheet of paper (NOT on your phone) a bullet point list of all the things you hear or see (conversations and observations). The point is to not have your phone in hand and to be completely observant of your surroundings. Two: then …

Introductory Workshops In Creative Writing: Writing Prompt Phase 1 - Understanding The Self, Noelle Marie Nagales

Open Educational Resources

What is this idea of “self?” How do we define it or more specifically how do we represent ourselves (as the writer) on page and to what extent can we make our own voice visible? Anyone can write a story, but where do you as the author exist within your own work?

For this assignment, you will be required to write a memoir (a personal narrative) or a short piece of fiction that depicts some aspect of yourself or an attribute of it, present within your own life. You can either focus on a specific moment of time, place, person, …

Low Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2150 (Writing Ii), Maxine Krenzel

Open Educational Resources

Welcome to English 2150, a writing and reading intensive course that will introduce you to the practice and process of conducting original research. This class will walk you through the research process step-by-step, from drafting an initial research question, to reading and analyzing archival and secondary sources, and eventually mapping out your findings in a final research portfolio. You will learn over the course of the semester that the research process begins with simply asking a question that addresses a topic or issue that impacts you in some way; it is my hope that by the end of the semester, …

Paging: A Collection Of Short Stories, Shruthi Deivasigamani, Katherine Hubbard, Ma

Phase 1

Introduction: Paging is a series of thematically interconnected short stories that take place at a single fictional urban hospital center. The guiding questions that the stories explore are twofold: other than doctors and patients, what kinds of people spend their time in a hospital? And, what kind of place is the hospital for these people?

Methods: The background research for Paging began by exploring written works of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir set in hospitals. After I had developed a set of guiding research questions, I spent the summer at a major hospital in New York City, where I was able …

Moving From Image To Narrative To Voice, Eileen Landis-Groom

Publications

As I review rubrics used for evaluating writing in my institution, I notice how voice often is a low priority or nonexistent criterion. Writing, however, with a voice awakens a reader; writing without a voice numbs the reader. Beginning with an image and moving to a narrative may provide writers with a voice, as it has for me. This article is a contemplation resulting from my own writing on the importance of images in generating not only a narrative but also a voice, in other words, a sense that a unique individual is conversing with another, the reader.

Small Worlds: A Collection Of Creative Nonfiction On Relationships And Our Connections, Nicole H. Conner, Colin Burch

Honors Theses

Small Worlds is a collection of creative nonfiction, personal essays, and memoir essays detailing the connections between relationships, love, and music.

Teachers Of Writing Who Write: Finding Voice And Embracing Vulnerability, Jeanne Muraco Hurney

Graduate Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to advance the premise that teachers of writing must write in order to establish their own voice and embrace the risk taking that the process entails. Only then can instructors of writing truly impart that knowledge to help students elevate their writing and motivate them to find their own voice. I will argue that eighth grade teachers who know the craft in this personal way are in a remarkable position to have an effect on students’ writing to prepare them with skills and power of writing they will need in high school, where the …

Yellow Pads And The Return Of The Writer, Gregory Shafer

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

A Wac Composition I Memoir, Nathan Larson

Theses and Dissertations

Composition I: Writing About the Visual Arts was a freshman / sophomore level writing course constructed on the methodology of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). Would student writing skills improve if writing assignments were based in the visual arts and the students who enrolled in the course interested in pursuing art history or the studio arts as a major or minor? Analyzing the semester writing assignments, I would ascertain if student writing skills did indeed improve and try to ascertain if WAC was a or the contributing factor. Ultimately, none of the students taking this course had any background in …

Dungeons And Drafting, Talitha Greaver, Paige Doland

Honors Program: Expanded Learning Clubs

No abstract provided.

From Creative Writing To A Self’S Liberation: A Monologue Of A Struggling Writer, Ethan Trinh

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

The pressure of being alone in a new country and of surviving in a competitive academia has scared me to death. I cannot find any better way to heal me other than writing. Writing helps me make sense of the worlds and come closer to my true self. This piece is journeying from my own struggles of a Vietnamese, queer, immigrant teacher to accept who I am as a writer. In addition, writing this piece helps me get closer to decademizing academic writing in higher education.

Bao Phi Interview, Elyse Warnecke

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Bao Phi is a Vietnamese American spoken and written word artist. Coming from a family of refugees from Vietnam, his escapism and life values he has found in literature have allowed for many great accomplishments, such as poetry championships, several books of poetry collections, and most recently, children’s books. He uses his life stories and lessons, as well as current events to guide his audience, as well as his daughter and younger generations, through a rather difficult world. His most recent project has been publishing a children’s book illustrated by Thi Bui.

Critical Introduction: Responsibility And Representation & Introduction To All My Mother’S Lovers, Ilana Masad

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This critical component of the creative thesis All My Mother’s Lovers explores the question of fiction writers’ responsibility to themselves, their work, and their readers in the age of social media and easy access of readers to writers and vice versa. Using two examples of recent online controversies, this piece explores the varying ways in which readers respond to writers and writers to readers and rhetorically analyzes the responses of those in positions of power (writers, publishers) as well as the cultural contexts from within which they respond. It then draws conclusions as to the trajectory of these two controversies, …

Self-Reflective Journaling: A Practice For Achieving Self-Understanding And Acceptance, Overcoming Creative Resistance, And Moving Toward Ideal Self, Courtney Moses

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

The Critical and Creative Thinking synthesis course provided an opportunity for me to begin a process of self-transformation, using all that I had learned in the program about metacognition, reflective practice, and creativity to inspire goals for my personal growth. As part of my work in the synthesis course, I rediscovered a consistent practice of self-reflective journaling that I had abandoned some years ago and used my synthesis paper to document my process in hopes that others may learn from it and perhaps be inspired to take on a self-reflective journaling practice of their own. As my paper reveals through …

Undertow, Adam Karlin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A short story collection that explores themes of culture, history, race, movement, stagnancy, and freedom. All stories are connected by elements of water, swimming, rivers, or wetlands. All contain characters seeking to escape their circumstances, with varying degrees of success. For some characters, the arc of their development lays in their movement; for others, it lays in their learning to live with a lack of movement.

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Slotus, Alison F. Huntley, Michael F.X. Daley

Honors Thesis

When a paranoid, image-obsessed woman becomes Second Lady of the United States, she will protect herself and her family from the (often non-existent) eyes of the press no matter what - despite her three step-children’s protests.

Exploring The Academic/Creative Writing Binary, Jessica O'Leary

Honors College Theses

I began to work on this study in my ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines class during my junior year at Pace University. After being asked to write a paper on what writing looks like in my discipline, I realized that my perceptions of the kinds of writing done by faculty and students in a university English department were limited and constricting as a result of the binary way in which I viewed academic and creative forms of writing. For instance, I had trouble believing that my creative writing professor studied pre-med in undergrad. I continued my research on this …

Writing For The Humanities And Arts, Yolande E. Brener, Julia Brown

Open Educational Resources

This Writing for the Humanities website includes the syllabus, schedule, assignments, and OER reading materials for the course. The syllabus covers a number of genres, and examines what it means to write for the humanities. This stretches beyond Art and Literature to cover History, Philosophy, Theater, Music, and Media Communications. The assignments are designed to help students in their future careers, especially if they aim to work in the Humanities, which include teaching, curating, counseling, technical writing and journalism. The assignments will teach students how to compose an effective resume and cover letter, how to create a focused report based …

Deliberate Practice, Writing Self-Efficacy, And Self-Regulation Among Internet Novelists In China: A Phenomenological Approach, Shuangshuang Cai

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The focus of this study was the role of deliberate practice, writing self-efficacy and self-regulation in the lived experiences of Chinese internet literature novelists. This qualitative, phenomenological study presented the shared perceptions of this phenomenon drawn from interviews of Chinese internet novelists. The psychological aspects of these novelists were previously unexplored and this study helps to address the gap in the literature. The phenomenological method captured the experiences of the Chinese internet novelists and added this rich detail to the existing research literature.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen Chinese internet novelists, and related documents from other Chinese internet novelists’ …

Words, Pictures, And The “Nonlistening Space”: Visual Design And Popular Music As Forms Of Performance In First-Year Writing, Maria Lynn Soriano

2019 Faculty Bibliography

The chapter focuses on the importance of teaching visual rhetoric by examining a multimodal first-year writing course unit that asks students to create concert posters for their favorite bands or musical artists. In addition, students produce explanatory essays that translate their creation process into words, representing their imaginations on paper. Soriano discusses the ways that this unit has improved and enriched the writing of many of her students, including poster examples and supplemental materials for instructors who might want to adopt this assignment and challenge their students to invade their own “nonlistening spaces.”

Writing For The Humanities And Arts, Shamecca A. Harris

Open Educational Resources

This dynamic English Composition course asks students to both create and engage with texts, in a variety of forms, that demonstrate how culture and personal experience inform a writer’s work. In this class, students will read and write voraciously about social, political, economic and cultural issues that influence their lived experiences and use the conventions of multiple genres to both reflect and respond to the times in which they live. Moreover, they will also consciously consider what it means to write academically at the college level through regular self-reflection and revision. In doing so, students will strengthen their rhetorical knowledge …

From The Dirt Up: Layering Story, Place, And Environmentalism Within Three Picture Books, Lucinda Rowe

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

The world is changing before our eyes – species are going extinct, the amount of habitat available to wildlife has decreased, and children are spending less time outside than in the past. Through analyzing environmental ideology within early childhood education and children’s literature, I demonstrate that picture books can inspire nature conservation, appreciation, and stewardship by encouraging outdoor play and exploration. I compare picture books that successfully demonstrate eco-consciousness without being didactic, how my thesis fits within the current environmental movement, and how it helps stretch the definition of what is considered eco-writing.

This thesis consists of three illustrated picture …