Creative Writing Commons^™

A Negotiation In Meaning: Identifying American Cultural Touchstones, Jayne Jaya Todai

Honors Theses

How can discussing a poem lead to a meaningful conversation? What if Americans used common poems as their nation's cultural touchstones? In my essay, I will explore how poems that serve as American cultural touchstones might develop better communicators within the United States. I will propose a template that determines which poems would qualify as these national touchstones.

Impact Of Ekphrastic Poetry Upon My Writing, Lacy C. Snapp

Honors Theses

This thesis contains an introduction in which I will define ekphrastic poetry and provide an explication of some ekphrastic poetry written throughout history, followed by a conclusion in which I will include my own poetry, both ekphrastic and non, followed by an explication of my progress. The first section will be about questioning how the selected poets use their chosen image to enhance their own writing, and the true purpose of ekphrastic poetry. The second section will show how my poetry has developed since this project began and I started focusing on ekphrastic poetry. When I write ekphrastic poetry, not …

The Fable And The Fabulous: The Use Of Traditional Forms In Children's Literature, John Joseph Hill

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To the outside world, Northern California might be trees, granola, hippies, rivers, snowboarders, environmentalists, farming, beaches, diverse wildlife, and wealth. Through a series of loosely interlocking fiction stories, this thesis explores the Northern California below the surface where people work as garbage collectors by day and attend community college by night, where teenage girls scam people in the park for free alcohol, where lovers spend their date night as part of a nude human-chain to protect an old growth redwood from being cut down, and where animal rights activists smoke cigarettes and seek love. Informed by personal experience and a …

Questioning The Pope, Jim Easterhouse

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

All Feathers And Attitude, Virginia Macdonald

All NMU Master's Theses

This collection of essays and prose poems seeks to examine the elements of an identity: how memories, culture, work, place, family, and brain chemistry simultaneously create and undermine a sense of self. How the sense of self is not contiguous, or smooth. How hope and regret wrestle.

While deeply personal, All Feathers and Attitude is not a memoir, but rather an assemblage of interpretations based on actual events. The individual pieces are gathered into sections that correlate somewhat to the themes mentioned above, but the sections are not labeled as such. The readers may draw whatever conclusions they wish regarding …

With The Light Caught Between, Albert M. Jacoby

All NMU Master's Theses

Although Henry and Claire Lumens are twins, their high school lives couldn’t be more opposite. Henry enjoys sketching, looking at handsome boys, and reading about fantastical places, but his shy and pensive nature means he battles demons of his own every day in the gym locker room. Claire, however, loves the world she lives in, which is easy because she’s bossy, clever, and stunning. On their seventeenth birthday, their grandmother gives them a gift that will take them to a fantastical world. Despite their ignorance of the world’s existence, their grandmother insists it’s their birthplace, and the only way they …

16-Bit Ghouls: A Novella, Alyssa M. Bersine

All NMU Master's Theses

This novella follows twenty-something phone psychic and recluse, Jane, whose dead brother haunts her Super Nintendo. When he prompts Jane to find his killer, she must learn how to navigate a world where he is absent. Jane struggles not only with the ghost, but also with letting go of the nostalgia and anxiety that prevent her from moving on with her life. 16-Bit Ghouls is a story about grief and growing-up.

Bleach, Cream, And Other Dolls, Elizabeth Diane Mackness

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Bleach, Cream, and Other Dolls questions current rape culture and the political power plays that take place behind it. As a whole, this work also investigates how the positioning of a speaker affects the ability to communicate, build and participate in relationships. Through this problem each speaker’s identity becomes skewed and the speakers struggle to find their identity through various mediums—revenge, death, penetration, definition, nature, skin and disintegration (among other possibilities).

Auto/Aura, Michael Wanzenried

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems, And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, section 6

Auto/Aura attempts to follow through on Whitman’s project by literally using materials from the world to create a situation that challenges the traditional reader-poet relationship. The poems here diverge from the page into a three-dimensional setting to continue in a largely personal and arbitrary lineage (as all poet-historical lineages tend to be according to Jerome Rothenberg) of 19th and 20th century poetic …

Land Of Entrapment, Scott M. Anderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

“Land of Entrapment” is a colloquial pun on the state motto of New Mexico, “The Land of Enchantment.” Though not every story is set in New Mexico, all of these stories examine characters trapped by something. In some cases, it’s drugs or terminal disease, while in others, characters are manacled by their emotions and feelings. In almost every case, the characters are haunted by their past, an inextricable part of their story, their existence. The narratives explore how these characters cope with their inescapable past while under some kind of duress, and find that the space between acceptance and despair …

Kania, Indrani Sengupta

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Kania begins as a poetic revision of fairy tales, an attempt to extract the potential female narratives buried within the source texts, in their stifling archetypes. In the spirit of Angela Carter, it attempts to manipulate the most recognizable fairy tale motifs in order to explore issues of violence, deviant desire, sexuality, and monstrosity. As the text evolves, the archetypal “monster” shifts in location, becoming increasingly internal to the woman/speaker. First “he” is the abuser, then “she” is the errant woman, then finally, “it” is the interior anxiety, the self”s nightmare, ungendered and constantly in flux. The manuscript strives, through …

Blue Girls, Jordan Lienhoop

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Bowling, Brian Austin

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Offensive, Hope Jordan

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Kiss With A Fist, Adrienne Westenfeld

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Orbiting, Mary Ardery

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Millcreek, Hannah Bradley

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

The Ladies Here Have Topographic Hands, Mary Ardery

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Plum Undone, Zach Manges

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Ann Marie, Emma Haynes

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Looker: Stories, George Robert Hargett

Master's Theses

The following stories, completed by the author between August 2013 and February 2015, deal with love, obscurity, isolation, failure, vulnerability and insecurity, looking and losing, the fears tied up in all these, and, once in a while, gaining.

Excerpts From Television's Greatest Hits And Other Stories, Zachary Stephen Williams

Master's Theses

The short stories contained in this manuscript are mostly of the realist stripe, with a few concessions made to my more fabulist tendencies. Each is about men and women being forced to relive their old lives or finding themselves at the cusp of new ones, propositions which prove simultaneously attractive and repulsive. By the end of each story, it is my hope to transmit that the characters have survived somewhat intact, though reconstituted. There is a man in grief over the death of the wife he couldn’t stop cheating on, adults trick-or-treating at the expense of their children’s youths, a …

Another Word For Autumn And Other Stories, Henry Burgard Shepard Iii

Master's Theses

The subject, style, and form of these stories are different from one another. At first glance, there seems to be no obvious thematic connection throughout this collection, no binding thread that ties them together. However, what allows these stories to exist side by side is their focus. The characters in these stories are human, no matter what situation they find themselves in, be it strange, fantastic, or mundane, they strive to achieve their desires. Each story takes a different approach to create a succinct feeling, all parts working toward eliciting a certain emotion. In one story, a family is powerless …

For Want Of Syncope, Noah Chauvin

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Garden Of The Gods, Dustin J. Dipaulo

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Open Diary, Kathryn Waring

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Fluoxetine, Sean Delles

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Songs Of My Youth, Theresa Flynn

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Missing Photos, Angela Rollins

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

The Contract, Elise Silverstein

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.