Creative Writing Commons^™

Let Your Head Hang Down: A Narrative Examination Of Cultic & Conspiratorial Romance, Kyle Macy

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

A response to recent cultural trends of radicalization, extremism, and violence in American society, this dissertation, a novel rendered in ephemeral fragments of oral histories, interrogates the romanticist postures that compel a community of musical artists, the so-called “Folk Revival Revival,” toward infamy and tragedy. Where more traditional sociological approaches to cultic formations stress the importance of centralized charismatic authority, and more traditional psychological approaches rely upon a conspiratorial Cold War ethos of cognitive bias and coercive control (i.e. “brainwashing”), this project meets such assumptions with incredulity, asserting instead that cultic and conspiratorial entrancement awakens first from within, and may …

Outside Inside: Poems, Emma Jane Sullivan

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis includes thirty-four poems and thirteen illustrations that investigate the topic of self-exploration, creative freedom, and liberatory pleasure. My poems are souvenirs from a failed ethical standard, a trove of misogynic micro-aggressions, a spotlight on the backward- ness of gender norms, and a surprisingly strong thread that links women to the planet and to shared language, a thread humankind continuously tries to cut. The methods of research were largely a self- study and one that required consistent reflection. The results were a collection of writings that had to be revised and edited with the guidance of my thesis …

To Swallow The Sun, John Morris Cox

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

My creative fiction thesis To Swallow the Sun is part one of a novel of the same name. Cage, the protagonist, is a dreamer; he yearns for visceral experience and enjoys assignations with the night beyond his bedroom window; but as his desires draw him deeper into a world of his own, there are many who see nothing but a boy in need of fixing. After continually falling short of the expectations his family and society have crafted for him- abandoning work, “ruining” school plays, even failing to react to a prisoner’s execution- Cage is sent to a psychiatric ward. …

American Eyes, Heather Phillips

Dissertations and Theses

American Eyes, a memoir in essays in the vein of Elisabeth Eave’s Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting lost, examines how the desire to travel, quest, and be transformed is complicated by conventional notions of home, gender, success, and culture. In a collection that spans twenty-five years in Thailand, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S., the author ponders the ramifications for women who eschew traditional notions of home and family to instead live life “on the road.” Exploring themes of travel, transformation, culture, identity, and (dis)embodiment as an American …

The Sun Goes Down In Juárez, Rosario Martinez

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The Sun Goes Down in Juárez is a historical fiction short story based on the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). It follows the changing relationship between brothers Rudy and Jaime as they join a rebel army in their journey across Mexico to assist in one of the most pivotal battles of the revolution. As their values unalign and the trek continues, Rudy and Jaime are left wondering if they left the other back home. The story heavily focuses on duty and family, particularly pertaining to their importance in Mexican culture, and how these values influence one’s decisions and the consequences that follow. …

Gills, Penny Reynolds

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Editors Bios, Editors Bios

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Untitled, Siena Lopez

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

A Local History Of Horses, Caleb Nichols

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Winter, Emily Niebuhr

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

There Sits, Mason Stobbe

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Flamenco Dancer, Tony Gudkov

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

My Lady Melancholy, Maya Seagraves

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Opposition Man, Theodore John Stratton

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Michael M. Morris is an oppositional researcher searching not only for dirt to take down those he feels are unworthy to hold political office, but also for his own direction in life. After the tragic loss of his wife and only child, he begins to put the pieces of his life back together, only to be pulled back into both destructive old habits and into the very town he hoped to avoid. Persuaded to return to Tallahassee, Florida, Mike finds himself not only fighting the wealthy and politically powerful family responsible for his misery but also the guilt that keeps …

Ukrainian Beauty, Daryna Gladun

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

‘Ukrainian Beauty’ is a collection of poetry that emerged from my two years in MALS. It confronts the misrepresentation of a female body and experience in a male-dominant society of a rising democracy.

The poetry collection commences with an essay, ‘Ukrainian Beauty—91’ and beyond,’ which delves into the historical and political backdrop of the first national pageant, ‘Ukrainian Beauty,’ held in February 1991, a pivotal year marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 20 poems in the collection reference the late 1980s-1990s artworks by the Kharkiv School of Photography and Odesa Conceptual Artists, Les Podervianskyi’s radio plays, texts …

Behind The Rhododendron, Tj Riley

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Like a rhododendron, man most often presents to the observer his ornamental self. Yet, what keeps in the shadows of all he presents to the world? What remains beneath in the dark soils of past experience from where he’s come? What must perish and decay to yield hearty growth and an individual expression that reaches humbly, and more deeply, toward some divine light? And what of this seemingly intuitive notion of something sacred he may struggle to comprehend and know?

Behind the Rhododendron is an intensely personal collection of poems that earnestly strives to scratch at the surface of such …

Adolescence: A Collection Of Short Stories ; Title Pending: A Novel, Dylan Siegel

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Riverrun 2024, Saint Mary's College Of California

Riverrun Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

V.1 Winter 2024, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2024 issue is formatted as a calendar featuring images of current RISD students recreating scenes from historical photos taken at RISD.

Sense Make Before Book, Bradley Sinanan

Theses and Dissertations

“Sense Make Before Book” is an Indo-Caribbean turn of phrase which refers to common sense being more important than book smarts. My sister sent me a post the other day on Instagram of an Trinidadian woman using this phrase, saying it was one of Indo-Caribbean origin. I was interested and asked my mom about it. My mom says that when she was younger my grandpa said it often around their house in Princes Town, Trinidad and Tobago. This adage feels charged thinking about the history of indenture and its effects on the Indo-Caribbean diaspora.

The written word of archival history …

Notes Toward A Personal Afrofuturism, Jalen T. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is penned by a young adult who is generally confused about a lot of things regarding life, but has one singular focus that is perhaps larger than life—trying to find the bridge between a future already lived, and a past yet to happen. These are his findings so far.

There Is No Substitute For A Lifetime: A Study Of Metaphor And Linguistic Autonomy In The Lives And Works Of Selected American Poets, Richard Tony Thompson

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Metaphor is not only figurative language, but also a way of understanding reality and creating truth. This study describes how selected American poets, including Tom Andrews, Patti Smith, and Natasha Trethewey, engage the concept of creation through metaphor in their poetic and autobiographical writing. Theories of signification, symbolism, and metaphor as defined by philosophers of language, including George Lakoff, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Roman Jakobson, are combined with complementary theories from philosophers of poetry, including Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, and Federico García Lorca, and used as a lens through which to view the agency of the language user as a …

Islands In The North, Kirstie Catriona Clinko

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Islands in the North is a coming of age Y.A. novel, set first on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, then Vashon Island in Washington State. Dwyn is fourteen and three quarters, and she has attended Bridgely School in Manchester, England, since kindergarten. At Bridgely, she can truly be herself. A straight ‘A’ student, an accomplished pianist, a good friend. Dwyn is a stand-in mother for her five-year-old brother, James. Their absent father is a merchant marine who sails the seven seas and is little more than a pen pal for Dwyn. Her abusive mother dates a Scottish …

Brat Olympics, Caroline Ganci Patterson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

brat olympics is an exploration of feminine disgust, apprehension, and disorientation contextualized through interpersonal relationships and societal shapeshifting. It pays particular attention to gender performance, surburban queerness, and strangerness. The manuscript plays on the history of the bildungsroman, but instead of one consistent singular timeline, it provides three separate attempts at a characterization of a life. These disparate approaches to a singular life’s characterization stress the mundanity of documentation.

This multinarrative approach satirizes the ideal of the singular confessional, and presents a discursive approach to the way we choose to build our worlds. Building off the works of the New …

Anatomy: The Book Of Moose, David Nelson Levine

Dissertations and Theses

Anatomy: The Book of Moose is a series of prose poems / flash creative non-fiction pieces all centered around body anxieties and health experiences. From the mildly curious to the truly terrifying, this project seeks to explore what it means to be healthy, what it means to be unwell, and the stress of constantly having to sort oneself into one of those two states. Originally conceived of as a poetic anatomy textbook, each piece in this collection focuses on one body part or experience. Through this framework, each piece becomes a self-contained entry in a memoir arranged tonally rather than …

Song Analysis - Final Project For The American Musical Experience, Agustina Checa

Open Educational Resources

Assignment designed as a final project for the undergraduate course MSH245: The American Musical Experience at Lehman College. This course surveys different musical expressions that emerged in the United States as well as the historical, social and technological contexts framing their popularization.This assignment asks students to analyze a song of their choosing performed by an American artist and to follow specific requirements in their study of this piece which include: historical and social contextualization, analysis of style, influences and lyrics, as well as the elaboration of a "listening guide" to fully appreciate the composition. Students are given the …

The Man From Figueras, Chris Burnside

The Man from Figueras

Chris Burnside is an artist/choreographer who was inspired to tell stories on stage after seeing performance artist Spalding Gray at an international theater festival in the early 1980s. After retirement and with the encouragement of a lifelong friend, Mr. Burnside started writing some of those stories down, eventually including others. The stories in The Man from Figueras focus on learning experiences, aha moments, and events that have, over the years, changed his perspective and shaped how he has lived his life. The ninety stories are in chronological order and are grouped by the eight decades of his life.

Burnside attended …

A Constellation In Training, Marko C. Capoferri

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Capoferri, Marko, M.F.A., Fall 2023 Creative Writing - Poetry

Light, Loneliness, and Location

Chairperson: Sean Hill

In many better-known works by the 20^th century painter Edward Hopper, I find a locus of visual concerns that overlay the fixations of the majority—if not all—of the poems that comprise my thesis, what I like to think of as the three L’s: light, loneliness, and location (to which I could also add, as secondary colors, longing and landscape). Additionally, there are what Mark Strand identifies as “two imperatives” in Hopper’s work, “the one that urges us to continue and the other that …

A Wreck Of Seabirds: Entrapment And Isolation Within The Australian Coastal Gothic Landscape, Karleah May Olson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis explores the concepts of entrapment and isolation as they relate to the Australian Gothic literary mode and coastal landscapes. It does so through a creative work, a novel entitled A Wreck of Seabirds, and an accompanying exegesis, which examines these concepts alongside the shift of the Gothic to Australian landscapes and ultimately to coastal settings, and their representation in fiction. It examines ways in which elements and tropes of the Gothic are utilized in Australian Coastal fiction, particularly through depictions and metaphors of entrapment and isolation. A Wreck of Seabirds is an Australian Coastal Gothic novel set in …

The Commonwealth Of Amnesia: A Collection Of Erasure And Cut-Up Poems Exploring The Forgotten Histories Of Croatian And Yugoslav Peoples In Australia And An Exegesis Obliteration Creates More: Examining The Wreck Of History Through Whiteout, Blackout And Cut-Up Erasure Poetry, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis consists of two parts, a collection of poems, “The Commonwealth of Amnesia”, and an accompanying exegesis. The collection explores the forgotten histories of Croatian and Yugoslav immigrants in Australia from 1901 to 1957 through the medium of erasure and cut-up poetry, re-arranging words found in nonfiction documents to posit that forgetting can be metaphorically and visually represented through erasure while also re-narrativising a text. Erasure poetry takes a textual document and using whiteout or blackout erases portions of a text, transforming that text into a poem; cut-up poetry rearranges the words of a document in a textual version …