Creative Writing Commons^™

Bouncing Back: Resilience And Its Limits In Late-Age Composing, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

This essay is one of a series on my mother’s late-age composing, studying a writing project she started at age 70 and worked on for more than 25 years. Her intention was to integrate extensive reading, personal experience, and cultural observations to explain changes in parenting (and, by extension, education and enculturation of the next generation) from her childhood in the 1920s through the 2000s. When she died at 97, she left behind a 75-page draft, but was unable to complete her plans for revisions and an ending. I focus here on identifying the multiple factors in the ecology of …

How To Rebuild Home: Lessons From Loss, Amelie Lee

Scripps Senior Theses

“How to Rebuild Home: Lessons from Loss” is a memoir that tells the story of my loss of my mother to cancer the summer before my senior year of college. In the piece, I utilize epistolary and creative nonfiction styles to grapple with what it means to grieve a mother both before and after she’s gone and what a daughter’s duty is to her parents in a Chinese American family. Through letters to my eighteen-year-old self and memoir-style storytelling, I've tried to create a coming-of-age story that dives into an emotional and nuanced relationship with family, love, and grief.

Of Monsters And Men: Deconstructing Patriarchal Relationships While Redefining "Family" In Seville, Annika Johnson

Scripps Senior Theses

After growing up with an abusive, alcoholic, narcissist for a father, I did not realize how abnormal my perception of family was until I studied abroad in Spain at age 19. The healthy family dynamics of my hosts–a Sevillan family of five who mirrored the structure of my childhood family unit of Mom, Dad, my sister, brother, and me–challenged my notion of home as a place of survival and of paternal figures as monsters. This experience led me to the questions: Do patriarchal societies inherently create monsters that we have to face or are the monsters the exception? How do …

Witness This Thing So Tender, Erin Marie White

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

At once fantastical and down-to-earth, the poems of Witness This Thing So Tender are concerned with the convergence of the speaker’s many selves and influences. Gritty and mysterious happenings shape the speaker’s physical, emotional, and psychological circumstances in the world. Whether the triggering topic is ecological, parental, or sepulchral, the work of the poems is to examine and integrate the changeable natures of memory and reality.

Each poem in the second movement of the collection, entitled “Lunar Cycle,” employs the idiom Once upon a time as its entry point. This small, well-worn turn of phrase operates as a springboard into …

Theory Of Care, Gabriella Ann Graceffo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With a backdrop of the body and its inner forms, Theory of Care is a collection of poems and lyric excerpts that explores themes of queer sexuality, physical and mental health, etymology, desire, and physicality. It coheres moments of internal reckoning with an exploration of how trauma lives in the body, particularly the queer femme body. By accessing various landscapes including the medical sphere, family dynamics, and the social environments of the South, the collection grapples with different vernaculars to question how the language used to discuss (or dismiss) trauma dramatically alters the perception of those experiences.

Constance After Dark, Connor Vanmaele

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Constance After Dark is an episodic screenplay, outlining the beginning, middle and end of a television comedy pilot. Set in Ohio, the story follows Brooks Riegler in his first semester at the fictional “Constance College” as he navigates the ups and downs of university life at the lowest ranked school in the state. Due to a class taught by the eccentric and nefarious Dr. Mars, Brooks learns to open up to hyperactive athletes, obsessive overachievers, and even strange, mysterious men urinating on the side of the road. Brooks, Cassidy, Jenny and Guy form a tight-knit and unlikely bond in a …

Self-Saturated, Maja Holmquist

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Learning, identity, frame, emphasis. Self-saturated is a compilation of one woman’s life so far. In this collection of personal written works, I desaturate, wring out life and explore the drops left clinging in the wake of the initial flow. Vulnerable and open to scrutiny, these works are those drops, and how I’ve found myself able to articulate them. By no means an exhaustive or comprehensive look at my life, each reader will create an alternate version of me, the one they build with my words and from within their own life’s narrative.

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 …

Flowerama, Demitri Cullen

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Writing For A “High Purpose”: Examining Charles Chesnutt’S Antiracist Manipulation Of Genre And Language In The Conjure Woman, Sheniah Lanier

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

From The Notes App, Marc Chiurco

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Engl 211w: Intro To Nonfiction (Points Of Entry And/Or Exit Wounds), Heather Simon

Open Educational Resources

We will explore the notion of creativity as it pertains to new ways of engaging familiar topics and carving out frameworks for exploring uncharted territory. We will actively read and respond to works of creative nonfiction to enrich our understanding of structure, style, and language. Assigned readings will demonstrate how creative nonfiction can encompass a variety of forms (think: reportage, braided essay, erasure, visual essay) and draw from both research and experience to offer a unique perspective and elicit an emotional response. We will develop our own creative nonfiction toolbox through a series of reflections, creative exercise, and projects. We …

Riverrun 2023, Saint Mary's College Of California

Riverrun Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Ash Grove, William Lapage

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis presents a collection of poems that attempts to foreground often dismissed or invisible landscapes and the people who inhabit those spaces. Drawing attention to moments of stillness, creating a space for contemplation and reflection, the poems in this collection stitch together a myriad of speakers whose voices grapple with landscapes of the past, interiority, place, and memory. These poems often center on the speaker's interior observations set against an exterior backdrop. These works are informed by the works of Carl Phillips and Robert Lowell, the British poet, Alice Oswald, the German-British painter, Lucian Freud, and the Chilean poet, …

Mrs. Blackbird And The Visiting Chair, Taylor Barnhart

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The following thesis is a middle grade novel exploring the events of one summer in the lives of two siblings, Susannah and Sawyer. The siblings are grieving the recent death of their mother and, at the same time, attempting to navigate the emotional withdrawal of their father. During the summer, the siblings get to know their eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Blackbird, who communicates with the spirit of her dead husband through an old armchair which is rumored to have magical powers. The novel deals primarily with the theme of grief and its pervasive nature in people’s lives. The story looks at …

Preparations, Sarah E. Lewis

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The following thesis is an excerpt from a novel depicting Caleb Warring and his employer, Mr. Phineas Pruitt, in their business of running a funeral home. It’s been a year since Caleb started working for Mr. Pruitt and since the bodies they had been embalming and preparing started coming back to life. After researching and careful planning, the two decide to embark on a trip to discover the solution to their problem, accompanied by Caleb’s best friend and Mr. Pruitt’s sister. Through the technique of agential constellations, the use of the uncanny, and a distinction between horror and terror, this …

Menagerie Pains, Rachel D. Mcclay

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In my creative thesis, readers follow Toddus as he accomplishes different tasks set out by the prince he serves, Prince Dinnax. My critical introduction examines the use of a hero in both my book and Redwall, by Brian Jacques, through the three steps of a hero’s journey outlined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s steps can be found in almost every book published, even non-adventure books. After following the steps, I examine my own choice of hero. Toddus is a personal guard to a prince, and as such does not carry a lot of …

Auto-Exploited: Narrative Explorations Of The Commodification Of Time, Grace C. Willis Ms.

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the phenomenon of the auto-exploitation of the modern individual through and in conjunction with the commodification of time. It explores the eruption of gig-work in recent decades in the United States, and the ways in which the modern individual is both consumer and product, buying and selling her own constructions of identity in order to gain time, fiscal currency and a sense of socioeconomic worth from herself and others. Using theoretical frameworks of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Catherine Rottenberg and Byung-Chul Han, I explore the ways in which the modern individual is …

Escape, Constance Leigh Lieber

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

My creative non-fiction thesis, Escape, is a memoir of the five years I lived in Bern, Switzerland, 1988-1993. During that time, I interviewed my neighbor, Horst Schirm, about his life during the waning years of World War II in what was the eastern border of the German Reich (Jauer, Schlesien) but is now Poland (Jawor, Sląsk). His mother with Horst and his two brothers and sister traveled from Jauer to Frankfort am Main and back to Jauer in an attempt to escape the Allied bombing raids and to find their father, who was missing. Finally, they, with the other remaining …

Zara And The Strong Gauntlets, Donnell Earl Griffith

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

My creative fiction thesis, Zara and the Strong Gauntlets, is the first part of a full length novel in the fantasy genre. The story follows Zara, a servant to a high member of society which she spends every day serving. Zara’s world is turned upside down when she walks into her master’s assassination. Zara is tossed out of her home, and with nowhere left to turn, tries to find a way to be able to stand up on her own two feet, and through her trials, discover a sense of self that will determine her new path in life.

After …

Minds Of The Mental: A Poetry Journal, Aviyah Washington

A with Honors Projects

This honors project shares 12 original poems written by the author.

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

Choosing The Present, Aaron Wayne Zimdars

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

Harvest: A Story Of Afropessimism, Briana Williams, Briana Williams

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Afropessimism is the idea that Black people will never be able to truly overcome the centuries of racism and oppression they have faced. A bleak notion, the idea heavily contrasts with Afrofuturism, the ways in which Black people use technology to regain their autonomy and rise from the societal binds they’re placed in. This story focuses on how even in the supposedly more evolved and progressive political landscape of the modern world, Black people still cannot escape the shackles of racism, particularly in the United States. Taking the common themes of and ideologies of Afropessimism, Harvest follows the story of …

Ferment, Casey Carpenter

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The fermentation process – an act of breaking down, letting go, and moving forward – is used by the author as poetic lens and as a narrative tool for self-reflection, self-transformation, cultural reflection, and cultural transformation. Akin to our own adolescent maturation, plants, fruits, and vegetables develop protective barriers around their most vulnerable parts in reaction to the health and condition of their lived environment. While serving a purpose of survival in the moment, these barriers will later cause the food to rot and spoil if left unchecked. The act of fermentation is thus explored as a managed process of …

The Wellington Affair: A Detective Story, Anakin Weston

Masters Theses

The week the heiress to the Wellington Family fortune returns to England, a series of strange events sweeps through the streets. The Wellington Diamond, unsurpassed by all of its kind, becomes the envy of more criminally-minded eyes and a plan is put into motion to steal it. Caught in the cross-fire, prospective writer Mark Verner is framed for the theft of the diamond but is saved from arrest by none other than the heiress herself. When the conspiracy to steal the jewel turns murderous, the only hope of the duo lies in the hands of the reluctant yet limitless detective …

The Amulet Of Nethelar, Sarah J. Brown

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Prince Of New York, Eric Fantauzzi

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Inspired by both Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN and Logic’s 2017 album Everybody, my project, “The Prince of New York,” is a story that speaks to the experiences of my character, Scott McKenzie. Using the thematic through line of athletics, the project is a coming-of-age story that shows Scott’s growth as both a high school athlete and a biracial teenager living in New York City. Throughout the story we see Scott navigate the pressures of living up to the expectations set by his parents, as well as those of being a star athlete. Initially, Scott wants to win a championship …

Wayfinding, Kalani N. Padilla

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.