Fiction Commons^™

Engl 352: Intermediate Fiction Writing—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Chigozie Obioma

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Absent the elements of effective writing, there has been a strong debate on whether or not other aspects of creative writing can be taught. Many practicing writers like myself who teach have concluded that a student writer can be guided towards fully actualizing their talent, and this “guidance” is what mostly constitutes teaching. How then do we evaluate the effectiveness of this teaching, and to what extent do students’ individual talent help or stand in the way of effective instruction? How do we plan various learning outcomes and test the success of such strategies over the duration of the ENGL …

The Geographic Center Of Nowhere, Sharon Mauldin Reynolds

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The Geographic Center of Nowhere. A collection of short stories exploring the perseverance of several women in varied situations.

Flight Home, Iris Graville

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

Skraw, Chioma Urama

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

The Smoulder Of Defiance, K. Amelia Sergaki

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

The Grand Gallery, Nicole Roché

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Grand Gallery is the story of a woman coming to terms with her identity and purpose in a small town in Kansas during the post-WWII boom. Astrid Grand is the heiress apparent to the family business, a gallery that has been at the center of the town’s operations from the time of its founding. The gallery displays a person’s “collection” at the time of their death. The townspeople collect everything from Victorian mourning jewelry to gum wrappers to objects found in trees. “In many ways,” as the novel’s opening chapter states, “the collections displayed at the gallery served as …

Ruth Harris: Under The Prairie Moon, Mary Hays

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Ruth Harris: Under the Prairie Moon is rooted in the rural Illinois landscape and its communities. The stories follow Ruth from childhood to old age and offer multiple viewpoints on fidelity, home, forgiveness, and finally, love. Focus on one character through a lifetime allows perspective to shift as she ages.

The Big Community, Jackson Freeman

The Laureate

No abstract provided.

Joshua: A Short Lament, Jared Sebastian

The Laureate

No abstract provided.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: A Historical Fiction Detailing The Trauma Of Mental Institutions In The Mid 1940’S, Jessica Klingensmith

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a historical fiction that details the trauma of one character, Francie, when she is admitted to a mental institution against her will in mid-1940’s America. Francie suffers from severe bipolar depression, which was poorly understood and had little treatments during this time. Different characters take turns narrating this piece, demonstrating how different perspectives can provide insight into the same circumstance. Francie’s family must cope with complicated family relationships and mental illness throughout this narrative, which serves as the first segment of a future novel.

A Meeting With Azrael, Aubrey A. Link

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

This Story Is Not A Monument, Rhiannon Winner

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Eden, Liam P. Hamilton

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Thunder Iii, David M. Aldridge

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

The awesome power of a military convoy in Vietnam can also be a danger.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

The Sun, Derek Mong

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

A Reflection On My Writing Process, Madison R. Hinrichs

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

For my honors research project, I investigated the techniques of established contemporary writers, took a specific look at their different ways of framing a story through the guise of recollected memory, and used their conventions and mechanisms to develop my own original work. I also studied the elements of noir, speculative, and realistic fiction, as those are the genres that I am primarily interested in. In the process, I examined my old workshop material, with revision in mind, and selected the pieces with the most potential for improvement. I then developed and polished these into two short works of fiction …

Intertext 2017 — Complete Issue

Intertext

The complete issue of Intertext 25 (2017).

Everyday Monsters: Stories, Brian Druckenmiller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These seven short stories explore characters either at war with themselves or living in a delusion, unaware that their skewed sense of self projects a subjective version of the universe. When one operates in a world that doesn't quite exist, their real world is destined to crumble, and, for many of these characters, the challenge is understanding the mirage's existence before it's too late. By slightly bending the parameters of reality as well as inviting these characters and conflicts into absurdity, Everyday Monsters offers wholly unique commentary on familiar struggles, including marriage, occupation, grief, destiny, and societal expectations.

Prone To Wander: A Novel, Daniel Patrick Mathewson

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …

Forsaken Trust, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

Book 2 in the Luce Hansen Thriller series. Third book forthcoming.

Description from the publisher:

Wallace Lake, Ohio, takes care of their own. Unwelcoming of outsiders, the community closes ranks when four women are found murdered along the water’s edge. Agent Luce Hansen of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation must find a way in before another woman loses her life to the ruthless serial killer.

With the help of her new team—a hot rookie and a smart, beautiful medical examiner—Luce uncovers a ring of devotion surrounding the prime suspect. As Luce works to unearth the dark secrets of this …

God Is An Animator, Mitchell Gregory

The Messenger

No abstract provided.

The Whole World To Please, Elena Leith

Audre Lorde Prize

This is a fictional piece derived from stories of women who have experienced abortions for different reasons.

The Genetics Of Morality: Policing Science In Dudintsev’S White Robes, Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The Men and women in White Robes (Belye odezhdv), Vladimir Dudinstev's fictional account of the banning of genetics in the Soviet Union, are acutely aware that in the 20th century, the study of the fruit fly is the study of man. The key to unraveling the mystery of human nature lies in the easily observed chromosomes of the forbidden fly (drosophila melanogaster). Under Stalin, the banned geneticists were branded “Morganists” after their hero Thomas Hunt Morgan, the Columbia University researcher who pioneered the technique of mapping locations on drosophila chromosomes to specific traits in the flies. To …

Dismas, Emily Bradford

The Messenger

No abstract provided.

Wearing Bare Feet, J. P. Schlottman

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

Wearing Bare Feet is a linked collection of wry short stories about a family of three on fictional Eel Island, three miles off the coast of Maine, an island that revolves around lobstering, tourism, billionaire movie stars, department store heirs, jewelry store heiresses, people who houseclean for snowbirds ... and the old, rich and entitled summer people who come back from Florida for the annual Fourth of July Parade, and then die. Because it is easier to die there. It is why the 13-mile-long "rock off America" has more ambulances per capita than anywhere else in New England.

It also …

Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, Alexis Renfro

All Master's Theses

The “madman’s” place throughout history has tended to be a mystery on both ontological and epistemological levels. From the perception of the madman as a crazed oracle in the sixteenth century to the perception of the madman as a criminal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth-century madman was even more difficult to define. Because insanity was deemed the inverse of bourgeois normativity and conservative moral standards, those categorized as mad in America during mid-1800s were institutionalized in reformed mental asylums, establishments which sought to homogenize human behavior through moral treatment. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville drew …

Daffodils: A Completely Unrelated Collection Of Short Stories, Sawyer E.P. Henshaw

Scripps Senior Theses

“Daffodils” is a collection of three fictional short stories without obvious thematic connection, yet all containing tenacious female characters. “The Winner” is told from the unflinching voice of a young wife in her struggle for control within the newfound environment of a Massachusetts boarding school. “The Seers” is a dystopian story, taking place in a world with months of “Sun” and months of dark at a time, intimately describing the effects of this phenomenon upon the civilization. Lastly, “Plastic Flowers” examines the loss of love and comfort within a relationship, depicting the insecurities of young adult life in New York …

Return To Sender, Katherine Noelle Nypaver

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Return to Sender is a fictional short story that illustrates the potential consequences of neglecting to take others seriously. River Ellison, a high school senior at St. Jude’s Academy struggling with depression and habitual self-harm, receives a note from his peer regarding his thoughts on suicide. His ordinary school day transforms into twenty-four hours of repercussions that force River to see his peer for what she is—an equal. Prefacing the short story, my critical essay explains why I find C.D. Payne, John Green, Jesse Andrews, and J.D. Salinger so inspiring to the young adult literature world. I also analyze how …