Fiction Commons^™

A Marriage Sewn Together, Marie E. Curran

All NMU Master's Theses

A Marriage Sewn Together is a creative writing thesis in three parts. Forming the thesis is a collection of very short essays, A Startling Passage, a short story, “Perigee,” and a novella, This Is Not Our Revolution. The latter pieces are fictional and take place in rural settings. All three pieces include explorations of questions concerning birth, beginnings, “original sin,” land, and the tension of balancing personal relationships with political or community ideals. The works are rooted in realism, and sometimes tend toward the lyric. As indicated in the introduction, the three works in A Marriage Sewn Together …

Remain, Johanna M. Hardy

All NMU Master's Theses

After completing her own grief counseling group, Gennie Maxwell becomes the leader of a grief group for young adults. Six people are left to her charge in the face of the loss of a loved one. Gennie, still grappling with her own grief, leads the way through each week’s group session, and the people within the group begin to find support and growth in their time within the group. As each member finds a place amongst the others, they unfold a stories of their individual struggles with being left behind when someone they love dies. As the weeks progress, grief …

Master Buddha & The Jolly Golly Fun Time Gang., Todd Edward Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first two chapters of a novel. The novel parodies the capitalist and consumerist United States of the 21st Century in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme.

This Sleep Of Reason., Brit Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis encompasses two features: 1) a critical component that contextualizes and supports the second component, 2) a short Southern Gothic novella. Critical analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and discourse about the genre illustrate where inspiration was drawn, and how the project’s creative component contributes to this genre. The project explores anxieties of displacement, isolation, and a stuck-in-the-past-temporality, as shown through the vessel of characters’ houses. The novella is decentralized in form and point-of-view—fragmentary excerpts of technological communications are utilized to illustrate how the protagonist’s problems are literally always on hand. The project argues that because the south remains …

Why Everything Is A Whole Lot Of Nothing Worth Losing Or Getting Back, David Kinzer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In these three stories, David Kinzer answers the collection’s title with the precision of the hard sciences. In “The Humanist,” the strained relationship between a father and son becomes even more complicated when the son marries. In “Château Royale,” a young woman moves into a new home with a dark history. The final piece, “Starting After Midnight,” follows two young people in the aftermath of a one-night stand. All of everything is inside: Gatling guns and The Birth of Tragedy, Anne Rice and Taco Bell, kit foxes and sex tips. The answer is waiting. All you need to do is …

The Body Experience, Jacqueline Sizemore

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

After a deadly disease sends a jaded college graduate to an isolation ward, a virtual technology provides all the escape she could dream of. When her life collides with an abused woman fleeing across the country, they both struggle to find each other before it is too late.

John Mcgahern And The Imagination Of Tradition By Stanley Van Der Ziel Review, Eamon Maher

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Lantern, 2015-2016, Blaise Laramee, Sarah Gow, Mara Koren, Adam Anderson, Madison Bradley, Sophia Gamber, Linden Hicks, Joshua Hoffman, Giselle Horrell, Alexander Kramer, Chi-E Low, Alexzandria Luben, Kevin Moore, Brian Thomas, Mayuko Todaka, Kara Travis, Solana Warner, Henry Willshire, Alyse Brewer, Kristen Costello, Rae Hodenfield, Jason Varma, Allison Arinaga, Brandon Carey, Faith Carson, Kevin Choice, Julia Crozier-Christy, Courtney Duchene, Ryan Ferguson, Lauren Geiger, Jada A. Grice, Albert Hahn, Alexandra Hemp, Michael Heimbaugh, Darrah Hewlett, Jordan Hodess, Sean Kenny, Dana Kluchinski, Brian Leipold, Juan Lopez, Mary-Kate Mcgrath, Johnathan Myers, Temi Olafunmiloye, Valerie Osborne, Serena Schaefer, Nicolas Shandera, Emily Shue, Amanda Sierzega, Samantha Straughn, Paige Szmodis, Collin Takita, Kathryn Bormann, Sarah Defelice, Mario Heitman '18, Mary A. Holmcrans, Chukyi Kyaping, Morgan Larese, Andrew Tran

The Lantern Literary Magazines, 1933 to Present

• Ghosts
• Going to China
• 98% Guaranteed
• Constellation/Boulevard
• Prayer
• The Little One
• Burning
• The Amber Macaroon
• Becoming
• Requiem
• Construction Site
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dragon
• Charlie
• No Sleep
• A Lesson in Physical Education
• Statues
• Who Can Love a Black Woman?
• Apples
• Fun Craft
• The Door at Midnight
• Eve as a Book in the Bible
• Boys
• Diamond Heart
• To Apollo
• Joanne and Her July Garden
• Option A, 1936
• Young White Girls, Hollow Bodies, …

2016 Spring Quiz & Quill Magazine, Otterbein English Department

Quiz and Quill

No abstract provided.

On Myrtle: A Novel, Laurie Ann Cedilnik

Dissertations

For nearly a century, readers have known the story of Myrtle Wilson, infamous literary mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY. Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan is married to a woman who is the picture of wealth and elegance, and yet he is drawn to this woman about whom readers know very little, and about whom we hear only in a retrospective vantage of the partial observer Nick Carraway. Mrs. Wilson puts on airs and takes blows, an her death is as graphic as any of literature's fallen women. And like Myrtle, Fitzgerald casts his fictionalized Flushing as symbolic of a …

The Disappearance Of The Hms Umbra, Francesca M. Costa

Student Publications

A sailor aboard the HMS Umbra has a strange run-in with an ominous fog that won't lift. As the days drag by, the weather is the least of his problems.

The Plastic Camp, Cierra Perry

Masters Essays

I have created this story to capture how human suffering is often contained, perpetuated, and reinforced by a cycle of fear and emotions that result from the psychological neurosis of humans themselves due to inescapable insidious reflections. What I mean by insidious reflections is how one's own reflection in the mirror can manipulate one’s perception of oneself. In this story I explore the notion of individuals mirroring each other by inflicting torture onto others that they are unaware of because they are simply "mirroring" someone else's behavior. I am inspired by Stanley Milgram's documented film experiment An Obedience to Authority …

Imaginary Subjects: Fiction-Writing Instruction In America, 1826 - 1897, Paul Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Imaginary Subjects: Fiction Writing Instruction in America, 1826-1897 is a study of the confluence of commercial, educational, and aesthetic developments behind the rise of instruction in fiction-writing. Part I ("The Predicament of Fiction-Writing") traces fiction-writing instruction from its absence in Enlightenment-era rhetoric textbooks to its modest beginnings in magazine essays by Poe and Marryat, and in mid-century advice literature. Part II ("Fiction-Writing in the Classroom") notes the rise of fiction exercise from early Romantic-era primers upwards into mid-centuryhigh-school level textbooks, and from there into Harvard composition exercises; this coincided with an increasing emphasis by author advocacy groups on writing as …

Madison Vanguard: A Novel, Berni Moestafa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project takes the form of a popular fiction novel that introduces parts of the academic discussion on capitalism to a wider audience through storytelling. Using a fictional fiscal crisis in New York as its setting, the novel discusses the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It therefore aims to address the underrepresentation of the debate on capitalism in popular entertainment and raise awareness about some of the debate’s key issues.

Popular culture be that music, film, books, media, videogames or advertisement surround our lives and expose us to a plethora of messages that help shape our understanding of the …

Heroes, Past And Future, Benjamin Green

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A creative work set in a small town in which everyone has a supernatural ability called a "Gift." This work shows the characters, all on different walks of life, as they show that the metaphorical fish cannot outgrow the fish bowl. Those who have lived in this town all their lives seem to have weaker Gifts than those who have lived even one hour away. Heroes, Past and Future explores how one cannot hope to meet their true potential as a person except by allowing themselves to move even slightly away from the familiar.

Not Black Or White, Lori Balaban

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Quirt Alerts!, Randy Harritan

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

In Vietnam, a soldier's live is saved on point by his heroic dog.

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.

On The Corner Of North And Nowhere. A Novel ‐ And ‐ Going Back To Go Forward: An Invitation To Get Lost. A Critical Essay, Ali Marie Jarvey

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises a young adult (YA) novel called On the Corner of North and Nowhere and an exegesis entitled ‘Going Back to Go Forward: An Invitation to Get Lost’.

On the Corner of North and Nowhere follows 18‐year‐old Nev Isles, who lives and works at Cleary’s, her grandmother’s art retreat in the Perth Hills. She dwells happily in an old cottage by herself, until her mother decides that she wants to move there too. Rather than live with her again, Nev runs away with her friend, Cole, set for the WA roads she travelled as a child and …

The Sins Of The Mothers, Sylvia Johns Schneller M.D.

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In The Sins of the Mothers, the main character, Bridgette, suffers a mental breakdown after the death of her three-month-old baby, Celeste, from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). She develops severe obsessive-compulsive disorder with the delusion that the child is trapped in Limbo because she was never baptized. The delusion haunts Bridgette, and she suffers brief dissociative episodes with visual hallucinations. Bridgette hears of a church in Provence where, according to a seventeenth century legend, children who died without baptism returned briefly to life under the intersession of Saint Pantaleon were baptized and gained heaven. She decides to exhume Celeste’s …

Achieving Relationships, Frederick C. Melancon

Master's Theses

These stories attempt to follow John Gardner’s instruction to create a dream that will engage the reader. Mirroring the goal that an author has to create a relationship with his audience, each story in turn focuses on emotional details that convey the characters’ feelings of isolation or, alternatively, inclusion in their communities. In the first story, a young man tries to recreate his father’s king cake. In the next, a middle school girl fixates on her relationship with her sister. Trying to recapture the memory of a lost daughter, a man searches for the perfect nectar snowball. A mom, then, …

An Unnamed God., Luke Cash Mansfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is the story of a man returning home at the behest of a friend who is undergoing great difficulties in her life. While Docent Americana ostensibly travels home to help his friend, he is also trying to cope with challenges in his own life. He suffers from bipolar disorder and although he is receiving treatment for it the stresses of the experience trigger a manic episode that threatens his personal stability and his relationships with those around him. An Unnamed God is set in western Kentucky, affording a glimpse at the slow decay of rural communities as …

Kowalski Lives, Jaymie-Rae Martin

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Creating A Monster, Taylor Johnson

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Funerals Are For The Living, Taylor Martin

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Cooking In Stride, Bret Lundstrom

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

A Trudge In The Snow, Bret Lundstrom

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Soulmates, Taylor Johnson

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Him., Brenden M. Kleiboeker

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Welcome To The Show, Jaymie-Rae Martin

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

The Ones Who Disappeared, Kristine Wagner

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.