Fiction Commons^™

Traumatic Experiences Through The Queer Lens, Holden Guckenberg

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This is a collection of short stories based off of real trauma that LGBTQ+ individuals have experienced. I have interviewed seven people who identify within the LGBTQ+ community and listened to their traumatic stories. Based on their stories, I have written their accounts with trauma while expanding and taking creative freedom to better enunciate and bring-forth their stories. Trauma affects the LGBTQ+ community at a greater height than it does the general population. It’s important to recognize this fact so that we can support those people who have faced tremendous adversity in the form of trauma. In one form or …

Dark Smoke Rising, Matthew Knutson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A collection of short fiction set in and around Southern California.

Things That Happened, Christian Chase

Senior Theses

This creative writing thesis contains a collection of short stories by Christian Chase.

• A Whole Lot of Nothing
• Grand Artistic Vision
• Architecture
• Hanging Around
• Silent Life
• A Special Dread
• Snowbound

Eulogy, Kim T. Allison

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Particular to the three short stories in Eulogyis the importance of place, as they are set in the fictional location of Potter’s Island, which is based on my childhood sense of Florida.Contradictions, complications, and disappointments can be uniquely tied to a sense of place. My own parents and grandparents moved to Florida when I was three years old, but where they lived, how they lived and worked, and what dreams they pursued was only partially an immigrant’s story of wanting a better life.

The past has weight—a weight that must be dealt with, for real people, and for …

Dandelion Wishes: Short Stories, Lucy E. Marcus

English & Creative Writing Students Scholarship and Creative Work

Lucy Marcus was Roanoke's Writer by Bus in 2019. This is a collection of short stories inspired by her bus rides.

Gone To Ground, Brian Blair

Theses

Gone to Ground is a collection of short stories that explores the possibilities beyond the edge of the everyday. They are an attempt to peek beyond the imaginary boundaries we erect for ourselves in the name of danger or the unknown. Each story is an opportunity to see our own familiar humanity in others, no matter the accidents of fortune that separate us. Though the stories in Gone to Ground often touch the surreal or the magical, they are firmly rooted in what could be out there, on the other side of our walls, whether real or imagined. These are …

More Than Skin-Deep: Reading Past Whiteness In Hemingway’S “Hills Like White Elephants”, Laura Valeri

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The author argues a much neglected element in the seminal Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephant." Reading the story by taking into context a subtext of racial bias lends new interpretation to the story.

Things We Have In Common: Essays And Experiments, Willow Grosz

All NMU Master's Theses

Things We Have in Common is a collection of short stories, flash pieces, and image-text experiments that attempts, in the wake of the death of my mother, to excavate the relationship between memory and narrative, identity and belonging against a backdrop of the main forces that have influenced my familial group, namely generational poverty, a changing relationship with our Athabascan and Caucasian heritages, and the complicated ecology, geography, and culture of Alaska. Like many forays into memory, this project represents a joyous failure. Please read this collection as a love letter to Alaska.

Thirteen Unlikely Stories, Joseph Gray

Dissertations

Thirteen Unlikely Stories is a collection of fiction composed and revised at the

University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers.

Second Safest City In America, Liam Cassidy

Theses

Second Safest City in America is a collection of short fiction set in Midwestern cities and suburbs, as well as the Gulf Coast. These stories explore the untethered expectations, broken promises, and absurdity of American life. The characters are violent, funny, emotionally unstable, politically wrong-minded, and compassionate. They implore empathy or actively avoid the pain of others. They search out security or take matters into their own hands. They sacrifice and they seek revenge. They are not outliers in this country. They are part of the mainstream weirdness that permeates everything.

Mammals Of The Pleistocene, Abbie Lahmers

Fiction MFA Theses

A thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Rhetoric, of Georgia College & State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree

Et Cetera, Marshall University

Et Cetera

Founded in 1953, Et Cetera is an annual literary magazine that publishes the creative writing and artwork of Marshall University students and affiliates. Et Cetera is free to the Marshall University community.

Et Cetera welcomes submissions in literary and film criticism, poetry, short stories, drama, all types of creative non-fiction, photography, and art.

Whatever It Is We're Competing For, Ferris W. Mcdaniel

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

Dream Variations: Fictional Views Of The School To Prison Pipeline, Kierstin R. C. Anderson

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

These two works of fiction will tell the story of the school to prison pipeline taken from the black and white of statistics and numbers into the colors of the individual; their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Dream Variations is the telling of one instance in the lives of different people, both the Black American youth who go through it and the lawyers who see their cases.

Dinner At Eight, Anastasia M. Berkovich

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis is comprised of six short stories of fiction in various styles and lengths, as well as a critical introduction wherein I discuss the various influences on my work, ranging from Charles Baxter and Karen Joy Fowler to Doležel and John Gardner. All of these stories share a theme of family and loss. Each story also grapples in some way with changing times and places. I have endeavored, by using rhyming action, repeating images, and melodrama, to give each story a great sense of emotion, a feeling both specific to the story but connects to the wider reading …

Rings In The Trees, Jordan Borchert

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduate requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Whether one likes history or not, history affects everyone. Everything that has happened in the past has led us to where we are today, as individuals, a society, and the world. We all learn in school about the concept of history, and we are taught about major historical events such as wars, prominent people, and cultures, at least to some degree. I define major historical events as public events that can be researched in books, online, and in documentary films and television footage. It is my belief that literature …

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 …

A Monstrous Tomorrow, Ty Noel

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Time Enough, Lb Kovac

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Ghost Stories: Doing Philosophy Through Literature, Paige Foreman

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Ghost Stories is a collection of three short stories that all make philosophical arguments. I define philosophy as an activity of thought that aspires to inquire into the nature of existence. I believe there are many ways to express philosophical thoughts, and I do philosophy in story form. The title story, Ghost Stories, is a Christian theodicy responding to The Book of Job that argues God should be held responsible for evil that happens in the world and that humans have the power to forgive God. The Palaces of Memory illustrates a new theory of personal identity as well as …

Rampant Love, Erica F. Deveer

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Like Branches On A Tree, Meiloni C. Erickson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Cunning Folk, Erin N. Wylie

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

Grieve If You Want, Travis Scott Ray

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories is trying to say something about empathy. It’s trying to connect with readers in an effort to convey some small kind of emotion the characters are experiencing. It’s about the difficulty we all have connecting and communicating with each other and ourselves.

Muscle Memory: Stories, Hannah N. Bradley 16

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Hunting Stories, Dave Storment

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

No Closure, J.P. Vallieres

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Relativity, Jeffrey Horner

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

The Real Thing, Ruben T. Rodriguez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

THE REAL THING is a collection of short stories released from the confinement of the everyday. The stories allow characters to pop off the page from every angle. With an eye for anthropomorphism and ear for lyric, the collection is comprised of twenty-nine short stories, nineteen of which work in a flash fiction form.

Magical in its motions, and charming in its spirit, The Real Thing explores life’s losses and gains through the lens of the strange and at times the absurd. It invites its readers to cast away expectation, sit back, and watch the show.

Me Without You, Michelle Bracken

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ME WITHOUT YOU is an interlinked collection of short stories set in the blight of an urban housing project in San Bernardino, California. The stories follow the lives of three students in their year of fourth grade at a low performing school. Narrated from these points of view, the collection amplifies the voices of a community wrought with violence, poverty, and crime while also exploring how children brave the consequences of a world they cannot control.

Mesmerizing in its simplicity, and gripping in its detail, ME WITHOUT YOU intertwines themes of identity, family, loss, poverty, and longing for what is …