Fiction Commons^™

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

"Are You There, Dog? It's Me, Riley": Poems, Riley Christine O'Connell

Canterbury Scholars

The end product of Riley O'Connell's Canterbury Fellowship, these poems, ranging in topic from family and loss to love and dogs, were composed over the course of Riley's four years at SCU, included but not limited to her time at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, where she taught creative writing therapy for her Canterbury.

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Slotus, Alison F. Huntley, Michael F.X. Daley

Honors Thesis

When a paranoid, image-obsessed woman becomes Second Lady of the United States, she will protect herself and her family from the (often non-existent) eyes of the press no matter what - despite her three step-children’s protests.

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 …

A Sign Of The Times, Zoe Roswell

CURCE Annual Undergraduate Conference

I drafted this short story for an assignment in my Creative Writing 102z course based on techniques we learned in class including estrangement but also it was inspired, in part, by Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”. Williams’ play touches on certain familial mental health struggles in each character that were deep rooted and I wanted to communicate the same effect. My story revolves around the present life and childhood of Charles, an underground boxer, who was orphaned at a young age due to both of his parents’ struggles with mental illness. Charles experienced his mother’s mental deterioration before and following …

Clean Slate, Richard Dinges Jr.

Westview

No one wonders why we return each morning, eyes half-shuddered, mouths yawning

On The Move, Jack Cooper

Westview

Arriving I caught the bus to the beach under a blue and white sky and sat behind five or six riders

Your Girlfriend Is A Boozy Animorph, Henry D. Goldkamp

Westview

My shadow nearly dodges your ghost for an iced glass, again a gin to toast.

A Certain Age, Anne Babson

Westview

The body churns out its red butter every Twenty-eight days but spends the whole cow to do it. The skin still glows a little, but blood vessels ruddy As the spaceship face fissures, approaching warp speed.

Ballad Of St. Stephen's Green, James B. Nicola

Westview

While loitering in St. Stephen’s Green, Watching the youth pass by, I spied an elder gentleman In a blue suit and bright tie

Beetles In Moonlight, Gordon Grice

Westview

This rooted cliff is riddled and pocked. On August nights, you can watch the moonlight clatter into shards that move apart and come together to couple.

Blimps Are Cool, Molly Sizer

Westview

Today we saw the Goodyear Blimp. It flew above the roofs of town.

Carved Door, Dennis Ross

Westview

I stagger with a heavy door, thick, ancient oak with six carved panels: a dove, a plow, flowers, wreathed acanthus leaves.

Health Care, Dick Bentley

Westview

On this hill, in this clump of trees at the edge of the golf course, I sit with the wind swaying the daisies.

If Ever, Dilvin Işiki

Westview

If ever this sadness unbraces the ties between me and you, I’ll hang myself to your happiness;

Midnight Run To Nacogdoches, Robert L. Penick

Westview

He is sitting in a fast food restaurant, pining for a woman who has never had an original thought in her life. It is Christmas Eve, and she is five hundred miles away, celebrating with her new in-laws. He is a damned fool, but hasn’t quite realized it yet.

Naming Southwest Oklahoma, Molly Sizer

Westview

Young Andrew Carnegie invested years steeling money; in his old age, he built imposing music halls on the east coast and libraries in rural towns out west.

The Choice Is Mine, John Grey

Westview

I wear mismatched clothes, fill the sink with dirty dishes, sit and watch football on the TV until all hours

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Lampyridae, Donna Emerson

Westview

As I walk down the June steps of the farmhouse, fireflies flash close to my face.

Commemorate, Nan Byrne

Westview

We learn by losing The dead—first one becomes many The truth we knew becomes the truth we suffered

Doughboy And Jenny, Donna L. Emerson

Westview

Our summer horses, five-gaited warm-bloods. Alert, easy to ride.

Green, Richard Dinges Jr.

Westview

Green is cool to gaze into, woods strangled in undergrowth

Part One, Diane Glancy

Westview

The Man Who Loves Dreamsicles

Rains, James B. Nicola

Westview

One kind of rain wears moccasins and comes in quiet as a ghost then leaves your cheeks-nose-forehead moist with an unremarked kiss.

Summer Thunderstorm, Richard Dinges Jr.

Westview

A cold pierce, bolts crack sky’s lids, a brief glimpse at eternity

Satori 2019, Winona State University

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

Late-Victorian Novels, Microsociology, And Bad Dialogue, Amy Wong

English and Creative Writing | Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of …