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- Creative Writing (3)
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Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Anti-Thesis: When Your Worst Moments Become Your Best Work, Abigail Williamson
Anti-Thesis: When Your Worst Moments Become Your Best Work, Abigail Williamson
Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects
My honors capstone project expands the creative work of a major writing assignment in English 3170: Successful Freelance Magazine Writing, which was modeled after Susan Shapiro’s “Humiliation Essay.” Shapiro’s signature assignment encourages students to write about an embarrassing or upsetting moment with the aim to force sincerity and humility. She writes, “It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.” The humiliation essay, she claims, often leads to publication because the conflict of the assignment inspires writers, and the narrator’s self-insight that occurs during the process of …
Heard: Pondering Life's Soundscapes, Carolyn Albright, Adam Berger, Lily Brooks, Amanda Denney, Liam Drehkoff, Jack Fink, Emerson Fraser, Benjamin Galligan, Marta Insolia, Sam Kleid, Finn Krol, Morgan O'Halloran, Keya Shah, Kit Simpson, Elliott Zajac
Heard: Pondering Life's Soundscapes, Carolyn Albright, Adam Berger, Lily Brooks, Amanda Denney, Liam Drehkoff, Jack Fink, Emerson Fraser, Benjamin Galligan, Marta Insolia, Sam Kleid, Finn Krol, Morgan O'Halloran, Keya Shah, Kit Simpson, Elliott Zajac
English
This collection explores the relationship between music, culture, and personal experience. The product of a fall semester honors Expository Writing course, Heard traces the songs that have impacted students' lives. From folk and punk to Broadway and yacht rock, the music of the collection has shaped each author's life in both small and profound ways.
Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault
Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault
MSU Graduate Theses
This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …
Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite
Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In the second decade of the 21st century, academic comics studies is well established as a serious intellectual subject, but for many non-specialists, including university administrators, a sense of frivolity still attaches to comics. This brief essay braids together personal history and intellectual analysis: 1) it compares the cultural position of comics today to the position of novels in the 19th century; 2) it analyzes the complementary nature of the verbal and visual channels; 3) it argues that neither words nor pictures should be considered primary in a narratology of comics; and 4) that comics are eminently well …
Reflections In Detroit: The Personal Essay As Epistemological Method, Greg Wurm, Joey Franklin
Reflections In Detroit: The Personal Essay As Epistemological Method, Greg Wurm, Joey Franklin
Journal of Undergraduate Research
The purpose of my project was to explore and demonstrate how the personal essay could be used as more than just a literary form of the humanities, but as an epistemological method in the social sciences. I built off the work of Dr. Andrew Abbott, of the University of Chicago, who, in 2007, proposed what he called “lyrical sociology.” In his piece, “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology,” he described that a lyrical sociology sought to “communicate its author’s emotional stance toward his or her object of study, rather than to ‘explain’ that object.” The personal essay has also …
Writing And Wellness, Emotion And Women: Highlighting The Contemporary Uses Of Expressive Writing In The Service Of Students, Cantice G. Greene
Writing And Wellness, Emotion And Women: Highlighting The Contemporary Uses Of Expressive Writing In The Service Of Students, Cantice G. Greene
English Dissertations
In an effort to connect women’s spiritual development to the general call for professors to reconnect significantly with their students, this dissertation argues that expressive writing should remain a staple of the composition curriculum. It suggests that the uses of expressive writing should be expanded and explored by students and professors of composition and that each should become familiar with the link between writing and emotional wellness. In cancer centers, schools of medicine, and pregnancy care centers, writing is being used as a tool of therapy. More than just a technique for helping people cope with the stresses of loss, …
The Sweet Script: A Critical Analysis Of American Sportswriting, Jonathan Schreiber
The Sweet Script: A Critical Analysis Of American Sportswriting, Jonathan Schreiber
Honors Scholar Theses
This thesis analyzes the sportswriting genre as a form of personal essay. It explores the art over time through writers Red Smith, A.J. Liebling, Roger Angell, George Plimpton, Bart Giamatti, Frank Deford, and Rick Reilly, as well as anthologized writers from 2008 and blogs.
Blue Heron Goodbye, Holly Rose Hansen
Blue Heron Goodbye, Holly Rose Hansen
Theses and Dissertations
As is typical to the way I write essays, I did not understand the goal of this collection until I wrote the last essay, “Blue Heron Goodbye.” Up until that point I was calling the collection “Why We Need Bloodhounds.” This title felt sufficiently representative to me of the goal of the collection because in this essay, I use discussions canvassing the Bloodhounds' strong sense of smell to focus my discussion about the world of the heart. However, when I wrote “Blue Heron Goodbye,” I realized I wasn't only interested in the struggles of the human heart (a broad topic …
Keeping Gardens: Poetry And Essay, Deja Anne Earley
Keeping Gardens: Poetry And Essay, Deja Anne Earley
Theses and Dissertations
This creative thesis includes two creative non-fiction essays and twenty-two poems, introduced by a critical essay that examines my work. The poems and essays share an origin in personal experience as well as an interest in language. Specifically, the poems and essays explore issues of family, relationships, spirituality, and observations of the natural world. The introductory essay discusses my interest in re-fashioning individual vision through the act of writing, relating to Helene Cixous's idea of creating a "portrait of God" through the act of art. The essay also examines the connections between the genres of creative non-fiction and poetry, in …
Finding Where I Am: A Collection Of Creative Nonfiction - Creative Thesis, Jana Lloyd
Finding Where I Am: A Collection Of Creative Nonfiction - Creative Thesis, Jana Lloyd
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is a collection of five pieces of creative nonfiction written over the academic years 2003—2005. Creative nonfiction is a genre that, in some form or another, has always existed, though trends in form and style are constantly in flux. Based on the experiences of the actual author, creative nonfiction seeks to present the journey of a mind at work, in a style that is candid, quirky, and insightful. It seeks to persuade its reader by establishing a likeable and trusted narrator; by relating interesting facts that teach the reader something about the subject at hand; and by appealing …
Learning To Create: A Collection Of Personal Essays, Naomi Lund Christiansen
Learning To Create: A Collection Of Personal Essays, Naomi Lund Christiansen
Theses and Dissertations
This is a creative thesis that focuses on the infertility experiences of the author. The introduction examines the author's justification for choosing personal essay as a genre and French feminism as the guiding theory in writing the essays. Six personal essays center on the author's attempts to have a child and the discoveries and failures along the way. Throughout literary history, women's bodies have traditionally been viewed from the outside looking in, as objects to be reified and preserved or exploited and used. Using the writing the body critics as a theoretical framework, the essays discuss the comforts and discomforts …
A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard
A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard
Theses and Dissertations
Over all, this thesis was written to be a "ramble" of its own around and through three issues that are central to the writing of the personal essay-voice, authority, and experience-and central to the emergence of this author's own sense of "self."
Drawing upon years of voluminous journals, this collection of six personal essays demonstrates what the scholarly introduction proposes: that the personal essay is both a valid genre and a magnificent bridge from informal life-writing to genuine literary accomplishment. Drawing on Phillip Lopate's differentiation of "memoiristic" essays from the more classic autobiographical form, this collection includes three of each …