The creative writing portfolio Fewer Mice includes 53 “Liners” (comedic one-liners), four untitled prose poems, two flash-length stories (“Cleanup” and “Battle Creek”), and two short stories (“Pipes” and “Tulips”). The purpose of this portfolio was to explore the craft of writing and determine which techniques are specifically and personally beneficial...
Creating an untraditional more personalized thesis allowed me to combine my
passion for children, travel, language, and books all into one. Hans the Adventurer is
a children’s book about a young German boy who loves to go on adventures.
However Han’s has to go on the adventure alone when his...
Flesh & Blood is a 118-page horror-drama screenplay about a single mother struggling to control her cannibalistic urges while caring for her young daughter and evading an increasingly suspicious detective. Two primary themes of this screenplay are control and motherhood. The protagonist of the film, Christine, grapples with controlling her...
This thesis will compare former OSU Professor Bernard Malamud’s life in Corvallis through primary sources and documents with his parallel experience in his 1961 novel A New Life. A close examination of Malamud’s literature and investigation of his life at OSU exposes an uneven balance between academic censorship and the...
Through the creation of a children’s book, this project aims to educate children and adults about the act of banning books in the United States. This non-fiction picture book targets readers between four and ten years old. Research on the history of book banning and questions about why it happens...
Under the Skin is a collection of short stories that explores how different characters behave when placed in situations that are outside of their control. Stories include “Mirror Image,” which sees a young teen grapple with the fear of being an incorrigibly bad person; “Very Slowly, Then All At Once,”...
This collection of creative nonfiction essays seeks to examine my expanding consciousness and the people and experiences that have contributed to it. The first essay juxtaposes competitive running and dancing, the second considers how food choices challenge relationships, the third unpacks an implausible friendship while paralleling an Audre Lorde essay,...
Oregon has a growing artisan cheese industry and is developing a reputation as one of the country’s leading regions for many varieties of cheeses. This thesis is an exploration of four of Oregon’s premier artisan creameries. The primary research for this project included visiting the farms and cheesemakers, tasting the...
The Other Side of Marin investigates how the lack of communication between family members can lead to potentially devastating consequences. The novella, set in the 1970s in Northern California, is told from the points of view of Lucy, a middle-aged mother of four, and her teenage son, who for his...
A recipe as a piece of text can tell a variety of stories as well as any other. Using a feminist rhetorical analysis, I read my grandmother’s personal recipe journal to show that her writings contain valuable information about women’s lives in twentieth century Poland. Through the close examination of...