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Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
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Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Baumer, Christopher
- Abstract:
- Shrapnel is an exploration through memory. It’s a work that bends and twists upon itself and, as memory often does, lands within worlds and experiences only for a moment before jumping to the next story or thought. This text is a hybrid work that doesn’t fit neatly within any specific...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- DeTal, Trev
- Abstract:
- "A Fool's Marathon" is a fabulist novel exploring themes of Platonic love, imagination and its relationship to reality, and psychological coming of age through the exploits of a young Oscar Duplenty. The work-in-progress is presented in two sections: the first a contiguous five chapters from the beginning of the newest...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Shum, Michael Shou-Yung
- Abstract:
- This collection of loosely-linked stories explores the lives of a set of characters who exist in the margins of society, but quietly so. In the opening story, "Two-Minute Histories," an ostensibly negative act—breaking and entering, among other verifiable crimes—is demonstrated to lead to some positive outcome such as a moment...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Zellers, Michelle
- Abstract:
- Body of Water is a collection of short fiction about women navigating shifting relationships to their bodies; their bodies of memory and knowledge; their family histories; and their natural and cultural environments. Most of the stories depict girls and women beginning to perceive and push against the bounds of gendered...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Olson, Rebecca (Rebecca Jean)
- Abstract:
- Her Hair is an Open Hand is a collection of free verse poems exploring unity and division through the lens of myth and place. The collection is organized into three sections. The first reflects on division: alienation between the speaker and physical landscapes, isolation within romantic relationships, and the violation...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Bremicker, Heather
- Abstract:
- This collection of poems and essays is about the folklore of family and the shadowy imprint family myth can leave on its members. At the center of the argument is a struggle about coming to terms with these shadows from a speaker trying to find a sense of a self...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Katz, Tanya
- Abstract:
- This thesis contains the first portion of Kingston Beach, a redemptive novel about a horrific event. The book chronicles the aftermath of a tragic plane crash in which Jay and Margot lose two of their three children while vacationing at the beach. Jay is a pediatric heart surgeon already highly...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Roush, Stephanie Rae
- Abstract:
- Something Mortal I Could Fall Upon is a collection of poetry exploring geographical, emotional, and cerebral permutations of home. These poems ask: What is home? What does it mean to give up a place? How does, or can, one rebuild the home? Although it is clear the speaker loves the...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Elbom, Emily Rebecca
- Abstract:
- In Everybody Doing Pretty Here, a collection of eight interconnected short stories, Emily R. Elbom chronicles the lives of a married couple, Max and Willa. Both characters survive various forms of physical, emotional, and social abuse, and seem to stay married because of this connection. In spite of their codependency,...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Groves, John M. (John Martin)
- Abstract:
- In Night Dreamer Walks, the first eight chapters of a novel of the same name, John M. Groves imagines the predicament of a young Native American man living 8,000 years ago in Oregon's Klamath Basin. Beginning as a story to avenge his father's death during an unusual outbreak of tribal...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Brisker, Kathy Jo
- Abstract:
- In this collection of nonfiction essays, Brisker recounts her path of recovery after suffering traumatic brain injury. The memoir opens with her first waking moments in the hospital one week after she was thrown from her horse and fractured her skull, and her beginning attempts at piecing together her fragmented...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Mercer, Jacob Ian
- Abstract:
- The Fifth Floor and Other Stories is a short-story collection about missed connection and exposure—about lonely men in specific places.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- de Soyza, Kushlani
- Abstract:
- Parangiya, Kotte Giya is collection of linked short stories, focusing on the experiences of a young Sinhalese-Dutchburgher woman growing up in Colombo Sri Lanka, in the years following the nation's independence from British colonial rule.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Rasmussen, Kimberly Ann
- Abstract:
- The Spillways is a collection of poetry investigating a wide range of themes: identity, memory, loss, illness, labor, suffering, and grief. At times, the poems investigate place−in the physical and natural world−as a driving force of the speaker's identity. Many of the poems also consider the role of work and...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Wyckoff, Elizabeth
- Abstract:
- In Can You See Me?, a collection of nine short stories, Elizabeth Wyckoff explores the conflicting desires of young women who long for connection, but struggle to find the balance between concealing and revealing themselves. The female protagonists in these stories simultaneously yearn to be seen, recognized, and acknowledged; and...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- O'Sullivan, Erin
- Abstract:
- Home Afterwhile, a collection of eight short stories and an essay, explores issues of family and maturation from the landscapes of the Midwest. Generations are connected through a sense of place—from small cornfield towns to Chicago and its suburbs—as well as through what gets retold and what goes unspoken. Characters...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Peacock, Jonathan Austin
- Abstract:
- The Skipping Stone is a collection of poetry investigating a wide range of themes: self-displacement, southern heritage, identity of the Self, loss, and grief. At times, the poems confess a kind of anxiety associated with experiencing the death of loved ones, acting as a coping mechanism for loss and self-exploration....
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Bravo, Simon Gabriel
- Abstract:
- Renovations or “Miracles” is a collection of poetry that exposes the miraculous within the mundane by bearing witness to where we come from and where we are going. Ranging in style from the lyric to the narrative, the personal to the political, these poems explore the relationship between individual and...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Watterson, Jaclyn
- Abstract:
- My thesis is a collection of short stories in which I explore themes like loss, identity, and memory. The collection includes both short stories and short short stories, and through in-depth exploration of character and form, the stories here attempt to fit into a tradition of writers articulating the experiences...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Harwell, Sarah
- Abstract:
- The death of a child is, for many, a fear too terrifying to imagine. The poems collected here explore this difficult loss; they examine the realities that form, and fall away, after the realization of a parent?s worst fear. Through the poems? speaker, a bereaved mother, a multitude of worlds...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- deTal, Vicki
- Abstract:
- In this collection of linked stories, four characters navigate space between selves they’ve been and those to come. Alice must invent an autonomous identity after her husband dies in a bike crash. As she casts about to populate a new life, a geographer, a violinist, and a clarinetist emerge at...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Hinderliter, Robert
- Abstract:
- The eight stories in Wild West Love Songs explore issues such as loss, suffering, and betrayal, but perhaps the most consistent theme is the examination of the ways we are haunted by our past. All the protagonists in these stories are haunted. Sometimes they are haunted literally, by a ghost...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Boisvert, Jon
- Abstract:
- This collection of poems discusses the human body, the desires to have control over that body, and the memories contained within. In some poems, the body is overt; in others, the probing spills from man into the animal world, and even poems that depict landscape often do so in bodily...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Jordan, Robin Lee
- Abstract:
- Porchless Staircase is a collection of poetry investigating a wide range of themes: consumerism, death, sexuality, alcoholism, religion, writing, family, and, most frequently, isolation. At times toying with notions of the sublime and surrealism, the confessional and the imagistic, these poems vary in form, process, and style, but are loosely...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Dickey, Eric Wayne
- Abstract:
- This collection of poems focuses on a range of content. They pose many questions that consider issues surrounding driving, cars and independence, as well as masculinity, fatherhood, domesticity and parental identity. The collection consists of three parts, Freeway, Menace, and Control. Freeway contains poems on driving and cars, some of...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Dmitriev, Vladena Aleksandra
- Abstract:
- Vladena Aleksandra Dmitriev, in her collection of fiction and nonfiction The Mercurial: Stories and Essays, examines the conflicts inherent in language, whether in her own experiences as a non-English speaking immigrant from the Soviet Union to the submersed anger and resentment that emerges quietly in disintegrating relationships. What unites these...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Carpenter, Claire
- Abstract:
- These stories follow the lives of women in a variety of roles—housewife, deli employee, artist, bird keeper, and sitter for the elderly—and at different stages of life. In “Beneath this Roof,” a young housewife’s life is rocked by a visit from an old friend who has changed in unexpected ways....
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Casas, Ruben
- Abstract:
- Modern Apostles actively attempts to blur the line between academic scholarship and narrative fiction for the purpose of satirizing the social and the political assumptions of its contemporary moment. By appropriating the loudest voices in dominant American culture, the inter-textual narratives (1) call attention to the voices that go unheard,...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Haskins, Isabelle
- Abstract:
- Kiddie Pool is a collection of eight short stories dealing in general terms with themes of culpability and control. The characters in the stories have their share of problems—car accidents, domestic violence, manic depression, obesity, unexpected deaths, truth or dare, religious crises—but they are resilient souls who keep on keeping...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Houghton, Melissa G.
- Abstract:
- This collection of poems spans a range of content. They pose many questions that consider issues surrounding identity, perception, and the relationship between the self and other. The collection consists of four parts. Parts I and IV explore the self and other by using personal experience and persona. Part II...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Gustie, Michael J.
- Abstract:
- This collection of poetry explores faith and isolation while questioning the ability of language to adequately express subjective experience. Gustie has provided a deeply contemplative, though rarely completely serious, romp through the lives of others who, ultimately, are reflections of the self. The three sections of the collection establish a...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Fath, Lauren
- Abstract:
- Lauren Fath, in her non-fiction collection Half-Life: Essays, examines the underpinnings of her upbringing in suburban Fort Wayne, Indiana, focusing primarily on familial relationships and the importance of hindsight in understanding how our families make an imprint on our lives. By looking at our relationships through the lens offered by...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Ludden, Jason
- Abstract:
- May We All Wake Up One By One is the beginning of a novel set in the West African country of Guinea. The story follows Sean Wake, a twenty-something American who finds himself working for the Feed the World Program as the country falls apart around him. While his co-workers...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Kroll, Adam L.
- Abstract:
- This collection of six individual writings, both fiction and creative non-fiction, is an exploration in narrative first-person voices and multiple themes, such as the loss of innocence, modernization versus traditions/myths, the California Central Valley, death, creativity, language, change, and the pressures of the future. Though abstractly linked at times, these...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Wisniewski, Stephanie E.
- Abstract:
- Ms. Miles is Missing—the beginning of a novel—is the story of a woman who, in her early thirties comes to realize that the life she is living is not the life she wants. She yearns for her lost childhood, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s death. Martha...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Aguilar, Joseph R.
- Abstract:
- This novel-in-progress is an attempt to struggle with the complicated process of forging one’s identity in the murk of urban Northwest life. The protagonist of this piece is confused, to put it lightly: bi-racial, torn between the affections of divorced parents, unsure about his religious views, and baffled by his...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Larison, John J.
- Abstract:
- Northwest of Normal is the first part of a novel that takes place along an imaginary Oregon river called the Ipsyniho. The story grows from valley’s fertile loam like a blackberry vine, entangling a group of locals—fly fishing guides and midwives, artists and dope growers—just as a posse of wealthy...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Drew, Christopher M. (Christopher Max)
- Abstract:
- These stories are an attempt to give a distinct literary voice to the people and places of rural Southern Indiana. They also strive to deal with certain elements indigenous to that region, some of which can be described generally as the tension between modernization and tradition, family and marriage as...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Richter, Amanda M.
- Abstract:
- This collection of stories spans a range of content: the personal, the domestic, the political, and the downright terrifying. In “Ilka the Flyer,” a young man is faced with his own crisis and that of his veteran uncle. Sister relationships bloom and fade as the entire family deals with changes...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Oleson, Wendy E.
- Abstract:
- This thesis is the first third of a coming of age novel called i. In this selection the central character, Bea Bouvier, prepares to see her estranged mother on a cruise ship to the Bahamas. She hopes her parents will decide to reunite as a family, though it becomes increasingly...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Bush, H. Takken
- Abstract:
- This thesis is the first half of a novel in progress called Things I Lost In Istanbul. In the selection, Simon Wells, an American expat living in Turkey, is trying to ignore the changes taking place in his life and in Istanbul--his adopted home and sanctuary. The novel tracks Simon's...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- McIntyre, Katharine L.
- Abstract:
- This thesis is the first third of a novel in progress called Rose, Thou Art Sick. In the selection, Rose loses her mother in a freak accident in Boston, is threatened by her evil uncle Charlie, and packs up and moves to Kansas to live with her father, whom she...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Ruch, Alison Louise
- Abstract:
- Comic Toast is a novel depicting a transition period in the life of the comic book artist character, Monica Holliday. This document includes a prologue, which provides details of a trauma in Monica's distant past, in order to inform Monica's adult reactions to the situations she finds herself entangled in....
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Shumway, Charity D.
- Abstract:
- A collection of short stories about the Gardner family, spanning several generations, but focusing on the children of Len and Laura Gardner, Brooke, the second oldest, in particular. Set primarily in Utah, the collection tells the story of family members' struggles with one another, with their religious faith, and with...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Baker, Jessica A.
- Abstract:
- This thesis is a work of fiction.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Kovatch, Sarah
- Abstract:
- The purpose of this document is to display a portion of the work I have completed over the last two years.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- McDonnell, Peter A.
- Abstract:
- The purpose of this document is to display a portion of the work I have completed over the last two years. The Athlete is the recently written opening to a novel of the same name. I've decided not to excerpt a longer section of the novel because the novel isn't...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Buck, C. Nathan
- Abstract:
- Always Talk to Strangers contains the first seven chapters to a novel. The novel focuses on the friendship between Amanda and Maria, two fourteen-year-old girls who are experiencing their last summer before high school in Madison, Wisconsin. Their friendship is a complicated one: Maria was kidnapped four years ago, the...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Martens, Jacob L.
- Abstract:
- These essays are an attempt to rebuild memories that explore the nature of work and family. They explore how work knocks against the joints of the body and against the joints between family members, and, as time passes, how the next generation inherits the family line of work only to...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Weber, Joshua D.
- Abstract:
- The Gospel: According to Matt is a novel, told in the first person, simple past tense, depicting the struggle of a young man attempting to make sense of his relationship with his estranged father as he wrestles with a growing crisis of faith. Matt is deeply sincere in his desire...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Tafolla Young, Kathryne M.
- Abstract:
- Ellis, a booming mid-sized town in California's Central Valley, is packed with farmers and commuters, and plagued with a dwindling sense of itself and its history. Set against the backdrop of a failed murder-suicide, a secret affair and a wealthy local mogul's attempt to develop the town into something it's...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Willis, Stephen E.
- Abstract:
- The thesis is the first third of a novel entitled Steelhead. The story takes place in and around a small southern Oregon town in the summer of 1967. The narrator, eighteen-year-old hot-rodding Emil Reese, discovers hippies swimming naked in the river near his house. The hippies, newly arrived from San...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Ni Bhraonain, Lisa
- Abstract:
- As I began to explore the evocative nature of language, the creation of themes and images, and the rhythm and beauty of words that I feel must accompany meaning, I discovered that I had always seen and heard and felt the world as many of my characters do; in this...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Sharp, Kimberly A.
- Abstract:
- The characters in each of these pieces exist outside the periphery of the so-called norm. In "Through Parted Curtains," "What They Do Besides Eat," and "Two Lambs," June wishes to enter the adult world that tends to exclude her (though she will only enter conditionally). June is, of course, about...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Starr, Peter W.
- Abstract:
- The purpose of this thesis was to create a sustained piece of fiction that both represented my growth as a writer throughout my time at Oregon State University, and wove together a mixture of imagination, language, and creativity. My hope was to write a novella that incorporated and drew from...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Jaramillo, John Paul
- Abstract:
- In 7 composite stories--shifting from the roads of Southern Colorado neighborhoods, the fields and unpaved roads of Northern New Mexico, and the streets of Culver City, California--Penitence follows Relles Ortiz and the bleak peripheral existence of the voiceless suburban people living in disorder and disorientation within the harshness of their...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Morrison, Rowan
- Abstract:
- Down the road is a collection of short stories written in the post-Stonewall tradition of gay men's literature, which has focused on works that reflect gay experience and specifically autobiographical fiction; a desire to write for gay readers without having to explain circumstances or points of view to readers unfamiliar...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Boothman Duyck, Tracy
- Abstract:
- The Yogiebogeybox is a novel-in-stories. This novel explores spiritual transcendence and the connection of art to that spiritual journey. A variety of points of view are employed in the narrative in order to depict the journey of the protagonist, Ant Malo, through this journey. Some of the narrative threads are...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Peters, Patrick J.
- Abstract:
- Hamilton Falls is a screenplay about a young attorney who returns home from WWII, is appointed District Attorney, and begins investigating an old murder. In the course of the investigation, he discovers that his mentor, the former district attorney, may have been the murderer. The story follows the film noir...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Bluhm, Michael A.
- Abstract:
- You Stay Here is the beginning of a novel that centers on the notion of family, community, and the expectations that drive our interactions within these circles. The novel tells the story of brothers Mills and Nance O'Malley as they interact with their parents, Richard and Margaret. The brothers own...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Stephens, Nia C.
- Abstract:
- Scenes from the Tarot is a novella that explores the desire to control time. The narrator, Truth Aiken, spurred by fear of her own death, recounts the story of her sister Beauty's death and its effects on Truth's highly unusual family. Proceeding backwards through time, Truth describes her tumultuous relationships...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Miftaraj, Andre M.
- Abstract:
- There Were Bears and Rumors of Bears is a collection of stories that explores spiritual injury and recovery using a variety of interior and exterior narrative approaches to depict the profane and sacred, the mundane and non-ordinary, aspects of experience. In each story, the characters encounter situations in the physical...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Van Handel, Lucinda S.
- Abstract:
- Set in the dryland farming country of Eastern Oregon in the late 1950's, this novel follows a year and a half in the life of a young girl as she comes of age. A water rights dispute, the plight of nearby ranchers, disappointments in her own family and a harrowing...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Harris, Gregory A.
- Abstract:
- The Long House explores belonging and commitment. Jennifer Hawley, an American graduate student in linguistic anthropology, arrives in the early 1990s in Long Awan, a Dayak village in the remote highlands of Borneo. Her research concerns oral history among Punan families, traditionally nomadic, which have recently decided to settle in...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Lont, Steven
- Abstract:
- This collection of stories explores moments of stillness in human relationships: moments during an argument when there is nothing to say, moments of quiet contemplation which precedes inevitable--and often unwelcome--life changes, moments of frustration, confusion, despair, and grace. In the chaotic lives of these characters, stillness is neither tranquil nor...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Goodrich, Charles
- Abstract:
- If home is the hearth, a place of safety and centeredness, it is also the portal, the magic door. From home we go out into spaces more humanized and technologized, or into spaces more natural, more other-than-humanized. We dress up and head downtown, or we pack up and head for...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Buchanan, Sherry
- Abstract:
- Living by the Wayside and Other Stories explores the tension between control and dependence and how that tension affects the ability to sustain intimate relationships. These are stories about women who struggle for independence, but experience the cost of self-rule as isolation. Living by the Wayside and Other Stories focuses...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
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- Creator:
- Millet, Terrance Lane
- Abstract:
- This thesis, a collection of short fiction, attempts to surface some of the discrepancy between inner and outer lives, between who these characters want to be and who they've become, between the lives they might have had and those they've chosen because the former are too chancy and the latter...
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis