Search Inside the UNT Libraries

  You limited your search to:

  Access Rights: Use restricted to UNT Community
  Remove
  Partner: UNT Libraries
 Degree Discipline: English - Creative Writing
  Remove
Home: A Memoir
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Home: A Memoir, a creative non-fiction thesis, is a memoir in the form of personal essays, each exploring some aspect of the meaning of home, how my sense of self has been formed by my relationship to home, and the inevitability of leaving home. Chapter I explores the nature of memory and of memoir, their relationship to each other and to truth, and how a writer's voice shapes memoir. Chapter II, “Paternity,” is an attempt to remember my father, resulting in renewed interest in his past and renewed awareness of his legacy. Chapter III, “Home,” is on the surface about my grandparents' house, but is really about my grandmother. Chapter IV, “Dixie,” is about my contradictory feelings for the South, and my eventual acceptance of the South's complexities. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2841/
Divine and the Everyday Devil (Short Stories)
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Divine and the Everyday Devil contains a scholarly preface that discusses the experiences and literary works that influenced the author's writing with special attention in regards to spirituality and sexuality. The preface is followed by six original short stories. "Evil" is a work addressing a modern conception of evil. "Eschatology" concerns a man facing his own mortality. "The Gospel of Peter" tells the story of a husband grappling with his wife's religious beliefs. "The Mechanics of Projects" relates the experiences of a woman looking for love in Mexico. "The Rocky Normal Show" involves a husband growing apart from his wife and "Mutant: An Origin Story" is about a teenager trying to find his own unique identity. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4159/
A Country With No Name
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
A Country With No Name is a collection of thirty-four poems with a preface explaining the style and influences of the author. The preface defends plain-language techniques in poetry, using W.H. Auden, Wislawa Szymborska, and Paul Simon as examples of poets who take a similar approach. The poems range in topic from personal and familial to societal and abstract. The main subjects encompass interpersonal relationships, romantic and otherwise, and larger concerns, such as the effects of war and modern lifestyles. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4460/
Claremont Connections
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Claremont Connections is a collection of fictional short stories about the relationships between the generations of women in one family and their friends. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4551/
A Drop of Oil
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Many Christian writers point to God through their fiction without openly evangelizing. The images their words evoke lift their secular and religious readers' heads, for God is reflected in their use of language, the emotions they describe, and the actions of their characters. The preface and short stories in this collection aim to show that God's presence can be felt even when people are suffering due to human decisions and mistakes. He is with His creations in the midst of their pain to impart hope when they need it most. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4739/
Stories: Spain, Lovers and Crazy Old Ladies
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Stories: Spain, Lovers and Crazy Old Ladies is a collection of short stories about relationships, traumas, memories and change. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4734/
A Hint of Meaning
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
A Hint of Meaning contains a scholarly preface, "Language, Experimentation, and Craft: Creating a Vivid, Continuous Fictional Dream," that discusses the ambiguities of language and how they relate to different aspects of the craft of writing. Six original short stories follow the preface. "Musical Chairs" explores a woman's conflicting emotions about her ex-husband. "Baby Steps" depicts the struggle of a woman against her father's alcoholism. "Go Home Happy" depicts a day in the life of a video store employee. "Bargain Basement Perfection" contrasts the reality of a relationship with an imagined, perfect relationship. "Did You Hear about Donald and Bitsy?" is an experimental piece that tells a story through gossip. "Glass Angels" explores a minister's relationship with his homosexual son and how that relates to the minister's faith. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4733/
"My Vagina" and other stories.
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
This thesis includes seven short stories and a critical afterword. The afterword places the stories in their literary historical context in regards to creative nonfiction. It goes on to discuss the craft of fictionalizing autobiographical stories. Each of the stories should stand alone, though they follow the narrator's life for a number of years. Harlin Anderson is the narrator of all the stories. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4821/
Language and the Art of Writing
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
I start writing by conjuring up an image in my mind. Sometimes it will be something that I have thought about for a while, sometimes it will be something that I sit around attempting to create. Either way, it is simply the idea that I need in order to get started. People will say, "Just sit down and write" which I can do, but it does not mean I will end up anywhere worthwhile. In my writing I need a focus. I need an idea or just one image to get me writing and I can base an entire story off of that one image. I think the reason this works for me is because in my mind it is an illustration and always something that is vibrant and unique. I want the image to stand out and to mean something because I feel that it comes to me for a specific reason, I just have to piece it all together and let the characters and plot unfold for themselves. People often say this, that the characters end up running the story. I think this is true, but in my case my stories are not so driven by character or plot as they are by language. A language driven piece can be a difficult thing to manipulate because it needs to have some direction and some purpose other than just being pleasing to the ear/mind/reader. And what is the point of a language driven piece? digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5230/
"The Barroom Girls" and Other Stories
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
This creative thesis is comprised of five original short stories and a critical preface. The preface discusses the changing cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic landscape of the modern American South and the effects-positive, negative, and neutral-these changes have had on the region's contemporary literature, including the short stories contained within. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5218/
Animals That Die
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
The thesis has two parts. Part I is a critical essay entitled "Lessons Under the Amfalula." Part II is the collection of poems entitled "Animals That Die." digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5418/
The Other Side of Yesterday
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
The four stories in this collection follow different, yet strikingly similar, protagonists who are facing crossroads in life. These stories include memories and specific scenes from the past that combine with scenes from the present to trace the development of the characters. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12194/
Where My Own Grave Is
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
The preface to this collection, "Against Expectation: The Lyric Narrative," highlights the ways James Wright, Stephen Dunn, and C.K. Williams use narrative to strengthen their poems. Where My Own Grave Is is a collection of poems that uses narrative to engage our historical fascination with death. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12100/
Tinder for the Bathhouses
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
In the preface to this collection, "Poetry and History: Finding 'What Will Suffice,'" I show how Czeslaw Milosz's "Dedication" and Jorie Graham's "Guantánamo" embody the virtues of philosophical meditation and the moral imagination to create a unique poetry of witness. These poems also provide American poets with an example of how they can regain the trust of an apathetic general reading audience. Tinder for the Bathhouses is a collection of poems in which I use the moral imagination to indirectly bear witness to events as far ranging as the Holocaust and the Iraq War. Using the family as a foundation, I show how historical narratives can provide a poet with the tools to think about larger metaphysical questions that poetry can raise, such as the nature of beauty and the purpose of art. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12088/
Dawn in the Empty House
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
The preface to this collection of poems, "Memory and The Myth of Lost Truth," explores the physical and metaphysical roles memory plays within poetry. It examines the melancholy frequently birthed from a particular kind poetic self-inquiry, or, more specifically, the feelings associated with recognizing the self's inability to re-inhabit the emotional experience of past events, and how poetry can redeem, via engaging our symbolic intuition, the faultiness of remembered history. Dawn in the Empty House is a collection of poems about the implications of human relationships, self-deception, and memory as a tool for self-discovery. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12091/
Prudence Stories
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
This collection of three original short stories is an excerpt from a novel about an East Texas family whose common bond is the need for a second chance. A preface dealing with the use of setting as a character precedes the short stories. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12099/
Excerpts From the Eva Crane Field Diary: Stories
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Male or female, young or old, the characters of this collection inhabit a liminal space of trauma and social dislocation in which elements of the real and fabulous coexist in equal measure. The ghosts that populate the stories are as much the ghosts of the living, as they are the ghosts of the dead. They represent individual conscience and an inescapable connection to the past. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28436/
Portraits: A Collection
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
This collection consists of a critical preface and five short stories. The preface analyzes what it terms 'fringe fiction,' or stories dealing with elements that are improbable or unusual, though not impossible, as it distinguishes this category from magical realism and offers guidelines for writing this kind of fiction. The short stories explore themes of attachment, loss, guilt, and hope. Collection includes the stories "Portrait," "Dress Up," "Change," "Drawn Onward, We Few, Drawn Onward," and "Broker." digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28396/
Fathom's Edge
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Investigating elements of the creative process in the work of three poets: James Wright, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Pegeen Kelly. Each poet deploys a different method for access to those experiences that lie at the edge of accessible language. Each method is discussed and its deployment illustrated. Wright leads us from the sensory world to the supersensual. Schnackenberg makes use of the formal device of the fairy tale. Kelly immerses in the logic of dreams. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's theory of the imagination, the case is made that the poetic act is a dialectic between the poet and the sensory world, in which perception and imagination are equally important. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28483/
A Chorus of Trees
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
This two-part thesis includes a critical preface and a collection of my poems. Using three poems-Louise Glück's "Lullaby," Bob Hicok's "Poem for My Mother's Hysterectomy," and Nick Flynn's "Memento Mori"-the critical preface examines how, in poetry, the transformation of a body negotiates trauma and triggers a conceptual shift, the creation and revision of identity, and the release of the duende's inspirational force. The collection of poetry that follows seeks to transfigure the body as a way to explore the nuanced traumas of human experience. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30485/
Henderson Street Bazaar and Other Stories
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
The preface, "Against Buses: Charles Baxter and the Contemporary Epiphany" deals with the epiphany as a potential ending to short stories. Baxter holds that epiphanies are trite and without purpose in today's fiction. I argue that Baxter's view, while not without merit, is limiting. Beginning with James Joyce and Katherine Anne Porter and moving to my own work, I discuss how some epiphanies, particularly false ones, can enhance rather than detract from excellent fiction. Five short stories make up the remainder of this thesis: "Dedication," "Taking it with You," "Transition to Flowers," "Profile in Courage," and "Henderson Street Bazaar." digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc33222/
Dead Fox Run: A Collection of Stories
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
This collection consists of a critical preface and five linked short stories. The preface analyzes the usage of violence in literate and other forms of media, and specifically the ways in which literature can address violence without aggrandizing or stylizing it. The stories explore this idea through the lens of the lives of two young men, following them from boyhood marked by violence to adulthood crushed by the trauma of the American Civil War. Collection includes the stories "Dead Foxes," "Cow Pen," "Fatherless," "Woodsmoke," and "Brotherhood." digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc68046/