MFA 2016
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Browsing MFA 2016 by Subject "Conflict"
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Item skin & breath: A Collection of Poems(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2016-01-07) Bethke, Ramonaskin & breath is a collection of poems that delve into race, heritage, sexuality, sin, redemption, submission, and strength. The reader will experience the unexpected and the redemptive outcomes of human conflict. In the hectic and hurried lives that are today’s norm, it is often arduous to be in the moment and embrace how that moment can define an individual. skin & breath asks the reader to stop, absorb a snapshot of time, and ask the questions: What are these lives we are born into? Can we change them? Do we really want to?Item THE SWITCHEROO: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2016-01-07) Winter, Gerald ArthurMy novel concerns family conflict. The father, Jack, has lost his wife and son in childbirth. His surviving daughter, Bonnie, is his dead son’s twin. An alcoholic, Jack’s depression over his losses, results in neglecting Bonnie, raised by her grandparents to age seven where the story begins. Jack had been a star college baseball pitcher whose injury kept him from playing in the majors. He had put all his hopes on having a son to coach, who might succeed where he had lost his chance to pitch in the majors. Since the tragedy of his lost wife, Lydia, and his still-born son, Jack had spent the past seven years coaching high school baseball teams to State Championships allowing little time for Bonnie. When his in-laws invite Jack to Bonnie’s seventh birthday party, Jack challenges Bonnie with a wager that she can’t blow out all the candles on her cake with one breath. When she succeeds, she holds Jack to his wager that he will play catch with her. The dark tone of the story shifts to hope through their shared dream, that he can turn her into the pitcher he had hoped her twin brother might have been. Their dream congeals with Bonnie’s hope to develop into a closing pitcher in the World Series. From age seven to eighteen, we share their dreams and disappointments of Jack coaching Bonnie, who is driven by an internal spiritual force that she has thought since her early childhood has comes from her twin brother. Even at eighteen, she believes Junior’s name embossed on the baseball mitt meant for him provides her with the magic to throw an unhittable pitch she calls, “the switcheroo.” The theme of gender equality is the essence of this narrative as Bonnie attempts to break the invisible, unspoken gender line in the Boys Club called Major League Baseball.