MFA 2016
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Browsing MFA 2016 by Subject "Family"
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Item A Collection of Poems(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2016-06-16) Wilhelm, TheresaThis manuscript offers a collection of poems that center around the first-person lyric. Interwoven, are themes and the aesthetic techniques that create imagery, and an experience for the reader. The poems are built for discovery, for the unveiling of the self. The importance of the poem is found within the diction. Each stanza is carefully considered, holding value to the individual word, line breaks, and white space. The manipulation of language allows the speaker to portray who the reader thinks the writer to be. Pardon My Society is written to impact the reader. The structure is built to enhance the metaphor and the voice of the speaker who is present. Themes within the poems uncover love, examine sexuality, with poems addressing societal issues, and the emotional concern of the family. The speaker’s voice is strong, and travels in and out of these contemporary pieces. Over the course of this manuscript, the reader will experience a battle with childhood, broken love and rebellion, female sexuality, and the everyday people we live amongst.Item The Maw of the Mountain: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2016-01-07) Weiss, MichaelHidden in a Pennsylvania mountain range, the secluded community known as the Schullen is accustomed to a way of life experienced nowhere else. It’s not uncommon for neighbors to claim they’ve witnessed forest creatures at night or a loved one’s spirit traipsing about the yard in the form of an albino rabbit. After all, when one has a stone god peering down from the highest peak and holidays include contact with hallucinogenic flowers, oddities are sure to take place. Yet at its core, the tight-knit town holds its doctrines, neighborly love and some harmless gossip, above all else. For Lowell Jameson, his destiny lies in the forests he holds dear and his bloodline promises him the seat of spiritual leader of the community. His dream is certain to be fulfilled and he eagerly waits for his turn to wear the uniform of the town’s premier holy man. Yet someday comes suddenly when his father abruptly abandons everything he’s stood for, he leaves a wake of confusion and dishonor for the Jameson family to deal with. One revealed secret digs up another and soon, a conspiracy and dark experiment is revealed at the core of the Schullen. Lowell’s journey for truth and to reclaim his home forces him to encounter not only the fantastical side of life, but also true desperation in a hollow world. Before he can find his way back, he’s forced to struggle with the concepts of faith, family, and when to question the seemingly infallible.Item PERFECT LANDING: A Collection of Poems(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2016-01-07) Hansen, TinamariePerfect Landing portrays through confessional poetry, the speakers experience of familial, and romantic encounters. This collection, introduces the reader to the concepts of acceptance, growth and forgiveness of relationships. From a Brooklyn childhood, through the experiences of adulthood, Perfect Landing displays the reality of intimate relationships with honesty and self awareness.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.Item The Way of the Saints(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2016-06-16) Engleman, ElizabethThe Way of the Saints tells the story of three generations of Puerto Rican women: Paula, Isabel, and Lizzy. It is a story of womanhood, spanning from Puerto Rico’s Nationalist movement for Independence against American Imperialism to the doldrums of New York City’s factories to the upper echelon in its wealthy suburbs. Paula and her seven children move to the brutal and impoverished tenements of the Lower East Side. There, desperately seeking to uncover the roots to a family curse that has left her infertile, Paula’s youngest child Isabel begins an unquenchable quest for power. Initiated into the secret African-Cuban religion called Santeria, she rises in the ranks toward high priestess, risking losing not only her own life but her relationship with her only daughter. Lizzy, her child born of spells and sacrifices, grows up in Westchester in the 1980’s. Among the sprawling mansions, the golf clubs, and the yacht clubs, Lizzy’s mother Isabel secretly practices a jungle magic that leaves Lizzy paranoid, powerless, and riddled with fear. Juggling two worlds, ancient island spiritism and yuppy suburban materialism, Lizzy’s is a story of secrets and the wants and rages of women. It explores a girl’s quest for identity and freedom as she uncovers the surprising grace of magic found in words and the redemptive power of story.