MFA 2014
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Item ACROSS THE BRIDGE; REMEMBERING AFRICA FROM THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-05) Isaac, Cheryl CollinsBy the time she arrived in the United States in 1996, Cheryl had been a victim of the First Liberian Civil War which was started in 1989 as a coup attempt by rebel leader, Charles Taylor, to overthrow corrupt president, Samuel Kanyon Doe. Cheryl’s father was a member of Doe’s cabinet. The coup soon escalated into a war as Liberia unraveled and rebels fought to eliminate remnants of Doe’s government. Founded in 1847 by African American freed slaves, Liberia had undergone years of unrest because of divisions between Americo-Liberians and Native-Liberians. Once Cheryl’s father fled the country and her mother was captured and forced to live with the warlord Prince Johnson, Cheryl soon found herself in the middle of war, separated from her family, and coping with a lifestyle much different from the privileged, Americo-Liberian one she had grown accustomed to. Fifteen years later, she suddenly finds herself reliving those years from a remote town within the Appalachian Mountains. Mirroring memory and the psychology of war trauma, this work of nonfiction uses two distinct narrative modes and voices to capture: Liberia from a child’s perspective in the early 1990s, and rural America from an adult’s contemplation in the year 2012; a Liberian girl in the middle of war, an American woman recovering from war.Item THE ARCHBISHOP’S SON: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-19) Hosek, Don A.The Archbishop’s Son tells the tale of Emil, an orphan raised in a Catholic orphanage in 1900 Prague. He discovers his mother had been one of the nuns at the orphanage and when he finds her, she tells him that his father is the archbishop and asks him to avenge her for the fate she suffered after being expelled from her order. The novel examines questions of theodicy, justice and family relations.Item ARMADILLO’S CROSSING: A MEMOIR(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Lockwood-Fleming, Katherine BatesOne night Kathy Lockwood comes home to find her father has cut his hand and can only assume he has killed her mother. Her OCD and dysfunctional life lead her to expect the worse – and often that’s what happens. Like an armadillo, she sees herself as road kill as she navigates her crazy life in the late 70s/early 80s of Washington D.C. and later Tampa, Florida, told with a sense of humor and comfortable voice. So while she didn’t have most of the usual teenaged problems like broken hearts and prom dates, she had to keep her family alive – at least until she could see them split safely apart.Item Asbestos: A Collection of Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Tier, BenjaminHerein contains a collection of my thesis work, consisting of short stories. Each story was written and revised during my time with the University of Tampa MFA in Creative Writing program. As an artist, I seek to explore the impulses and sensations of which I am most ashamed. As a writer and a student, I aim to craft this shame into prose fiction. “Asbestos” symbolizes a universally acknowledged evil that was once a perfectly viable commodity. There exist many asbestoses. The obvious evils are horrifying, but even more so are the subtle asbestoses that lead to the metastasis of moral destruction.Item BACKBEAT THE WAVES: Selections from a Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-03) Wilhelm, GreggSet in a time between glam rock and filthy punk, “Backbeat the Waves” washes over the summer that changed Mercury Widdershins’s life. His divorced mother struggles to keep the family bar from sinking. His gay uncle gets promoted to tollmaster of the city’s new bridge that completes the beltway circuit. His strung-out sister bursts about like a seagull popping Alka-Seltzer. His extended family of barflies includes a wooden-legged charlatan, a former stripper with dementia, a reporter with literary aspirations, an AWOL sailor of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, arabbers, beat cops, and ballplayers. Merck’s life completely spazzes when his cousin arrives from Appalachia—as alien as a Wookie—bringing with her a weird look, strange words, a radical attitude, and ultimate questions. Together, they discover their own liberating music, their unique sexual identities, and their separate solutions to what the future holds. Told from the perspective of popular late-night disc jockey Mercy Withers, over the course of her last shift before a station format change, “Backbeat the Waves” explores moments when people exist between things: city and country, adolescence and adulthood, male and female, perseverance and mortality. For a summer that witnessed the death of a universal “king” and the launch of human culture toward interstellar space, the most dramatic events happened at home.Item Better Times Than These: A Novel or Selections from a Novel or A Collection of Essays/Poems/Stories or Nonfiction(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Cox, DanielBetter Time Than These is a compilation of eight short stories whose central themes revolve around the characters’ constant striving for goodness up against the simple human truths of hunger, weakness, honor, lust, and courage, to name a few. Some manufacture their own misery and slide into darkness, while others, by simple fate, find themselves faced with impossible situations with impossible odds. Through the gearing of the physical to the felt, these characters push the bounds of human nature by subverting the myths upon which our preconceived notions rest, calling all certainty into question. They allow us, as readers, to stack cruelty against compassion, evil against good, and give us a glimpse of the possibility of redemption and grace for even the worst of us.Item BONECLOCKS: A Hybrid-Genre Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Tomassi, Adriana F.Boneclocks is a hybrid genre work consisting of a nonfiction foreword and a novel in multiple voices that utilizes typography, artwork, poetry and prose. The published version will be much more intricate and laden with imagery and all handwritten text will actually be handwritten. My genre is poetry, but I have been allowed to float between genres in making this novel. These are only excerpts or vignettes as the novel is over 35,000 words and would be too long for this thesis.Item THE CHIMNEY: A Novella(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Silvia, JaredThe Chimney is a postmodern literary noir which concerns Davey, a recently un-employed newspaper photographer who is conscripted into the service of an agency that deals in explicit celebrity photographs. Davey endeavors to capture a dirty picture of a local celebrity in the town of Groveland, a failed industrial city reconfiguring itself as a playground for the rich and beautiful. His work is further complicated by Sarahmony, a part-time locksmith and full time arsonist who torturers Davey to help him understand the nature of the universe. As Davey tries to tie together the loose threads of his existence, he is forced to confront the possibility that Chaos may truly be the current flowing behind everything he experiences.Item CTHULHU’S BASEMENT: A Collection of Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Sanger, KatherineIn the darkness, Cthulhu waits. But not very patiently. Instead, he hangs out in a basement apartment, eating the residents and plotting his return from R'lyeh to the universe we call our own. In these 19 stories, Cthulhu’s helper (and landlord) rents out the apartment to an unlikely assortment of misfits and miscreants, letting Cthulhu feed and come back into his power.Item Dark Humor Thesis(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Garbatini, MatthewThere is humor in everything. Not necessarily “ha ha” humor, but humor nonetheless. My topics of interest all derive from this theory. The mere absurdity of my characters and their situations are what make my stories entertaining. I consider myself to be a dark humorist, not to be confused with black humorists, who I have come to learn are completely different. Though I may write about the most taboo of topics, I do so in a way that touches on them from a comedic standpoint. Instead of just pointing out the drudgeries of life I choose to celebrate them. Dark humor is just that. It is dark. But what most people fail to realize is that even in darkness there is light. It is when you go black that you turn off that light completely.Item DEAD FISHWIND: A novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Levey-Baker, CooperItem DRECKSACK: A Collection of Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Fuhrmann, KariThis collection of short stories uncovers the thoughts and fears of traveling overseas. The stories in this collection are centered on an American point of view centered on traveling through Germany. Some stories focus on the dynamic of a family from an ethnical point of view. They center on the challenges and thoughts of an American traveling to Germany to visit family. While other stories in the collection merely focus on the challenges and fears of traveling – the what-ifs that could happen when traveling alone in a foreign country. Despite the differences in each story, there is one common theme and that one common theme is the dynamic and interactions between people despite their ethnical background.Item A Fine Line: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-02) McConkey, Ryan K.A Fine Line is a novel set during the Great Tribulation. Nothing has turned out like it was supposed to. The Great Tribulation has been going on for eight years, but Jesus has yet to return. The anti-Christ rules over a united world, and those who defy him are forced underground. The last remnant of Christ takes to the sewers, where they are hunted night and day for profit. Imprisonment awaits all who are captured, a fate that is said to be worse than death. With little to place their hope in, the last remnant is forced to make a series of difficult decisions. Should they wait it out hoping for the rapture to finally take place, or should they stand on faith and fight against the anti-Christ? Is it possible to stop that which has been foreordained by God? For every decision there are consequences, and for every act of free will there is a destiny that cannot be altered. Though much is made concerning the indisputable difference between good and evil, you will find that the two are only separated by a fine line in the middle that makes all the difference in the world.Item FLESH IS NARRATIVE: a collection of poems(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2013-11-15) Duncan, Catherine MooreThis manuscript contains 64 poems, written in primarily open verse with some use of meter and measure in the line, as well as a blending of forms. The collection is comprised of variations on the theme “loss” within the presented subjects of family relationships, marriage and motherhood; loss and recovery; betrayal and forgiveness. One focus is the duality of our existence, sweet/bitter, sorrow/joy, mind/body connections, and explore that balance in poetry by making use of imagery and layers. The collection can be viewed as a lifespan within a female voice, somewhat chronological. This progression is echoed in the title “Flesh is Narrative” as well. In some poems, the body is overt; in others, the probing spills from woman into the natural world, though even poems that depict landscape often do so in bodily terms: the ash tree as a woman’s beauty, a rosebud becomes a vagina, and the wild violets’ leaves are outstretched hands. The collection is a composition about a life in progress and is varied accordingly. Any development in the poems has been toward the idea of exploring the narrative life of mind and emotion in the more tangible experiences of the flesh.Item FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB: A Collection of Essays(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-01) Deuel, NathanIn 2008, Deuel, a former editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, and his wife, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent, moved to the deeply Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to see for themselves what was happening in the Middle East. There they had a daughter, and later, while his wife filed reports from Baghdad and Syria, firefights erupted and car bombs went off right outside the family's apartment in Beirut. Their marriage strained, and they struggled with the decision to stay or go home. At once a meditation on fatherhood, an unusual memoir of a war correspondent’s spouse, and a first-hand account from the front lines of the most historic events of recent days— the Arab Spring, the end of the Iraq war, and the unrest in Syria—Friday Was The Bomb is a searing collection of timely and absorbing essays.Item The Gospel According to Felix Kiger: Selections from a Family Memoir(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Kiger, Travis M.This thesis is composed of selections from a family memoir that serves three coinciding masters. First, it serves as familial oral history preservation, prompted by a coincidental meeting on an airplane, and probes the lives of my great grandfather, grandfather, and father. Much of the narrative is in third person, and is cultivated from research, personal interviews, and oral histories. Secondly, the memoir as first person narrative attempts to reconcile my own place in the legacy of the Kiger men before me. This is at times challenging because the men before me were born and raised in Grand Isle. I determine that I am of that place more than I realized, but at the same time, I am not of that place in consideration of the diversity of my experience and my avoidance of the alcoholism and womanizing that have plagued the men of my family. Lastly, this project is about place – most specifically Grand Isle, LA. The selections in the thesis exhibit the evolution of the fishing island – both culturally and physically, economically and civilly. Grand Isle’s relationship to South Louisiana is often similar to my own relationship to my family. She is of that place, but also not. The observations and narratives that support this determination reveal that multiculturalism is a culture in itself, deserving of celebration and preservation.Item Harry and Mary, Dancing the Twelve Steps(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01) Richstone, Barbara A.Item IF YOU WANT TO LEAVE: A Collection of Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-18) McFadden, Kevin LouisSet primarily in the Hudson Valley, this collection of stories features characters struggling with loss, certain death, and the inability to let go or hold on to the things most important to them. Often it is true that our greatest loses will haunt our futures. These stories offer empathetic characters stuck in situations of loss. Some struggle with the loss of parents, spouses, and children. Other struggle with the loss of normalcy in their lives. Whether it is an addict struggling with the loss of his identity, a young man running away from the loss of his parents, or an heartsick twenty-something dealing with an ex-girlfriend and perhaps fatal chicken pox, each story aims to understand the clumsy way in which human beings try to move on from loss.Item Like Something Wild: A Collection of Short Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Boussias, ChristinaLike Something Wild is a collection of short stories that examines various subjects and themes, including cultural identity, tradition and the immigration experience, gender roles, coming of age, differing perceptions of community, loss and love.Item A LONG LINE OF SOMETHINGS: A Collection of Short Stories and a Novella(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-13) Allen, Kerri-AnnThis collection of short stories and the beginning of a novella takes us on a journey through many different landscapes, some familiar and others not so much. The underlying link between these journeys is the relationships that we have with each other. Whether it is between mother and son, friends, lovers, or even a pet and its owner; these stories allow for the exploration of emotion, and love. It is my hope that reading these stories will allow for some insight into the emotions of these people.