MFA 2018
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Item All That is Given(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Levin, MeganIn All That is Given, Megan Levin confronts the shattering of the Davis family, and the pieces that spread and grow on European and American soil. After undertaking the task to heal from maternal divergence, daughter Aubrey and her husband Johannes Esser create their lives in the university town of Marburg, Germany. Back in New England, younger brother Isaac vows to keep his wife Muriel in an eternal state of felicitousness. Aubrey’s best friend and sister-in-law, Bridgett, soon becomes the median between what is left of the Davis family. With the help of a Parisian painter, she shelters her nephew before he too is caught up their perpetual familial feuds. This novel pilots readers though the Davis’ and Essers’ adolescent adventures through the use of flashback, and invites readers to explore the demands and cultural electricity of expatriation as it is seen through the eyes of young adults.Item Altar Call(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Dupuy, Daniel"Altar Call and Other Stories" shows the division inside and between characters. The collection explores this relationship through prideful siblings, oblivious parents, and troubling neighbors. It contains themes of death, betrayal, moral duty, and mercy. The stories often feature the struggles of growing up as an older sibling through “Golden Hour,” where a sister struggles to process her relation to her ill brother, and “Brothers,” where the older brother must decide if he will defend his younger brother who is getting bullied. It features themes of physical deformity boys born with no arch to their feet in “Sins of the Father,” a father who has lost his eye to cancer in “How to Kill a God,” and a young man who tries to atone for his sins by plucking out his eyes in “Dust.” The stories are grounded primarily in reality with occasional diverges into the fantastical when the characters imagine events playing out, experience events half asleep, and go on bad drug trips. The language is focused primarily on metaphor, and each of the endings move towards an epiphanic moment, without stating each one explicitly. The stories attempt to draw from theological principles, but are grounded often anagogically rather than in parable or direct allegory. The characters are often unsympathetic and operate at odds to their own beliefs, resisting their own systems of thought. While they often move towards self-realization, they seldom experience a change in themselves, but there’s a change outside of them that transforms something or someone else, such as the unnamed man in “Asher” or the neighbor in “August.”Item Caleb and Other Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Schwartz, JosephCaleb and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction that explores the interactions between humans and animals. The collection features a cast of characters whose lives are irrevocably changed by these wild encounters. Their stories, like our own, challenge our perception of life, and the nature of our own existence.Item Church Slut(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Flynn, KathleenChurch Slut is a reflection on the variable nature of personal faith. A series of essays, musings, and witticisms, Church Slut reminds us that faith changes with us and becomes us.Item Comets(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Costa, Joseph AllenComets is a linked collection of short fiction that follows the life of Robert Lazzara and the unpredictable struggles of a group of cabinetmakers in the Latin Quarter of Ybor City, an historic Tampa neighborhood. Robert is a lying, juvenile, self-pitying cabinetmaker who spends long days in his father’s shop staring out the garage doors waiting for his life to start. He is incredibly perceptive to small details, but blind to the comic and tragic lives of his coworkers: Del, who stumbles into seven garbage bags of pot and sees it as financial freedom; Pernell who has PTSD, a loveless marriage and works 16 hour days believing that death can make him a hero; Crazy Jimmy who speaks to his dead son and dreams of flying away with his homing pigeons; and Larry, the homeless, jazz pianist, who fights demons, addictions and racism. The twelve-story collection follows the mild and dire struggles of the men, as well as their wives and girlfriends, with problems that resonate deeply, while throughline protagonist, Robert, grows from a sophomoric 19 to an assured 36, trying to fill his father’s shoes, while searching for a deeper understanding of himself and his life. Inspiration for Comets was drawn from collections like Olive Kitteridge, Knockemstiff and Jesus’ Son, as well as by the gritty, blue-collar world in which I was raised.Item The Craft of Blasphemy(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Kalathia, AlexanderIn the fantasy world of Meynas, Art is magic, and Art is power, and none are more powerful than the five Sacred Artisans, the five gods that rule the Continent and walk amongst the people. Meynas is a land choking on plenty, with the five gods preventing war and providing for the basic needs of all inhabitants of the five Great Cities. War is a distant memory, and starvation little more than myth. Even in this peaceful world, however, discontent brews as the dispossessed, Artless masses chafe underneath the rule of the upper class, who have the ability to Craft their realities, using art to perform magic that mimics the feats the gods perform. Overpopulated cities bulge with restless limbs and angry mouths, and in the midst of the bubbling unrest, Veinos, God of Secrets, stumbles upon the greatest secret of the world--that gods can be killed. Veinos reaches out into the mortal world to assemble a cadre of malcontents from different cities and different specialties, including Isoba, a slave that is an illiterate Umbrascribe, Mist, a Stormsculptor who balks at the excesses of her own noble family, and Ashe, a young Flamechanter that watched a god be murdered before her very eyes. With these imperfect tools, Veinos hopes to write the ultimate blasphemy--and end the rule of the gods.Item Fiery Girls and Other Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Evans, SarahFrom the unlit pilot in the opening sentence to the heated heroine advancing in the final scene of the collection, the narratives in Fiery Girls and Other Stories build from individual sparks of enlightenment to eternal flames. Visceral. Vulnerable. Volatile. As the eclectic characters in the nine short stories and culminating novella encounter unique circumstances, bordering on the absurd, the pieces are unified by their authoritative tone, time-traveling transitions and slow-burn rate of revelation. Focusing on the feminine ideal of both/and, the pieces presented in Fiery Girls and Other Stories are chaotically patterned, craftily playful and seriously funny. Traditional story plotting combines with unladylike thoughts and themes to create an explosive narrative documenting what it means to be burned out and fired up.Item Five Points Forgotten(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Lewis, JoanneFive Points Forgotten is a 90,000 word historical mystery that begins during the Civil War and concludes in 1910. During that time, the Manhattan locale of Five Points was synonymous with poverty and crime. Yet despite their struggles, people in Five Points formed lasting friendships, and even a sense of family. Five Points Forgotten follows Noble Jennings from an orphan child into his sixties when he became the first American diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. William Henley and Noble have been best friends since they were in an orphanage together. As adults, Noble is charged with murder. William, a successful attorney, defends his friend using the original defense of early on-set dementia. Five Points Forgotten is a tapestry told within the framework of Noble’s trial. The novel weaves together an ensemble of real and fictional characters that include Dr. Alois Alzheimer; Dr. Levi Solomon Fuller, the first black American psychiatrist; Sarah, a mulatto woman who must care for her brain damaged mother; Tammany Hall racists; Jenny Big Stink, a drug dealing fish peddler; and Lonny Massacre, a serial killer. Told in five sections (Five Points), and dramatized through conventional literary devices such as third person close and omniscient narratives, and through newspaper articles, a manifesto, and other non-traditional story telling tools, Five Points Forgotten culminates in Noble’s trial when William fights for his best friend’s life, and metaphorically for his own. The novel’s principle themes include forgetting from where we’ve come and, as an extension, remembrance. Also, finding family in unexpected places.Item A Good Walk(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Dale, FrederickA Good Walk is an ode to momentum, an ode to the hard-earned bonds of hiking—a father and son chasing each other along various trails. A Good Walk is a poem in twelve parts, each section crowned by a poem centered on a day in Scotland. There are tales of castles and deer, kings, queens, rock throwing girls, and heather—two men walking through it all. Each “Scotland” poem is followed by four thematically linked poems—trails that lead anywhere—from a game of roadkill bingo, to a sweatshirt of bees—from Dee Dee Ramone’s caterwaul call to song, to the coffin journey of Agnes through the Katrina flooded streets of New Orleans. A Good Walk examines the walkable territory of love, and the peculiar sideshows that pop up along the way.Item Groom Lake(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) McCray, ZacharyAfter her husband goes missing, newlywed Rachel Parrish travels through the desert of Groom Lake, Nevada in search of answers.Item Hellscapes(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Trumble, BrianHellscapes is a novel about the torments we create for ourselves, and the ones we let others put us in. Hell isn’t other people. Hell is us.Item I Married a Jellyfish(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Patterson, KrisI Married a Jellyfish is a collection of poems that explores one woman’s journey to find unconditional love. As she examines her tumultuous relationships, from a lust-filled courtship and abusive marriage, to the strained bonds between her and her son, she ultimately finds love from the only person who can give her everything she needs—herself. Along the way, she lets us eavesdrop while she experiences therapy in many forms, and through her, we find ourselves.Item I'm on Ten-Thousand(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2017-06-15) Jackson, YukiThis collection of poems is a narrative expression of real life moments. It tells the story of my awakening as Mary Magdalene (the wife of Jesus), Yashodhara (the wife of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha), and other figures. They were all the same life, essentially the same woman. This is based on life being an eternal energy that cannot be destroyed, only transferred or transformed. And this woman is speaking for herself now. The purpose is to bear witness, reveal relations, and speak for the silenced. I’m currently a student in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Tampa. My writing is directly influenced and inspired by my Soka Gakkai International Buddhist practice, my half African-American and Japanese background, hip-hop lyricism and the art within daily life.Item The Jesuit(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Winters, RichardItem John Donne, Jesus, and You(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Mobley, MatthewJohn Donne, Jesus, and You is the interwoven poetic memoir of a man lost in modernity, awash in his own desires and masculinity, in search of a bygone past which no longer exists—if it ever did. Using John Donne’s Holy Sonnets as the basis for an intertextual conceit, the work juxtaposes the classic with the modern and attempts to reason with both personal desire and a masculinity seemingly incongruent with modern society. The poems present braided concepts of time, love, anxiety, conflict, and the line between real and imagined memories. Often cynical, John Donne, Jesus, and You argues with the past, with god, and with the imagination, revealing the development of someone at once vulnerable and strong, confused yet confident, rational yet completely absurd.Item No Safe Spaces Here(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Higginbotham, RobertNo Safe Spaces Here is a short story collection that explores how people inhabit and respond to manufactured environments. Subdivisions, IKEAs, and back-alley garages populate the collection and reflect how we have lost faith in our basic, traditional American systems, and what it means to no longer know your neighbor. Isolation in society, isolation in relationships, and tensions between class and pop culture collide in these fictions.Item Resurrection(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Forrester, AmandaResurrection: (noun) the state of one risen from the dead Resurrection is a series of poems depicting the tribulations, deaths, or causes of ruin that girls and women can experience and rising up under suffering, or resurrecting from ruin. It’s the recognition, reconciliation, and recovery from trauma. Beginning with I. First Death, poems are concerned with childhood, childhood sexual trauma, incest, and rape. II. New Ways to Die comprises of poems concerned with marriage, traditions, and breaking free from them, or dying to them. III. Resurrection contains poems that celebrate life after trauma and issues that continue throughout recovery, which allow survivors to move forward.Item Rule One and Only: Part 1(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Baczewski, DarekRule One and Only: Part One is the first half of the second novel of a planned series. A work of Literary Science Fantasy, Rule has to both reference events and knowledge from the previous novel yet still stand alone as its own body of work. A number of themes interwork with each other to provide a balance of character-driven and plot-driven narrative. The primary theme centers on the novel’s title; Rule One and Only references and spoofs several similar rules of non-interference that have become a staple of science fiction/fantasy, such as Star Trek’s ‘Prime Directive.’ By referencing similar works, Rule explores the morality and ethics of such policies, asking not whether to help or not help but how much help is too much. The novel also functions as a New Adult, coming of age story for the series protagonist, Joseph Degrep, Archivist Third Class. Still relatively new to his chosen career, he is sent on a mission to learn from a more experienced Archivist, who challenges his understanding of the Rule and his own feelings of inadequacy both as an Archivist and as a man. Through Joseph’s inner and external conflicts, the novel explores themes of belonging, infatuation, and when to let infatuation go.Item Salt Water(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Reyes, LisaA prose poem novella, Salt Water is a simple love story. As her mother is dying, a daughter sets out to meet the father she hasn’t seen in eighteen years. The story moves between New York and Miami, between leaving and returning, between memory and myth.Item Satin Stains(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Stewart, MargaretThis creative nonfiction follows the connections of three women: the narrator, her mother, and Silvana — a victim of a violent crime — for whom the mother serves as an advocate. From marriages to family holidays, and births to murders we follow their realities of what it takes to “get through it.” Each will find moments where they get through it together and moments that they work it out alone. Through an experimental blend of personal essay, faux-theatre scenes, and true crime writing, the reader will traverse narratives of family, trauma, and survival.