MFA 2018

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    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.”
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    Twisted Fates
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Villines, Chondell
    Shifting Fates tells the story of CeCe as she deals with the loss of her brother G, or Grisha as CeCe always called him. CeCe’s mother reveals long held family secrets as everyone comes together to plan the funeral. Can CeCe cope with the shifting realities, or will her grief and sense of betrayal overcome her?
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    Shelf Space
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-14) Smith, Abigail
    In “Shelf Space,” siblings Clint and Cindy are overwhelmed by life’s expectations, and left feeling unfulfilled. Cindy is listless in the family she’s built, and Clint is simply trying to keep from self-destructing. Reunited after three years, they learn to make peace with their choices and, most importantly, to keep space in their lives for those who matter.
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    Caleb and Other Stories
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Schwartz, Joseph
    Caleb 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.
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    Salt Water
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Reyes, Lisa
    A 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.
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    Welcome to the Day
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Renken, Keven
    An old man, separated from his family, makes his way across an unfamiliar landscape to get back home, reliving moments from his past along the way.
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    I Married a Jellyfish
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Patterson, Kris
    I 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.
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    Groom Lake
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) McCray, Zachary
    After her husband goes missing, newlywed Rachel Parrish travels through the desert of Groom Lake, Nevada in search of answers.
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    Wings Upon Flames: A Collection of Short Stories
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Mallory, Sean
    Wings Upon Flames examines the human connection of love and relationships balanced between working class-Blue collar characters, searching for their place in this world. This diverse collection journeys through the characterization of light-hearted men and women interwoven into an alluring comedic, real-life drama. Wings Upon Flames ventures through a fantastical world of a young man that experiences the visual spectacle of a dragon. Life Stream explores a relationship between father and son after years of silence. Jake blames his father for the death of his mother when he was younger. Through Jake’s tragic memories of his childhood while visiting his father on his death bed, Jake bonds with his father’s nurse who also shares a tragic past. The Audition serves as the acting life-style of Sara, a young ambitious woman planning to make a career in Hollywood. Her past may be the vital piece to land the role of a lifetime in a film that could be her big break. While on summer vacation at their grandparent’s cottage in the Georgia mountains Donna and Cheryl experience a ghost that haunts them into adulthood in The Path. An intense killer is on the loose in the town of Twin Lakes and Detective Donald Granger is on a mission to solve it. 3 Each story is constructed with a splash of humor, fear, and love, while exploring the humanity of each character through their faults and victories. Wings Upon Flames boasts a diverse collection of short stories that soars through the flames of destruction in an ever-changing world of the human condition.
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    Five Points Forgotten
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Lewis, Joanne
    Five 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.
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    Where Would I Go
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Krein, Jenya
    Where Would I Go, a narrative of love, loss, and reinvention, is set at the Mulberry Castle, an assisted living community located in New England. The Castle is a waiting room of sorts, one step removed from the grave—where two residents, Sam and Rita, against considerable odds, find love and fulfillment, and a social worker, Sophie Menchik, an orphaned young woman, idealistic and lonely, watches it happen. She wants nothing more than to become an artist, so she can recreate the world of her childhood. In the process, she discovers that life doesn't stop until the final breath, and that love and necessity are stronger forces than ambition and goodwill. In Where Would I Go, Jenya Krein portrays the shattering of a small family of immigrants, and the far-reaching effect it has on their only daughter, Sophie. In an attempt to recover from the loss of her parents, she submerges herself in the world of others, in particular Samuel Klass, a retired professor, and Rita, a pianist who can’t play due to her debilitating arthritis. The very lives of these two people and their budding affair will be threatened when, prompted by Sam’s wandering, Castle’s management decides to move Sam to the secure memory care unit on another floor, and Sophie comes to see it as her mission to keep them together.
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    The Craft of Blasphemy
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Kalathia, Alexander
    In 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.
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    Resurrection
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Forrester, Amanda
    Resurrection: (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.
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    Fiery Girls and Other Stories
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Evans, Sarah
    From 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.
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    A Good Walk
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Dale, Frederick
    A 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.
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    Rule One and Only: Part 1
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-06-14) Baczewski, Darek
    Rule 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.
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    Church Slut
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Flynn, Kathleen
    Church 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.
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    I'm on Ten-Thousand
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2017-06-15) Jackson, Yuki
    This 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.
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    The Jesuit
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Winters, Richard
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    Hellscapes
    (MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2018-01-04) Trumble, Brian
    Hellscapes 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.