MFA 2014

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11868/38

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FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB: A Collection of Essays
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-01-01) Deuel, Nathan
In 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.
Asbestos: A Collection of Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Tier, Benjamin
Herein 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.
THE CHIMNEY: A Novella
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Silvia, Jared
The 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.
CTHULHU’S BASEMENT: A Collection of Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Sanger, Katherine
In 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.
IF YOU WANT TO LEAVE: A Collection of Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-18) McFadden, Kevin Louis
Set 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.
Snowdrifts: A Collection of Short Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) McDonough, Conner
Snowdrifts is a collection of short stories centered around the residents of Upstate New York and their lives as they move about their worlds. Thematically, the collection focuses on loss, post-industrial decline, trauma, violence, and how these come together in a world that shrugs off the combination with ease.
WANTING TO SEE STARS: A Collection of Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-19) Logan, Kossiwa Kiese Kinshasa Wa
ARMADILLO’S CROSSING: A MEMOIR
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Lockwood-Fleming, Katherine Bates
One 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.
DEAD FISHWIND: A novel
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Levey-Baker, Cooper
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.
ACROSS THE BRIDGE; REMEMBERING AFRICA FROM THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-05) Isaac, Cheryl Collins
By 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.
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.
MY MOTHER WHO TEACHES DANCE: Selections from a Novel
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-19) Holmes, Connor
My Mother Who Teaches Dance is a novel of self-discovery, told alternately from the perspectives of Alby Melvin, a South Florida crime reporter, and Mariposa Fernández-Pérez, a Cuban ex-pat living in Miami with her parents Mateo and Lucia. Some sections are told from the perspectives of supporting characters, though Alby and Mariposa drive the story. Their lives intertwine when Alby goes to the funeral of his estranged father, held by Mateo, whom Alby’s father had saved in a trucking accident. Alby must reconcile his father’s abandonment and his mother’s late-stage Huntington’s Disease, and Mariposa must traverse her tumultuous past growing up in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Both struggle to understand Alby’s father, Franklin Melvin, who passed through their lives so fleetingly. The novel explores various themes centered on homelessness, foreignness, fatherhood, abuse, abandonment, and reconciliation. The novel is written in a traditional style but with sections utilizing syntax or formatting in order to accentuate the narrative material, including alternating POVs, stream-of-consciousness, and the use of subtitles or numerical lists. Ultimately these techniques should serve Alby and Mariposa’s story by palpably exorcising the traumas of their pasts and helping forge a new conversation between them.
RADIO DARK: A novella
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06-19) Hinton, Shane
RADIO DARK is an examination of the fundamental problems at the heart of all interactions: between people, objects, institutions, and technologies. The main characters, Memphis and Cincinnati, discover their own momentum in repurposing the materials of a rapidly deteriorating world. The novella jars the reader by making use of deadpan narration that has the effect of alienating the reader from the events of the story. This alienation highlights the principal concern of the piece: that narrative begins and ends in the spaces between bodies, where it is open to the corrosive potential of its environment, and where it is stripped of all inherent meaning before being received and reinterpreted.
A More Foreign Country: A Collection of Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Hardcastle, Michael
A More Foreign Country is a collection of short stories set mostly in Florida that deal with encounters with the uncanny—unusual, sometimes violent, experiences that can make even the familiar and benign seem foreign and dangerous. These stories also deal with the things on which the mind can fixate—a car accident, a trampoline, jack-o’-lanterns, the Floridan aquifer. In these stories, boys explore an abandoned subdivision, a deputy searches for an escaped lion, and a man buries his neighbor’s cat, and they all pursue human connections and meaning.
Rules and Other Broken Things: A Novella and other short stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014) Grilli, Kat
DRECKSACK: A Collection of Stories
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Fuhrmann, Kari
This 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.
SOMETHING MUST BE WRONG WITH YOU!
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Dickerson, Susan
There was house in my old neighborhood with forest green trim on a dark brown exterior. It had a perfectly matching shed and a perfectly matching mailbox and a beautifully manicured lawn that was also perfectly green and brown. There was a picture-perfect swing on the porch. And, there were never any people enjoying this perfect house, which must be how it stayed so perfect all the time. Whenever I walked by this house, I immediately wanted to lie down in the road and take a nap in front of it. Not because the house looked comfortable, but because it was so boring. This house was so incredibly dull it gave me narcolepsy. I don’t want to write anything boring like that house. I hope my stories aren’t predictable. I hope I never write anything too easy to read. I don’t want to write any regurgitated plotlines or stock characters. That’s not why I’m here. The declaration “make it new” means something to me. I want to write stories that surprise my readers. This means my writing can come out like a total mess sometimes, a little too raw, and that’s why I’m here. I’m working on getting my words under control. I’ve come to the end of this Masters program, and my words still give me trouble. But, I have written a few stories under the guidance of some very patient mentors that I’m really proud of. Maybe they’ll be published one day. Maybe they won’t. But, goddamnit, I wrote them anyway.
TRILOGY OF ABSENCE: A Collection of Poems
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-06) Carmona, Jose A.
The work shown here is a compilation of revised poems and new poems written during my ten-day residencies and throughout the semesters taken to complete the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida in Tampa, FL. It is divided into three parts to please the title, “Trilogy of Absence,” because it depicts three long periods of time in the poet’s life. The earlier part incorporates a chronology of silhouettes from my very early life in Cuba and my younger years in New Jersey. The second part is a discovery of life around me during my teenage years through my thirties. The third part, Revelations, is more analytical in nature; here, the poet is observing pieces of his life instead of the whole picture. This section shows a constant interaction with the world around me as well as my observations at a more mature age. It is interesting that there is a progression from fewer poems in my earlier years to many more in the later sections. It is simply that there were much better poems later than when I started writing in English at eleven years of age. Up to that age, I was already writing poetry, however, the poems were written in Spanish as it my native tongue.
Of Unknown Origin: A Collection of Nonfiction Essays and Poems
(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2014-05-15) Brown, Phoebe
In May 2003, Phoebe’s riding lesson is going as planned until, in a freak accident, the bridle is ripped off the horse’s face. The panicked horse takes off, forcing Phoebe to leap off his back. By October she is admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital where it is discovered she is septic. This double trauma changes her world. She loses friends, violin, horses, health, and youth all while struggling to recognize her new self, find happiness in the pieces of her dreams, and maintain her spirit. Of Unknown Origin is a collection of linked narrative nonfiction essays and poetry, which engages with themes of anger, loneliness, pain, grief, fragility, and surrender. Through an honest, thoughtful, and willing tone, the narrator and the reader examine past experiences—trying to find the story in what was once thought to be known only to learn that much of life is prefixed with un-. Together narrator and reader can wonder what it means to be of unknown origin.

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