MFA 2015
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Item Dog Gone By: a Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Welsh, Carmen K. Jr.This thesis examines the profound effects of Prohibition on race, politics, and sociology. To explore the role of the 1930s and its influences and potency, this thesis analyzes, through the fiction device, anthropomorphic animals employed in a historical setting, as the first half of this novel-in-progress. Through the story, the 1930s not only reeled from the insanity of the previous decade, the 1920s, it carried over and solidified many contemporary facets of modern life: Jazz, the Arts, Organized crime as well as Racial integration and interrelations. Peopled only by canine characters, “DOG GONE BY” tells the story of Basenji-mix STACEY HANKIN, a recent arrival to Gotham during the early summer of 1932. As part of the Great Black Migration, an exodus that occurred between 1916-1970 when Blacks left the South to migrate North, West and Midwest, and to escape rampant Jim Crow laws, Stacey tries to find opportunities not available in rural Tennessee. Even in the North, segregation and other troubles prevail, making it difficult for Stacey to secure a living. By the time of the story, she has already met and been employed by bootlegger/gangster ‘SLASH’ CASTELLANO, a mutt with wolfish features. “Dog gone by” speaks on themes of one’s past often catching up with one’s present, how profound the effects can be from previous generations. Also, how someone can be gifted/cursed by the vestiges of family history and how societal pressures continue to press on the individual’s free will.Item New Book(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Stancill, NancyItem The Lost Son: Essays on displacement of the body, heart and soul(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Skerritt, Andrew J.“The Lost Son: Essays on Displacement, Body, Heart and Soul,” is a collection about experiencing and understanding loss. The title of the collection has a dual meaning and speaks to the phenomenon of the author’s loss of son. “The Lost Son” and “Autobiography of My Children,” are essays on the children we have and those we lose. In a way, as parents we eventually lose our children, to death or adulthood; we can only hope the latter comes first. But the writer never loses; he always wins. But “The Lost Son” title must also be viewed through the prism of the author as a lost son - lost to native land, lost to his adopted island, lost to his adopted home. Even when he has found a home, there is also a sense of displacement, of belonging but not quite, being permanently uneasy. He is the ultimate outsider and this collection is an attempt to make a statement; it is a manifesto of seeking to belong. The political sensibilities of Andre Aciman, Edward Said, Jamaica Kincaid and George Lamming imbue this collection. From the first essay, “Why I write,” to “The Sunday Morning Club” and “Children of the Fire,” themes of separation reoccur. In “Why I Write” one hears the voice of an eight-year old boy on a Caribbean island writing to his mother in far away in London. Writing is his first act of affirmation, long before he knows what affirmation means. Formatted: CenteredItem OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Ringler, RobynDriving through small towns in upstate New York, I can’t help but notice the signs of local businesses—some new and colorful, others battered and hardly readable. What strikes me is the name of each store, shop, warehouse. Names like By George Food Specialties and Nadine’s Permanent Makeup. Most are provocative and invite the imagination—mine, at least—to wonder who owns the place, who works there, what their lives are like. Curiosity—I was born with it. The desire to peel back the layers of a person’s existence. But, as a fiction writer, I have evolved. I am no longer as interested in the real people, but would rather imagine them. Occupational Hazards explores the possibilities of who these imagined characters, living in the upstate New York town of Burnt Hills, might be. My stories explore the difficulties of their lives set within occupations they have either chosen or fallen into. All in the background of an economically depressed upstate town made more complex by the Downstaters who sought a new place after 9/11. Occupational Hazards explores the lives of characters engaged in the “occupation” of life. Some stories track the same character over time. Others reflect on a particular event at a particular time. All have a deep connection to Burnt Hills which is a character in its own right.Item LEFENSTRAUSSE(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Reeser, CynthiaItem Hurtling Through Space(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Macias, MatthewItem OBSTACLES TO LOVE(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Leinfuss, EmilyItem STRAITS: Selections from the Novel and The Short Stories "The Grove" and "Look Away"(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Howell, Steven ThomasItem Treble Boy: Draft(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Hasker, CharlesItem The Bubble Watchers: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Goldstein, SasiItem THE TIDE: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Felisberto, MaggieIn The Tide, high school sophomore Andreia Carvalho has always been an odd one out. In the homogenous community of Jackson Falls, Pennsylvania, her Portuguese-American ethnicity has always been noticeable, and it has made her the target of bullying. The bullying, though, is only part of the problem. Dreia fights moderate OCD and depression on a daily basis, and though nobody else seems to know it, Dreia has frightening memories of being assaulted by her cousin as a child which cause her anxiety and fuel her obsessive nature. Despite this, Dreia has good friends in Teddy and Emmy-Lynn and an active social life. Things start to change for Dreia when Teddy falls for her and she begins to suspect that her secret childhood trauma may not be so secret after all. After their first family Christmas with Dreia's aunt in a decade, she and her parents both reveal that they've known all along about the assault, and Dreia turns to Teddy for emotional support. This care system doesn't last long, and after a fateful car accident Dreia is forced to find her own strength to sort through her depression and her loss.Item SILENT CHAINS(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Entreken, Vicki ShawWhen Patricia died, I inherited her intellectual property: poetry, short stories, brown and brittle photographs, letters, and a notebook. I knew that my mother was adopted, and that her mother gave her away when she was eight. I knew she was raised on a farm in Gainesville, Florida. But I didn’t know the events that took place there, events in which she, in her entire 73 years, could never speak of. When she was twenty years old, she wrote them down, along with accounts of her life before being abandoned, with family that she kept secret, in a brown English II notebook. I inherited that notebook. In this thesis, I embark on a journey of research and discovery, using yesterday’s documents and today’s technology. I become obsessed in finding my mother’s birth family; also mine. I learn that abandonment continues. Can the chains be broken? This thesis is only the first half of my book, which intertwines Patricia’s memoirs with my discoveries, my own memories, and my understanding of my grandmother’s true intentions. Why did she do it? In 2013, I lost the woman who raised me. Now, I feel like I didn’t really know my mother at all, and in this book I search through piece after piece of a puzzle to find her.Item MURDER IN THE MIX: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Eichhorn, CarolynMurder in the Mix is a mystery novel detailing the adventures of ghostwriter Regina Morrison, who has been assigned to work with celebrity chef Marisol St. James on a memoir of stories leading to some of her most beloved dishes. In the middle of the project, Gina is horrified to learn that Marisol has been brutally murdered in the kitchen of her New York restaurant, The Mix. Gina’s agent presses her to complete the project in spite of the untimely death of the famous chef as it sure to be an instant bestseller, but Gina quickly comes to realize that her own life may be in danger. She reluctantly teams up with Drew Sherman, a private investigator who always seems to be handy when things go terribly wrong, and together they dig through the stories from Marisol’s past in order to find the secret that might drive a killer to silence anyone who might expose the truth. Along the way, Gina has to find her courage, keep her sense of humor, and start living a life worthy of her own memoir.Item FOUND OBJECTS AND FICTIONAL FINDS: Selections from Novella and Collected Short Stories(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Douglas, CoeThe stories in FOUND OBJECTS AND OTHER FICTIONAL FINDS explore themes of identity, hope, masculinity, family, and the absurdities of the modern human condition. Using at times satire and aspects of the absurd, this thesis looks at how we navigate the sometimes unexpected turns life takes. In Found Objects, aspects of the grotesque are applied to a story where a man’s discovery of a severed foot on the side of the road gives his dying southern town a new sense of hope. In La Cobija, masculine stereotypes and cultural biases and confronted and smashed in central Mexico. Stories like Standing For Something, Aunt Marie, and Squirrel Deaths and Towel Makes Heat use the absurd to extract the marvelous from the mundane. Many of the stories find objects as central to the plot, like in Dolores, where a stuffed fish conjures memories of a dying father’s better days as he sees his son for the last time. And, in Juan Pachanga, a day out with a girlfriend’s father, a stripclub and a latex vagina, leads to the discovery of secret and a decision about the future of their relationship.Item THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY: A Collection of Stories & Portions from a Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Wait, Catherine ChelseaThis collection of eight stories takes place in the desert, the city, the bayou, the mountains and the corn belt, the ocean and a small town in Vermont. It’s about women and the way they care for others. Don’t mistake these for love stories. There’s more to them than that.Item THE SAFE WAR(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Caine, JimItem Jasmine Rivercity(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Cadora, KarinaItem WHAT I REMEMBER: A Collection of Stories & Portions from a Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Caruso, Katharine“What I Remember,” a collection of short stories and portions from a novel, explores memory and the decisions one makes when coming to a crossroad. It’s a final look back before moving forward. It serves, also, as a mirror into the mind of various women when faced with the vagaries of life and the way in which the past acts as a guidepost and the impetus for change or lack thereof. While there are secondary and tertiary characters woven throughout, as appropriate, the focus of the stories is the psyche of the woman with respect to the things that are thought, even obsessed over, but rarely spoken of or discussed. Death, desertion, and divorce: these are the ways in which we all leave a relationship. This collection reflects the argument that the decisions a woman makes with her mind in regard to her heart and body are those that are most often made in fear of the loss of control in some other aspect of her life, that her personal identity, even more so than her social identity, is tied to her relationship to the men in her life. The only decision that is truly hers in a relationship, and which thus forms that identity, is whether a woman chooses to remain or leave it. Because this is a cross-cultural decision, the women in these stories are from a variety of backgrounds and at various stages in their lives. However, these stories are all in some way tied to the Tampa Bay area as it supplies a diverse demographic of characters from which to draw, provides a common backdrop for the subject as an ‘everyman,’ and because with all its richness of history and culture, Tampa Bay remains woefully underrepresented in literature.Item [Untitled](MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Christian, AlyssaItem WORLD OF FIRE: A Novel(MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa, 2015) Cote, ZackeryWorld of Fire is a Young Adult novel that describes the adventures of two siblings who must journey into a parallel world where they find themselves enlisted to stop the tyranny of an Archmage. Viktor Tamriel always felt that there was more to life than doing carpentry work in a small town far removed from civilization. In search of adventure, he meets an alternate version of himself named Cosmo, who claims to be a Time Mage from a different world in another timeline. Soon Viktor and his sister Jessica are far away from home entangled in a conflict that could decide the fate of every world. Along the way, Viktor gains a new love for the simple life he left behind and beings to understand the importance of family, community, and the true meaning of home. Sense of self is a prominent theme throughout the novel, as Viktor’s experiences with his doppelganger cause both men to question what they have become and the circumstances that made them thus. The meaning of love and family is explored as Cosmo experiences through the Tamriel siblings a relationship that he may have had if his life had been different. Ultimately Viktor learns to appreciate the blessings he has and find meaning in the people and places he loves, and Cosmo learns that there is always a chance to have a fresh start.