Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Selections from Inventions in the Key of C is a collection of essays about cancer and issues related to cancer. Books on the topic of cancer are plentiful. There are a number of narrative memoirs including The Red Devil, by Kathryn...
Darwin Walking Backward follows Nolan and Elsa Grey, estranged half-siblings, whose father is suspected of drowning himself off Leap’s Island. Their father was an eminent evolutionary biologist whose fall from grace led him to Leap’s, ...
This collection of short stories is set in Cabo Verde, California, New York, Massachusetts, and Missouri. It tells the stories of, among other people, a young woman disillusioned with her boyfriend’s struggle to live a moral life, and a...
It seems as though I always hearken back to the same themes, in whatever I write. This mix of genres I have pieced together hinges off the idea of how there is what is, and how we perceive it to be. I feel that the non-fiction piece is...
In My Own Hands is a novel that follows the life of Abbie, a young woman with an overbearing, needy mother and absentee father. As a young child Abbie witnesses the abuse of her mother at the hands of her biological father. While seh...
Set in rural North Carolina, BEWILDERNESS explores the current opioid crisis and the link between addiction and trauma, specifically PTSD and sexual assault. Narrating the story is Irene, a part-time food server who pairs a cynical...
With the theme of leaving home to return home, my dissertation starts with my memory of being born like a stranger in the extended family and growing up as an only child in Wuhan, the hometown’s history and current struggle examined...
This is a novel that takes place primarily in 1947 – 1948—the immediate postwar period—in a fictional British Caribbean island named St. Francis. St. Francis, while a distinct fictional space, is strongly based off the island I grew up...
The Fun house of God tells the story of a young woman's return home to the fundamentalist central Mississippi world of her childhood in order to attend her brother's funeral. Looking into the causes of his death, she learns secrets never...
This dissertation takes the form of memoir and weaves three narratives together: (1) the story of my travels through Greece in search of my father's family, (2) the examination of my father's crimes and suicide and their effect on my...
Let's take for granted that the notion of eternal return is utterly true, writes Will Duncan, from prison, as he finally reveals his embarrassing secret to the reader: his earnest belief that his cousin, the infamous Paul Duncan, is...
This dissertation novel is the result of a longstanding desire by the author to fictionalize an incident firmly embedded in her family lore concerning the immigration of her grandmother's parents to America, the tragic death of her great...
After a messy divorce, Jeff moves to Hawaii to escape his pain and to start afresh. Running cannot stop the flood of emotions and memories, as he soon finds. He meets a beautiful young stripper who accepts him as he is, but his...
A Good Place To Wake To: Stories is a collection of short stories that take place both in the Midwest and the South, exploring themes that are relevant in not only contemporary American society, but globally as well—themes such as...
An Appropriate Age is a novel told through the alternating third-person perspectives of three women in the same family: Anna, Presley, and Gigi. It is divided into three parts. It is set in a fictional retirement community in central...
Westerners is a collection of eleven stories, mostly about people struggling to connect in this time of so-called "globalization." Two stories set in the 19th century aim to enhance the meanings found in some of the contemporary stories....
I was working as a bookstore manager in Tucson, Arizona in 1993. It was there I first noticed the habits of bookstore patrons. Most enjoyed browsing the shelves, and they did this by choosing a book, tracing their fingers across the...
The title for this collection comes from the last essay and is a reference to Saul of Tarsus’s conversion in the New Testament. Though as the last essay will reveal, I have experienced more of a reverse conversion in regards to my faith...
This creative thesis tells how, in the summer of 2005, the author'a malingering grad student who had already overstayed his welcome in a vain five-year attempt to forge a novel'drove the entire length of the United States along...
For me, there has always been a wolf at the edge of the woods, watching and waiting. My sister often cried wolf, trying to shape reality into words that fit her emotional desperation. The rest of my family simply agreed not to speak of...
This novel represents the culmination of my work over the last three years at Florida State University, featuring many of the thematic elements I've explored in short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. ALL THE GOOD NUMBERS is an extended...
These nine stories are a reflection of the shifting culture and rapid economic growth of Northwest Arkansas, the birthplace of Walmart and Tyson Foods. While the stories may have a distinctly Southern flavor in their setting, they are...
The following is a collection of unconnected short stories inspired by studying the work of short fiction authors, the likes of which include (but are not limited to) Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, and Jane...
To complete my Master of Arts degree I am submitting Part One of my novel-in-progress Horse Show Circuit. This first section presents the novel's set up of characters, setting, and situation. The novel is written in the tradition of...
Novel based on an Upstate New York Vineyard about a young couple's struggles with economic hardships, sexual identity, and the cyclical nature of love.
The land of ancient Egypt, as with most ancient cultures, was described in terms of its fertility, flooding, and available fresh water. The fertile flood plains of the Nile and the Delta that begins at Giza and Cairo was called Kemet, ...
Set sometime in 2002, And the Hills Burned tells the story of Chidi, a boy whose father – former Minister of Petroleum in the Nigerian Military administration of the early 90s, and current environmental activist – runs afoul of the...
SEARS Family Portrait of the Artist is a memoir that depicts the author's recovery from molestation that occurred approximately from his age 5 in 1987 until his age 8 in 1990 at the hands of a family friend. The author narrates from age...
This collection of stories is divided into two parts: the first is called Edgewater, the second Father Land. The eight stories comprising the first section of the manuscript--Edgewater--all center on and are narrated by the same young...
Like most teenagers, Morris fears divorce; he fears his parents won't get one. Morris hates his mother. Margaret dominates and dictates every aspect of her family's lives and Morris can't take it anymore. What's worse is his girlfriend's...
THE HEART IS A SLOW LEARNER AND OTHER STORIES explores love's vagaries in settings that range from the Deep South to Alaska. The stories depict relationships between lovers, friends, and family members--especially mothers and daughters....
This dissertation collects stories that range from traditional realism to more experimental forms often exhibited by contemporary fiction, but never to the point of breaking what John Gardner defines as the "vivid and continuous dream"...
This is a collection of short stories in fulfillment of the Florida State University Ph.D. dissertation requirement. The collection contains eight stories. Its title is Catching Up: A Collection. The stories form a type of sequential...
Until Henry Li moved into the house across the road, Rose Gillespie didn’t have any friends. Her main relationships were with her parents, therapists, teacher, and caregivers, and the great burden of her life is that though she has the...
"If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunion—if baseball is a Romance Epic—it is finally told by the audience." These words come from A. Bartlett...
Five Stories contains the imaginative work of Jason Freels. The thesis concentrates on the craft of writing short fiction, and will demonstrate the creative abilities of the author by successfully producing stories in this form.
This is a collection of stories centering on the lives of the Palestinians living in Deir-Al-Asad, Israel and the United States. Lying With the Saints focuses on the roles of respect and honor within the Arab family. Engagement is about...
When I began writing this collection, it started off as a short story collection. As I continued to work with memory and recreation / re-vision, my stories began taking the shape of non-fiction. I have decided to include two non-fiction...
The topic of my master's thesis is a long time coming. Since entering the graduate program, even attending Florida State University as an undergraduate and taking my first writing workshop my sophomore year, I have been writing, ...
The stories in this collection are perhaps so different from one another because my sources of inspiration (a photograph of hands molding clay, one of Aesop's fables, a guidebook on Morocco) are so varied. The joy of writing short pieces...
Gods of Fire uses linked stories to illustrate the connections between Birch, Montana’s brief, glorious mining history, and the hardships the present generation faces as a direct result of that history. From one story to the next, ...
The History of Living Forever tells the story of Conrad, a gay teenager with a dying father and a secret lover: his high school chemistry teacher, Samuel "Sammy" Tampari. When Sammy commits suicide in the novel's first chapter, Conrad...
Can't Go Back is the story of Martin Paris, a former cop-turned-private investigator, who is also a homosexual, living in Los Angeles in 1947. Written in the tradition of Noir detective fiction, the novel uses the conventions of the...
Newark Pastoral is a collection of fictional short stories that center on the African-American inner-city experience. This collection encompasses a number of themes and subjects including identity, religion, community, sex trafficking, ...
My Heart is With You in This Sad Time is a collection of first-person narratives with female protagonists set in the Florida panhandle. While their ages, educations, socioeconomic levels and domestic circumstances vary greatly, they are...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
