English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Thump Like They Should(2011) Siela, Noah F.; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of poems starts strange and ends strange. Strange, in this case, is not a pejorative. Rather, these poems try to capture a hunk of the creative mind at work when the impetus for expression is familiar and ultimately its own mechanism for repulsion. These poems sometimes are set in Baltimore, the rural community of childhood, or inside a marble. To these poems, the idiomatic and the colloquial are more relevant than the elevated. Language sets tone and acts as stabilizer in what is, hopefully, a shaky and divot-filled mindscape.Item Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend(2011) Jerome, Timothy Joseph; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend is a biography of the singer/songwriter Stek Mainard. The text opens with Stek Mainard walking away from his music career at its peak, when mainstream success and fame are all but realized. The book's editor/writer, Timothy Jerome, is Stek's best friend, and this book his attempt to explain to the world why his best friend left his music career behind. Jerome combines stories from fans, bandmates, and critics with his own stories about him and Stek all in order to answer one big question: Why did Stek Mainard leave?Item Little Pomerania and Other Stories(2011) Earles, Thomas; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in this thesis represent a portion of the work I have done during my time as a student in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. They were ultimately chosen for their thematic links and because they--I feel--best represent the writer I have become over the last three years. Collectively, the stories deal with class, communication, culture, disappointment, displacement, marriage, and maturity, sometimes all in the same story. While each story is meant to stand alone, it is arranged here in a deliberate order, relative to the others, as there is a discernible arc.Item Urban Reef and Other Stories(2011) Ellis, Joshua Trebach; Feitell, Merrill; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of fictionalized work (an assemblage of interrelated short stories within a novelistic structure) represents my thematic interests as a writer: the tensions between a community and the people who comprise it; the consequences of religious identification; the possibility of life after death and how that belief affects life; the consequences of devoting one's life to the bar industry. My intent was for this collection to explore these interests (and others) through the interlocking experiences of those who work and drink at a bar in Washington, D.C.Item Millers Heights: A Novel(2011) Lohr, Justin Charles; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This novel-in-progress probes the connection between faith and guilt within a religious context, exploring the role that the latter has in shaping and inspiring the former. From this foundation, it investigates popular belief and the tenuous relationship between organized theology and popular belief, which derives less from dogma and more from personal experience and folk tradition. These more abstract concepts come together in the religious struggle of Pastor Mike Williams, who, in light of his father's death, begins to revisit and wrestle with the guilt that inspired him to faith through the lens of folk story and historical inquiry.Item Tour of the Ruin(2011) Kleinman, Steven Daniel; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Poems in this collection trace natural and urban spaces as well as real and dream-like worlds. The poems are interested in loose form. Narrative is employed, especially in the prose poems, as a definition of experience. All the poems pull physical details from the natural world, from the speaker's family, and from several literary sources in an effort to quietly detail, on the whole an often flat tone.Item Midtown Holding Pattern: Stories(2011) Orlando, Jacqueline; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this collection of fictional short stories, we meet people who are stuck: in unfulfilling jobs, unsatisfying relationships, and other moments of their lives that they suddenly cannot bear any longer. There are psychics and sex changes and hysterical pregnancies, weddings and babies and funerals, and through it all, a destabilizing sense of failure as each character falls from grace or cannot reach those prescribed cultural marks of young adulthood.Item Spring Tide Wait(2011) Leverone, Julia Eva; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)These poems work the geography they possess, moving as fully as their peripheral vision permits; their area delineated by a quietly biding moment revealing the narrator's uncertainties and desires, and especially her romantic relationship. The visual efforts are detailed and many times drawn from the natural and/or the foreign, traveling from the New England coast to Spain and Argentina, while incorporating translated works from Latin American poets--Heberto Padilla and Dulce María Loynaz--, the wonder at the expansiveness of another place isolating and contrasting.Item Time's Arrow(2011) Burke, Conor William; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using narrative and lyric modes, the poems of Time's Arrow address the experiences of childhood in the Midwest, of growing up with a handicapped brother, of coming to terms with the humanness of one's parents, and of reconciling the inescapable aloneness of being a conscious creature. Time's Arrow is itself an act of memory, of putting back together-- perhaps inexactly-- the pieces of a life; for time inevitably changes the past.Item The Things We Know(2010) Green, David Robert; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Things We Know is a collection of six short stories that revolve around the basic reality of white, male, suburban rage: what it means to feel culpable, responsible, and, ultimately, ineffective. The collection's protagonists, all but one of which is revealed through the first-person, range from the pre-adolescent to the middle-aged and offer up, rather than answers to the questions that plague this state of being, glimpses into the mind of the storyteller himself, examining what is revealed, what is known, and, perhaps most importantly, what is utterly unknowable.