abstract: This manuscript of poetry examines the weird and the wonderful of the worlds of science and popular culture. The poems touch on such topics as varied as tabloid inventions, shipwrecks, wandering planets, and Davie Bowie. A focus on figurative language, intriguing vocabulary, and the interesting tidbits of life provide the foundation for the thesis both in individual poems and as a whole. This thesis draws from three years of work and revision as an MFA candidate. It contains sixty poems of varying forms and lengths. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2014

DESERT PALMS is a contemporary women’s novel set in an Arizona RV park. When Miamians Margie Campos and her husband, Carlos, unexpectantly inherit Desert Palms, a rundown retirement community, Margie reluctantly agrees to stay in Arizona to overhaul the park. With the discovery of a secret letter that threatens to unravel the family, an unscrupulous broker determined to buy the park on the cheap, and a husband bent on hitting it big, Margie digs in and starts to find purpose amidst a desert microcosm. Told from Margie’s perspective in a closely attached third person, DESERT PALMS is a realistic and humorous narrative that falls somewhere between the style of Liane Moriarty in, “The Husband’s Secret” and Anne Tyler in her novel, “Back When We Were Grownups.” DESERT PALMS offers an offbeat cast of central characters who help Margie gain a deeper understanding of herself and what makes life worth living.

The purpose of this study is to enrich understandings of the major issues encountered when tutoring writing with beginner-intermediate level Japanese EFL students in a Japanese university. Specifically, the thesis examines how students and tutors perceive the challenges experienced in EFL tutoring and the various roles tutors adopt during EFL writing tutoring sessions with Japanese beginner-intermediate students. A mixed method approach is employed utilizing different methods that combine qualitative and quantitative data. Four data collection methods were utilized: pre and post-semester interviews with writing tutors: student questionnaires from a sample size of 24: 30 tutorial observations: and two tutor training workshops (quasi-focus group). Symbolic interactionism (SI) provided a framework for analyzing tutors‟ roles and their practices during EFL writing tutorials. This view assumes that roles emerge from, and are significantly shaped by, interactions in specific social settings. It was found that writing tutors adopt the following roles: proofreader, translator, coach, teacher, mediator, and timekeeper based on their interaction with the individual student. Each role was adopted as a reaction to a challenge but also created new problems. Many of the roles the tutors adopted in this study parallel the research on roles tutors adopt in the ESL writing center, however in EFL tutoring these roles are magnified. For example, in this study tutors play both the role of teacher and mediator to a much larger degree. The translator role however is unique to EFL tutoring. The roles put forth encompass a different way for tutors to think about effective tutoring in an EFL setting with beginner-intermediate students. This study contributes a deeper understanding as to how administrators and writing tutors can better conduct writing center tutorials with EFL students.

These are my flows, they flow through me.<br>

<p>My novel is a multigenerational queer narrative, one which seeks to illuminate erased and hidden queer history from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through Prohibition and war, through scientific advances and cultural setbacks, three generations of women strive tofind happiness while avoiding the encompassing grasp of America’s growing total institutions -the jail, the asylum, the military. Narrated by the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, the novel focuses half-lifes, ghosts, trauma, and what lingers after the destruction of queer families in favor of nuclear ones.</p> <p>As a queer writer, I’m interested in history, archival silences, and erasure. I believe that a historical framing which insists on writing a narrative of linear social progression erases vital and vibrant queer and trans communities and struggles throughout history. Furthermore, this narrative is often used to justify abuses in our present time, under the guise even these abuses are better than the oppressive past. Research shows this is not true, thatmany places and times had bubbles of freedom, utopian spaces built in opposition to societal pressures.</p> <p>As many of these spaces were built outside the law, it is impossible to talk about queer and trans  history  without  talking  about  total  institutions.  Queer  historical  fiction  must  engage  with police and prison abolition, the abuses of the asylum, and government censorship such as the Hayes Code or the chilling effects of the loyalty oaths. In this context, there is much to learn about the strategies  queer  and  trans  people  used  to  fight,  evade,  and  survive  within  or  against  these institutions.</p> <p>As  a  writer  whose  background  rests  in  speculative  fiction,  I’m  interested  in  using speculative elements such as ghosts and nuclear waste to speak about the trauma that remains from the last 100 years of American oppression. I want to examine what and who is left behind as laws and  norms  change -in  an  age  of  scientific  advancement,  what  happens  to  the  prisoners,  the institutionalized,  the  queer  and  trans  people  whosevery  being  has  oscillated  between  legal  and illegal with each decade. </p> <p>I see my work in conversation with Malinda Lo’s<em> Last Night at the Telegraph Club</em>, a novel about  a  queer  Chinese-American  girl  who  discovers  a  lesbian  bar,  set  during  the  Red  Scare. Additionally, I’m in conversation with the work of Jordy Rosenberg, specifically <em>Confessions of the  Fox</em>, a speculative historical fiction novel about a trans folk hero in 1600s England. I’m interested  in  works  of  historical  fiction  which  challenge  popular  andretrogressive  views  of  the past with the hard, beautiful, subversive, and real lived experiences of queer and trans people</p>

<p>Devoted is a novel.</p>

This applied dissertation was designed to determine the impact of direct writing conventions instruction on second grade writing mechanics mastery at an independent school in southeast Florida. The research study utilized a nonexperimental quantitative method. The design was pretest-posttest with a control. The pretest-posttest assessment was the Children’s Progress Academic Assessment. The score utilized in the analysis was the Phonics/Writing subtest. De-identified data were collected and analyzed from two separate second grade classes from two consecutive school years (i.e., 2011-2012, 2012-2013). The control group consisted of 43 second graders who received writing conventions instruction in the context of student writing during individual and small group conferences. The control group received no direct writing conventions instruction. The treatment group consisted of 39 second graders who received direct writing conventions instruction through the use of mini-lessons during the writing workshop. An analysis of the de-identified data revealed that, although the treatment group mean change score had a positive change greater than the control group change score, the change was not statistically significant. The researcher failed to reject the null hypothesis relative to a statistically significant difference between the two groups. Recommendations were made for future research.

Marathon is a novel about a young girl who is not born into the best family, who sets out to make a family for herself.

These Romantic Dreams in Our Heads is a collection of linked essays that study how key relationships in the narrator's life intersect. The essays attempt to show the complicated nature of relationships and how multiple lives are affected by one's decisions. Taking place over two years, the relationships in focus involve the narrator's parents, his girlfriend, and his dog. The essays deal with themes of manhood, parenthood, gender roles, religion, and memory. The characters deal with discovering their limitations and searching for a balance between responsibility for others and responsibility for their own lives.

Road Stories is a collection of three novellas that explore the pull, allure, sanctuary, serendipity, and adventure of life on the open road. The novellas examine how for some, the road holds the promise of a new day, an improved life, a better opportunity, or a deeper love; while for others, it is nothing more than an assortment of jumbled blue lines on a map. In Tierra del Fuego, a man takes to the road to figure out how to deal with the grief and sense of betrayal he feels following the death of his wife. Lake of the Falls involves a decades-long dispute between a father and son who take to the road and come to realize that home is not always where you live. In Back on the Road, three recent college graduates set off on a road trip inspired by Kerouac's On the Road to celebrate the end of their college years and lament the imminent approach of adulthood, only to learn that their lives are soon going to take vastly different paths.