VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Mann, Jeffrey A."

Browsing by Author "Mann, Jeffrey A."

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Against the Wire
Rand, Jamie Michael (Virginia Tech, 2014-06-06)
A troubled Marine Corps veteran, home from a combat tour in Iraq in 2003, must choose between making a better life for himself in college or staying with the self-destructive friends he served with during the war.
The Bass & The Boogeyman
Walker, Robert Coleman (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-13)
The Bass & The Boogeyman is a manuscript of poems that explores issues of sexuality, gender, and identity. The poems also attempt to reach an understanding of what it means to be a member of a largely marginalized social group (homosexuals). In this explorations and a attempts the poems are also engaged in finding the origins of fear. The poems follow one narrator from childhood into adulthood. While the poems do not provide the type of clear narrative and story arc one would expect from a novel, they do offer a sense of trajectory and reward the reader for reading from cover to cover. This manuscript is very aware of itself as a book and strives to exist as such (rather than as a stack of poems who happen to be in the same place at the same time). The manuscript features several connected poem series that work to provide cohesion to the collection. The poems Boys, Men, and Fags are an example of this connection between poems. Each of these three poems can be read as individual pieces, but when taken together they offer a commentary on all three groups that cannot be gained by reading them separately. The manuscript also employers a cast of repeating characters (the boy & the boogeyman among them) to give the collection the sense of narrative trajectory mention above. Lastly, the manuscript combines numerous traditional poetic forms with a wild and unruly use of pop culture and humor. The end result is proof that funny and serious are not always contradictory terms.
Big Baby Hot, Big Baby Cold
Kocz, Nick (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-14)
The stories in this collection reflect the absurdities of contemporary American family life, and the particularly distressing economic conditions of the present moment. These stories often employ absurdist elements. Because of the personal history that informs my work, realism does not seem an appropriate form for me. My oldest son, in whom my emotional well-being is heavily invested, is autistic. He is not “normal"? in a way that others would understand as “normal."? Parenting a child with special needs changes the way a marriage operates, deforming it. The personal experience that drives these stories often seems fantastical even to me. I don’t write about my personal experiences, but I write about the impressions that those experiences make upon me. In this way, my work is descriptive rather than didactic.
Bodies Degraded by Friction
Torres, Josette Annmarie (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-20)
Bodies Degraded by Friction is a collection of poetry existing in finite spaces. The first section, “A Moment and a Moment and a Moment," attempts to capture in words small passages of time as simple as clicking through a Facebook photo album and as destructive as new love. The second section, “It’s Complicated," is a manuscript in progress detailing a year in the life of an “other woman" negotiating an interpersonal relationship role underrepresented in self-help books and mass media. Several themes run throughout the book: the consequences of the use of technology-mediated communication as digital isolationist mechanisms, the collisions of real/virtual identity and real/virtual place, disruption as a poetic device, and the idea that love is a fleeting and ultimately impermanent state.
Dear Dear Dear
Koch, Devin Harold (Virginia Tech, 2019-05-21)
Dear Dear Dear is a collection of prose block poems that follow a queer speaker who is being confined by the world around him (the Midwest, the speaker's family/family values, gender norms, to one's own body, mortality, Monsanto, etc.) that tries to control and define him as a person. Dear Dear Dear examines the notion that humans are a product of one's own environment. It explores how one can be ones own product in response to being confined. Dear Dear Dear explores different themes such as 'Nightmares VS Reality', 'Confinement', 'Response to Being Confined', 'What is Home' seen in the collection. These themes intertwine with one another to create a loose narrative about a speaker actively trying to find a space where he can simply exist and call home without any fear of judgment from the world in which he inhabits.
Genome
Sierra-Santana, Mariana (Virginia Tech, 2017-06-22)
Collection of poetry.
I Am A Lonely Engineer
Haynes, Jeffrey Kyle (Virginia Tech, 2015-06-01)
I Am a Lonely Engineer is a collection of poems dealing with the emotional fallout of a speaker whose life has been uprooted by the absence of his father. Through a series of semi-surreal narratives, the speaker eventually comes to terms with his father's absence and begins the process of healing in the wake of this familial trauma.
I Woke Up a Ghost
Woodworth, Samuel Olson (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-07)
I Woke Up a Ghost is a collection of poems interacting and reacting to the death of a mother in the speaker's childhood. Through examining various relationships and states of mind, the speaker seeks new ways to imaginatively interpret and emotionally deal with loss and begin healing.
Identity and Place: Exploring the Complexities Between Rural Education, Community, and Queerness
Whitten, Clint Davis (Virginia Tech, 2024-04-11)
These combined manuscripts explore the intersections of rural education, community influences, and diverse identities by challenging rural monoliths and deficits while working to address opportunity gaps for rural youth and educators. Theories throughout this work include critical pedagogies of place (Bass and Azano, 2024; Greenwood, 2003), critical theories disrupting power (Freire, 1970), a pedagogy of love (Darder, 2017), and poetic explorations for a sense of belonging and a celebration of place (bell hooks, 2008; 2012) allowing for my own poetic voice to "cry out" (hooks, 2012, p. 12). The critical engagement with place norms and influences on identity development is further rooted in Queer studies, binding these manuscripts as a "tool of incessant unsettling" (Luciano and Chen, 2015, p. 192) by challenging the role of cis-heteronormativity (Berlant and Warner, 1995) in rural contexts. These combined manuscripts situate knowledge production and identity development in educational spaces in conversation with rural education, local and federal policies, issues of access, histories of erasure, and local and societal cis-heterosexual norms. Literature informing these manuscripts focused on rural schools and the unique challenges embedded in those communities, such as rural poverty (Lewis and Boswell, 2020; Tieken, 2022), geographical inequities (Lichter et al., 2012; Showalter et al., 2023), fewer resources for Queer youth (Kosciw et al., 2022; Movement Advancement Project, 2019; Ramos et al., 2014), and limited enrichment opportunities (Azano et al., 2020; Callahan and Azano, 2019; Rasheed, 2019), with a focus on how these challenges influence rural identities and widen opportunity gaps for rural learners. As a manuscript style dissertation, each manuscript centralizes parts of these theories and literatures. Manuscript 1 is a grounding theoretical piece that explores how Queer rural narratives are tangled in a spectrum of visibility. Manuscript 2 is a literature review that navigates how rural education and Queer identities have been discussed in research and reports. Manuscript 3 is a policy brief that presents a framework to critique federal and local anti-Queer policies and their influence on rural Queer youth and educators. Manuscript 4 is an empirical study exploring how rural youth explore their own sense of place and identity while attending a residential summer camp aimed to address an opportunity gap for rural gifted learners. While each manuscript stands alone, combined, they present themes about (a) the internalizations and externalizations of rural identity, (b) the value of diverse rural representation, and (c) the influence of policy and place norms in rural schools. These manuscripts suggest the need to uplift vulnerable and historically marginalized narratives in rural schools in order to challenge rural monolithic narratives, the possibilities of alternative learning spaces to address opportunity gaps for Queer and gifted youth, and the hope for more safe spaces that celebrate diverse rural identities and experiences to increase authentic learning opportunities to celebrate place and self together.
The Language of Dolls
Sharma, Manisha (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-13)
The characters in the short story collection The Language of Dolls spring up from the poor, the resource less multitudes of society. Caught in their culture, locale, and state in life, these characters struggle to manifest their potential to the fullest. In a way, they stretch their boundaries and distinguish themselves. Teetering on the verge of a collapse, whether men or women, poor or psychologically impoverished, they all emerge triumphant or often signal ambiguous resolutions. Most of the stories present the struggle of women in adverse circumstances. The Language of Dolls is an act of translation. Set in India and the United States, these stories, characters, their speech, actions, rituals, traditions, setting all are an alien culture fused indelibly to the English language.
Last Rites for Uptown
Fields, Raina Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-10)
This autobiographical poetry collection is about identity, belonging, and brokenness, dealing with the aftermath of a dead mother, a deadbeat father, and a decaying home filled with years of trash and memory. In many ways, this collection is a buildungsroman. For me, what seem like ordinary questions become a journey into memories and experiences that were once repressed. As a child of a hoarder, one who fielded questions from family, friends, and the Department of Human Service for almost twenty years, I am just starting to confidently address the many silences that were and are present in my family: my mother’s quest to hide her breast cancer and her subsequent death as a result of her secrecy; my father’s four other children that I have never met; and my grandparents’ military history spanning three continents in the 1950s and 1960s.
Like Water, Like Clouds
Wilson, Ashley Kristen (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-07)
This collection of short fiction explores femininity – a difficult term, in and of itself, because it implies that to be a woman is to be feminine in the traditional sense, or feminist in the revolutionary sense – rarely do the connotations allow for much in between. But I choose this term over “womanhood," for example, because it is more difficult, and culturally loaded, and conflicted, and even offensive. In truth, these stories attempt to portray the multi-faceted nature of how we see the feminine. They hope to convey the most fragile and complicated net of relationships, with men and with women, with mothers and fathers and children and lovers and enemies, each of whom make their own demands about what sort of femininity they require. Considering all this, I tend to think that there is no such thing as the much-talked-about “strong woman" in real life, not completely. She is constantly being pushed into corners where she is weak, or careless, or cruel–secretly unsure of who she is expected and ought to be. The result is a female psyche that is always shifting and disintegrating and dissolving, becoming someone or something else, like the characters in these eight stories. The modern woman is no sure thing. She is in flux and changing shape. And really, it is for those of us who watch to decide if it is for better, or for worse.
Magic City Mischief
Roberts, Geri L. (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-13)
Set against a lush landscape of swaying palms and rolling waves in what should be a tropical paradise is Miami a.k.a. The Magic City—a hedonistic metropolis saturated with sex whose residents are consumed with the pleasure principle. Combine the sheer numbers and too-busy, modern lives—and the consequential ability to live anonymously—plus inhabitants who embrace the “me"? principle, whip these ingredients together, and traditional guidelines are abandoned. The linked fictional collection consists of longer, more richly-textured stories, as well as experimental and flash fiction pieces that mirror the characters’ unreflective lives and risk-taking nature. While aware of conservative literary models, writing stories about my home of thirty years demanded the more avant-garde tradition of the erotic exemplified by Vladimir Nabokov, Anaїs Nin, and Sidonie Gabrielle Colette. And because my stories are grounded in such a vehemently bold locale—not to mention a bolder present—I aimed for language as bold. To alert the reader that this is a different sort of read, a Sexual Relationship Tree—as opposed to the more customary Family Tree—has been placed at the collection’s start. Clearly, mischief abounds. Note it was my conscious decision not to insert a filter between the story and the reader. Keeping my narrator’s tongue tightly in check, I have embodied the commonly heard storytelling directive of “show, don’t tell"? by opting for a more reportorial approach. I trust my sagacious reader to supply a filter of his/her own when considering the thematic weights of the collection.
The Mundane Habits of the Opposite Sex
Zubillaga, Amanda (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-17)
The stories in The Mundane Habits of the Opposite Sex explore themes of identity, loss, gender, and the often-complex landscape of human interaction. These are relationship stories, coming-of-age stories. Stories about searching for answers to mysteries both large and small. Loneliness is de rigueur for these characters despite a fervent desire to connect with others in a meaningful way. A Congressional intern misrepresents herself in order to mingle with the Washington in-crowd, a fledgling screenwriter is intrigued by an enigmatic woman with a distinct tattoo, a runaway honor student and an alcoholic former cop become unlikely travel companions on a cross-country road trip, and Iowa teenagers resist their own mortality by hanging out in a small-town graveyard. These stories ask the question: if we don’t fully know ourselves, how well will we ever truly know someone else? In settings both dreamy and extraordinarily commonplace, from sleepy diners to abandoned tourist traps, from the real world to places weird and imaginary, this collection examines the rare moments of beauty and persistent minefields that arise while navigating the convoluted intricacies of human experience.
Necessary Fire
Sullivan, Katherine Aiken (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-25)
In this collection the poet explores the gyre of domestic life and specifically how this complex and paradoxical storm pulls women/wives/mothers in many directions at the same time. Using a variety of motifs including glass, water, fire, and bodies, she writes about the deluge of joy, grief, fear, passion, desperation, wonder, salvation, and destruction that accompanies devotion to children, partners, relatives, and friends.
Preoccupations
Melling, Daniel Richard (Virginia Tech, 2019-05-17)
Preoccupations is a creative work dealing with the subject of existence. It takes the form of a collection of poems and creative essays that deal with the subject in one way or another. There are a variety of subjects used as vehicles to pursue the overall theme, ranging from groundhogs and the desire to become one, to drug and alcohol dependency. Preoccupations also deals with the subject of death, specifically the early deaths of the speaker's friends. There are a number of questions asked in Preoccupations, few of which are able to be answered. This is an accurate reflection of the thought process of the speaker.
Saints of Grand Rapids
Derks, Mark Henry (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-26)
These stories examine the lives of working class people in light of the current economic and social climate. They address and attempt to empathize with the despair and disillusionment many working class Americans express in response to their economic and social realities, and the stories attempt to walk a non-judgmental line regarding the attitudes these characters espouse. Instead of judging the characters or championing a particular moral stance, the pieces attempt to present individuals faced with major failures: child abandonment, guilt over preventable death, overriding selfishness, racism, and shame regarding social status. These failures of character or morality echo the larger failings, as the characters perceive them, of their time and place. Within this worldview of disillusionment and despair, many of the characters in these stories choose to struggle toward self-betterment—not economic or social betterment per se, but individual betterment, a reckoning with themselves and their failures that necessarily reflects and interacts with the world they inhabit. These are stories rooted in the Midwest and its rust-belt inhabitants, but for all their contemporary socio-economic concerns, the stories are first and foremost concerned with the individual and representing each individual portrayed accurately and honestly.
Secure the Shadow
Silcox, Beejay Rebecca-Jo (Virginia Tech, 2017-03-21)
Secure the Shadow is a collection of short-shorts and flash fiction, which draws heavily on the conventions of fables, parables and fairy tales to consider modern themes, desires and cruelties. The collection is linked by a meta-fictional fascination with the act of storytelling -- the liminal psychological space between the real and unreal, fantasy and delusion, seen and unseen, predator and prey. The collection also maps the topography of loss -- it explores what it means, and how it feels, to lose and to be lost.
She Will Be the Last of Us
Acosta Gaspar de Alba, Ana-Christina (Virginia Tech, 2017-02-07)
She Will Be the Last of Us is a collection of closely interwoven short stories narrated by four generations of Mexican women. They are all members of the fictitious Belmonte family, once a stronghold in Mexican politics and high society, now nearing extinction. The collection explores the idea of legacy and repeated history, and what matters and remains when a family line dies out. Other thematic focuses include notions of class, nationalism, womanhood, and motherhood in Mexico and on the US-Mexico border.
Sins of the Daughter
McCrery, Ennis McNeer (Virginia Tech, 2007-06-04)
Sins of the Daughter is a poetic exploration of one woman's journey through a gendered world. Broken into four distinct sections ("Circling the Slaughterhouse," "Circumference," "Sins of the Daughter," and "Magnetic Resonance"), the collection uses formal verse and free verse to explore the domestic, spiritual, physical, and cultural facets of femaleness, feminism, and femininity.

Browsing by Author "Mann, Jeffrey A."

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