​​​​Did you haunt the school library (even after hours)? As a kid, did you read under the covers by flashlight? Did you fall madly in love with heroines and heroes (main character energy)? You might love big historical tomes you can get lost in, or you might prefer slim monographs; fantasy might be what opens you; or hardscrabble stories; or adventure–trips to the Poles, or shipwrecks or castaways; stories of immigrants (arriving to a new place) or translation (bridging worlds).

 

If you’re a voracious reader who finds yourself in books, consider joining us for a 6-week online course in which we tap into our super-power: telling stories–not to be expository, but instead to delve into the myths of our lives, the unfolding drama of all we have been and all that we’re becoming.

 

W. S. Merwin said, “Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.” The idea of seeing anew—it is reparative, and it is liberating. We are entering an imaginal realm through which we can envision our life and our identity in a way we might otherwise have been unable to do.

 

What does it mean to “re-story” our lives? We’re continually telling ourselves stories–that’s how we make sense of the world. Simply put, when you tell a story–or when a story is told to you–you are seeing the world through a different lens. It makes sense, then, to call in some of the world’s greatest storytellers as teachers and collaborators.

 

Telling stories, and falling into the stories of others, can help us become the protagonists of our own lives—that main character energy. Jeannette Winterson says, “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.” We can think of conditioning as a lifelong rupture that reality has made on us. And the medicine of reading and books can heal that.

 

To enter these spaces, we will be inviting in mentors—specifically, collaborating with literary mentors. As we fall into communion with them, they become our guides. We can connect to an ancient lineage through books and through discovering a literary ancestor. This is a listening practice, and it’s one we’ll do together.

 

In the course I will offer generative writing prompts to help readers and writers to connect more deeply with themselves. For example, you will be invited to write an elegy, and we’ll use Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom’d [his eulogy for Lincoln] as a guide. The commemorative is a great portal for any writer.

 

We’ll also be doing some Bibliomancy—ie, divination. We pose a question, and then open a guiding text [it can be anything: Shakespeare, Homer, Goodnight Moon] and blindly put a finger on the page. The text there contains the guidance you need.

 

We’ll also hold Literary Seances—with members of the course gathered over Zoom. One way to start that is with a kind of automatic writing. Eg, we’ll choose a paragraph or at most a page of writing from one of the ancestors, and then write in the same rhythm, the same number of words per sentence, each noun-verb combo, etc. So we are inhabiting the prose of the mentor and conjuring a living presence through words.