Hi guys!

I've had so much fun writing the Explorer Fiction class! The whole business of going into the Unknown and discovering wonders which illuminate your inner self has always fascinated me. We get to play with Marco Polo, Prester John (again!), Christopher Columbus, and a few more conquistadores for good measure.
Then there's the 19th century burst of explorer fiction -- H. G. Wells! Jules Verne! Conan Doyle! Doyle's The Lost World is an awesome tale of finding dinosaurs still alive in the South American jungle that is nothing at all like the movie Jurassic Park. His White Company is an amazing 14th century drama about the French-English wars, starring the invincible Sir Nigel Loring. Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth has been made into over a dozen movies (I personally have six of them).  Can we count H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, where the Martians go into the Unknown to find us? I guess not. Shucks. What about The Matrix? Sure, why not? In that case, the world the hero leaves is the world of illusion -- the Unknown he discovers is the world the way it really is! That can be set against George Russell's weird descriptions of seeing beautiful cities and beings of light while he was walking on the moors of England. Now let's see, was he leaving the world of illusion and journeying to reality -- or was he leaving reality and journeying to illusion?

You can see the Explorer Fiction pattern can lead to a million variations, and it sure has! People never get tired of it. This is going to be one of the fun classes, for sure.

A Class in Magic Sword Stories

We had to back my Heroic Tales class off until March 7, so if you haven't signed up yet, it isn't too late! We will meet at Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a, at the Products Fair.

I just finished the Magic Sword class -- stories about Magic Swords and the heroes who wield them. If you're a writer, this class is for you!

 Each class teaches a different writing technique, using the works that gave birth to a genre to illustrate it. Magic Sword stories illustrate the way to handle your internal monologue when you are writing.  It's a great technique!

Creating the Heroic Tales Classes

Aloha again!

I am working away at the classes for my Heroic tales course, starting Thursday Feb. 21 @ 7 PM at Small Town Coffee, Kapa'a Fairgrounds. I have completed the first class, which is an introduction to seven different genres of Heroic Tale. The third class on Utopias is already prepared.

I also have most of the Magic Sword tales class ready to present. Now that's an interesting one! When you cross Excalibur, the sunny, positive sword of kingship, with the dark Viking sword of doom called Tyrfing, with its three vile deeds, you get the Sword of David in the Queste del Sainte Graal, which is a sword of kingship that also commits three vile deeds. Countless magic-sword stories have been told that use aspects of these three seminal magic-sword tales. Tolkien makes gentle fun of the whole idea in his Farmer Giles of Ham, where the sword Caudimordax, or Tailbiter, is the terror of the local dragons.

I am noticing that my different Heroic Tales classes kind of support each other. Explorer Fiction is a lot like Utopian fiction, but the explorer who finds a Utopia observes and records social customs as a way of reflecting on the author's own time. The explorer in Explorer Fiction just records wonders -- monsters and strange people. The Woman's Journey, which goes beyond fame and fortune to quest for wholeness, seems to lead naturally into the Spiritual Quest, which goes beyond personal wholeness to fusion with the Sacred. And Magic Sword Tales, which usually involve the irony that using the sword on others leads to you getting killed yourself eventually, bear a complicated relationship to the Dystopias.

The whole thing is becoming so interesting I am thinking of making the eight classes I am creating into a book.  These are genre studies, really, so each chapter would sail across the centuries picking out examples wherever they may be found. The Utopias class starts with the Garden of Eden and ends with a 20th century Shangri-La, so that one really covers some ground. Woman's Journey stories track back into the timeless mists of folklore. Explorer Fiction can start with the 12th century voyages of Marco Polo, and continue into the 21st century space program. Spiritual Quest stories have been with us since the Descent of Inanna 4000 years ago.

Time melts away, when you look at story telling this way. Come melt away some time with us, Thursday Feb. 21 7-8 PM at Small Town Coffee, Kapa'a Fairgrounds. The first class is free!

Dr. Matt

Preparing the Heroic Tales Class

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I am having way too much fun creating my Heroic Tales classes for delivery at Small Town Coffee Thursdays 7-8 PM (Kapa’a Fairgrounds). The first meeting is February 21^st. I get to talk about all my favorite books!

I just finished prepping the Utopias class, our 3^rd meeting. We will take an hour looking at Utopias from the 12^th to the 20^th century, starting with the astonishing legend of Prester John.

The Magic Sword class will start with tales of Tyrfing, the Viking sword that always killed someone once it had been unsheathed.

And the Woman’s Journey – ! Well, I don’t want to give it all away. There will be a hatful of great ideas at every class, for students to develop into a story or an essay. I will co-edit student writing with the student, to develop it to its highest potential.   

We will sail past so many great books in an hour! Blue House bookstore will order any book that you hear mentioned in the class, at a 20% discount to the student. Each class will also have a keynote work that is available for sale at the class with the same discount. We will spend a week each on

1.     Structure of the Heroic Journey

2.     Magic Sword stories

3.     Utopias

4.     Explorer Tales

5.     the Woman’s Journey

6.     Dystopias

7.     Visits to the Future

8.     Hawaiian Tales 

Hope I'll see you there!

Dr. Matt

Heroic Tales Class Coming Up!

Thursday February 21^st, 7-8 PM at Small Town Coffee, I will kick off my Heroic Tales class. This will be a hum-dinger of a roller-coaster ride through some wild genres of story-telling. We will use the seminal works of a genre as a spring-board, and look at how their structure was imitated by a host of later works, creating the genre as we have it now. Students will each write an essay or a story related to one of the genres we discuss. I will co-edit it with them to bring it to a finished form.

After this basic training in literary reading, any time we see a work in that genre we will recognize it as a genre work, and know more or less what to expect. Then we become active readers, observing and enjoying how this particular work follows the genre pattern, and how it violates or alters the pattern in surprising ways.

Come join us at this feast for the heart, mind and soul! You’ll walk away with a story or essay in hand, and a head full of knowledge about the amazing forms taken by the Heroic Journey in literature and in life. There will be a sign-up sheet in the Blue House bookstore at Small Town Coffee in the Kapa’a Fairgrounds. Students will pay $80 (cash or check) at the end of the first meeting if they want to go on with the whole set of 8 meetings. Contact me if you want to reserve a seat by prepaying (mahopmi@gmail, or come by Small Town Coffee Saturday 10-2 when I work in the bookstore).

The Archetypal Fiction Class Ends

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Well, my Archetypal Fiction class at Small Town Coffee has come to an end, after 21 fun Thursdays! At the end of its term, it gave birth to a small Writer’s Workshop, in which I and some of the Archetypal Fiction students will just get together over a weekly potluck to read our work and comment helpfully on what we hear. We are all teachers and all students: price of admission is something good to eat.

We had a great time the first evening of the Workshop, reading each other long free-verse poems we have written and looking at how they link to music. I played a recording of myself reading a narrative poem called The Pirate Band Laments Its Fallen King, in sync with the music of the pirate band itself – or rather themselves, since there are really two pirate bands, one with electric guitars and the other with a piano and other classical instruments like flutes and trumpets. They get into a musical competition to see who can lament their fallen king the best, and we hear their sad conversation about the Great Man when he still walked the decks and ruled their lives.

I had just seen Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time when I created the words and music, and  this was a weird spin-off from that unique movie experience. It all seemed so real to me at the time, I developed a short story from the lyrics. Who knows where these things come from?

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