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).

Community

1. Community

Kauai rose from the sea, volcanic, in a dawn

No human eye can know. What colors were the sky

Five million years ago? Against that nameless pyre

The great vent billowed sputtering from the cry

Of violated ocean, hiss and spit of water meeting fire.

There in that ancient dawn, unknown to other

For no other was there to be known, a great

Spirit rose from the water in gouts of fire

Smoke formed wavering into towering shape, a

Woman of Fire, Water and Earth, clad in the Sky.

She spoke the great sizzling hiss of creation’s song

And from the water rose a smoking land, to dry

In shades of black against a blackened air, veined

With red. It loomed and bulged against the sky.

Then from Her hands grew vivid ecstasy and pain

The little forms that birth and fight and die,

The spirochetes in their watery home

Amphibians that master double worlds,

The farmer seeking life within the loam

And fishermen that fish upon the foam.

Kauai bloomed in the sea, blossomed in a dawn

That looks like dawn to us. Familiar as the touch

Of lovers’ hands, the font of all creation flowered

Over like a boiling pot, so rich were her ridges and vales

With the juice of raw Creation and its life-producing power.

Her first people came from the stars to stay in this place

Where Being first found its birth, to know Her where

She lingers still here in Her place of Making.

They worshipped Her because they were human there

In that place of worship, true humans without faking.

Kauai, place of powerful prayer, in later years recalled

Was said to be the home of the high goddess, said to be

The child of Hina. But let those who later come to Her

Know there is only one God, but She may take many

Forms, the Spirit in deities and dogs, feldspar and fir.

The missionaries with their trunks of books

Knew Her stern face, because they needed sternness;

But these people knew Her in Her flowers and fruit,

Ripe rain that hangs forever in the air, earnest

Music of the rainbow’s colored lute:

Community with the Oneness of all things.

by Dr. Matt Miller