Creative Writing Class Starts June 6

My next Creative Writing class will start June 6, Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a at the Kapa'a Products Fair! We will meet every Thursday night 7-9 for 8 weeks. The last one was about different genres of heroic tale -- this is a hands-on practice-in-the-classroom writing class. We'll get creative writing done and talk about how it works in a discussion format. Student writing will be published on my website (unless the student doesn't want to publish!). We would love for you to join us! Contact me at mahopmi@gmail.com for further details if you are interested in a creative writing class. Dr. Matt Miller

Morning Prayer

Morning Prayer

I wake, and fragments of yesterday

plunge through the tunnels of my soul –  

But I let the light wash them away

and I let its sweetness make me whole.

I float in a pool of ecstatic light

Sweetened to stay soft in the fight –

Warriors whose wars will never cease

Will lie amazed in my place of peace.

Ladler in soup kitchens, tired but true,

I’ll pass out bowls of light to you.

See you at Small Town Coffee, 7 PM tonight!

Well, it's not too late to get yourself down to Small Town Coffee to enjoy my first class on Heroic Tales -- the free one! It starts 7 PM Small Town Coffee @ the Kapa'a Products Fair. I have a great little overview planned of the ground we will cover in the next two months and how it all hangs together. I hope to see you there!

Dr. Matt

Class in the Woman's Journey

Hard to keep writing when life wants so many things from me but I stagger on. I am deep in the Woman's Journey class for the course I have proposed. So many ideas and research of the past have come together in this!

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