On this site you will see many resources — books, articles, videos — that focus on stories from the vast sea of cultural storytelling. The resources tend to focus on one particular tradition or theme each week, but you are welcome to navigate these materials in any way that suits you. The main thing is to find your people, your stories, your culture, your traditions — and explore them by way of reading. The cultures and narratives with which you resonate may not be connected in any obvious way to the traditions of your family or immediate culture (though all things are connected, ultimately). Choose based on what calls you, what seems fascinating to you, what moves you. Feel free to utilize any of the online resources and readings or choose your own. Please read in a way that helps you deepen and connect with the past — especially the distant past. The important thing is to choose what interests you; reading out of interest is the only valid perspective from which to write something interesting about reading.
Please remember that this course is for you, not me (the instructor). What you choose to do in this class should come from your own impulses and interests, from the deep well of your own journey as a creative person. Your process should be focused on what you want to learn in a class like this — not what I might want you to learn. This is the opposite of what normally happens in an academic environment and is, typically, the hard part in the classes that I teach. The pages and videos that describe my approach and my perspective on learning outcomes offer more detail on why I take this approach and why it is much better (but much harder) than mainstream academic formalism.
Creative thinking is more cognitively demanding than logical thinking. It engages more parts of the brain across the left and right hemisphere and places higher demands on working memory. In that sense, creative thinking is a higher-order skill. In practical terms, this means that analyzing an idea is easier than synthesizing a new one from multiple sources.
If your reading takes you to a place where you want to dive deeply into mythic narratives and their meaning for the contemporary world (and to understand why I created this course), you can read my book A Stone's Throw: The Enduring Nature of Myth. Each chapter of that book is available for you to read online at the following links.
This book explores the long threads of myth that connect the ancient Egyptian tradition with Judaism, Islam, and related traditions. It begins as I hike with my father up a remote B.C. mountain in search of a mythic stone. I find it in an icy river, pack it home, and spend a year sculpting it in my shop. As I work, I discover why stones have always been viewed as foundations of community, symbols of the self, and embodiments of sacred wisdom. I examine the persistence of this powerful symbolism as my hands shape the stone. And I discover despite our general ignorance of mythological history, the fables of our ancestors are still imbued with great power. Recounting archaic myths and tales from my own family, linking together the essential religions of the West — all with stones at their core — I illuminate the deep unity among spiritual traditions that are, in the contemporary world, perpetually at war.
A Stone’s Throw is about the weaving together of stories by which we construct our lives, individually and collectively. I explore the forces that lead both Jews and Muslims to revere the foundation stone of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Taliban to destroy stone carvings of Buddha, terrorists to attack the World Trade Center. As I craft a volcanic rock into a piece of sculpture, I peel back the facade of the present to reveal the contemporary world as a place where the past is forever working out its unfinished dreams.
Details and Possible Content for the Reading Project
This project is focused on your responses to the reading you have been doing. What has been interesting to you? What has made you think, or feel? And, since you are a unique person, your responses will be unique to you. There are no right answers or secret criteria here. You are not making an argument in this project, not passing along some version of the main points of what you read. No, you are simply reading, absorbing, reflecting, and then writing. In that order. The essence of what you write about in this project is your reflections on the reading.
I am not asking you to prove that you’ve read anything. Instead – and again, just to make this really clear – I’m asking you to reflect on your reading. Here are some examples of the kinds of things you might reflect upon:
- Why did you choose this particular reading?
- How does this reading make you feel?
- What metaphors or symbols stand out for you, and why?
- Does the reading remind you of something inside yourself? What? And how?
- What does this reading teach you about your life?
- Why do you react to the reading in the way that you do?
- What do these reactions tell you about yourself?
- How might you use the knowledge or insights from your reading to grow as a person or to improve and deepen your relationships with others?
These are just examples. They are not intended to be prescriptive or compulsory. You will learn your own thing, in your own way. But let’s hope that you’ve learned something from your reading. The reading assignment is to write about your reflections (again, in case you missed it the two other times).
Do not write an academic essay! If you do, I will send it back and politely ask you to resubmit the reading assignment. No essays. No five-paragraph boilerplate. No thesis statements. No bibliography. No statements to the effect that you “will demonstrate in this essay”, or that “further, this shows that”, or “in conclusion.” Nope. You have probably learned to write slightly different versions of the exact same essay, over and over again, in your educational journey. If that’s the case, then this assignment will perhaps be anxiety-provoking. I’m asking you to abandon a particular writing skill – traditional essay-writing – and instead try something that might be completely new.
What to write instead of an academic essay? If you’ve been reading a good book, you will have noticed that you don’t see a lot of thesis statements and concluding paragraphs and weasely academic language. Instead, what you see is storytelling. Good writing tells a story – fictional or nonfictional or some strange blend. And the stories we are most drawn to? What do they do? They teach us about ourselves. That’s why we’re drawn to them.
Don’t summarize your reading, or do a book report, or an essay based on what you think I want to hear. This assignment is about you, and your reactions to what you read, and how those reactions percolate around inside you until you know just a bit more about yourself and the world. This is a complex, deep, and somewhat mysterious process that sometimes goes by the name creativity.
This is a straightforward project. And yet, many people struggle with it because I am not telling you exactly what to do. Instead, I am suggesting a direction you might go (reading) and I am encouraging you to follow it wherever it may lead. I don’t know where it will lead; neither do you. In the study of creativity there’s a hifalutin’ word for this process: the liminal space, or liminal zone. Or liminality. The area of uncertainty, ambiguity, and perhaps even disorientation. The place of edges and peering over them.
The description of this assignment is supposed to be vague. That’s the point. All the assignments are going to be like this. It’s your path, your creative journey. You need to follow it (or not) to where it takes you.
How long should it be? Good question. How long do you think? If you spend some time reading, and you learn something really interesting – maybe about yourself, or your relationship with the world – how many words would it take you to write down your reflections about what you’ve learned and what they mean? More than a hundred? For sure. Five hundred? More, probably. More than a thousand? Probably. Ten thousand? Maybe not that much. See how it goes.
I get a lot of assignments that are 1004 words long, or 1002, 1008, or 1033. You get the idea: just over the edge of what I’ve specified as the minimum. Please don’t do that. Write until you’ve reached the point that you’ve said all you need to say. It’s impossible to specify in advance how long that should be – and equally impossible to do it well the night before it’s due. If you rush through this assignment, writing madly at 88 miles per hour to get it submitted before the clock tower signals 10:04 and you’re outta time (you get that pop culture reference, right?), then you will probably not be happy with the result. Instead, take your time. Write this assignment over the course of a week or two, in several shorter writing sessions of maybe an hour each. That should do it.
Storytelling – whether you are writing about your life, or your readings, or the maintenance you do on your motorcycle – is as varied as writers. The more of them that you read (writers as well as stories), the more you will get glimpses of what you could do. It won’t help for me to specify in great detail what the form of your project should be. The more formulaic this project is, the less creative you will be. Your job is to think about how you might create something on your own, and do it. This might be very hard. Try hard – and try not to spend time figuring out what I might want. This assignment is not for me; it’s your creativity, and it’s for you. Remember that if you can.
If you get stuck with this assignment, feel free to reach out to ask questions. But really, getting stuck is part of the process. Getting unstuck is how you activate your creativity.
The reading project is worth 40 percent of your grade and is provisionally due at the end of week 4.
Example Narratives
Writing about reading is a colossal genre with ancient roots. The conversation between readers and writers is one of the most robust and persistent aspects of literature. Sometimes the responses of readers are philosophical and complex (such as Alberto Manguel's response to Walter Benjamin's ruminations on unpacking his library); often they are interwoven with cultural and personal themes (such as Annelie Chen's reflections on Walter Deakin's book about swimming); and sometimes they explore the resonance of personal themes in the writing process (such as Ta-Nehisi Coates' Why I'm Writing Captain America — and why it scares the hell out of me). I don't expect you to craft narratives that are equivalent to these examples, which are written by highly skilled professional authors (Anelise Chen is an accomplished author, essayist, and writing instructor at Columbia University; Alberto Manguel is one of the most renowned and respected authors of our time; and Ta-Nehisi Coates is an influential cultural commentator and author). But we want our aims as writers to be aspirational, right? So, let's take encouragement from the great Arthur Ashe: start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Read the examples, reflect on what you might do, and go from there.
A Note of Caution
You can write about anything you want. But please consider that any subject that is challenging for you to talk about openly (such as personal trauma) is a subject you should probably not write about. On the other hand, powerful personal experiences often provide excellent source material for writing, so it may be difficult for you to decide what to do. First, please use your judgment about how best to keep yourself emotionally safe within and beyond the classroom. Second, please discuss your plans (or your concerns) with me if you decide to write about personal or provocative subjects. In particular, be cautious of subjects involving violence, abuse, trauma, death, mental illness, and related themes (whether they happened to you, happened to someone else, or are imagined). These subjects reliably activate strong emotions and are often unsafe if not handled properly. While no subject is absolutely off-limits in this class, there are many subjects for which there is a risk of harm to you, to me, to others in the class, or to our shared communities. We must be respectful and careful of ourselves and our relationships with others. Please ask me for guidance if you are uncertain.
Ask for Feedback (or not; up to you)
Please remember to ask for feedback if you want it. If you do not ask for feedback, you will not receive feedback. For further details, please review the feedback page. You will see on the feedback page that feedback is a recirpocal process; it requires reflection and consideration. Appending a single sentence to the end of your project with the words “feedback please” is not asking for feedback.
Not everyone wants feedback. Some learners just like to see a grade. That is a completely reasonable approach and you will not be penalized for taking that approach. See the feedback page for details.
How to Submit this Project
Upload your project (in PDF, Word, OpenOffice, or plain text Markdown) via the Moodle link shown in week four.