Exploring Landscape and Belonging Through Story

‘Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.’

James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room

Recently I attended a storytelling festival in Aberystwyth and as I sat mesmerized by the unfolding story of Pryderi, the ruler of Dyfed, I realized once again the power of the ancient stories and the oral tradition of storytelling to connect us to history, to each other and to the land. In Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote that, ‘telling or hearing stories draws its power from a towering column of humanity joined one to the other across time and space, elaborately dressed in the rags or robes or nakedness of their time.’ Listening to this spine tingling retelling of stories from the Welsh Mabinogion, for a moment I felt myself balanced on this towering column and understood what it must mean for someone to feel rooted to the earth, to grow and develop in a country with stories that feed the soul with the wisdom of mythic times, and a landscape that is steeped in these stories.

While the stories we tell about ourselves form our individual identity, the stories we tell about our country form our national identity and for better or worse, these narratives act as roots to ground us to place, providing a sense of belonging and a definition of nationhood. I don’t pretend to be Welsh but my ancestral roots are closer to Britain than they are to Australia where my ancestors are not the indigenous Aboriginal people whose land was taken from them. It’s not always comfortable being a white Australian. We have no ancient claim to the land and no traditional stories to draw from, except the stories of conquering and overcoming the odds, and the legends of mateship and a ‘fair go’ that came with colonization and a persistent white Australian policy. These are stories that have become mythologized in Australia, forming a national character that often marginalizes the indigenous population and ignores the fact that Australia is now a multi-cultural nation and the majority of its population are or once were, immigrants.

There are a number of contradictions inherent in white Australians’ relationship to the land. Many of us are at once drawn to, and repelled by the outback, awed by its beauty and frightened by its dangers. We carry the guilt of the conqueror, a guilt that often stops us from claiming a real connection to the land. Our legendary heroes are the men who cleared fields of rocks, who dug canals to drain marshy land, who made the harsh land work for them. The Aussie battler has become part of our national character. Yet, despite this reverence for the outback, more than ninety percent of Australians live in urban environments, for the most part clustered around the edges of this continent, turned away from the centre which carries such a mystique. We romanticise the wilderness, but most rarely, if ever, experience it. Yet, deep within us there's such a longing for wildness, for wilderness and for the sense of real connection with place.

When I began writing my first novel, Gathering Storm, I had no idea how important a role landscape would play in it or how confused I was about my own relationship to the land. The story moves from the snow covered Malvern Hills in England to the harsh heat of the Australian outback, a dramatic contrast in itself, but then there are the contradictions that are deeply embedded in the relationship the characters have with the places in which they live, or once lived, or never lived, but still dream of. These are contradictions which I feel strongly, having grown up in the suburban wilderness of Adelaide, with its manicured lawns, neat fences and garden beds filled with roses and hydrangeas, all cowering under well placed umbrellas to avoid the worst of the baking sun. At school I learned European history in an education system that was still clinging to the comforting notion of a homeland. The only things reminding me that there was more to Australia, were the throaty laugh of the kookaburra, the eucalyptus scent of the gums trees, the fierce summer heat and the frequent dust storms that blew in from 'out back', turning the sky orange and clogging our lungs.

The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots, nostos (returning home) and algos (pain). For most of my life I suffered from this affliction; a yearning to return home but no idea of where that home might be. This sense of alienation I felt goes some way towards explaining why I decided to make my main character English in Gathering Storm. This gave me the freedom to describe Australia through the eyes of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong. Storm is also part Romany – partly imbued with the blood of a nomadic people, and although her family have lived in England for nearly seventy years, she still doesn't fully belong there either. Storm belongs nowhere. She is torn between movement and stillness, restless but afraid, wanting to settle, but eager to move. Her sense of self is scattered between the cottage in the Malvern Hills, her boyfriend’s apartment, her art studio and her Kombi van. Then there's her romantic notion of a Bohemia she has never visited, her nostalgia for the Malvern of her childhood and her fearful retracing of her mother's footsteps in the Australian outback. And finally there's the traumatic cultural legacy of the past that plays havoc with her sense of self. Storm’s childhood is filled with secrets and silences embedded in the spaces between the stories her family reluctantly tell. Speaking of her childhood need for stories, Storm says, ‘I consumed them as if there were a great hollow inside me that needed filling and that once filled, their weight, the weight of my ancestors, would act as an anchor. . .’

For me, a sense of belonging is linked very closely to place and to the stories we tell that connect us to place. I was an adopted child and grew up steeped in a sense of my own illegitimacy. Like Storm, I felt I belonged nowhere, that no place was truly mine. And because this lack of belonging was a strong central theme in my own life, it inevitably demanded to be explored in the stories I told. Woven through both Gathering Storm and Flight, is this sense of dislocation and statelessness that can be felt and experienced personally, but also within a family a culture and a nation. Place gives us identity, a passport to belonging. But time does it too. In a sense, space and time cross when a family or a people have been anchored in one place for generations. Ancestors provide us with roots and so does place. As Storm asks: How long does it take? How many generations? Do we inherit place? Do we earn it? Or is belonging simply a state of mind? Exploring these questions through writing has helped me to resolve issues of belonging and identity within my own life. Like Storm I have begun to suspect that belonging is ultimately something we carry inside of ourselves. It is a realisation that comes when we are on the right path in our lives. Until then nowhere is ours, but when this realisation arrives, the world becomes ours. For as Joseph Campbell wrote, ‘our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life’.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Breaking The Curse: Making Myth Our Own

'All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip, other voices might be heard, speaking of the life of the mind and the soul's journey.'

Jeanette Winterson, Weight

In previous posts I have discussed the ways in which myth enables us to reconnect with a different form of knowing, one that is more intuitive and that embraces mystery rather than fact. Using mythic tools/elements in our writing helps us to create timeless and universal stories, living stories that are steeped in authenticity and that encourage us to grow into individuals. In this post I want to look more specifically at ways myth might be used in story, by rewriting old stories, taking specific elements from myth or even simply using the themes that are predominant in myth.

We can use myth overtly in story by taking the structure and storyline of ancient myth and translating it into a contemporary setting or even a different point of view. In the Myth series Margaret Atwood wrote Penelopoid, the story of Odysseus from the perspective of Penelope and her maids, Alexander McCall Smith rewrote a Celtic myth in Dream Angus and Jeanette Winterson wrote Weight, her own version of the Atlas myth. In the introduction, Winterson wrote, 'the Myth series is a marvelous way of telling stories, re-telling stories for their own sakes, and finding in them permanent truths about human nature.' Winterson wrote Weight from her own situation, stating that 'there is no other way'. So Weight became a 'personal story broken against the bigger story of the myth we know'. When we rewrite myth in this way, we inevitably make it ours and we also see how easily any story can carry the timeless themes of myth. The ancient stories of the battles amongst the Norse Gods might be translated into contemporary stories about the battles between the heads of powerful corporations, or the story of Theseus entering the labyrinth to kill the minotaur can be written as a modern day story set in war torn Vietnam where Captain Willard is given the assignment to journey deep into the jungle (psyche) and capture Kurtz (a renegade Colonel). This is of course, Apocalypse Now, a story that was drawn from Conrad's, earlier novel, Heart of Darkness, but whose themes reflect the mythic journey of Theseus to kill the beast.

While Flight is not based on a single myth, it does contain a number of mythic references: to Theseus slaying the Minotaur in the labyrinth; to Orpheus returning from the underworld with Eurydice but unable to resist looking back; to the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; to the Greek myth of Cassandra. . . The characters Cassie and Hector represent Cassandra and her twin brother Helenus who as children were left overnight at Apollo's temple, where serpents licked their ears, endowing them with the power of prophecy. Cursed by Apollo for not returning his love, Cassandra found that although her prophecies were true, they were not believed. Cassandra and Helenus share the power of prophecy, but their skills and methods are different. For Cassandra the prophecy is received intuitively, while Helenus reads signs and portents in the things around him in the natural world, for example, the shape of clouds or the flight of a bird. In Flight, Cassie (like her namesake) is overcome by the knowledge she receives intuitively and is disbelieved by others, whilst Hector is a meteorologist, using computers and satellites to forecast the weather. In a sense, Cassie and Hector represent the extremes of the right and left brain modes, or intuitive and intellectual thought. Together they maintain a vital balance.

Curses, or inherited patterns of behaviour are themes that appear in all three of my novels, and again and again in ancient myth. In Nowhere Man, Ivan is psychologically trapped within patterns that he unconsciously repeats over and over. In Gathering Storm, four generations of women have been trapped by a Romany curse, though in actual terms they are trapped in inherited patterns of behaviour. In Flight, the idea of the curse is explored in mythic terms, in relation to the classic pattern of heroic myths, identified by Otto Rank (see Writing Myth). I did not set out with the idea of writing about a curse, instead it arose about halfway through the novel when I stopped what I was writing and wrote the prologue in a different voice and with an explanation of Fern's origins. Fern is born to a powerful man, her birth is accompanied by a prophecy, she is abandoned and brought up by strangers, unaware of her identity. Myths such as Oedipus and Perseus explore the journey of the child to the father. This is generally an arduous journey, involving great dangers, but the greatest danger lies in the meeting with the father, who may or may not deem the child fit to accept. In myth, the child, if ready for the confrontation, generally brings about the death of the father, often without being aware of their father's identity. This is retribution for the father's unnatural desire to halt change. It is only natural for the child to step into the father's shoes in adulthood, or on a cultural scale, for a new king to step into the shoes of the old king. When this potential is denied by the father then the cycles of life have been denied and stagnation sets in. It is the child's role to force change.

For the most part, Flight follows Ranks pattern of heroic myth. In the opening pages, Simple Simon, a gardener in the Botanical Gardens, utters a prophecy, saying that Fern would cause the death of her father. The prophecy quickly becomes a curse as Fern's father, Eric, responds by trying unsuccessfully to kill his unborn daughter, the prophecy 'eating away at him, turning him into its slave'. Although the curse is delivered to Fern and her mother, it is directed at the father. Fern is the arrow, charged with delivering the curse. Eric is a powerful man, born with great gifts, but he has abused these gifts and this is a crime for which he must pay. There is no humility in Eric, no respect for life, no compassion and no humanity. But there is pride. As always it is hubris which activates the curse.

Psychologist, Liz Greene identifies a number of features that appear consistently in myths about family curses. According to her, the curse is usually linked with the abuse of children in a pattern that repeats itself through generations. 'Each generation has the opportunity to reverse or transform the curse by perceiving and acknowledging the pattern of destructiveness and transcending it, but fails to do so because the individual cannot resist indulging in fear, greed, anger, or the desire for personal vengeance'. Instead, the individual responds instinctively, refusing to acknowledge the pattern or take responsibility and transform it. So, as Greene states, a curse can run its patterns through generations, both inherited genetically and taught through the behaviour of the parents. This is something I had already explored in Gathering Storm, but in Flight I looked at patterns of behaviour that have been repeated through many lives, ideas that are expounded by Jungian psychotherapist, Roger Woolger, who suggests that childbirth triggers karmic residue and the choice of parents reinforces the patterns from one life to the next until the person is finally able to break free of that pattern.. This is exactly what happens to Fern who finds herself abandoned at birth, threatened fundamentally by her birth father and psychologically abused by her adopted father, so that she carries a heavy burden of guilt and grief that parallels the burdens she carries from past lives.

Woolger wrote of 'patterns in remembered lives', explaining that they can become compounded into a repetitive cycle of hatred and revenge, the players 'drawn to each other karmicly' in roles from which they cannot escape'. Fern and Eric are caught in a destructive pattern that has persisted for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and which always involves an abuse of power and some form of injury to a child. In this life, Fern is once again given the opportunity to break free of that pattern. Through the course of the story, Fern is forced to face memories from a number of lives, but it is not the stories of these lives that are important for Fern's transformation. As the Bear Handler tells her, 'only the patterns matter, for it is in those that you will see the places that you are caught, repeating yourself, lifetime after lifetime'.

A good friend and editor, Teresita White, surprised me by pointing out the parallels between Greene's analysis of the family curse and the events in Flight. 'Paradoxically,' she wrote, 'any attempt to cheat the prophecy usually results in its fulfilment'. Eric tries to destroy his own daughter, which results in her mother hiding Fern from him, by having her adopted and not putting his name on her birth certificate. His violent attempt to kill Fern, results in the shutting down of her psyche, so she does not know who she really is. When Eric seeks Fern out he unwittingly awakens her spirit and bit by bit, her memory. When he attempts to frighten her, he awakens her courage. When he draws Fern to himself he unwittingly invites destruction into what he believes is impregnable. When Eric shows contempt for Adam and his qualities, he sabotages his seduction of Fern. And when he causes another's death, believing he can sabotage the prophecy, he provokes the final confrontation in which he is destroyed. Although Eric does not die, he is left hovering on the border of life and death and his power is spent. In the end, following Ranks patterns of heroic myth, Eric is crushed and Fern is liberated.

Myths remind us that life is all about change, that the wheel of fortune turns and we must flow with it. For Eric the prophecy is a warning. He has become corrupted by power and he must let go of it in order to restore the natural flow of life. Instead, he holds onto his power and the result is a living death. For Fern, the prophecy is a blessing as it gives her an opportunity to free herself from a pattern of behaviour she has become enmeshed in, to find the courage to become a fully conscious individual and rediscover the gifts she had turned away from. But myths also remind us that there are no 'happy ever after endings'. Whatever position we find ourselves in, it is wise to remember that 'this too shall pass', that at any moment the wheel may turn and we will be called yet again, to adventure.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Telling Tales – Exploring Elements of the Fairy Story

'If you don't know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don't know the stories you may be lost in life.'   Siberian Elder
                                                                                                                                           
Once upon a time. . .
These familiar words have such power. They evoke a stillness, a bating of breath, an eager air of expectation as we gather around them, waiting for their magic to transport our imaginations to far off worlds, and their wisdom to help us understand the world in which we live. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim wrote, 'for those who immerse themselves in what the fairytale has to communicate, it becomes a deep, quiet pool which at first seems to reflect only our own image; but behind it we soon discover the inner turmoils of our soul – its depths, and ways to gain peace within ourselves and with the world, which is the reward for our struggles.' Fairy tales are timeless stories, traditionally passed down orally from one generation to the next. It is only relatively recently that they have been written down, reinterpreted  through the moral filters of those who recorded them, and consequently changed, sometimes almost beyond recognition.

Myth and fairytale are a rich source of material for authors and their form and content resonate with readers; both adults and children. Some writers, such as Angela Carter, have rewritten existing fairy tales applying their own personal interpretations. Recently in Bitter Greens, Kate Forsyth rewrote the Rapunzel story, enriching it with a historical setting and vivid characters. Other writers take elements from fairy tales and/or write their own tales that mirror the structure of older stories. This is what I have done in Flight in which there are a number of references to both myth and fairy tale, most of which were not consciously intended on my part, only recognised by me when they appeared, revealing that like most of us, my personal history is steeped in the stories and religion of my childhood. In the first draft of Flight, I signaled the use of these references as they arose but during a later edit, decided it would be better to cut out these signals, allowing the reader to identify the references themselves. As I write Falling Between Worlds, I can seen that fairy tale and myth will also play a role in this novel, though I seem to be incapable of planning the inclusion of these elements or planning the structure of my stories. Instead I ask questions and leave myself open to whatever answers arise, letting them find their place on the page and within the story.  For me and for many writers, asking questions is an important part of the process of writing. In so doing we discover what our story is and why we are writing it. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, 'asking the proper question is the central action of transformation – in fairy tales, in analysis and in individuation. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.'

Initiation is a common element in both myths and fairy tales and a major part of novels which we call 'coming of age'. Jones writes that in the myth, the initiation is a spiritual one, whilst in the fairytale, the initiation is 'into a greater awareness of ones own desires and fears'. I'm not sure it's necessary to distinguish between them in this way, as the fairytale initiation is a necessary part of the spiritual initiation. In Flight, Fern must face her fears in order to be initiated into the spiritual world. And indeed, Bettleheim writes that myths and fairy tales 'derive from or give symbolic expression to initiation rites or other rites de passage such as a metaphoric death of an old, inadequate self, in order to be born on a higher plane of existence'. In Flight, Fern is undergoing an initiation as she is forced to let go of her old way of being, in a sense dying to her old self, in order to find a new way of living. This is an initiation of the soul but it can also be read as simply a rite of passage from one stage of life to the next, a coming of age or perhaps a 'coming to self'.

In The Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Marina Warner writes that 'shape shifting is one of fairy tale's dominant and characteristic wonders'. There is much slippage between fairy tale and myth where shape shifting is a common element, the gods and goddesses frequently shifting form in order to confuse and dazzle humanity. Shape shifting is also an integral part of shamanism, with shamans sometimes transforming themselves into creatures in order to traverse the underworld. Shape shifting plays a role in Flight, with Fern at one stage slipping inside the skin of a bear, then later, growing wings and perceiving herself flying. The novel also contains shape shifting in the form of slippage between lifetimes, with both Fern and Eric maintaining their essence and their enmity whilst regularly shifting costumes.

Aside from these general themes of initiation and shape shifting, there are also references to some well known fairy tales. There are some parallels between Fern and Rapunzel. Fern is a reluctant soul, not wishing to inhabit her body or this world, so in a sense, the tower, or attic in her case, is Fern's attempt to escape. Paradoxically, Fern is also a prisoner. She might have chosen to stay in the attic but she is still trapped, held prisoner by herself. Rapunzel must literally let her hair down in order to find a new life. Fern is chased from her attic but she too must embrace life, and it is Adam, her true prince, who helps ground Fern and teaches her to live. In a sense, Adam too is blinded in the novel. He can't see what Fern can see, he can't look into minds or enter her dreams. Instead he must trust her and his own role in the story.

In Fern's penchant for sleep, there is a reference to Perrault's 'Sleeping Beauty'. Bettelheim writes that Sleeping Beauty is the classic coming of age story, reminding us 'that a long period of quiescence, of contemplation, of concentration on the self, can and often does lead to the highest achievement'. In our modern world this has largely been forgotten and withdrawal from life is viewed with suspicion. After spending months in solitude, Fern prematurely re-enters the world only to be forced into solitude again, this time in the psychiatric ward where she has been placed because her mother and society in general, misguidedly interpret her symptoms as an illness that must be treated, rather than as the welcome first steps in an initiatory process. Sleeping Beauty is a tale of sexual awakening, while Flight is a tale of awakening. Fern has been asleep all her life and her awakening doesn't come at puberty but when she is called to an adventure. Fern must reawaken sexually, as she does with Adam, but it is her whole libido that must awaken, not just its sexual aspect. It isn't a man that Fern needs to bring her back to life, but it is the masculine. Fern is out of balance, overtaken by the shadow side of her feminine aspect and terrified of the masculine. Her journey is to seek balance. In a sense the prince is simply a part of herself, the active masculine side that she must embrace.

There are other, more minor references to fairy tales in the novel. Early in the story, Fern falls down some steps and descends into the underworld, just as the shamans do in order to retrieve souls, and as Lewis Carroll's Alice did when she fell down a rabbit hole and found herself in Wonderland. Like Alice, Fern finds that this world is very different from her own, with a new set of rules that are not entirely rational and which she must learn in order to find her way. Later there's a  reference to Cinderella when Fern is dressing for dinner in her father's house and slips on the stiletto shoes her father has selected for her. I have used the shoe as a symbol of power, the power of a man over a woman. Fern tries the shoes on and to her surprise they fit almost perfectly. This suggests that Fern's father, Eric is her prince, something that almost becomes the case, when he later attempts to seduce her. Fern obediently wears the shoes but can hardly walk in them. The stiletto heels are crippling for her, sending her off balance, which is exactly what Eric hopes to achieve. Later, after rejecting her father, Fern kicks the shoes off and frees herself from his influence.

In our writing we can make specific references to known fairy tales and myths, we can mirror their structure (something I will explore in a later post), and we can also draw on their themes which are often powerful explorations of life and its necessary transitions. According to Steven Swann Jones in The Fairytale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination, 'the objective of the myth is oneness with the divine . . .The objective of the legendary quest is social harmony. . . and the objective of the fairytale quest is personal happiness'. So if, on one level, myths are the mega stories that societies tell about themselves, then fairy tales are the micro stories. Fairy tales address everyday problems in a fantastical way, giving a nudge to a child unwilling to move on to the next stage of life, providing guidelines for understanding the dangers one faces in life (Red Riding Hood) and exploring notions of good and evil. With their emphasis on moral behaviour and rewards, fairy tales both define the world and hint at the possibilities of breaking free of those definitions. Characters, such as Bluebeard's wife are both punished and rewarded for breaking the rules. Warner writes that fairy tales 'offer a way of putting questions, of testing the structure as well as guaranteeing its safety, of thinking up alternatives as well as living daily reality in an examined way'. Perhaps then, fairy tales are a way for us to understand and accept the paradoxes of life; pointers to the lessons which are able to be learned through myth. As Hans Christian Anderson once said, 'life itself is the most wonderful fairytale of them all'.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Writing Myth

'A myth is a story that is true on the inside but not the outside.'

Joseph Campbell

As my new novel begins to form I'm wondering how I might use myth to enrich the story and deepen the themes - something I did extensively in my previous novel, Flight. This has inspired me to consider once again what it is about myth that is so fundamental to humanity and whether or not it is still relevant in our world today. It is myth that forms the basis of most cultures' storytelling, so it has a number of functions that are above and beyond simple entertainment. Myth is an intuitive way of interpreting the world around us but to a large extent it has now been superseded by the current rational method of understanding and measuring reality. For me, myth contains vital truths and yet in our modern world, it has come to be defined as something untrue, as seen in our phrase, 'exploding the myth'. As Karen Armstrong writes, 'we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned with what actually happened. But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event had meant.' So it seems to me that in our modern tendency to confuse fact with truth we are in danger of losing meaning. 'A myth is true,' says Armstrong, 'because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.'

Jung wrote that 'myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.'  In The Mythic Journey, Jungian psychologists, Liz Greene and Juliet Sharman-Burke wrote that 'myths have the mysterious capacity to contain and communicate paradoxes, allowing us to see through, around and over the dilemma to the heart of the matter.' Mythologist, Joseph Campbell wrote that 'myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.' While Christopher Vogler applied definitions of myth to contemporary stories, insisting that all stories are sacred, all have the capacity to heal and all mirror the structure of their larger counterparts, the mythic heroic stories.

In The Artists Way, Julie Cameron writes that 'creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms', while Catherine Ann Jones believes that 'to write from one part of your self, the logical mind, results in a fragmented story as well as a fragmented life'. Certainly for me the writing of Flight was not an simply an intellectual process but one which intuitively drew upon the mystery behind creativity. A few years ago as I was writing Flight, I found to my surprise, that I had been unconsciously using mythic elements, drawing from both the content and the patterns of ancient stories. Once I had recognised that this was happening I was able to make the process conscious and develop certain elements in order to explore the themes that were important to me. In the end it was myth that gave shape and depth to my novel and it was myth that helped me to understand what I was writing about and why I needed to write it. Consequently, Flight is heavily laden with references to myth and fairytale; from Sleeping Beauty to the myth of Cassandra, something I will explore more further in a later post. It's themes and plot were drawn from common elements in myth such as the curse or prophecy, mirroring in many ways the classic patterns of heroic myth as identified by Otto Rank. Fern is born to a powerful man, her birth is accompanied by a prophecy, she is abandoned and brought up by strangers, unaware of her identity. As an adult she must seek her father and confront him, potentially bringing about his death in order for the natural cycles of change to continue unimpeded. And finally, the structure of Flight mirrors in many ways the stages of story that Joseph Campbell identified, something I discuss briefly below but will explore further in a later post.

Campbell not only identified a common pattern in the structure of mythic stories but also interpreted what this pattern meant, socially, psychologically and to a certain extent, spiritually. Of all stories, Campbell believes it is the myth that speaks to us most strongly. And of all myths it is the universal story of the quest to find the essence of self, that appeals most to a modern day humanity in search of meaning in a world where meaning and identity has moved its focus from the group to the individual. In the past, and primarily for survival purposes, the individual was first and foremost a part of society. Exile was a life-threatening break with existence and therefore the worst possible punishment. Yet exile (physical or psychological), is also the necessary first step on the heroic quest, a breaking free of the known or ordinary world and a stepping into the unknown. In the opening to Flight, Fern has unknowingly taken the first step in the quest, exiling herself from family and society 

The reward for this quest is self-knowledge, but the true hero will also ultimately return to society bringing back that which he/she has learned, and thus enriching the community. However, unlike fairy tales, which almost invariably finish with a version of 'and they lived happily ever after', myths embrace the possibility of tragedy and change. In myth, endings are not fixed and new quests are often necessary, the hero may die on his quest, or like Gilgamesh, return triumphant from the Underworld, only to have the elixir for eternal life slip through his fingers. Sometimes the hero may find that the metaphorical gold he or she found, has turned to dust, or like Buddha, he or she may return with their treasure, only to be faced with the difficult task of telling a story that is beyond words. In Flight, Fern is given information, allies and tools that she must integrate and begin to use, in order to overcome the obstacles and dangers. In the end, Fern uses these rewards well and returns to society carrying this metaphorical gold.

Campbell emphasised the importance of metaphoric and poetic readings of myth, which allow for psychological and metaphysical interpretations that help us to map our development. Purely literal or rational interpretations of story create a dangerous black and white world in which dogma rules. So do our contemporary stories fill the spaces that myth once filled or have they lost something fundamental? Is it the stories that are depleted or simply the way that we read (see Reading Between The Lines)?  I don't know the answers to these questions but I do know that if we simply skate over the surface of stories we will forget how to measure them in anything but rational terms – the terms of logos. It is in the depths of story that the true lessons lie and it us up to us as writers to include the hidden truths of mythos in our stories in order to feed our readers and our selves on living stories that speak to us on many levels.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Catharsis And Transformation In Writing

'Through writing, suffering can be transmuted into art.'

Louise de Salvo, Writing as a Way of Healing

My father, like many of us, was afraid of death. So much so, in fact, that he refused to live. He was a sick man with a weak heart and a fear of almost every aspect of life. After surviving six or so heart attacks and an anuerism in his brain, he still clung to life, even joining a second church in the final years. 'Double indemnity,' I used to joke. Needless to say, we didn't get on too well. In fact, fathers - cruel, absent and sick, have been a major theme in my writing to date.

When Christian theologian, Parker Palmer wrote, 'the greatest paradox of all: that to live we have to die', he was most likely referring to the obvious scientific fact that death is an inescapable part of life; in a sense it is the only certainty we have in life. Life is full of paradox. That is part of its beauty. But Parker Palmer's statement isn't simply about the certainty of death; within it we can also find the ancient idea that in order to live well one must symbolically die to one's self and be reborn into a new self. This is found in religious stories and myths across many cultures, such as the death and resurrection of Jesus and the Babylonian story of the goddess, Innana's descent into the underworld. This idea is also deeply embedded within more contemporary story, within the arc of character and the transformation that may or may not occur in the course of the character's physical and/or psychological journey through the story.

As I wrote in an earlier post Digging Deep – Writing Character, there are a number of metaphors for this journey of transformation and they are powerful reminders that each of us is meant to evolve, to embrace change and to learn from our experiences. There are key moments of change in the journey of major characters – turning points or moments of catharsis. These are moments when a character is forced, or chooses to turn away from what is familiar and face the unknown, and in so doing comes to a realisation of some sort. In a sense they are a purging of an old way and an opening to the new. They occur at various points in a story and thus relate to the movement of plot but importantly they also relate to character development. In Flight, each of Fern's emotional breakthroughs represent a reclaiming of a fragment of self, providing her with the opportunity to become whole again and discover a new way of living (more on the character arc in a later post).

Catharsis is a word that means vomiting up or purging, and is a term that was originally associated with Aristotle and Greek drama, which was, according to Christopher Vogler, 'constructed with the intent of triggering a vomiting up of emotions by the audience'. During the nineteenth century Franz Mesmer began to use hypnotherapy with his patients and discovered that part of the cure often involved a healing crisis in which blocked emotions rise to the surface. A century later, Freud began provoking catharsis in his patients, and now the concept is widely used in psychotherapy. While catharsis is a common element in story, writing too, can be a cathartic process for many people, a way of expelling or simply becoming acquainted with, the demons that haunt them, or as Jung would call them, the shadow aspects of our selves that we bury deeply within us. As a teacher of creative writing I have seen many times how the simple act of framing a story or of understanding the motivations behind a character's actions can challenge the foundations on which a person has lived their lives, forcing them to question the stories that they have told themselves about who they are. In Writing as a Way of Healing, Louise DeSalvo explains that we are the accumulation of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. So changing our stories. . . can change our personal history, can change us. Through writing we often revisit our past and review and revise it. What we thought happened, what we believed happened to us, shifts and changes as we discover deeper and more complex truths.' So in separating a story from ourselves, in writing it down, we are changing our perspective on it and are therefore able to see it differently, without the burden of emotions.

In the writing of Flight, I could feel the cathartic process working its magic on me as I purged and released myself from a good deal of the past, just as Fern, my protagonist did. The process of writing, of weaving fact and fiction, memory and imagination into a story, helped me to learn lessons from the past, thereby enabling me to evolve as a human being. Writing about my own parents (albeit in fictional form) enabled me to step into their shoes and thus begin to feel empathy for them. In so doing, I began the process of forgiveness. According to psychologist, Jean Houston, forgiveness can have 'a momentous and evolutionary potency' and its roots are located in the discovery of the Larger Story. This is a process I have frequently observed with students when I run character workshops. The most profound exercises are always the ones in which I ask students to shift their perspective and step into the shoes of another character, usually someone to whom their main character is opposed. It is an excellent exercise in empathy and in developing an understanding of the often unconscious motivations behind human behaviour (more on character motivation in a later post).

In a sense catharsis underpins the transformative potential of the process of writing and of story itself. While catharsis provides an emotional clearing the character must then take the next step and integrate what they have learned, in order for change or transformation to be possible. Karen Armstrong wrote that 'a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another.' Story then can be transformative, helping us on our journey towards individuation, as Jung describes it, a journey that is not taken automatically when someone reaches a certain age, but rather is dependent on our willingness to comprehend the nature of self and become true individuals. Flight started out as a story of alienation and anger, but it became instead a story of love and forgiveness, and in the process I liberated myself from much of the past and from the weight of unresolved memories.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Digging Deep: Writing Character

'Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.'

C. G. Jung

Secrets are fertile ground for writers because they lie at the very heart of character. Conjuring images of dark musty cupboards rattling with bones, and of snakes slithering through wood piles, secrets are framed in silences. Adept at creating conflict, secrets are embedded within personal and family stories; the unspoken, the prohibited, the places we fear to tread. When these secrets are released they strike us at our core, but then most likely we will end up asking: So what? Was that all? You see, the danger of secrets so often lies not in their content but in their very existence. Secrets have a way of passing down from one generation to the next, growing, deepening, poisoning; the silences around them creating gaping chasms between people and between generations. Sometimes we accidentally stumble over a secret but generally it takes courage to chase one down and look it in the face. It takes a profound need to break free of a pattern and to take a close look at who we really are.

My first novel, Gathering Storm is about secrets, the corrosive sort that are passed down from one generation to the next, while my new novel, Flight is about the secrets we carry within ourselves, just out of reach of our memories, secrets that manifest in the forms of patterns of behaviour, unconsciously repeated over and over until we are forced to stop and face what we are evading. Mythologist, Joseph Campbell believed that the slaying of a dragon in a story is a metaphor for inner change, for facing those things within us that we are most afraid of. The plot then is a metaphor for character development. The outer passage of a story incidental, the inner passage fundamental. The outer passage the costume, the inner passage the essence. There is a tension there, because whilst the outer journey often follows a linear sense of time by moving into the future, the inner journey is often a series of movements into the past, not a straight line but a thematically choreographed dipping into memory. This inner journey uncovers the fragments that motivate a character's actions and creates an opportunity for the character to eventually heal a wound.

There are many metaphors for the journey of a character in a story. Alchemy is one; that fiery process of turning lead into gold. Or there's the symbolism of death and mystical resurrection, the shamanic descent to the underworld, followed by magical flight, the journey into the labyrinth to face the monstrous within us and the thread with which we find our way back out once again, forever changed. All of these are metaphors of transformation, something which begins to occur to varying degrees in a story when a character turns to face the unknown or the unremembered. But transformation is a process, not a product, it is perpetual and vital. As with life, in story there are turning points, moments of catharsis, of understanding, followed by periods of integration of that new knowledge.

In Flight, Fern's must retrieve and release lost memories in order to become whole again. Paralleling the quest of the hero in ancient mythology, Fern's journey through the wilderness is symbolic of the journey into the labyrinth, or the underworld. A place where fear is faced and inner change happens. Flight is a metaphysical novel in which the classic narrative patterns of the adventure story and the spiritual journey are intermingled. Since the time of humanity's first storytellers, the unnamed shamans, we have told stories that document the journeys of the soul, sending our characters deep into a literal or metaphoric underworld in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. In Flight, Fern takes her first reluctant steps in an odyssey, embarking on a dangerous journey that will eventually bring her face to face with her deepest fears. As Fern herself soon discovers, in order to fly, one must first be willing to fall. That is, after all, the nature of story, an invitation to journey, to adventure, to remember who we really are, something that is summarised so beautifully by TS Eliot in Four Quartets,

'We shall not cease from explorations

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.'

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Reading Between The Lines

'Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.'

James Russell Lowell

It was a timely decision to designate this year as the National Year of Reading. Literacy is fundamental to living in our society, to meeting the demands of everyday life and to discovering the magic contained within books. Yet even when we are literate, we run the risk of losing that magic. In this increasingly fast paced, hi-tech society we have become impatient, finding ourselves drawn to abbreviations rather than elaborations. Facebook and twitter reduce our news to paragraphs and sentences respectively, micro-fiction is blossoming, the pace of our stories is increasing, as is the speed with which they are delivered, until there is little time for contemplation, for pausing over a beautiful passage in a story, for allowing stories to seep into us and change us from within. And yet stories are vital. More than mere entertainment, they tell us who we are and they help us to find ourselves.

As Ralph Waldo Emmerson once said, 'I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.' Each of us is the product of the stories we tell ourselves, the stories our culture, our society, our family, our friends, our teachers, our filmmakers and our authors tell us. Story is what forms our identity and our opinions. But stories can do something else too. They can be truly revolutionary. When we read heroic myths, or novels which tell of the coming of age of a character, then we find that these stories can also help to free us from an identity that has been constructed by others and to see through the ideology in which we are immersed. Reading can and should help us to learn how to live as individuals within society, by encouraging us to reach inwards and explore ourselves and showing us how to reach out and connect with others.

Our imagination is a vital part of each of us. It is what makes us human, enabling us to experience events and emotions we might not normally experience, to reflect, to find commonality with others and thus understand ourselves. And most importantly, our imagination is what allows us to step into the shoes of others and so develop empathy. For as Joyce Carole Oates once wrote, reading helps us to 'slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul,' A tool, a toy, a gift and a responsibility, the imagination is something which must be developed and nurtured, not ignored or stifled. Reading is a collaborative effort between the author and the reader, allowing the reader to use his or her imagination to bring a story to life. Hence, our frequent disappointment with film adaptations of novels, which rarely come close to the extraordinary world or the characters we have already created in our imaginations from reading the novel. For as Stephen King wrote in On Writing, 'description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

If the stories we tell ourselves, and the way in which we use our imaginations play a role in creating who we are, then it might not be enough to simply encourage reading, we might also need to consider what we choose to read and how we read. At present, many of our stories, across much of our media, celebrate violence and cynicism, anger and betrayal. A premium, it seems, is placed on ugliness, and stories that 'tell it how it is' receive accolades from critics. There is much that is ugly and violent in this world and much of it needs telling, but from chaos and pain it is possible, through story, to create harmony and peace. Why are we so afraid to tell stories that explore love and compassion and hope? Why do we so often deride them? If story can change us, then it can also change the world, so perhaps we should be writing and reading stories that are optimistic, that 'tell it how it might be' instead of 'how it is'. Franz Kafka once wrote that 'a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us'. These are the kinds of stories that I search for as a reader and the ones I seek to write. Stories should stay with us, should linger in our conscious and unconscious selves, working their magic even after we have finished with their writing, or their reading.

And as to how we read? Perhaps it's time to once more step beyond the limitations of the predominant story of science and rationality. Instead of insisting on the distinction between fact and fiction, or denigrating myth as false, we might then allow ourselves to read more deeply, exploring the nature of truth rather than fact. For not all truth is measurable. As Maya Angelou writes, 'There's a world of difference between truth and fact. Fact tells us the data. . . but facts can obscure the truth.' Stories can be unifying, building bridges between people but often it depends on how we read them. There are many stories that build fences, creating dangerous 'us and them' distinctions but this only happens when stories are read literally rather than metaphorically. Religious stories are sometimes an example of this. They are too often read literally, which misses a good deal of their beauty and wisdom, whilst creating fences that divide and divisions that kill. It happens too when we skim the surface of a story rather than peer into the depths; when we criticise or value a book for it's language and miss the beauty and purpose of its story; and when we dismiss a memoir because it is not entirely factual, missing the powerful emotional journey the writer has taken us on. In this year of reading, we must remember once again that truth is not fact. That, as the great Sufi poet, Rumi wrote, 'a tale, fictitious or otherwise, illuminates truth'.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

A Book Excerpt from Flight

'In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one.'

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

As my new novel is published this week, I'm too unsettled to write a 'proper' post, so have decided to be self-indulgent and post the prologue to Flight. It's a long piece, so I've divided it in two and will post the second part later this week. No doubt by next week I will have settled back into a routine and will be able to focus my thoughts once again. For anyone in Australia and New Zealand who wants to read Flight, it is available as of today in bookshops. For international readers, I'm disappointed to say that I haven't yet found international publishers for Flight, but I believe (depending on geographical copyright restrictions) that you can get it as an ebook from Amazon or Bookdepository. I hope you enjoy the prologue.

Flight - Prologue (Part 1)

I came early, slithering into the outside world and into safety, or so I hoped. But this was to be the first of many hopes, all dashed against the brutally sharp edges of reality. As in all great myths, my birth was accompanied by a prophecy. I, it seemed, would be the death of my father. How this was to come about no one could say. But the prophecy was there, it escaped from the mouth of Simple Simon, the old gardener at the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide where my mother often went to sit in her lunch hour.

On this particular day she was waiting to meet my father. He was late and the pregnant girl felt a persistent nagging worry. There was something big hovering around the edges of things, a sense that life had woken up that morning slightly askew. Nothing she could put her finger on, but it was enough to make her nervous. And then there were the contradictions: worry that he would come, worry that he wouldn't. Fear and love tugging her between them until all she could feel was a tearing anxiety. You see, my father was a strong willed man, older than her, but still too young he said, to be tied down like this. He would have walked away but he was snared by his desire for my mother. She was beautiful and fragile and needy, easy to bully but also detached in a way that he could never put a finger on. This detachment was what kept him there, waiting, wanting her to surrender completely.

It was summer but there was an unexpected chill in the air. The wind was a fresh south easterly, not the usual hot northerly that stirred up dust and discomforts, and the sky was clear enough to make everyone's heart lift. Even my mother's, the seventeen-year-old girl with the rounded belly who sat on a bench chewing a deviled-egg sandwich and watching Simon methodically plant a row of violets, a flurry of chattering birds surrounding him.

When a magpie greedily pecked Simon's finger, perhaps thinking it a fat juicy worm, my mother forgot her troubles for a moment and laughed. Simon looked up, directly at her, and her laughter quickly turned into a shudder. Where one eye should have been there was a socket, dark and deep. One eye looking out, the other inwards – perhaps this was the secret of his second sight. Or then again, it might have been the snakebite all those years ago which left him hovering between life and death for weeks on end. When he finally woke he knew things other people didn't, but he had forgotten how to live in this world. No one knew how old Simple Simon was or how long he'd been working in the Botanic Gardens. He was a fixture, like the giant oak under which my mother sat.

Simon stood up straight, wincing as he stretched, one hand massaging the small of his back, the other leaning on his spade. 'Ah,' he said, shaking his head. 'That one will be the death of her father.' Wincing again at the creaking in his swollen joints, he walked over to my mother and poked his finger into her tight belly. 'Mark my words, the death of him.' While she sat staring at him, open-mouthed, he went back to his planting, still shaking his head, but with a gleam in his eye.

At that moment I moved. Well, bounced really. Did a somersault in a small space, causing my mother to double over in pain and think her time had come. It hadn't. I wasn't going anywhere. Safety, I thought, lay in the warm fluids that contained me. And I didn't want to kill anyone, especially my own father, even though I wasn't exactly fond of him. There'd been words already, white knuckles and fists, sending me curling up into a tighter self-protective ball. My father didn't love me. Even then I knew that. And he didn't love my mother. Like me, she stood between him and his plans. He wanted only to conquer her, in the same way he planned to conquer the world. You see, my father had big ideas swirling inside his head. Even then he loved power more than people. Even then he would let nothing stand in his way.

My mother loved my father but for all the wrong reasons. Love, hate and fear were all bound up together for her. She was young and weak and couldn't distinguish between these things. She wanted me and she didn't. She was afraid. It's not unusual. And Simon's prophecy had filled her throat with the burning need to tell. So when my father arrived a few minutes later, she laughed a kind of brittle nervous laugh and repeated what Simon had said. It was a big mistake, because more than anything my father wanted to live. He was a rational man, or so he claimed, but underneath that rationality lay a deep-rooted superstition. Underneath everything, he knew the power of shadow.

At first he tried to laugh it off but my mother could see the discomfort in his eyes and the tension in his fingers, already bunching up into fists.

'You should have got rid of it,' he hissed. 'I told you.' Then he hit my mother hard in the belly, the shock and pain spreading through her thin skin and into me.

At that moment I decided it was safer out than in. I fled, bursting the bag that contained me, sending the warm liquid pouring down my mother's legs, soaking her pants and forming a puddle on the ground under where she sat, her heart beating in terror from the attack, her breath coming in quick panting bursts. Her fear spread quickly into me. In a panic I bounced my head again and again, pushing at her uterus, sending out waves of contractions. She ran, out of the gardens and onto the footpath, winding her way through other pedestrians, doubling over with the pain as another contraction hit, then running again, away from him, away from the agony that was me and that was tearing her neatly down the middle.

It was lunch hour in the city and there were lots of people about. She could see the concern in their eyes but her terror didn't allow her to respond. Like a panicked horse she bolted, not noticing where she was. It took a Don't Walk sign to bring her to her senses. Perhaps it was some instinct for survival, or the need to protect me. Perhaps it was fate, for the prophecy had been written in the stars and spoken aloud by Simple Simon, setting it in motion. Or perhaps someone reached out their hand and grabbed her arm or dress, yanking her to a halt. It could have been any of these things that made her stop, only a half-second away from the truck that muscled across the intersection, dangerously close to the kerb, making everyone step back and brushing the wind through her hair just as my head burst free of the birth canal, only to find itself imprisoned in her underpants as she slid, moaning, to the ground, hands reaching out to support her. And all the time my father stood back in the crowd, watching me emerge and wanting to stamp the life out of me but unable to come forward. Yet.. . '

(to be continued)

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Rewriting The Future

'The world is changing and the time has come to let go of the old ways, the ones that ensure the repetitions of history. Peace is a gentle thing that can no longer be fought for. Instead it will enter our hearts and spread from there like the ripples of a pebble dropped into a pond.'

Rosie Dub, Flight

I love the new year. There's a freshness to it, a tantalising sense of opportunity and new beginnings. This is a perfect time to publish one novel and begin another. Today, as I sat down to begin my new novel, Between Worlds, a box full of copies of Flight were delivered. It was a precious moment to finally hold this novel in my hand. Like the new year, it feels like both an ending and a beginning; the book symbolises the end of my long journey of writing, as well as the beginning of its own journey, into the hearts and minds of readers.

As I start work on Between Worlds which, like Flight, is set in the present, I find myself pausing to wonder about where humanity is heading. We've reached 2012 and many people are falling into fear over Mayan predictions of the end of the world. I have no doubt that this is a time of change – we can see it in the Arab uprisings, the global economic downturns, the changes in our climate, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. . . The old structures are crumbling and the old powers are clinging onto the ruins, trying to ignore the fact that the people are now able to see through their ruses and will no longer accept inequity and abuses of power as a natural part of society. There is plenty of fuel for pessimism and fear but there is also plenty of fuel for optimism and hope. Each moment we have a choice to focus on one or the other, to see our glass as half empty or half full.

I'm turning fifty in a few days, so it is a natural time of reflection for me on the transitions of life and the inevitability of change. I know that I'm privileged to live in a relatively wealthy and stable society, though there's nothing to say that this will remain the case in years to come. I feel optimistic about the future of humanity and hope that I will be able to contribute in a positive way to creating a new way of living. Inevitably though, it is the younger generations who will bring about change and this is how it always is and how it should be, as is illustrated in the current upheavals around the world, the cycles that govern nature, and many of the greatest heroic myths. In The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Otto Rank identified a common pattern of events in the life of heroes. The hero is usually a child of distinguished or powerful parents, and a prophecy usually accompanies his or her birth, warning that the child will cause the death of the father. Sometimes the father attempts to kill the baby, always to no avail. The baby is then put in a box and set adrift in the water before being saved by animals or people of low birth and brought up by them, unaware of his/her origins. At some point the hero must go on a quest in search of his/her origins and make retribution for the father's unnatural desire to halt change. It is necessary for the child to step into the father's shoes in adulthood, or on a cultural scale, for a new king to step into the shoes of the old king. When this potential is denied by the father then the cycles of life have been denied and stagnation sets in. It is the child's role to force change.

What astounds me is the integrity of today's young people, the extraordinary and mature way they are peacefully, but with determination, planting the seeds of change. From the crumbling ruins of the old structures is arising an amazing movement. No longer are secrets able to be kept hidden, no longer are lies upheld. Greed, inequity and corruption are being exposed. Eventually power will be something that can only be used with integrity, not kept for its own sake. I don't imagine it will be a smooth transition – change rarely is - but it will most certainly be interesting, which reminds me of the old curse – 'may you live in interesting times'.

The events that are happening in our contemporary world and the mythic theme of cyclic change are both deeply rooted in Flight, which begins with a prophecy concerning the protagonist, Fern: 'That one will be the death of her father. . . mark my words, the death of him'. This sets in motion a series of events which, as in myth, will inevitably lead Fern to her fate and hopefully to greater self-knowledge. Now, as I work on the sequel to Flight, I'm asking myself what the catalyst is that will force change by creating conflict and dramatic movement. But more importantly I need to know why there is a need for a catalyst. And of course the answer is that stagnation has set in. Fern has become too comfortable, she has failed to understand that transformation is a perpetual and vital process, not a product. As soon as the idea of self becomes crystalised, it must be transformed in some way, and if this transformation does not occur voluntarily, then it must be forced.

As with story, life is about change. So often we forget the cycles of nature, the waxing and waning of the moon, the course of the seasons, and the circular nature of our lives. Instead we cling to what we know, resisting the natural transitions in life, from child to teenager, to adult, to elder. Or more simply, we resist stepping from the known to the unknown. The wheel of fortune turns and we expend our energy on finding ways to stop it. Story is a reminder that change is natural, it helps us to link our lives back to nature and to understand that change is an intricate part of living. It also helps us to remember that life is a journey, which suggests movement, not stasis. By accepting the path of change, we develop. Like the seasons, stories remind us that life is cyclic, that change is inevitable. Whether or not we accept it, embedded in story lies the invitation to adventure, to journey, to evolve as humans - it's up to us.