By John Yorke — 2016
From Avatar to The Wizard of Oz, Aristotle to Shakespeare, there’s one clear form that dramatic storytelling has followed since its inception.
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CLEAR ALL
What might have been a chilly and confusing morning drive to school for father and children has instead been an opportunity to weave an astonishingly intimate fabric of heart and imagination.
Providing ways for people to share their perspectives through storytelling initiatives can contribute to bigger changes in society and even help reduce prejudice.
The climate emergency has clear themes with heroes and villains. Describing it this way is how to build a movement.
“If you turn your back to the blues and deny your dependence on them,” Ellen Meloy wrote in her timeless meditation on water as a portal to transcendence, “you might lose your place in the world, your actions would become small, your soul disengaged.”
The first thing you want is to know that you belong here, that you are a part of this planet, just like the earth and the water, the sun and the wind, and the trees.
We are speaking with Nancy Mellon, an elder in the global storytelling renaissance, a psychotherapist and a former Waldorf teacher who now lives in California.
Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling.
Campbell claimed his theory, which has gone on to influence everything from Star Wars to Disney’s Aladdin, arose from a universal structure inherent in the global myths of antiquity. The problem is, that’s a lie. Campbell’s theory is as mythological as the stories from which it borrows.
Deena Metzger discusses a wide range of topics in this 1984 interview.
From our earliest times of uncertainty, it seems, we have searched for a happy ending.