The hero wins

Yes! Hero's Journey/Writer's Journey short course will run, starting in two days, which means tomorrow will be full of sketching out the 5-week plan and detailing the outline for the first 2-hour class.

My main source book, by the way, is Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (Boxtree 1996). It's very approachable and clear, though more film oriented than applies to my reading-on-the-page territory. I get back-up from loads of other myth-y books on my shelves including Jung and, of course, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The trick, always, is to make up the exercises that get people not just learning 'about' archetypal characters and structure but also actually processing it -- by thinking and writing in class.