Inviting You to Spend Some Time Dreaming About Myths

You are invited to participate in a large-scale imagining: in collaboration with Cleveland author RA Washington, I'm asking a group of writers, artists and visionaries to use the following writing on myths in our time as a prompt for a piece (writing or visual art: your choice) of your own.

We will be collecting submissions of selected work done off this prompt into a book and a public reading.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, April 2, 2010. Work can be sent to stewardsoflostlands@gmail.com, or you can contact me there to arrange a drop-off. After the work is reviewed, we’ll let folks know the plan for releasing the collection and staging a reading/viewing. If you have any questions, drop a line at the above contact info.

We look forward to seeing what people come up with! The writing prompt follows right... now...

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Why the Leaves FallBloomFall

The earth was a goddess whose daughter was abducted by the god of the underworld. Hades kept the girl a captive underground, while her mother raged and withered, unwilling to put forth any fruit until she found her Persephone. The leaves withdrew, the grains hardened, the sun clouded over. Demeter did eventually bring her daughter home, but not before the girl (perhaps starving for a simple taste of above-ground ripeness) had eaten 4 pomegranate seeds in the underworld. For this, she was condemned to return there for 4 months each year, a season her mother would from then on make cold, barren and bleak.

So, winter is because of pomegranate seeds, or more succinctly, because someone was held against her will. Which feels like winter, doesn’t it? Like darkness rolling in at 4:00 pm and icy forbidding streets to slip on while carrying your groceries. Like dirty slush, full buses and the sudden awareness through its freezing on your bones that your flesh is simply meat after all.

Demeter, Persephone and Hades are such a part of my mind’s firmament that I refused some pomegranate offered me in late February this year, out of fear I might draw the long winter out even longer. Strange to think a story so couched in antiquated human dynamics can still transfix me.

I was told their story as a kid to illustrate how myths animate the world with characters whose actions explain why things happen the way they do. But what makes a tale like this stick, when its characters are a bit tired, really, and its human interplay a throwback to my ears? Have we simply not come up with new stories compelling enough to replace them? Or do they hold a specific grotesque, primal magic that new times haven’t produced stories to match?

We’re in new times now, and new times call for new myths that answer to the times, making sense of the world as we know it. So, I want to start asking people a question: what could you use a myth to explain for you?


Maybe a myth for the birth of the imperial mind, how the prevailing assumption got made that domination will always trump cooperation.

Or, a myth to explain Messiah complexes, and the desire for Messianic figures, and the complex complexes built around Messiahs for the people that follow them.

I could use a myth about the speeding up of all things: thought, desire, gratification, discovery, information, ambition, and our minds as well, taking it all in, flashing like strobes.

How about a myth for what happens to the presumed eternal forces of earth and air and fire and water when under the influence of pollutants? Do they look and act the same as in the old stories? Rule the stars reliably? Or are they sick and tired?

Maybe there should be a myth about epidemics of boredom and malaise when there is so much waiting to be done.

I’d like a mythology where women don’t have to be raped by gods to give birth to or be something sacred.

I’d very much be into a myth about the drive to couple and uncouple, the difference between expectation and possession and love itself, and what you reproduce for in the end-times. What sex and relation can produce in end-times.

I’d like one for a virtual world, for infinite anonymous personae, for disguises upon disguises upon disguises and the impact the concealments have on the true and the slow.

And then, maybe a myth where binary and nonbinary thought duke it out in the dark woods.

I wonder, how would they conduct their fighting?

-- Kate Sopko, Cleveland, Ohio