In Act 1 you will travel through the childhood of language and connect with the elemental power of sound. You will tap the potency of rhymes, wishes, spells, dreams and write your own creation myth. Once you have gained creative momentum, the myths of India, Persia and Babylonia will provide fertile places for your writing to evolve.
Act 1 Lesson Titles:
Lesson 1: Magical Language
Lesson 2: Echoes of the Sacred
Lesson 3: The Wishing Well
Lesson 4: The Ladder of Dreams
Lesson 5: Fabulous Tales
Lesson 6: Word of Creation
Lesson 7: Parting with Paradise
Lesson 8: Through the Floodgate
Lesson 9: The Embrace of the Gods
Lesson 10: Between Light and Darkness
Lesson 11: Baking the Stars
In Act 2 you travel with the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and write your Egyptian initiation of earth, water, fire and air. You will compose psalms in the Hebraic tradition; lament with Orpheus the loss of Eurydice; make love poems with Sappho and sober yourself with Roman rhetoric. You will join the voyage of Odysseus and the Gnostic’s quest for truth.
Act 2 Lesson Titles:
Lesson 12: The First of Friendships
Lesson 13: The Weighing of the Heart
Lesson 14: Inside the Burning Bush
Lesson 15: Psalms and other Songs
Lesson 16: The Lyre of Orpheus
Lesson 17: A Journey of Epics
Lesson 18: The Labyrinth of Light
Lesson 19: A Sober State
Lesson 20: The Cross of the Word
Lesson 21: Tongues on Fire
Lesson 22: The Braiding of Words
Act 3 commences with the fierce poetics of battle preserved in Norse myth. You will widen your poetic horizon by following Dante from hell to heaven and Rumi in his ecstatic search for the beloved.
You will monologue with Shakespeare, join Goethe’s Faustian pact with the devil, walk the eightfold path with Buddha and write haiku. You will encounter the threshold experiences of the Modernists and contemporary women poets.
Act 3 Lesson Titles:
Lesson 23: The Poetics of Battle
Lesson 24: The Grail Quest
Lesson 25: Troubadour and Troubairitz
Lesson 26: The Purgatory of Words
Lesson 27: The Alchemical Stage
Lesson 28: Poets in Precedence
Lesson 29: The Pact with the Devil
Lesson 30: The Sermon of the East
Lesson 31: Tracing the Beloved
Lesson 32: Crossing the Threshold
Lesson 33: The Choir of the New