A new year, a new direction

Newsletter 16: January 1, 2025

A new direction

It’s almost a year to the day since I started The Mythopoetic Classroom, and I think it’s time for a change of direction.

2024 was all about looking back over a career that began in 1970 in a Sydney English classroom (see the post The Sticky Tape Poem) and ended with my retirement in 2015 and the publishing of The Worlds of Harriet Henderson. I’ve posted the chapters of my book School Portrait and sections from my Masters thesis (the stories of Ben and Sarah).

2025 will be more about looking forward. I’ve been working (off and on over a couple of years) on the first draft of a new novel, Sally and the Universarium, and I’d like to finish it. I’m imagining that this year my Newsletters will be more chatty: my writing challenges (see below for the first one), reflections about retired life, pictures of the glorious Clancy.

So, lighter in tone. That’s the plan, anyway.

The PhD Thesis

There’s one project from the past, however, that I’m keen to publish on The Mythopoetic Classroom: my PhD thesis Mating with the World: On the Nature of Story-telling in Psychotherapy. I’m one of those rare birds who loved doing a PhD. My supervisors encouraged me to write it as a story, and so Mating with the World is the story of my work with Joseph (a fictional character, an amalgam of a number of my young clients) and the sometimes thrilling and sometimes anguished conversations I had with my supervisor, the extraordinary Giles Clark.

Perhaps I’m publishing this just for myself. But it’s a good story, and it’s possible that some of you might be interested in reading chapters as I publish them over 2025. If you think you might be interested, have a quick look at Chapter 1: The Evil and the Good.

(I won’t be sending out emails when a new chapter is published, so if you’d like to be notified when I post a new chapter, send me an email – steveshann47@gmail.com – and I’ll let you know when I post.)

Writing Challenge

So, I’ve been working on the first draft of Sally and the Universarium, and last week got stuck with one of the characters, a teacher named Cynthia.

I try to write my way through periods of stuckness. I try to resist the urge to press on with the draft, and instead I write about feeling stuck, hoping that some insight or way forward will emerge from what I write.

Here’s what I wrote in an attempt to find a way through last week’s stuckness.

Write from the wound, not the scar. [George Sanders?]

***

For me, art begins as feeling, an intuitive act that must be divined onto the page. I don’t choose the novels. What I’m seeking always is a story that can contain my obsessions, a sense of great mass and energy hiding behind an opening scene. [Paul Lynch]

***

Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. [Karl Ove Knausgaard]

***

I’ve been struggling with the character of Cynthia, the English teacher. I think that this is partly because I’m making the starting point of my thinking the question of how a classroom scene will fit into what is unfolding in the story. Cynthia becomes a kind of carrier of the ‘theme’ or ‘themes’, and loses any sense of a real character operating in a real world.

This is particularly problematic when I’m trying to balance the personal (her grief around Maurilio, her exhaustion) with her obvious love of teaching (she comes to life in classrooms that Sally describes.) It’s like there are jigsaw puzzle pieces that I’ve made out of aspects of Cynthia, and I’m trying to fit these into the bigger picture … or I bend them to fit, and the character of Cynthia ends up being unconvincing.

So I’m wanting to think freshly about Cynthia, and to use as my starting points the idea of the wound (not the scar), the idea of drawing the essence (what I know deep down) out of the shadows.

What do I know about Cynthia/Steve? First of all, what’s the wound? The ongoing wound?

It’s a sensitivity about how those closest to me perceive me, experience me. There’s a semi-conscious part of me – no doubt a remnant left over from boarding school but also from childhood family dynamics – that feels overly sensitive about my physical or sensual self. This makes me introverted, and suspicious when people say something that implies I have some attractiveness. The suspicion leads me to read into slight miscommunications something much deeper, some desire in the other to be cruel, hurtful, dismissive.

This, I think, is the wound, still fairly easily opened.

But I don’t feel this in the classroom. Kids can be challenging, even rude, or act as if nothing I do touches them in the slightest, and still (for the most part) I feel potent, interested, determined, wanting to think my way around an obstacle. I feel creative, or at least optimistically experimental, convincing myself usually that there is some way through a barrier, with a class or a student or a topic. I feel this enormous frustration that what I intuitively know about learning and students is continually at odds with the ways the system conceives them, so I get frustrated in staff meetings. But I’m usually back in my element once I’m with the students.

And so with Cynthia? She can have all these feelings about herself (her body, her health, her lack of attractiveness, her thinking at times that the Maurilios of the world are laughing at her) and at the same time she can be energetic about her teaching and her students.

Does this constitute Paul Lynch’s ‘great mass and energy’? I’m not sure yet. Certainly it’s not emerging convincingly in the drafts I’ve done. The Cynthia-in-my-drafts feels too constructed to fit my novel’s themes and not organic and ‘from the heaving centre’ of things. The ‘there itself’. I’ll never be a Lynch or a Knausgaard, but it’s good to be influenced by these thoughts.

Sol’s paintings

A number of you have told me how much you’ve loved my son’s Sol’s paintings, which I’ve been using in posts. I’ll continue to use them from time to time, but in order to signal this shift in direction for 2025, the image at the head of posts will be different … probably :-)

The photo at the head of this post is of our garden this morning. It’s over 30 years since we moved here, and the garden then was an ignored flat paddock of untended grass.

Here’s more of what it looks like now.