Exploring The Mythic Frankenstein with Molly Dwyer

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Pour yourself a cup of hot tea, throw another log on the fire, and settle back into your favorite chair for - well, not a story exactly, but a conversation about stories. Molly Dwyer is on a first-name basis with the likes of Goethe, Byron, Aesop, and especially Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein. She takes us inside the minds of these literary icons to explore the seeds of creativity and imagination, and the way story both defines and fashions who we are. Most fascinating is Dr. Dwyer's ability to bring us into her own writer's world, where she not only tells her stories but inhabits them, savors them, luxuriates in them - and of course, like every good writer she connects to something much larger than herself. She says, "There's a collective unconscious, a zeitgeist, so that we're moving with energy that's already there to support us. We're drawing on it without understanding that we are. It's supporting and encouraging us to move in a certain way. We're following it all the way back to indigenous people, back to the beginning, and we carry it forward to the next generation." (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)

Bio

Molly Dwyer has studied literature at the National Writing Project, England's Arvon Project, and Oxford University. She holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies, has taught writing and literature for twenty years in workshop and college settings, and was co-director of Satyana Institute's Gender Reconciliation Project in Boulder, Colorado.

Dr. Dwyer's books include:

• Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men (co-author with Will Keepin and Cynthia Brix) (Hohm Press 2007)
• Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein (Lost Coast Press 2008)

To learn more about the work of Molly Dwyer go to mollydwyer.com.

Topics Explored in This Dialogue

• What is the imaginal world that will come to meet you when you enter your own creativity
• What the story of Frankenstein tells us about today's political climate
• How the English Romantic poets have influenced us today
• How we might ultimately be saved by "the exhaustion of war"
• Why the stories you tell are so important