Catherine D. Yates
This unit rigorously examines a mythical relationship between research and writing based on anthropological and literary studies around how we understand who we are and how we understand our relationship with religion, education and society. It is a template to explore personal and cultural histories guided by a magical, transformative syntax of myths and fairytales following the logic, rationale, and strategies, teachers lead their students on detailed, vulnerable cultural and psychological journeys through research, poetics, fieldtrips, and celebration. In The Yale Review in an article about writing titled ‘Nothing ‘Nothing Is a Memory’ about the New York School poet Bernadette Mayer, Daniel Poppick writes in the Yale Review that the relationship between writing and myth. In Mayer’s hands, Aesculapius, the name of the Greek god of medicine, feels like a playful tribute to poetry’s trickster mutability, a tacit acknowledgment that the language we attach to things is itself mythology—an invention affixed to other inventions, endlessly corruptible. Any use that we attach to it is blown to smithereens…” This combination of mythology and writing leads us to a mythical space where we can investigate playfully what our stories and our experience means.
(Developed for Creative Writing, grades 9-12, and English Language Arts, Poetry, and Literature, grades 11-12; recommended for English Language Arts, Creative Writing, Poetry, and Literature, grades 11-12)
