On Mythic Fiction

Today we have the honor to present a guest post from author Michael Williams on the topic of mythic fiction. Michael’s visionary literary fiction project The City Quartet falls into this area, so you can gain some insight into the fascinating novels that make up the quartet such as Dominic’s Ghosts and Vine: An Urban Legend.

On Mythic Fiction

by Michael Williams

They’ve always been my kind of stories. I can remember being six or seven years old and reading Gerald Gottlieb’s retelling of the adventures of Ulysses. The story drew me in at once, as it has people for generations, for millennia.

At first, of course, I came for the monsters. I knew, even then, that the creatures were exactly what they were, encountered in exactly that order, because there was power in the details. Myths were the first stories that opened other worlds for me, and to this day, move me more than conventional stories, whether literary or speculative or both.

And here is why, I think:

I knew, even then, that patterns lay underneath the story. That some stories spoke to something basic and essential in me. And that those stories were laced with a kind of urgency that I had not found elsewhere in the things I had read and heard. What caused this knowledge, these feelings? And why do they persist into adulthood, and why do most of us find them necessary for spiritual survival.

Karen Armstrong, in her wonderful Short History of Myth, lists 5 elements of experience that myth provides us. First, she claims, it is born from our mortality and fear of extinction; second, it is usually inseparable from ritual; third, it takes us beyond our experience, to places and deeds we have not visited or undertaken; fourth, it shows us how to behave; and fifth, it presupposes another world alongside ours, a world that somehow sustains and supports us. It is an important list, because it speaks of the larger truths—those relationships to the world and to each other, the basic things that make us human.

Armstrong’s elements of myth sound to me very much like elements that we discover in our experience of art, especially narrative art. And the term “mythic fiction” comes, as far as I can tell, from Terri Windling and Charles DeLint, whose work was characterized as “urban fantasy” before that term became the blurred label that it is today. According to DeLint in an interview with Locus (and I think we can work with this definition), mythic fictions are quite simply, stories that deal “with contemporary people and issues, but…utilize the material of folklore, fairy tale, and myth to help illuminate that.” It’s a definition that is focused enough to be meaningful, but allows a great deal of free reign as to what those contemporary people do and the contemporary issues they face.

My City Quartet, which has been characterized as mythic fiction, does something akin to DeLint’s recipe for the genre. The Quartet, though, is in ways about the power of myth—its ability to shape our understandings, to damage us, but to free us and heal us. “What happens when we believe in stories?” has become the principal question of my longest work. Each book in the Quartet centers on a kind of storytelling in the process of becoming myth—Trajan’s Arch turns around a manuscript of short stories, Vine: An Urban Legend around the amateur production of a classic play, Dominic’s Ghosts around a silent film festival, and Tattered Men around the biography of a homeless man.

And each is structured archetypally, using a mythic pattern as part of the plot: Trajan’s Arch is a coming-of-age story, Vine a Greek Tragedy, Dominic’s Ghosts a Descent to the Underworld, and Tattered Men a Hero’s Journey. My hope is that you will enjoy the novels as semi-realistic accounts infused with the fantastic, but that the experience will also be something a little different from urban fantasy or magical realism: that you will sense patterns in the books that tap into some of the oldest stories you know, and you’ll be drawn toward their worlds with the same sense of eagerness and wonder that a six-year-old boy brought to Mr. Gottlieb’s retelling of the adventures of Ulysses.

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About the author: Over the past 25 years, Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early Weasel’s Luck and Galen Beknighted in the best-selling DRAGONLANCE series to the more recent lyrical and experimental Arcady, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines. In Trajan’s Arch, his eleventh novel, stories fold into stories and a boy grows up with ghostly mentors, and the recently published Vine mingles Greek tragedy and urban legend, as a local dramatic production in a small city goes humorously, then horrifically, awry.

Trajan’s Arch and Vine are two of the books in Williams’s highly anticipated City Quartet, to be joined in 2018 by Dominic’s Ghosts and Tattered Men.

Williams was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of Appalachian foothills and stories of Confederate guerrillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey he made his way through through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britain and Ireland, and has ended up less than thirty miles from where he began. He has a Ph.D. in Humanities, and teaches at the University of Louisville, where he focuses on the Modern Fantastic in fiction and film. He is married, and has two grown sons.

Book Synopsis for Dominic’s Ghosts: Dominic’s Ghosts is a mythic novel set in the contemporary Midwest. Returning to the home town of his missing father on a search for his own origins, Dominic Rackett is swept up in a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival. As those around him fall prey to rising fear and shrill fanaticism, he follows the branching trails of cinema monsters and figures from a very real past, as phantoms invade the streets of his once-familiar city and one of them, glimpsed in distorted shadows of alleys and urban parks, begins to look uncannily familiar.

Author Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mythical-Realism-The-Michael-Williams-Page-128713900543978/

Tour Schedule and Activities

2/13 Ravenous For Reads www.ravenousforreads.com Author Interview

2/13 Breakeven Books https://breakevenbooks.com Guest Post

2/14 Marian Allen, Author Lady www.MarianAllen.com Guest Post

2/15 Inspired Chaos http://inspiredchaos.weebly.com/blog Guest Post

2/16 I Smell Sheep http://www.ismellsheep.com/ Guest Post

2/16 The Book Lover’s Boudoir https://thebookloversboudoir.wordpress.com/ Review

2/17 Jorie Loves A Story http://jorielovesastory.com Review/Author Interview

2/18 The Seventh Star www.theseventhstarblog.com guest Post

2/18 Willow’s Thoughts and Book Obsessions http://wssthoughtsandbookobsessions.blogspot.com/ Review