Jesse Carsten, PhD (they/he) is a mythologist and multidisciplinary artist, poet, musician, and educator. They hold a doctorate in Mythology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and a BFA in creative writing and performance studies from the Art Institute of Chicago. Their doctoral thesis centered on the cosmic jazz composer Sun Ra’s revolutionary personal mythos as embodied creative practice. Jesse has been composing music under the Half Shadow moniker for more than a decade, and self-publishes essays, chapbooks, and zines. Salt, a book of prose poems and photographic images was published, in collaboration with visual artist B. Ingrid Olsen, by Hassla Press, NYC in 2017.
Our events, classes, and seminars bring the community together to hear, learn, and discuss the most compelling issues and ideas of our day. We hope you will join us in our community space and bookstore at 716 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, OR, online, and at partnering venues across Portland and Oregon.
Strange and surreal, mysterious and dream-like, when “the supernatural” is conjured in story we find ourselves lifted out of the ordinary, material world and into more spectacular realms. In this seminar we’ll read novels that embrace this otherworldliness, stretching the familiar first into the unknown, then to the far reaches of personal and collective transformation.
In recent years, authors have become inspired to conjure modern takes on ancient Greek myths in best-seller ready, cinematic novels as well as in more explorative, poetic forms. Many of these bring out the inherent juiciness of these perennial tales, while unveiling feminist, queer, and ecstatic undertones buried in the original texts.
Known for her “fearless and unbridled” writing about the natural world, Annie Dillard’s first three non-fiction books conjure lyrical insights so vivid that they seem to burn. So much more than a “nature writer,” Dillard’s observations of whatever she’s looking at—the transient effects of an eclipse viewing in a small town, a near-deadly airplane crash on an island in the Pacific Northwest, the unraveling of a tangled snake-skin she finds wandering through the woods—reveal the living textures of things: their ordinary strangeness and transcendent beauty.
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