WILLIAMSVILLE-The Rock River Players present “The Power of Mythology in Creative Life,” a talk by Allison Stieger, Thursday, March 26, 7 p.m. at Williamsville Hall. The evening will include a talk with visuals followed by a Q&A session. Artists and creative thinkers of all types are encouraged to participate.
Stieger founded Mythic Stories in 2004 to support creative individuals and organizations in unlocking the sacred stories that illuminate their untold potential. With a master’s degree in mythological studies with an emphasis in depth psychology, she offers expertise on how the world’s most ancient narratives can enrich and inform creative life.
Stieger will speak to the heart of her work, which led her to these sorts of speaking engagements as well as to writing a forthcoming book, creating classes, and coaching individuals.
As creative people, she says, “we go through and dig into our own stuff and come out with something that’s beneficial and positive.”
Through it all, we are buoyed by stories and inspired by others’ creative expressions.
“It could be a myth, it could be a painting, it could be a building — anything. We all have things we turn to that are important to us, that help us get through the suck of human life, right? The ancestors left their stories for us to learn from. They left their art for us. Everybody turns to something that makes you feel just a little bit better that day.”
In her work, Stieger explores how one can turn what might be a devastating experience with health, mental health, relationships, or the like into productive expression.
“One can hit rock bottom, end up in the underworld, and work through it, however painful that process might be,” she says.
“There’s going to be something in every life, something that just drops you into the underworld,” Stieger continues. “Sometimes it’s sudden; sometimes it’s not.”
In the process, “you’re going to go down, and it’s going to be terrible, but you’re going to take solace and succor from your favorite painting, your favorite film, your favorite novel or poem or myth,” she says. “That thing is going to be an ally — it’s going to make it possible for you to go through what you have to.”
That process, Stieger explains, can yield something worth sharing for the benefit of others, especially from an artist’s hand and mind.
The quandary, she adds, is, “How do you know when it’s time to leave the underworld? How do you know when your work is ready?”
Processing trauma on the page or on the easel can be “the kind of thing you would do with a therapist,” she says.
But it can also take the form of “something that’s useful to other people,” which Stieger says is “the differentiating factor.”
“You can write about how terrible your mother was, but if there’s not something in there that’s actually going to interest — and benefit — somebody else, then your work isn’t ready,” she says.
The intention as an artist, she explains, “is getting to the point where we actually have something valuable to share,” and in so doing, private pain is transformed into “something that’s actually going to make somebody else’s path a little bit easier.”
Of the stories, Stieger says she tends to call most on Roman and Greek mythology. “And I use one particular myth from Mesopotamian mythology, ‘The Descent of Inanna,’ quite a lot. I use Celtic. I use Norse.”
But she adds that with her coaching clients, she will often ask, “Where are your people from?” or “Is there a particular mythic system that you really feel drawn to?”
“The client I just finished with is of Iranian and Cherokee descent,” Stieger says. “So we worked in that space. Our myths show us that we can, in fact, learn from them enough that we have something to share on with other people afterward — that you can, in fact, bring treasure out of the underworld,” transmuting pain “into art, into beauty, into power.”
That concept, she said, is a core part of what she will talk about: Instead of providing the opportunity of simply surviving a traumatic experience, myths present the option of transformation.
“So it’s survival versus transformation. You’re going to try to pull some kind of wisdom out of this experience — or some kind of art that you’ve made — and you’re going to learn from your ancestors. We take whatever it is that they have to offer, we go through it, and now we’re ready to help somebody else. And this is the beauty of human life, right? That we want to share what we’ve learned.”
The Vermont culture with ‘Bernie Sanders vibe’
Relatively new to southern Vermont, Stieger explains how she, her husband, and two teenage sons landed here.
Having spent most of her life in the West — central California and Alaska — she and her family felt compelled several years ago to search for an escape from air quality issues rendered by wildfires in the Seattle home her family had had for 27 years.
We “honed in on Vermont, mostly for cultural reasons and that Bernie Sanders vibe, I guess,” she says.
In some ways, too, “it reminded me a lot of Alaska growing up, just that sort of ‘chop wood, carry water’ ethos,” Stieger says. “And the climate’s more like Alaska, so I had a kind of feeling of home already.
“Sometimes you go to a place and it just feels right,” she says. “It feels like home, even though you’ve never been there. And that was how it was for us.”
A whole new world
Beyond a childhood love of mythology and her advanced studies, discovering the work of Joseph Campbell, an author and scholar of mythology and comparative religion, when she was about 30 years old “really locked me in.”
“I was feeling kind of lost in my late 20s, not really sure where I wanted my life to go,” she says.
Stieger then dug into The Masks of God, Campbell’s four-volume overview of world mythology.
That, in turn, opened “a whole new world” of Jung, Nietzsche, “and all the other writers that he talked about,” she says. “It was wonderful.”
Having been raised an evangelical, she’d left the church, but not without elements of religion that wove into deeper understandings of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, archeology, and literature.
Stieger became a master pastry chef and worked in technology for Adobe and Microsoft as she went through her own underworld experience with intense health issues.
Live Mythic, the book Stieger is writing, begins as she is wrestling with those issues on a quest in India that, she says, “restarted my life.”
The book explores archetypes with which Stieger engages deeply, exploring their potency and nuances. For instance, Campbell, she explains, focuses on the “hero’s journey.”
She takes a different spin to de-emphasize the masculine in that concept and to recognize that not everyone feels comfortable under a hero’s mantle. Instead, we may each be called to do something heroic — or to make a heroic choice: a one-off we can handle.
Stieger’s book will deal, in part, with the heroic journey at the end of which one “would come out ready now to share what you’ve learned with the community.”
“You’re going to create your art, you’re going to give advice, whatever it is you’re going to do,” she says. “So it’s kind of like pulling a cloak around yourself.”
Stieger hopes her Williamsville lecture will inspire people to look at their work and their approach to the creative life in a new way. If interest warrants, she’ll offer a follow-up workshop in which participants can apply what they’ve learned through the talk.
“I have a lot of creativity exercises that I guide people through that can be really helpful to kind of lodge” these discoveries into one’s mind.
Good fortune and coincidence
Stieger’s Newfane home is full of mythological visuals: the dining room wallpaper, for instance, tells the story of Telemachus from The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem from ancient Greece. “It fits the era of the house, and also my own personal interests.”
The ceiling of her office is etched with “gods and dragons. And this is Circe from The Odyssey,” she says, pointing to a sculpture with a pink balloon emerging from its mouth. (She also has a cat named Circe.)
Acknowledging the journey full of good fortune and coincidence that landed her family here, she says, “I could have moved anywhere in the world, but we chose here, and we have this beautiful home in this beautiful community.”
Now in Vermont, she adds, “everything about my work just got lit with rocket fuel. I don’t even know why. I don’t know if it was the room of one’s own instead of sitting on the couch in our living room in Seattle or what it was, but it’s just really caught fire. I’ve been doing more public speaking, more coaching. I create classes.”
Candidly, Stieger adds that one reason she wanted to offer Thursday’s free lecture “in the first place was just to introduce myself to my new community.”
“I know there are a lot of creatives in the area, which is one of the reasons we chose to move here,” she says. “ And I just want to say, ‘Hey, you know I have this weird niche thing, and I think it’s interesting, and if you’re the kind of person that also finds it interesting, come check it out.’”
In the process, she knows she’ll be making new friends.
The Rock River Players present “The Power of Mythology in Creative Life,” Thursday, March 26, 7 p.m. at the Williamsville Hall, 35 Dover Rd., Williamsville. Admission is free; donations to sustain Rock River Players’ programming will be welcomed. For more information, visit mythicstories.com and rockriverplayers.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.