ABSTRACT
What is it to write in the mythic mode? It is to have the sense that trees breathe, the cosmos speaks, things change shape, and the world is essentially comedic, with a capital C, meaning that mythic writers write texts that show us the aliveness of life, including death. Texts are full of hardship, color, shape, sound, love in multiples and diversities. There is the sense that all things rise and fall, wind and circle back, always with verbal awareness, -ing in motion. Humans, animals, plants, stones interact, as do deities with humans, plants, animals, and stones. Writers in the mythic mode reveal profuse con-fusion. This confuses students, which is why, precisely why, we should teach these writers so as to disillusion any too-secure mooring in a faith that is carved with too much satisfaction. Flannery O’Connor once said, “The thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me” (in Fitzgerald, 1979, p. 100).
