Author Archives: Theodora Goss

This post is prompted by two things: First, I heard Elizabeth Gilbert say, in an interview, that according to Joseph Campbell there was no such thing as a heroine’s journey, because the heroine did not need to go on a … Continue reading →

Life is uncertain, we know that. We know that we’re on a small blue globe spinning through the darkness of space. We’ve seen maps of galaxies with the little arrow pointing: “You are here.” We know that in a moment, … Continue reading →

I’ve been decorating, so I’ve been making lots of mistakes. The latest is the Mistake of the Bedroom Curtains. Yes, they have names, like Sherlock Holmes cases. The mistake was that I bought the wrong curtains, but it actually all … Continue reading →

You can’t do everything. You can do a lot of things, but you have to pace yourself. These are the lessons I’ve been learning this month. I’m the sort of person who wants to do everything: Teach. Write novels and … Continue reading →

Goodness, I suppose I must be middle-aged. By which I mean that I’m in my 40s, and that’s what they call middle age, right? It’s supposedly somewhere in the middle . . . Although my grandmother lived to 96, and … Continue reading →

In a blog post called “The Storyteller’s Art,” Terri Windling included a wonderful quotation from Philip Pullman: “[T]here was a sort of embarrassment about storytelling that struck home powerfully about one hundred years ago, at the beginning of modernism. We … Continue reading →

I keep seeing articles of various sorts about “Finding Your Purpose.” I think they’re about the wrong thing. Nowadays, we’re all supposed to find our purpose in life: the fundamental reason we were born, the thing we are supposed to … Continue reading →