Adding the Epic to Fantasy: World Building by the Author of the Silk & S...

Karen Azinger's new video is a fun watch. She also offers tips on worldbuilding in a fantasy.

Poet Emmett Wheatfall Speaks to Portland Chapter of Willamette Writers

"If You Want to Be Immortal, Write A Book" with Emmett Wheatfall

Tuesday, October 7/7:00 – 8:00pm

Willamette Writers Writing Center, 3121 S. Moody Ave, Portland, OR, 97239

Poet Emmett Wheatfall will take on the quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers, as a starting point for exploring the writer’s journey. Every serious writer aspires to literary success and recognition, and along the way, we all need inspiration. Join us on October 7th at the Willamette Writers Writing Center (3121 S. Moody, Portland) from 7:00-8:00 pm.

Emmett Wheatfall is just the speaker to inspire. Attendees can expect motivation, powerful quotes that stir the heart to write, and a lively mix of lecture and robust conversation. As Emmett reminds us, every serious writer should pant like a deer thirsting and searching for a water brook. Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with poet Emmett Wheatfall and reignite your passion for writing!

About Emmett Wheatfall

Emmett Wheatfall is an American poet, Oregon Poet Laureate nominee, and recipient of the prestigious Oregon Poetry Association Patricia Ruth Banta Award. His poetry has been published in several books, collections, and anthologies, and one of them, As Clean as a Bone, was a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist and a da Vinci Eye Award Finalist. Emmett has keynoted two Oregon Poetry Association Conferences. In 2020, Corban University produced a 9-part series documentary that highlights Emmett’s early life and poetry. Emmett Wheatfall is one of Oregon’s premier poets. https://www.poet-emmettwheatfall.com

About Our Events

Willamette Writers meetings are free and open to all writers. Middle and high school writers are encouraged to join Young Willamette Writers. Attendees are welcome to make a donation to help support the cost of events. If you feel sick, please stay home and join us online. Contact the office if you have any accessibility requests.

We look forward to seeing you there!

For more information about Willamette Writers chapter meetings and events, visit https://willamettewriters.org/events/

Capsule Movie Reviews That Explore Storytelling

Quick Cuts -- Capsule Movie Reviews

Reviews by Bill Johnson
These capsule reviews offer a basic overview of what these Hollywood movies did (or didn't do) to engage an audience. They are not meant to convey a full review of the movie, or a scene by scene breakdown of story characters.

Caught Stealing

I was going to skip this movie as a generic action film until I saw the director was Darren Aronofsky. The main character is young man who missed a chance to play major league baseball because of a car accident that killed a friend. As the story opens he's a bar tender in New York with a great girlfriend who wonders if he'll ever be able to live in the present and not perpetually mourning the life he lost.

When a British punk rock apartment neighbor asks him to watch his cat for a few days, he finds himself beaten by a crew looking for the neighbor. The violence keeps escalating, with more deaths, and threats to his mother.

The movie has wonderful, gritty details of New York in 1998.

In the end, the young man realizes it's time to stop running from the accident and start his life again.

The hitman are a strange crew of odd balls.

Fun movie to watch.

I do wish it had a stronger, odd title. I didn't make the baseball connection in the title until the end of the movie.

Weapons

Unusual and thoughtful horror film. 17 of 18 grade school students all wake and leave their homes at 2:17 am. Destination, unknown. The boy who didn't disappear and his teacher are interrogated but offer no clues. Many parents believe the teacher is complicit.

She's the focus in the early film, as she tries to deal with the fall out of what's happened and connect with the boy who didn't disappear. She's warned to leave him alone, and just when she realizes something odd is happening at his house, she wakes to a nightmare of a clown-like figure on her ceiling.

Now we go back and meet a father, who paints the teacher's car, branding her a witch. We see many scenes from his point of view. Then the movie shifts to other characters.

What's unusual, there's almost nothing conveyed about the investigation to find the children. It's not the focus of the story or plot.

Eventually there's a revelation about what is happening. It's spooky, but didn't quite work for me.

The movie than builds to clever and violent scenes of the children getting vengeance.

The focus on the visual details on the screen always held my interest. The director was always in control of telling the story his way.

I had one small nit pick based on the film's ultra realistic tone. There's no media scrum on the sideway outside the young boy's house.

I love stories that create an unusual structure. I look forward to seeing more work by this director.

The Fantastic Four

This good-natured movie is quite up front that it's a story about family. The idea of family runs through every aspect of the movie, which makes it unusual in the super hero movie realm. The only such story I would compare it to is the early years of Smallville, when Clark's father serves as the moral center of the series.

There are special effects and action scenes, but they are secondary to the story.

I recommend the film to new screenwriters who would like a lesson about how to convey story in an action film.

Megan 2.0

The set up for the first Megan film was simple. A scientist creates a doll with artificial intelligence and programs it to protect her niece. When a bully comes along, we know what to expect. The movie is quirky fun.

Megan 2.0 is complicated and violent and features a beautiful young woman who is an A.I. bot assassin working for the FBI that goes rogue. Megan comes along about a third of the way in the movie.

Megan 2.0 is an action film with a high body count and some fleeting humor when Megan returns. Someone must have thought the violence would appeal to fans of action films. The niece barely registers.

28 Years Later

This is the sequel to 28 Days Later, a film about a rage virus turning most of the population of Great Britain into fast zombies.

28 years later, Great Britain is surrounded by a naval military quarantine to prevent any infected zombies from escaping and spreading the infection.

A small community survives on an island connected to the mainland via a causeway that is submerged at high tides. One aspect of the story is how the survivors try and hold on to pieces of their former lives while they create a new normal.

The main characters are a young boy, his father, and his ill mother. As the story opens, the father is taking the young boy onto the mainland to have his first experience killing zombies. It's a rite of passage. After the experience is being celebrated, the young boy learns that a doctor is still alive on the mainland.

The boy takes his mother to find the doctor. After many harrowing escapes, the doctor diagnoses the mother and the boy faces another rite of passage.

The scenes with the mother, son, and doctor develop a heart felt quality.

28 Years Later is an example of how a horror film can be thoughtful and have something to say about life.

The Phoenician Scheme

A quirky, fun, Wes Anderson film with his trade mark stylized acting and odd composition of shots.

An amoral business man decides to make a daughter/nun his heir and to help him navigate with five different people to save a huge project. He's survived many assassination attempts and near death experiences in heaven, but he knows his luck could run out.

The plot is straight forward and direct. Can he save the project by getting five people to agree to new terms for already signed contracts?

The story, about family, however, is thin. The business man has a stable of children from different mothers who live in a boarding house across the street from his mansion. The daughter accuses him of having her mother murdered. It also comes out the nun might not be his daughter.

But most of the family material is conveyed via dead pan humor. It's only at the end of the film when the now failed business man is a cook in a cafe that he runs with his now retired nun daughter (who also manages all his children) that it registers this is a story about a fractured family coming together. This is conveyed when the business man and nun play a game of hearts, which is a sly way of conveying the business man now has a heart and a family.

It just doesn't register clearly in the way the plot is clear and direct.

It's easy to enjoy the spectacle but to still want something more during the body of the story.

I loved the dead pan humor and the heavenly interludes.

To read more reviews, visit

Capsule movie reviews.

Notes on Emma Pattee's Novel Tilt

In Emma Pattee's Tilt, a young, heavily pregnant mother is in an IKEA in Portland, Oregon searching for a baby bassinet when a major earthquake levels parts of Portland and all but one bridge over the Willamette river. At first trapped, she's rescued but loses her purse and phone in the rubble.

Her rescue can also be viewed as a metaphor, a birth into a new life.

Her first goal is to track down her husband at his job working at a cafe. When she reaches the cafe, she finds out he lied about working and instead is auditioning for a play, something he said he wouldn't do with the baby's birth immanent. To find him, now she must find a way to cross the Willamette river on the only standing bridge.

The novel is organized around going from the present to the past, meeting her actor husband when she's had a first play produced and has a fantasy about becoming a famous playwright. When she meets her later husband, he has a fantasy about becoming a famous actor.

Each jump to the past brings us nearer to the present. We learn how she gives up her fantasy, but her husband has clung tightly to the idea that somehow he can become a famous actor.

The chapters in the past collectively operate as a series of jolts that affect her marriage; mini earthquakes, so to speak.

When she finally reaches the last bridge standing across the Willamette river, it's blocked. The metaphor is that it's one of the last bridges that connected her to her marriage to her husband.

The novel makes the young woman's grueling journey heart-felt, compelling, and painful. By the end of the novel, she's ready to begin a new life.

I very much enjoyed the soon to be mother's journey through the broken city, passing by many, many landmarks I'm familiar with.

Recommended.

For more of my novel reviews, visit http://www.storyispromise.com

Introduction to Experiences With the Energy Body

This journal is an account of my experiences of my energy body, also known as prana or life force.

I began this exploration at a time I had started to practice hatha yoga postures. It opened a door I passed through to learn about my energy body over a period of a year, with 3-4 hours a day of meditative work.

I considered this the first quest of my life.

Later I did some visualization and energy body work that opened a tight band of energy around the crown. I considered that the second quest of my life, and my experiences were detailed in the first edition of this work.

This 3rd edition of my journal conveys the beginning of a third quest, to understand the flow of energy around my face and head, including some drawings with renditions of energy flow.

I'm now including drawings of principle lines of energy throughout my body in this edition created July 2025.

My explanations of my understanding of my energy body will be interspersed with details of my life.

The journal is my attempt to share what I have learned.

Facebook Posts

As I began this quest in May of 2025 to map the energy flow around my face and head, I decided in August to begin offering posts on Facebook that tracked my progress. I will continue to add those posts here.

July 27th, 2025

For the last week I've been feeling two currents of energy running on both sides of my chest and over my heart. I enjoy it when I can feel the energy flow in part of my body. It's part of the process of fully opening the flow of energy.

I've been walking on a treadmill in a gym. While walking I visualize two bands of current running up the back and top of my head.

I expect this to be a slow process to open the energy flow in those channels.

Here's an image of my initial map of the energy flow around the top of my head. The map becomes more detailed as I continue this work.

August 4, 2025

In my energy body work, I'd spent time visualizing currents running through channels that came down my face. My goal was to open those constricted channels. I was surprised when those channels ran down my body and met at the base of the lumbar spine. There are also channels of current that run down each arm and leg. I knew about that from my energy body work in my twenties, when I did bellows breathing 3-4 hours a day for a year.

Interesting path to be on.

One way to understand energy flow in the body, think of a new house. Turn on water faucet, full flow. House 30 years old, turn on faucet, 50% flow. 60 year old house, 25%.

Various things constrict the energy flow in the body over time. Diet, lack of exercise, aging, dumping life force into negative thought patterns, just giving up.

Here's a map of my full body, front view.

To learn more, visit Experiences With the Energy Body

Experiences With the Energy Body Available in Print and in Color

Bill Johnson offers a detailed account of how he developed and expanded an awareness of his energy body. In his twenties, Bill did bellows breathing for a year. That experience helped him to open restrictions in his body's energy flow. In this 2nd edition available in print and color from Amazon, Bill maps the energy flow around his face, head, and body and records his experiences and suggests techniques others can use to experience their energy bodies.

His book offers an insider's peek to those who struggle with managing and learning from the integration of body, mind, and energy body and what it means for the creative process.

Additionally, he provides some biographical details and endeavors that add color and insight into his treatment of this little-explored realm.

Available at https://www.amazon.com/Experiences-Energy-Body-Understanding-Together/dp/B0F5P47FK5/

Throwing Your Characters Over The Edge,­ Setting Out What’s at Stake in a Story, by Bill Johnson

When a story’s action shatters the lives of its characters, those characters are thrown over the edge into new worlds. They become dramatic characters because the choices that face them are stark: how will they, can they, survive in these new worlds? How will they change? Can they avoid changing?

In years past, several movies found different ways to throw characters over the edge: The Sweet Hereafter, The Five Senses, and Last Night.

The Sweet Hereafter begins with a man, woman and baby girl sleeping in an idyllic setting. This quiet, peaceful opening begins a story about loss, by starting with a scene that suggests the opposite, a loving, fulfilling moment in life.

We then cut to Mr. Stevens, played by Ian Holm, a lawyer, who takes a call from his estranged daughter. She’s a drug addict and also, we later learn, the baby in the first scene. Because of her drug addiction, he has ‘lost’ his daughter even though she’s alive.

We go from Mr. Stevens, to a father watching his teenage daughter, Nicole, getting ready to perform at a country fair.

Each of these scenes takes place at a different time, but each carries embedded meaning that serves the dramatic purpose of the story. The chronology of the events of any story is not linear. A storyteller chooses those moments in time that best evoke a story’s journey.

Mr. Stevens arrives in a small Canadian town as a lawyer seeking to represent the parents of children who died in a tragic bus accident. Because he’s tormented over the loss of his daughter, he’s focused his life on using others to prove that someone is at fault for every tragedy, that every tragedy has a root cause that can be known and understood. He says to a potential client, “You’re angry, aren’t you? That’s why I’m here. To give your anger a voice. To be your weapon against whoever caused that bus to go off the road.”

As we learn more about each parent and the children involved in the accident, the scenes that lead up to the accident develop more and more dramatic power. But when the accident finally happens, we see very little of it. What we see is the shocked look on a father’s face as he watches the accident unfold, then later sees a blanket put over the bodies of his dead children.

Then he looks up and sees them laughing, running toward him in the snow. At the moment of their deaths, they are more alive to him than ever.

Later, as he looks at the hulk of the bus after the accident, he hears the screams of the trapped children. This is a motif that recurs several times. People looking at the bus hear the screams.

The loss for Nicole’s father is not that she ends up in a wheelchair, but that he loses his dream of helping her become a rock star, a dream he wants to share with her in an intimate way.

As the story advances, one thread occurs years later. On a plane, Mr. Stevens finds himself sitting next to a young woman who was a childhood friend of his daughter. This brings us to a revelation of what happened in that opening scene. In that idyllic bed a hidden menace struck; baby black widow spiders bit the baby girl. As she began to swell, there is a long ride to the hospital during which Mr. Stevens holds his daughter in his lap, a knife ready to cut into her throat if she can no longer breath. Was this the turning point that turned his daughter against him? He can’t know, only wonder and grieve.

The story turns when Nicole is asked to testify at a deposition. When she balks, Mr. Steven’s tries to manipulate her by telling her that people feel sorry for her because she’s in a wheel chair, and testifying is her chance to be angry and get revenge.

She appears ready to go along, but instead, she lies at the deposition, and there is no longer the basis of a law suit against the town or bus manufacturer.

Nicole’s reason for lying is set out by her voice over recital of the Pied Piper, in part, “One was lame and could not dance the whole of the way/and after years, if you would blame his sadness/he was used to say/it’s dull in our town since my playmates left/I can’t forget that I’m bereft/of all the pleasant sights they see/which the piper also promised me/for he led us he said/to a joyus land...where waters gushed and fruit trees grew...and everything was strange and new.”

Nicole has left behind the world she once knew. As she narrates at the end of the story, about Ian, “I wonder if you understand, that all of us, Delores, me, the children who survived, the children who didn’t, that we’re all citizens of a different town now. A place with its own special rules and its own special laws. A town of people living in the sweet hereafter.”

Unlike many films, the Sweet Hereafter does not suggest grief and loss can be resolved. It only suggests that life goes on for the grieving, and that we all grieve in our own way.

A beautiful film.

Another recent film uses a great device to throw its characters over the edge: it’s the end of the world; it’s happening at a clearly defined moment; no one will be spared.

Each character in the story reacts to this situation according to what’s important to them. Some simply want to gather with family like it’s a Christmas dinner and pretend all is well. Others riot. Another character arranges to have sex with every woman he’s ever had a fantasy about, including his high school English teacher. Another man spends his last hours calling people to let them know the local gas utility has appreciated their patronage.

The story’s main character, a young man, wants to die alone. The natural question, why? Fate brings him together with a young woman desperately trying to find her way home to a lover. This also naturally raises a question, why her desperation to get home if the world is ending?

He tries to help her, because helping her means he can die alone. But fate keeps bringing her back. And as the time draws near the end, we find out why he wants to die alone: the loss of his wife who taught him about love has left him bereft. He doesn’t want to go through that loss again. Then it comes out why she’s so determined to go home: she doesn’t want to die a death at the hands of a common fate; she and her lover have made a suicide pact.

She asks him if he’ll kill her. The catch is, she needs to fall in love with him to go through with her plan.

He doesn’t want to get this involved, but the story ends with the two of them facing each other, guns pointed at the head of the other. But instead of killing each other as the world ends, they do something else that acts out what each was really looking for, what each really wanted to share with someone else.

This story raises a question that has stayed with me, what would I do if the world were coming to an end in the next 24 hours? >p> A lovely film.

The Five Senses has a plot that revolves around a missing little girl. The mother of the young girl blames a masseuse whose daughter was supposed to be watching the little girl. The mother’s feelings of grief, loss and anger are deeply felt.

There are many beautiful scenes in this film, but several stand out. In one, a young man begs the masseuse for a massage. The masseuse at first refuses, then gives in. During the massage, the young man begins to cry. The only time he’s touched is when he pays for a massage. Something in his life has thrown him over the edge, outside of normal human contact, and he craves being touched.

Another character is a doctor who eavesdrops on the conversations of others in the office building. The natural question, why? It comes out that he’s going deaf and he’s trying to store as many auditory sensations as he can. After he admits his situation to someone, he’s taken to a concert and shown that he can ‘listen’ to the music by feeling its vibration on church pews. This moment allows him to feel he can survive in what to him would be the most barren of all worlds, one without sound.

In a turning point, the mother of the missing girl accepts the masseuse in her life as someone who understands how she feels. The lost girl is found, and what else is found is the relationship that had been lost between the masseuse and her teenage daughter.

This is a beautifully told story about how we perceive the world through the senses, and through the memories of our sense experiences.

* * * *

One way to discover what drives a character is to ask, what is the one thing a character would miss the most if he or her were to lose everything? What a character craves most in life might be a commitment to the truth, a loving relationship, a sense of justice. Throw that character over the edge into a world where what they value most is taken from away, and that character must react.

Another way to frame this question, what is most important to YOU, the reader, in life? Create a character who loses that, and you can explore your own feelings and thoughts to understand what drives your character to act, to gain some goal, to discover how to exist in the new world you’ve created.

* * *

The Sweet Hereafter. Writing credits, novel by Russell Banks, script, Atom Egoyan. Directed by Adam Egoyan. Released 1997.

Last Night. Written and directed by Don McKellar. Released 1998.

The Five Senses. Written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Released 1999.

For more of my movie reviews, visit http://www.storyispromise.com