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/