Leigh’s presentation topic is “A Networked Imagination: Myth-Making in Fan Fic’s Story and Soul”
While movies can feel deeply mythic, they are tightly authored and frozen, outside of the volk culture that underscores how myth moves through the collective unconscious. The story-making in fan fiction challenges the idea that any story should be frozen, that its ownership rests in individual authors, and that there is a hierarchy of how, what, why, and by whom the story is crafted. By creating story in this way, within the particular shapes of community co-creation and ongoing arcs, fan fiction creators of all mediums become mythmakers. In a dance between insider/outsider, individual/collective; this co-created world emerges and is always emerging as a never-ending story. Its connection between people and ideas that are simultaneously liminal, canonical, mnemonic and imaginal; all sitting in servers that may archive well or may not; brings a life force to story-telling that hums more deeply than simple fiction. Made up of so many exquisitely human, intimate, microcosmic moments and, at the same time pulsing with a broad archetypal energy – fan fiction is, in a word, mythic.
About Leigh
Leigh Melander, Ph.D. has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and has a background in writing and the performing arts, marketing and strategic planning, and strengthening communities nationally and internationally. She has served as a board member for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and on the academic advisory board for Spring Journal for several years, was featured on the on the History Channel as an expert on myth and story, and hosted Myth America, a weekly radio program on myth and imagination on an NPR affiliate in New York for four years. She was the founding editor of the Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast essay series, and has been published in Spring Journal, the award-winning Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies,and just released her first book, Psyche’s Choice. Leigh works with individuals, communities, and organizations to imagine past what they think as possible, and she and her husband own Spillian: A Place to Revel, a regenerative center for imagination and creativity on the historic Fleischmanns Yeast family estate in the Catskills.