The

The Hello, this is Let's talk about Myths, Baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with a very quick introduction

for a returning guest we all know and love.

Joel Christensen returned to the show, this time not to talk directly about the Homeric

epics, though indirectly, definitely still the Homeric epics, but instead to talk about a new book,

he has out called Story Life. And I am always happy to have Joel back. He is incredibly supportive

and generally doing good things when it comes to ancient history and welcoming people into that realm. And so I'm thrilled to have yet another

conversation with him. And yes, there will be another one soon. We didn't really plan it like

that. It's just we've been recording them over like months and months and now they're lining up.

But we had to talk about toxic masculinity in the Iliad,

so you will forgive me when another episode with Joel comes out next month.

For now, enjoy StoryLife. Conversations When Science Meets Storytelling Story Life with Joel Christensen.

But why don't you tell me about the new book and what you were looking at?

All right.

So the book is called Story Life and the subtell is on epic narrative and living things.

And the sort of summary of it is that it's a series of biological analogies applied to epic poetry, myth, and how stories function among human beings to try to understand the impact that narrative has on our lives.

And there's sort of like a couple, there are a couple different aims with it.

Aim number one is to de-center author and authority and to get us thinking more about how creative works come from communities.

Aim number two is to get us to think about narrative as not having authorial intention, but having a sort of life

and mind of its own. And aim number three is to ask or really to give examples of how narrative

functions negatively and to get us to think of it as a type of parasite virus that has a

function of its own. And so the soft form of the question of my proposal in the book is that narrative

...