World-Building in a Mythical Landscape

A Personal Year-Long Curriculum

A personal curriculum is a self-directed course of reading, writing and practice, designed not for an institution but for yourself alone. Here is my year-long curriculum planned to teach myself about creating a mythic landscape through research into landscape, folklore, sacred practice and the art of world-building. It is divided into four seasons, each with its own theme, books, exercises and creative focus.

The curriculum moves through the wheel of the year: from the waking world of spring, through the long light of summer and the thinning veil of autumn, into the deep of winter. Each season pairs one non-fiction text with one work of fiction, and provides six writing and creative exercises, weekly plans, an outdoor outing, and a closing reflection essay.

· · · ✦ · · ·

The Four Seasons

🌱
Season I — Spring: The Waking World

Origins · Sacred Landscape · The Other Beneath the Surface

The first season digs into the deep soil of the English landscape. You learn to read the land as a palimpsest — layer upon layer of belief, practice and presence. You draw the foundational map of your invented world and name its first sacred place, tracing the legend at its origin.

The Stations of the Sun — Ronald Hutton The Crystal Cave — Mary Stewart
Enter Season I →
☀️
Season II — Summer: The Long Light

Mythology · The Divine Feminine · The Hero Who Is Not A Man

The second season turns the gaze upward and outward — toward the great structural patterns that underlie stories. You move into comparative mythology and fiction that rewrites the expected heroic arc. Your invented world gains its gods, its founding myths, the stories its people tell to explain why things are the way they are.

The Myth of the Goddess — Baring & Cashford The Buried Giant — Kazuo Ishiguro
Enter Season II →
🍂
Season III — Autumn: The Thinning

Folk Magic · The Liminal · Tradition & Transgression

The third season moves into the hidden world of cunning folk and rural practice. You study the secret societies and folk magic traditions of the English countryside, and bring a cunning person into being inside your invented world, grounding their practice in real historical tradition.

Witchcraft and Secret Societies of Rural England — Nigel Pennick The Owl Service — Alan Garner
Enter Season III →
❄️
Season IV — Winter: The Deep Archive

Time · Memory · The Self Across History

The final season is a time of synthesis and completion. You explore the nature of time, memory and pattern in both building and story, and write the deep history of your invented world. The year closes with a reflection — musing on everything you have read, made and understood across the four seasons.

The Timeless Way of Building — Christopher Alexander The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin
Enter Season IV →
· · · ✦ · · ·

← Back to Home