Browse All Live Event Calendar Course Calendar Blog Is WDU For You? Success Stories FAQ

The Hero's Journey for Storytellers

GLORIA KEMPTON

The Hero's Journey for Storytellers

GLORIA KEMPTON

$499.99

11/06/2025 - 01/15/2026

Enroll Now

For me, as a storyteller, the word, 'hero', is like the word 'home' --we all want to go home. We all want to be at home. We all want to be the hero. We all want the traits that a hero has. To be a hero is to be a believer in our own amazing potential, to be courageous in pursuing our life’s adventure, and to be sacrificial in our relationships with ourselves and others. It's to decrease our emphasis on the fighting and aggressive warrior archetype that we all seem to understand way too well and begin to live in the transformative and  miraculous power of the magician archetype. To be a hero is to be at home in our own lives.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey is about finding the hero in the stories that are our lives and giving him expression. It's saying yes to the hero when he shows up. We face down our demons and transform our fears into places of magical and miraculous potential. When we are able to do that we are empowered from the deepest and most authentic place inside of ourselves.

As writers and storytellers, acknowledging the Hero's Journey for ourselves if we're the main character in our story or acknowledging it for our characters if we're writing fiction is to give ourselves permission to break through the conflicts and troubled places in our minds to a place of transcendence and freedom.

Chris Vogler writes in his book, The Writer’s Journey: The Hero’s Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world…The Hero’s Journey is a pattern that seems to extend in many dimensions, describing more than one reality. It accurately describes, among other things, the process of making a journey, the necessary working parts of a story, the joys and despairs of being a writer, and the passage of a soul through life.

This course is about identifying the story you want to write about, deciding whether you want to approach your story through fiction or nonfiction, and then having the courage to say yes to the “call to adventure” and move into the “special world” of The Hero’s Journey.

$499.99

11/06/2025 - 01/15/2026

Enroll Now

For me, as a storyteller, the word, 'hero', is like the word 'home' --we all want to go home. We all want to be at home. We all want to be the hero. We all want the traits that a hero has. To be a hero is to be a believer in our own amazing potential, to be courageous in pursuing our life’s adventure, and to be sacrificial in our relationships with ourselves and others. It's to decrease our emphasis on the fighting and aggressive warrior archetype that we all seem to understand way too well and begin to live in the transformative and  miraculous power of the magician archetype. To be a hero is to be at home in our own lives.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey is about finding the hero in the stories that are our lives and giving him expression. It's saying yes to the hero when he shows up. We face down our demons and transform our fears into places of magical and miraculous potential. When we are able to do that we are empowered from the deepest and most authentic place inside of ourselves.

As writers and storytellers, acknowledging the Hero's Journey for ourselves if we're the main character in our story or acknowledging it for our characters if we're writing fiction is to give ourselves permission to break through the conflicts and troubled places in our minds to a place of transcendence and freedom.

Chris Vogler writes in his book, The Writer’s Journey: The Hero’s Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world…The Hero’s Journey is a pattern that seems to extend in many dimensions, describing more than one reality. It accurately describes, among other things, the process of making a journey, the necessary working parts of a story, the joys and despairs of being a writer, and the passage of a soul through life.

This course is about identifying the story you want to write about, deciding whether you want to approach your story through fiction or nonfiction, and then having the courage to say yes to the “call to adventure” and move into the “special world” of The Hero’s Journey.

Course Details

Course outline

  • Asynchronous Lessons: Access weekly lessons and assignments at your own pace
  • Personalized Feedback: Receive direct feedback

Meet the instructor

Gloria Kempton

Gloria Kempton is an author, writing coach and former magazine and book editor. She was raised by a professional romance writer who smoked all day while writing stories for true confession magazines. While the smoking had its downside, the writing took hold in Gloria’s soul when she was just nine years old. She wrote throughout grade school and high school, selling her first story at 21 years old.

She is now the author of hundreds of magazine articles and short stories and eleven books, including Write Great Fiction: Dialogue and The Outlaw’s Journey; A Mythological Approach to Storytelling for Writers Behind Bars. She’s a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest magazine and an instructor with their online writing courses at Writers Digest University. Gloria brings Joseph Campbell’s mythological storytelling system, The Hero’s Journey, into correctional institutions throughout Washington state where the writers in her classes are learning to write their personal stories and become the heroes they were always meant to be.

Gloria’s love is the craft of storytelling—plotting, dialogue, setting, creating very real conflict on the page for story characters so that as they work on those conflicts, wrestling with demons and shadow characters along the way, they will emerge heroic at the end of their adventures. Or not, and that, too, is a lesson—the tragic hero’s journey. The Anti-hero’s journey. Gloria has learned that there are all kinds of heroes, and as we craft our story characters (whether memoir or novel), we learn about ourselves