This book has tremendous hope in it. It contributes to the hope that the superb work Joseph Campbell did on the written story and Gioia Timpanelli does on the spoken story can be continued. Danny Deardorff carries mysteries into a new place. The place is nourishing, startling and full of intelligence.
Robert Bly
Daniel Deardorff's The Other Within confirms what I have felt for some time: being at the center is far over-rated; being on the margin, however, gives an angle of vision unique to it. It is as if Dan's book is a confirmation of where the poet-whaler Ishmael dwells in the last pages of Moby-Dick—on the margin. There, he survives the suffocating suction of the whirlpool that takes every chip of the Pequod down. Sometimes, as Dan's thesis confirms, being marginalized offers the highest rate for survival. What an evocative read.
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.
Core Faculty, Mythological Studies
Pacifica Graduate Institute
Author of A Limbo Of Shards: Essays on Memory, Myth And Metaphor
In this time of global awareness, there are many books on the theme of otherness and the otherness of race, class, religion, ideology and gender, as well as the otherness of ourselves, the "I" that walks beside me that is not "I." But rare is the expression of otherness from the perspective of otherness. This is one of those rare books! It is a telling example of what Gaston Bachelard must have meant, writing in his book on Air and Dreams, when he said that deformation is the clue to imagination. It is conventional to think the opposite: namely, that the formation of some definite identity is the way to imagine meaningfully. But Daniel Deardorff reveals to the reader in this book that in our various identifications of meaning, we egos are typically one-sided, walling ourselves in upon ourselves. This work artfully reveals that the wall is one-sided, and then it leads us to the other side of the one-sided wall!
David L. Miller
Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion Emeritus, Syracuse University
Core Faculty Member, Pacifica Graduate Institute
Because the important figure of the Trickster has eluded many in our modern culture, I urge you to read Daniel Deardorff on the subject. In this amazing study of the real and imagined 'other,' he has given a valuable roadmap to the profound regions of Story.
Gioia Timpanelli
Author of Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily
Daniel Deardorff's The Other Within offers us a brilliant account of the ways in which the redeeming energies of the Sacred often find their access to us through our weaknesses, our limitations, even those parts of ourselves which we find most ugly and shameful. This is an authoritative voice and one which should be heard by everyone in the field of soulwork and healing.
Robert Moore, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Spirituality, The Chicago Theological Seminary. Author of The Archetype of Initiation: Ritual, Sacred Space and Healing and Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity.
“To witness Deardorff in action is less storytelling, more an invocation.The precious winter fire, the tip of an owls wing, the freshness of tundrasnow, all abide directly in the rich seam he draws upon. He has a hard wonintelligence that informs, dismays and ultimately inspires the listener aboutthe ragged grandeur of our own lives. The openness of his heart provides atrail for the initiated to travel into the deep magic of myth. If there isa better story-carrier in the United States, I haven't heard them.”
Martin Shaw
Author of A Branch From the Lightning Tree