Downing (Christine) Papers

Note from Christine Downing: "actually also contains letters from me and others, including Eloise Wlech-- but mostly all focused on the 'crisis' of 1967".

Note from Christine Downing: "(my mother-in-law)-- about early years of motherhood".

Notes from Christine Downing: "1970-- a letter folder and a seperate dream folder", "1974-75-- mostly notes re audio-taped letters sent & received-- mostly in correspondence with George Downing or William Doty", "1974-77-- letters from David Dohen", "1978-- letters to and fro-- mostly in correspondence with William Doty or David Cohen".

Note from Christine Downing: "1983-- many of the letters are in response to my book, The Goddess".

Note from Christine Downing: "GODDESSES-- Notes & Syllabi for Goddess lectures given elsewhere, Reading Notes, Clippings".

Originally entitled "Mementos-- Early On 1941-1968, incl. letters from Germany 1952, 1968"

Note from Christine Downing: "Favorite quotes, letters, poems, dreams-- mostly from College Years".

Note from Christine Downing: "Favorite quotes, letters, poems, dreams-- mostly from College Years".

Note from Chris Downing: This one I am still proud of! Not for school-- just a summer project for myself.

Folder originally labelled RE-Downing.

Notes from Christine Downing: "IMAGINING THE REAL: THE PERSISTENCE OF PROPHECY Prospectus and Outline, the completed (and sometimes published) sections which were to have been included (I received a Cross Disciplinary Fellowship from the Society for Religion in Higher Education to work on this project during the 1967-68 academic year-- and spent the fall semester doing postgraduate study in Comparative Literature at Yale to work on the literary part and a spring semester in Tubingen to work on the New Testament part-- but somehow when I got back to Rutgers and discovered that feminism had happened while I was gone the energy for the project evaporated!)"., "A POETICS OF THE PSYCHE: MYTHOPOESIS IN THE PSYCHOLOGIES OF SIGMUND FREUD AND CARL JUNG Manuscript of completed portion-- brings the story up to World War I. (When I came to SDSU from Rutgers in 1974 I already had a good sense of the shape of this book; my 1974 AAR presidential address, 'Sigmund Freud and the Greek Mythological Tradition,' provided a kind of overview. Most of what was completed was written during the summer of 1976 spent in Badenweiler, Germany-- and during an NEH Summer Seminar session in Santa Barbara the following year. In the meanwhile I had already written 'Persephone in Hades' (inspired by a spring 1975 dream). When I showed the book prospectus & draft and the Persephone piece to Bill Whitehead at Dutton, his response was that there were already too many books on Freud and that he loved the Persephone. My response was to drop the book and focus instead of what eventually became The Goddess.)", "TROPE OF TRAVEL-- 111 page draft, Letters from 1982 trip around the world. Some of this ended up in Journey Through Menopause".

Note from Christine Downing: "DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE This book did eventually get published as The Long Journey Home. What this file contains is the original much longer version that Shambhala insisted needed to be radically cut. ALSO included here: the original versions of papers reworked for inclusion in The Goddess, Journey Through Menopause, Women's Mysteries", "ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE-UNDERWORLD MYTHOLOGY Prospectus, Lecture Notes, Published essays (I had a contract for this book & an NEH Fellowship to work on it; I have published essays and presented lectures that cover most of what it would have included-- but after the Berlin Wall came down I realized that I needed instead to focus on my own engagement on that period of my life when the underworld emerged into history, the period of Nazi rule. So I dropped this project to turn instead to my "Remembered Lives" project.)".

Notes from Christine Downing: "ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE-UNDERWORLD MYTHOLOGY Prospectus, Lecture Notes, Published essays (I had a contract for this book & an NEH Fellowship to work on it; I have published essays and presented lectures that cover most of what it would have included-- but after the Berlin Wall came down I realized that I needed instead to focus on my own engagement on that period of my life when the underworld emerged into history, the period of Nazi rule. So I dropped this project to turn instead to my "Remembered Lives" project.)", "A LESBIAN MSYTERY SERIES Lecture Notes re "Getting Ready to Write a Lesbian Mystery," clippings re plot ideas, some preliminary ideas written down by River (When my partner, River Malcolm, and I first moved to Orcas in 1994 after my retrirement from SDSU we imagined that we might together begin writing a series of detective novels featuring two lesbian women as the detectives. Instead Pacifica invited me to come be part of the Core Faculty in the newly established Mythological Studies program and I ended up not being retired after all.)", "REMEMBERED LIVES: A HOLOCAUST MEMOIR Extended description of the book project; Notes re giving talks about it; various outlines; reflections on Ruth as a namesake".