A Stanford-educated poet and scholar by day, teaching the classics at Dalhousie University near his home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mitchell’s affinity for Star Wars grew out of another author’s interpretation, a children’s book read aloud to his then four- and six-year-olds at bedtime. “I had always been a kind of Star Wars fan, maybe six out of 10 on a scale of devotion. I could quote lines, but I wasn’t a real scholar,” Mitchell tells StarWars.com. “But when I started reading to the kids and they responded so eagerly, I thought to myself, ‘Well, here I am actually transmitting a myth, which is what I read about in my work all the time. This is actually the continuity of our culture happening in real time.’ And then during the process of reading that book, maybe for the tenth time to them, I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I just try and see whether this myth would work in a purely poetic, Homeric form?’” Mitchell penned about 10 or 20 lines in the style that night, which became the basis for the opening lines of his new book, The Odyssey of Star Wars. “Once I realized I was really enjoying every step of it, then I just kind of pushed on forward.”
The resulting epic poem took Mitchell two years to draft, plus another year and a half of revisions and polishing. Through it all, his children remained an important sounding board. “I immediately began reading it to them sort of as it was being composed and they were keen for more, to the point where they demanded more if I hadn’t produced enough on time,” he says with a laugh.
