Where The Mountain Meets The Moon

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. An “archetype” is a pattern that many works have in common. One example is the hero’s journey. What can you guess about this archetype from its name? What stories have you read, seen, or played that you suspect are examples of this pattern?

Teaching Suggestion: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a hero’s journey. Knowing more about this archetype will increase students’ comprehension of the story’s deeper meaning. After they give preliminary answers to this prompt, you can offer them the resources listed below to deepen their understanding. Afterward, they may enjoy discussing how the various parts of the hero’s journey manifest in some of their favorite hero’s journey stories.

• This 5-minute video from TED-Ed offers an overview of the hero’s journey as formulated by Joseph Campbell.
• This 10-minute video analyzes Disney’s Moana as an example of the hero’s journey.

2. What do you think makes the hero’s journey archetype so popular?

Teaching Suggestion: Some students will be quicker than others to come up with a theory about what makes the archetype popular. In discussion, this may have a chilling effect on others’ abilities to come up with divergent theories. If students will not be writing individual answers before discussing the question, you might introduce the discussion with a challenge to the class to think of as many different reasons for the archetype’s popularity as they can.

• This article explains Christopher Vogler’s adaptation of Campbell’s model and offers insight into what the archetype offers readers and writers.
• This article from the Los Angeles Review of Books offers a thoughtful analysis of the history of the hero’s journey archetype and its cultural context. Due to length and complexity, this is intended as a teacher-facing resource.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the novel.

If the hero’s journey corresponds in some way to the stages of a human life, what part of the “journey” are you in right now? Why? Does it feel “heroic” to you in any way? How might it uplift or inspire people to think of themselves as heroes on a journey?

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt is intended to encourage students to find a personal connection with the somewhat dry academic concept of the hero’s journey and to give them one more opportunity to apply the idea of the journey’s stages to a real-world context. If students have not already suggested in discussion that the stages of the journey might correlate to common aspects of human experience or to life stages, you might explore this idea with them before they attempt to answer this prompt.