What the Mythological Tradition Preserves and What the Novelist Discovers Beneath It. There is a kind of silence in ancient sources that is not absence but compression. The authors who mention Atalanta—Hesiod in fragments, Pindar, Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Ovid, Hyginus—do not bother to explain her. They assume their audience knows who she is. The […]
Atalanta Before She Was a Myth Read More »
There is a sentence men have told women for as long as sentences have been spoken: “Here is what you are for.” A daughter is for marrying well. A wife is for bearing sons. A queen is for outliving her usefulness with grace. A princess is for the alliance her body can purchase. None are
Why I Write Women Who Refuse the Story Given to Them Read More »
By law, by Church doctrine, and by the unspoken consent of a society, power was a man’s possession in the Florentine Republic of the Quattrocento. A woman passed as property from her father to her husband. Her purpose, as the age defined it, was procreation and domestic service. Non-conformity was frowned upon, and in extreme
Women’s Power in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy Read More »
On Ovid, Myth, and Historical Imagination There is a question every novelist must answer, if only to themselves: why this story, and why now? For me the answer arrived not gradually but all at once, in the final lines of a myth I had known for years without truly seeing. Ovid tells Atalanta‘s story across
Why a Novel About Atalanta? Read More »
In the vast pantheon of Greek mythology, sorcery is rarely a solitary gift. It runs in bloodlines, transmitted from divine parent to mortal child like the color of eyes or the timbre of a voice. No mythological family demonstrates this more powerfully than the daughters of Hēlios, the Sun God, and the Oceanid Perseis, for
Pasiphaë & Kírkē: Mighty Sorceresses of the Bronze Age Read More »
In the deepest places of the Greek mythological imagination—below Olympus, below the world of heroes and city-states and clever men with clever plans—there is a darkness that was never conquered. Zeus defeated the Titans and imprisoned them in Tartaros. He defeated the Giants and buried them beneath volcanoes. He defeated even Typhon, the last and
Echidna: Mother of All Monsters, Bride of the Mightiest Foe Read More »
