February 28, 2026 • 52 mins
In this episode of Greek Mythology Retold, I sit down with bestselling fantasy author Ayana Gray to discuss her newest novel, I, Medusa. It's a powerful and intimate retelling of the Medusa myth. We explore how Gray reimagines Medusa not as a monster, but as a young woman named Meddy before she becomes the legendary Gorgon of Greek mythology. If you love Greek mythology retellings, feminist myth reinterpretations, fantasy author interviews, and deep conversations about storytelling craft, this episode is for you.
I, Medusa is available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
WikiHow Expert Contributor
I, Medusa is available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
WikiHow Expert Contributor
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome back, murmered on to another episode of Greek Mythology
Read Told podcast. Today's episode is such a good one.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ayana Gray,
best selling fantasy author known for her richly layered storytelling
and emotionally grounded characters. You may already know her from
(00:44):
her Beasts of Praise series, but today we're diving into
her newest book, I Medusa, and I have to tell
you that this book is so elegantly written. It's a
unique and deeply intimate tape on Medusa that really steps
away from the monster that we think we know and
(01:05):
instead introduces us to a young woman named Mehdi before
she becomes the mythological heroine that we remember from most
of the retellings that we hear. It is reflective and
fierce and thoughtful in a way that lingers with you
days after finishing. We talk about voice and rage and power, authorship,
(01:30):
and what it means to step into a myth that's
been told for centuries and claim it.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
As your own.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Now, let's dive in.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
What pulled you toward Medusa as a character. We're centering
do you want to if we could start there sure.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Well, thank you for having me. First of all, Oh,
you're welcome. This is exciting. So I have always been
a Greek mythology girly, you know, I think a lot
of kids, I don't know if it's nineties kids or
just kids in general, because it's we're exposed to it
so early. I mean, I think everybody goes through a phase.
Some people stay in that phase longer than others. And
(02:10):
so I was a big, big Greca Roman mythology fan
as a kid. I loved it. I loved it in media.
Two if my favorite stories were that of the minotaur
Minuitur and also Medusa. And then as like my interests changed,
she popped up at other places I read, like comic
books where she appeared with Wonder Woman. She pops up
(02:31):
in pop culture, you know, in fashion and music, in
all these different places. So she kind of stayed in
my periphery. And then one day I was just doing
a Google search to see, like where she might have lived,
and I learned that scholars have actually debated this for
a long time, and one of the places that they
have suggested she could have been from was on or
(02:51):
near the North African coast. And I had never thought
about Medusa having any proximity to Africa, even though Greece
is pretty close to the Africa the continent, right, And
it fundamentally changed how I saw her, and I was like, well, wait,
what if? Why not? And the story took off from there.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
As somebody who like yourself, likes the Greek mythology and
you said, like the nineties, did you ever watch like
the old like the Clash of the Titans.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Did you watch all that stuff?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (03:18):
For sure, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I feel like we kind of we were introduced to
a lot of that, and so it's nice to meet
other people that are into that as well. Medusa is
such a diverse, like her stories are divergent, just the
way like a lot of the mythology is. So everybody
starts to think they'll have like their own favorite telling
(03:41):
and then I think that's the one, like that's it,
but no, there's like so many other layers to the
characters and where they come from and depends on what
fragments or who you read. So I like that, and
I think that people forget that Grease is like literally
right there on the whole north of Africa, and there's
(04:02):
like a whole trade and integration all around the Mediterranean. Absolutely,
we kind of stand still, No, right, exactly what did
you want most for Medusa to be able to say?
What did you really want her to like bring forward?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah? I think, And I'll say it's difficult to talk
about Medusa without giving spoilers because her story is really
well known, but not everybody does know how her story ends,
so I want to be mindful of that. There are
two specific moments of Medusa's story that are remembered in
history and in mythology, and they both have to do
(04:41):
with violence. I won't spoil I won't spoil it too much,
but they both are defined by violence, and that's really
all we know about her when we think about her
in pop culture and all these labels that are assigned
to her. And what I wanted to do with this
story was give her a life before that and show
that she had nuance and she wasn't perfect, but but
had a whole life that could have been lived, and
(05:03):
that was lived before these two really violent, horrible moments
that people have come to define her with.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, you said at the bottom of this page, and
I underlined all this as she douses the temple's torch
and surrenders to the dark. Medusa thinks about monsters and
how easily she became one. That was so powerful to
me when I read that, I just whole the whole
(05:30):
opening scene. You just set the tone for what to like,
what we could expect from Medusa. You handled it so
well with that priest. I love that, and I think
that people oftentimes that's all they think about her as
is as like the monster, right and the famous artwork
(05:52):
you know of her head being held up. That's so
much more. And I love how you just went into
her character, her family life. Did you want to tell
us a little bit about how you structured her her
early years?
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Yeah? Sure so. The fun thing about writing doing a
reimagining of a very famous, well known mythical figure is
I had the outline of Medusa. I had an idea
of who her parents were, even though a lot of
people don't know that her parents are canonically see Gods.
I had her father forcas, her mother Cato, I her
(06:30):
She has several different siblings, but the ones who show
up the most in this book are Stheno and your Reale,
and in the myth she's the youngest of the three Gorgons.
So I had this outline of her family, but there
isn't a lot written about these members of her family
or how they lived, And so it was cool because
I had some structure, but I still had a lot
of room to imagine and play with things and kind
(06:52):
of introduce my own spin to it. But in this story,
we see she's METI. In the beginning of the story,
she becomes Medusa. Later we see this girl kind of
on this uncomfortable cusp between girlhood and womanhood. She's stuck
on an island. She's in a very dysfunctional situation. She
is the only mortal member of her family, so there
is an otherness that's already happening where she feels isolated
(07:14):
and like nobody can really relate to her desperately wants
to see the world. She knows there's a bigger world
out there. And I did that all on purpose. I
set her. I put her in a setting early on
where it makes what happens to her later makes sense.
Hopefully she is Ultimately, it's not too much of a
spoiler to say that someone targets her and they use
the fact that she's grown up in dysfunction and she's
(07:35):
grown up in this environment where no one has really
ever fully understood her. They come in and they say,
well I understand you, you can trust me, and they
use that. So, Yeah, she starts out with this dysfunctional
family situation that later influences some of the choices she
makes later in the book.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I really liked the relationship that you built with her mother,
and that was people can relate to that on a
human level. You know what I mean to have not
the closest relationship, maternal relationship. And there's that moment when
her her mother was rather explosive and then the you know,
(08:15):
the apology. How did you like come to develop that
dynamic between her and her mother? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, a big theme, one of the many themes in
I Medusa is that the story is never what we
see on the surface. There are layers to everybody's story.
And even though the focus is Medusa Mehdi in this book,
everybody around her has layers, and her mother, who is
someone again we don't see very much mentioned that. In
Greek mythology, her mother has a story. She was once
(08:46):
an incredibly powerful sea goddess who was feared and respected
and revered, and because of the dealings of men and God's,
her power was taken away, and we see the way
she responds to that and how ultimately her hurt people
tend to hurt other people. And even though it's not
an excuse, it does give her context and gives her
(09:07):
nuance to understand how these generational cycles are sometimes continued
ultimately because people are don't know how to handle hurt
and abuse, and so they end up perpetuating that cycle. Again,
not an excuse, but just kind of showing how some
oftimes this is really it's really complicated. Right.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Do you find that as a myth Reteller, that you're
able to touch those human elements, you know, like the
things that make us human, like you did with the
with her relationship with her mom.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yes. I think the reason well, these myths. I think
part of the reason these myths have endured and people
are still drawn to them is the human elements. Because
even these all powerful gods that are going to live
forever feel these very base emotions like jealousy and sadness
and anguish and fear at times, and pride appeals to
(10:00):
us two thousand and three thousand years later.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
As someone who like retells Greek myth too. I find
that sometimes building those characters, you're able to pull in
those elements of things that in our modern society we
have a label for it. You know, so when you're
building a character, you can't say, oh, a character is
having dysfunctional family, or they're having some sort of a
(10:25):
narcissistic trauma, or in my case, I do have Trojan
Warriors having PTSD. But you have to build those things
in without naming them, because they didn't. They didn't name
it that way.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
You know, we didn't. We didn't have labels for it,
but that it still existed. We just didn't study of it.
We didn't have the labeling that appears that appears all
over the book.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, exactly. Did you find that it was easy to
weave that in as a writer? Did you have did
you have to? Did you like deep dived psychology? I
don't know, I'm talking over you.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Sorry, no, no, no, no, no, get excited about it. I
think some things came pretty easily. I knew I wanted
to make some very like definitive I wanted to make
some definitive messages about kind of the predatory relationship sometimes
or the predatory strategies that sometimes people with power use
on people who don't have power, and so that was
(11:22):
always going to be there. And then you know, when
I the way I am as a writer, I outline
about eighty five percent of the story and then I
leave fifteen to ten percent open. I don't plot so
tightly that there's no room for variation, and so sometimes
as I'm writing, something will naturally click into place and
I'm like, ah, this is an opportunity to talk about this,
(11:44):
This is an opportunity to do this, And so I
leave that little bit of surprise for myself as I'm writing,
but I also kind of have an idea of where
I'm going.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, did you have any moments in that fifteen twenty
percent that when you were right that things popped out
for either Medusa or another character there? Oh? I had, like,
oh that it just the characters started to tell you
where they wanted to go in your story.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yeah. I think her parents are a really good example,
because I knew her parents weren't going to be great people,
but as I was writing and digging into them and
and just writing them, writing their dialogue, writing their behavior,
they surprised me. And in revision going back and fine tuning.
I would write a line and be like, oh, that's right.
(12:31):
So there were those moments, moments with Athena. She's a
pretty complicated character in this story where we see vulnerability
from her, and I wasn't necessarily planning to show that vulnerability,
but when I did, I was like, that that feels right.
I've talked before about how, for me, among other analogies,
writing feels like tuning an instrument where you're plucking along
and you're listening, listening, and then when you finally hit
(12:53):
that right no, and you've tuned it just right, you
just know in your gut you're like, that sounds right.
But so that it takes some times moremultiple tries to
get there, and you're just tweaking and messing with it,
hoping you're doing the right thing. But when you know, you.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Know, yeah, I've never heard it described like that before,
but I love that. I really do. It is like
a It's like sitting down at a piano or any instrument,
just like you said, and you don't know. Yeah, I
like that. So, in the context of your book, what
does monstrosity mean to you? You know, when we think
(13:28):
of Medusa as a monster. What does that mean to
you when you're writing this book.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Yeah, so I've talked about this with my previous books too.
When I was in college, I took a course called
political violence and it was like a special class that's
offered at the University of Arkansas every two years. Ten
students are picked for this class. We meet once a
week for three hours, and my professor, doctor Ryan incredible,
(13:56):
incredible man, incredible teacher. We would sit for this class
a week and discuss political violence. And it was so
interesting because we'd start out the class he would ask
us a question like, you know, is doing this atrocious
thing ever justified? And we would be like, of course not,
that's not right, that's terrible. And then in the in
the discussion that three hours that we were together, by
(14:17):
the end of it, we'd all be like, oh my gosh,
any of us would be willing to do a horrible
thing for a justified like for a reason we felt
was justified. And it was this beautiful experience, this you know,
kind of once in a lifetime class that I took.
What I took from it, like years and years later,
was that morality is so relative. You know, we see
(14:38):
this horror, this horrible act, and we're like, how could
this person do this? In what you realize is that
it doesn't take that much to you would do the
same in most cases if the atmosphere in the environment
was right. And I this is like a roundabout way
of saying, monstrosity is relative, you know, is it? I
can think of like a person, a parent trying to
(14:58):
protect their child doing quote unquote monstrous things to save
their child, or someone trying to save their loved one
or do something to protect their loved one. It's all relative.
And I think that's one of the I don't have stark.
You know, this is the message, but it's one of
those like implicit messages I put into I Medusa A
lot of the times when Mehdi is doing not all
(15:21):
the time, but a lot of the times when she's
doing these terrible things or thinking these really violent thoughts,
and you see the rage, it's in defense of someone else,
and so on the outside, she looks like this angry
girl who's just lashing out. But what you don't know
is that this anger has been building and that she's
doing it because she feels like she has to do
it to protect people.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
She loves, Yes, and that makes me think about Clydemnestra
because she's often framed as a villain. But what wouldn't
a parent or a mother do? Yeah, I think revenge
is sort of a that we could all understand. Yeah, well,
Agamemnon killed her daughter. Why wouldn't she want to plan something?
(16:02):
Why wouldn't she want revenge? You know, is it wrong
for her to want that? Is it wrong for her
to want him to be punished for what he did?
Speaker 3 (16:10):
And where does the where does the cycle stop? Because
with revenge, especially, you can go into this cycle of
well he did it, so I'm doing it, so she's
doing it, and this is how you have, like right,
generational blood feuds. Right, I think. I think another thing
to think about that I got from take that course
I took many years ago is whenever there's a narrative
about someone, we could say Clytemnestra, we could say Medusa,
(16:33):
we could say any woman or man or any person
in modern times. Anytime somebody is cast as a villain,
the question I immediately have is who benefits from that?
You know, if we say Medusa is the villain, who
does that make look like a hero? Now you know
who is absolved of responsibility. So I think that's something
(16:55):
else that hopefully this book encourages people to do not
just take the story at face value, but ask questions.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
And sometimes like villains don't always think they're villains. They
think they're the good guy. They think they're they you know, Agamemnon,
he justified what he did. I mean, you know when
you look at the ends, justifying the means or the
means just to find the end. That must have been
a really good class, interesting class.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
It was. It was so fun and there's no clear
to be there's no clear answers. You just like to
think about it. And I think, as children, when we
watch Disney movies, and I love Disney, but we watch
Disney movies and we are presented good and evil, are
presented as good bad and that's it. And so as
we get older and we become adults and we realize
that it's just rarely that simple, it can be a
(17:44):
jarring thing for some people. M M.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, there's all the gray area in the in the
real world. I call it being disney fied, you know,
wrapped up up and they're like bo and they make
it all nice and everything's beautiful, but you can break
it down, like all the way, female rage is often
like framed us something to suppress. And you open that
(18:09):
that very first opening, it's it's clear that we're going
to see a Medusa like layered and coming to this
because she's this rage. She doesn't have that in the beginning.
What did you want her anger to represent?
Speaker 3 (18:25):
I think about, especially on social media, like what are
the videos that go viral? It's the crash out videos, right, Yes,
it's someone losing their mind, whether it's somebody at the
store or getting into a fight, whatever, it's always that
thirty seconds of the absolute crash out, right. But we
never see the before, right, We never see we never
(18:48):
see the first three times the kid is picked on.
We see the time they snap. And so what I
wanted to I guess show is in this, in this,
especially in this digital age, when the rage and the
big moment is focused on that rage is for most people,
rage is not instantaneous. Rage is actually a slow build.
And you know, medi is very sweet at the beginning
(19:10):
of the book, but even in the very beginning, you know,
past that prologue where we see her as the gorgon,
we go back to her in chapter one as a
young woman kind of girl. The rage is still there,
and she's thinking about how what she wishes she could
do if she had power to protect people. It's there
and it's small, and then what happens throughout the story
is the rage grows and grows and grows, and then
(19:32):
one day she's like, hey, I have power. I can
actually do something with this rage. Now, the men who
come to her island, who she and her sisters returning
to Stone, they don't have any context of that beginning,
but now the reader does. So what might seem as
what might seem cruel and violent and terrible to those
men who are just walking into her story. Now you
as a reader are like, I kind of get it.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, we're in on the build up of that. Yeah,
did you ever worry about making her, you know, too
powerful or maybe not powerful enough? How did you find
that balance? Because in the end we're very sympathetic and
you see her differently, you know than a traditional telling.
(20:19):
Let's say, yeah, without giving all the things away.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Yeah, it's hard, it's hard. I'm like, it's a two
thousand year old spoiler to some extent. If you don't
know what happens to Medusa. Yeah, got to open up
your Greek mythology books. But I think there are moments
when Madi, well, at that time she's Medusa, her sisters
who are immortal and just don't have that connective thread
(20:44):
to humanity, are doing things and she's the one that's
pausing and saying, I don't know if this is right.
So we see her like the other thing. I think
we show good and evil as these two good to
evil and there's nothing in between, but we also show
people's progress and people digress, like we show it linearly
a lot of the time, and I just don't think
(21:06):
that's always what happens. So it isn't like Meddi becomes
Medusa and she just suddenly is all in on being
quote unquote bad, evil, violent. She still has these moments
where she's pulled back to humanity and really grappling with
that on the page. So she's powerful, but it's not
a clean like it's not a clean journey or a
(21:26):
straightforward journey where she just never looks back. She does
look back, and I think that's like anytime you make
a big decision, you do have moments when you look
back and you're like, is this the right thing? Did
I make the right choice? So I think I used
that her kind of going back and forth internally, not
to cut her power down, but to show that she's
still she's still a young woman throughout this whole book,
(21:49):
She's still struggling and trying to figure out what's her
purpose and who she wants to be. That's a very
natural thing I think at that age.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, it is right, and you kind of forget that
she's so young, you know, and she's still trying to
figure out her life or purpose and all of these
things are happening that are determining a course of action
for her. And sometimes I like that you said that,
because life will take you places where you did not
(22:19):
intend or did not expect, and you still have to
and you have to deal with that, you know, grieve
what was lost. But also here I am, and now
what's my next step? How do I move forward? And
what pieces of myself am I going to leave behind?
If I have to leave anything behind?
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Right? Yeah, and there's no guide map. I think we
as a society are really tough on I'm not going
to call them necessarily kids, but just young adults because
we say, oh, you're eighteen now, or whatever country you're
in the legal aid you're eighteen now, you're an adult,
but that's just a number. That's just an arbitrary age.
We decided that means you're an adult now. But I
(23:03):
don't think I felt like a real adult until I
was in my mid twenties. In my early twenties, my
late teens, I still felt like a kid, even though
the world didn't look at me that way. And it
was a strange sensation to be held to certain standards
that you didn't necessarily always feel ready for.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Right. I teach high school history, so I've got juniors
and seniors all day and they're seventeen eighteen at this
point of the year, but they're still they're still trying
to figure it out. You know. We have a lot
of good discussion about things, but it's it does seem
and we talk about that in class that it's even
(23:43):
though you're eighteen, you have a lot of responsibility, but
you don't. A lot of them are like stressed out
about college, but it's like, you know, you don't have
to have it all figured out at eighteen, and.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
No, that's okay, it's okay, and worth. I know, you
know this, eighteen can looks so different depending on the person,
depending on how they've grown up, if they've had responsibility
from a young age, if they have been through trauma,
Like one person's eighteen could look totally different from another
person's eighteen. Which is why I'm just not a fan
(24:15):
of holding people to say the standard of saying, well,
you're eighteen, you're an adult now. You need to be
able to handle X, Y and Z. Some people can't sell.
People need more time, and that should be okay.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Right, And a lot of the Greek mythology characters are young.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
They are and.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
They're doing these sort of extraordinary things, facing extraordinary situations
and events in their lives that are propelling them down
this course that you know, Greek mythology tells us is
their fate or their destiny. And I remember when I
was researching for Achilles, so I think it was easy.
(24:57):
It had him at like fifteen, yeah, getting to the
getting to the Trojan war, and I'm thinking fifteen, that's
called like a high school reshman. Yeah, like, oh my god,
So I guess that your mom is a sea goddess,
so you're a little bit you're you have a little
bit of an edge, but he was leading men at fifteen,
(25:19):
the closest historical character. I got to that when I
was trying to like how possible, how do I How
am I going to work? This was like Alexander the
Great because he was very young when he was doing
things for his father, and so I'm like, okay, that
kind of plausible. But I'm just I think that's that's
(25:40):
stunning that to be that young and to do something,
you know, to have a story that's so powerful, like Medusa,
like you said, she's she's young because we have her
in the very beginning, and for her to have to
face everything that she faced and rise above that and
move on and grow into her power, you know, that
(26:04):
was pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
That was pretty powerful. How did you how did you
approach the gods, you know, building Athena and Poseidon?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Mm hm, So I mean I think the gods, like Medusa,
some of them are very well known, very familiar. So
I wanted to I guess the term I turned to
a lot is familiar but fresh. So some thinks about
them feel familiar in some things you haven't seen before.
One thing I knew with Poseidon was that when you
(26:35):
think of Poseidon, you kind of think of like a
character that maybe looks like King Triton from Little Mermaid,
like old but muscular, white hair, you know, under the
water whatever. And I always thought like with Medusa's the
Roman version of Medusa's story where he violates her, you know,
I'm like, I wanted to paint that a little bit differently,
(26:58):
and so in this story, instead of him being kind
of like some old guy, in this version of the story,
a lot of the gods choose to present themselves as young,
and so it suddenly makes sense that Medusa, it could
be lured in by this young guy who only he's
thousands of years older but only looks to be a
few years older, and he's cool, and he's worldly and attractive.
(27:24):
Not to take away from what happens to her, but
there are versions of Medusa's story where she is implicitly violated,
and there are versions of the story where the text
suggests it could have been a consensual relationship. And so
I wanted to kind of play around with the different
versions and say, what if there was a situation where,
like a lot of young kind of girls on that
(27:45):
cusp of womanhood, she sees this older guy, and he's
attractive and interesting, and he represents the outside world she's
never seen. She's very sheltered and here's this guy who's,
like I said, as worldly and so anyway, that's a
long diet tribe. Like I wanted to change the way
Poseidon is presented. I think Athena is another character who
(28:06):
in a lot of the stories with Medusa and Athena,
she's just outright the villain, and she is still pretty
horrible in this book, but I wanted to give her
some nuance in this world. The way the gods are
in this world, their strength is based on their faith,
the faith others have in them, and so the more
people who believe in them and worship them, the more
powerful they become. And what we see in Athena is
(28:27):
that for all of her power, you know, she's this
this like cool alpha female character, she still has fear
because she's still living and trying to survive in a
male dominated world, atmosphere, environment, and past all of like
the toughness that you see on the outside, she's she's
terrified of losing it all. And I think that mirrors
(28:49):
what we see in the real world, where some of
the most accomplished women in their industries carry deeply misogynous views,
you know, because and you're thinking, well, you've made it
this far, why why wouldn't you be in favor of women.
But they have these deeply misogynous views because they're just
trying to survive themselves, and they pull the letter up
(29:10):
behind them and we see that. So I didn't want
Athena to just be like a flat that quote unquote villain,
because I think there's more to her story too.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I think you did a really good job of giving
us the three dimensional gods in the in this story.
But I was just talking with another friend of mine
this morning and we were talking about how sometimes in
Greek Greek mythology retellings, characters can tend to be two
dimensional because people have people go into the stories expecting
(29:48):
X y Z to happen, and it's a very it's
a challenge to write a three dimensional character, and especially
with the gods. You know, everybody has an xp tation
of of who Poseidon is, of who Athena is, and
to create characters that are well rounded and like you said,
(30:10):
giving Athena that vulnerability that's not something that we see
with her. You know most people, most people know her,
you know, as you know, telling Odysseus what to do,
and she's kind of like a like a scolding mother.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
And like almost in almost like a girl boss you
almost as a kid, she was my favorite goddess. Yeah,
full stop, like war goddess, like wisdom, smart, smart and
could fight, like doesn't take any crop from anyone, like I.
I admired her, and I'm still outside of the context
of my Madu. So I still do because when you
think of war and toughness, you think of men, and
(30:46):
here's this girl kicking butt. Yeah, we don't. We don't
normally see vulnerability in Athena familiar.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Right, exactly what does justice look like for you?
Speaker 3 (30:59):
And I'm a duce, so I think within the context
of im Medusa, you have this I go back and
forth between saying girl and young woman, because she truly
is on the cusp where it's not clearly defined. You
have this young woman, this girl who begins a story
with no power whatsoever, not in her family, not in
her home, nothing. She gets a little bit of it,
(31:22):
it's taken away. And I think that in some versions
of Medusa's story it's a tragedy because she is she
loses her life and then for the rest of eternity,
like she has all these unfair labels put on her
and she's remembered as a monster. But to me mehdi slash,
Medusa gets her justice because she's remembered and we look
(31:43):
at how she's remembered in pop Like I said, pop culture,
she has become a symbol of something powerful and beautiful.
Women get Medusa tattoos. I don't know that they get
Athena tattoos as often. You know, it was almost like
her her taking power in her is what has allowed
her to be remembered through the eons, even though I'm
(32:04):
not I don't even want to say the hero's name,
the hero who ends her life, even though Poseidon, even
though all you have all these different characters in myth
who have tried to kind of silence her and diminish her,
and it's like, actually, in what they did, they actually
helped her become immortal, even though she dies. So I
think it's a it's a strange kind of justice, but
(32:25):
it's almost like Medusa got the last laugh mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
That's I think a lot of like Greek mythology. The
immortality comes in the written word. And I think that
even for Achilles, it was, you know, the idea of
his name. We remember Clydemnestra. Like all of these stories
are so old. Medusa's story is so old, but we
continue to say their name, we continue to retell their story.
(32:54):
It's like every decade, it seems like we we work
through it, and as as our society is working through
its own issues, we go back to the myths and
then we we it's like we tweak them again for
you know, like the upcoming movie, the one that the Odyssey.
How many Odyssey retellings have there been? Right, but resonates
(33:18):
so much with us.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
I think, yeah, it builds this really cool bridge to
the past. And I think that's that is the most
honest beauty. That's the beauty of myth telling. And it's
taking a story. And we do this all the time
in our lives, right, You tell a story to a friend,
they take the parts that were important to them and
emphasize that, and then they maybe dismiss the parts that weren't,
and then they retell it to someone else, and then
(33:42):
the story is changing and morphing. Oh but the core
of the story staying the same. And I think that's
that's just part of the human condition. We like to
tell especially when it's a good story, we like to
repeat it and focus on certain pieces and not focus
on the pieces that we don't care about. We say
that we see that all over the world and all
these different cultures, and what's cool. I don't know if
(34:03):
you have done any reading, like outside of Greek and
Greco Roman mythology, but you'll notice that some figures, certain gods,
certain babels, pieces of folk or they're very similar, even
though they're in different parts of the world. You might
hear a myth that comes from ancient China that sounds
very similar to a myth from East Europe, and you're like,
(34:25):
have that happen? But it's the same story that has
been taken and it's traveled to different people and resonated.
So I think that's one of the really really cool
things about myth.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah, I think a lot about who gets to hold
these stories And did writing Medusa change how you think
about ownership of myth?
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Oh? Definitely, it creates It's kind of like what I
was saying earlier about good and evil and how there's
never a clear answer. I think the same thing is
true of myths. We know the earliest written accounts of
Medusa's story, but the truth is we don't know where
her story true began, and we don't know if it
was orally being passed on until if somebody finally decided
to write it, or if there was an earlier version
(35:07):
that was written that just was lost to time. I
do respect that certain myths come from different parts of
the world and have real origins. There absolutely but for
these stories to survive, like I said before, they're repeated,
and as they're repeated, and as people move, the stories
move with them, sometimes by force, sometimes by voluntarily. Another
(35:29):
good example is like if you listen to or read
about mythology and folklore on the West African part of
the continent, and then you go over to the Caribbean
and South America, some of the same figures have traveled,
and some of the same stories have traveled, sometimes by force,
sometimes not, and they've more often become their own thing.
(35:50):
And then there's a question of well, now, who owns
these myths And the answer is, I'm not sure anybody
really owns them, because they're not meant to be owned.
They're meant to move around, really changed with each generation.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Right, Yeah, let me think about that for a second.
You said a lot right there.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Sorry, I'm really at that. You can't tell.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, no, me too. I love I really love Greek
mythology specifically, and I'm not as familiar with other mythologies.
Oh no, mythologies I would like to be.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Oh no, there's so there's so much. And I've I mean,
I've written three books that pull from different mythology in Africa.
That's how I have some of that context. But it's
all just to say, like, myths move around, they're almost
like living things. And so when you talk about ownership,
I think it's difficult to say anybody who owns it
because they're not Greek myths, Roman myths, West African myths,
(36:46):
East European myths. They're not meant to necessarily be owned.
We can always honor where they came from, but I
don't know if that's the same thing as ownership.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Right And I feel like right now they're having a
really big discon discussion that there were no Greek actors
in the New Odyssey movie, and that's a whole that's
a whole discussion.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
In that space.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah, so that kind of makes me think about from
the Greek perspective, like that was our religion and now
you're retelling our stories And I hadn't as a reteller,
I hadn't ever thought of that. That was like a
new conversation that got put into my head.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Yeah, and it's some of these discussions aren't easy. I know.
I did quite a bit of research on like act
how actual priestesses in ancient Athens would have behaved, what
was required of them, because I felt like in order
to write about it, I needed to understand. And my
thing is always you can break rules, but you have
to know why the rules exist if you're going to
break them. So if you're you know, if you make
(37:48):
a choice to have a certain actor play a certain character,
I think that's fine, but you also need to be
prepared to answer questions about it and back up your
choice if you choose to deb eight you know.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah, I think the you know people are when we
they have this expectation when they come to mythology about
who the characters are going to be, how they're going
to act. And I when I was who was I reading?
I want to say it was doctor Casey do a
(38:24):
Hackney's paper, and she was talking about how the oral
storytelling that when you looked at say like the Trojan
War myths. And I'm sure this goes to what you
were saying earlier, that it's it's probably all myth was
oral at some time, and that it wasn't like it
was one storyteller. So people tend to think like Homer
(38:45):
was the storyteller. Now he's like, he's just one person
who happened to be the one credited with writing down
stories that had been told. Trojan War stories existed throughout
the Green world and probably at the edges and bled
into other areas. We don't know how many people were
(39:06):
telling these stories, so the name would be familiar and
maybe the the you know, the basic kernels of their story.
But each storyteller brings something different. And you as a writer,
you know that you brought a nuance to it that
nobody else could bring.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
So and you bring out, bring your own biases, you
bring your own perspective, and that's not a bad thing.
That's just a natural part of storytelling.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Right, And I think that oral storytelling for us is
you know, that's part of what makes it universal that
we can connect to these characters in different ways, different
aspects of their story. There is no one right way
to tell any of these characters stories.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Yeah, I think I always I always want to iarify that.
I Medusa is not a story where I'm saying history
got it wrong. Medusa was a black one and you
all got it wrong. I don't think that's productive or
helpful message. I think like one of the things all
I'm saying is a speculative author is well, what if?
What if she had lots? What if she had brown skin?
(40:19):
And also why not? Why can't we take when we
look at the North African coast and when we look
at Greece, why couldn't there have been an island somewhere
hidden between the two? Why not?
Speaker 2 (40:32):
You know?
Speaker 3 (40:32):
And I hope it encourages people to use their imagination
and ask why not? And ask what if?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
There's so much about the ancient world that we know,
but there's so much that we don't know. Yeah, I
was in grad school and was I think it was
doctor the late doctor Dan Harris in her class. We
were talking about how little of the extant writing that
we have actually like two or three percent of whatever
they of the total of whatever they wrote. And I was,
(41:00):
you know, to think about in modern society, what if
they only had like two or three percent of everything
that we ever produced in America? What would they think
of America? Because what would they get? What if they
just had a stack of like Cosmopolitan magazines and and
and they were building this whole ideology of what we were,
what we were about based.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
On that exactly. It's ludicrous. And so I understand that
there are people who dedicated their whole careers to studying
the ancient world and certain things we do know, but
like you said, there's a lot that we don't know.
And I don't think there's any harm in saying, well,
why not until we have definitive proof? Why not? We
do know for a fact that there were black people
in ancient Athens, and they weren't necessarily slaves. They there
(41:44):
were people there who built lives. Athens was a coastal
trade city. Of course, of course there were people from
all from everywhere who were there. So why not? You know, No,
I was, I was just that's that's I always go
back to that, the why not and the what if?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Right do you watch the sho show Spartacus by Chance.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Oh gosh, it's been remade, hasn't it.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
They did. They just had another season, the most recent season.
I feel like they do a really good job of
giving us a diverse cast in that ancient Roman world. Yeah,
because I think that's more representative of what was happening.
Because you've had you had immigration, you had, like you said,
(42:25):
people trading people, and they sailed all over the Mediterranean.
It wasn't like, oh we had to just wait for
some invasion to happen. People they were in boats, people
had things to sell and trade, and obviously people are like,
when you trade it, you have a business on the
other side, connections.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, I was going to say certain things, remember, like
it's so funny to see, like how certain things haven't changed.
People always want what's not accessible and a round. So
if there's a certain cloth dye pattern, a certain perfume,
a certain delicacy of food that isn't grown where you are,
people will pay premium prices to have this exotic thing
(43:07):
that's foreign and interesting. And so of course that you
develop microeconomies off of perfume and spice traders and clothing
textile merchants who are profiting off of the fact that
people want what is in high demand and what is
not available to them there. So once you start thinking
about it, you're like, of course, there were people from
all over the world in Athens, and it would make sense,
(43:31):
like you said, because of slavery, because of job opportunities,
because of love. People got married and were not necessarily
from the same culture. So once you think about it,
you're like, oh, actually, that does make total sense.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
How did you find the balance between the mythic tone
that you were setting and the intimate interiority of your characters?
I thought, And then this is kind of like a
side quest or off that question. I thought you handled
the the intimate scenes very cleverly, like as a writer,
(44:07):
and they were you know, they weren't graphic. They were
just so well done.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
How did you get to that, because that's that's so
hard to do.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
One thing is like and I did not understand this
until I was, you know, in my twenties. I would
read my first drafts of stories that I was trying
to write, and then I would read like books by
authors I really loved and be like, well, my writing
is not like theirs, so I just might not. I
just must not be a good writer not understanding that.
I you know, these books go through so many rounds
(44:39):
of revision. You have editors, you have copy editors, sometimes agents,
you have critique partners. So what you see when you
read I'm Medusa is the you know, I wrote those words.
But it's also like the reflection of a lot of
people looking at it and being willing to give me notes.
And I don't want to take away from my own work,
but I also want to be honest and acknowledge that
(45:01):
it takes a village as far as the intimacy and
some of the more difficult scenes, I just made a
decision that part of the problem. And I don't mean
to be too heavy yere, but one of the issues
particularly around assault in violent that culture, I'm trying to
avoid saying any words that will get this video flag
is one of the issues around that culture is silence,
(45:23):
the fact that we don't talk about it, the fact
that we euphemize it. And I'm having to euphemize it
right now because YouTube flags these things. But like I
did not, there's a particular scene in this book that
is uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable to write uncomfortable to think about,
and it's probably uncomfortable to read. But the thing is,
sometimes that discomfort is healthy because it is an uncomfortable
(45:44):
and inherently wrong thing. And so I thought about real
life examples, and I've been very open about talking about Aliyah,
pop star from the nineties, who was preyed upon by
another pop star named Dark Kelly, and I named him.
I name him on purpose because part of the problem
when she was being harmed was people wouldn't name him,
(46:07):
and they covered for him. And it wasn't until many
years later, after Leah had passed away, until he'd harmed
a lot more women that he was named. And so
I think, even when it makes us uncomfortable, sometimes the
most just thing we can do is tell the truth
and be honest and not shirk away or hide that said,
(46:28):
I did like tell my editor like it was one
of that was one of the things that I really
wanted to get right, and so I worked with her
to make sure I was not being graphic or explicit
or doing anything to sensationalize this really heavy thing, but
also being honest.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
It's a delicate thing to do in Greek retellings because
it happens to so many female characters. Yeah, across the board,
you know, through assault by gods or assault by other men,
and it's normalized.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
It's just it's so frequent, it's normalized, and that's another problem.
So I didn't want to lie about the reality of
what it would have been like for women in that
time when there were not there wasn't really a lot
of legislation to protect women and men from that kind
of violence. But I also, again, I just I didn't
want to sensationalize it. The art of telling a myth
(47:24):
and retelling it is you get to take the parts
that resonate with you and emphasize that, and the parts
that you don't care for or don't like you don't
have to necessarily focus on. And there are people who
are very purest and very protective, and I get that too.
But yeah, again, we don't know what the original, original
first time Medusa story was told. We don't know what
(47:46):
that story was. We know the versions that have been
written down and have been preserved through time. We just
hold those up as the official versions, but there's no
official version. Nobody owns the story of Thesa, the story
of Clydemnestra the story of Achilles, like these are all
and you said it before, kind of the amalgamation of
(48:07):
lots of different people with giving their input and emphasizing
the emphasizing the things that they care about. So I
think that's a very natural choice.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
How was writing I'm Medusa? How did that change you
as a writer?
Speaker 3 (48:25):
That's a good question. Every book I've written five now,
the experience of writing a book is never the same
because I'm never writing it in the same period of
my life. Right like I started I'm Medusa. I mean
I started to pray my very first book when I
was fresh out of college and feeling very lost and
like what am I going to do with myself? And
then I wrote I'm Medusa. I feel like that book
(48:49):
I wrote almost exclusively in my thirties. It was the
first book I wrote in my thirties. I think that
this book because it was an adult book, like I
figured out pretty quickly that it was not going to
be for kids. It was a book that encouraged me
to dig deep and write from a really honest place,
whereas I did write from an honest place with Beasts
(49:09):
of Prey in the two books, other books in that series.
But I was always aware that I was writing for
kids and that I needed to keep that in mind.
With I Medusa, I knew it was an adult audience,
and I didn't have to be quite as I didn't
have to sanitize as much. I could go into places
that were heavier and not necessarily worry as much. So
(49:29):
that was very freeing and larry liberating. And there were
times I wrote things and it was uncomfortable to write,
but then to get readers come back and say, I
really appreciated that you talked about this, or that you
showed this on the page, or you handled this way
this thing in a particular way was really validating. The
best time, the best art you make, I think is
the art that you're when you when you're putting a
(49:51):
little bit of yourself on the page, and it feels
very vulnerable and scary, but it's authentic. So it encouraged
me to write from an authentic place and to keep
digging into the places that are sometimes uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Yeah, and that came through on the page, and I
keep the word I wrote down in my notes was elegant.
So I thank you all that I'm gonna stick with
that one. So is there anything that you would like
to add that we haven't covered or.
Speaker 3 (50:22):
I think I've said everything. I just, more more than anything,
I don't write my books with a message like I
said where I'm like, this is what you need to
take away from the book. But I just I hope
this book starts conversations, whether they're angry conversations or impassioned
conversations or sad conversations. I've done my job when I
can create art that makes people think and makes people
(50:43):
want to have conversations about the things that they're taking
away from the book, whether they like it or not.
So yeah, that's my hope.
Speaker 2 (50:51):
Well, thank you, thank you so much for joining me today.
It was lovely to chat with you and get to
know you. And I will be sending this out to
the world with my message to read your book, and
I'm gonna put it Okay, I'm Medusa. It's gorgeous, by
the way, the cover, everything about this is gorgeous.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on
to this was really fun.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, I'll see you bye bye.
Well that's it for today.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Thank you so much for joining me for this deep
dive into Iana Gray's I'm Medusa. I hope you enjoyed
our chat as much as I did. It was such
a thoughtful and layered conversation. If you enjoyed this episode,
please take a moment and leave your rating on your
favorite podcast platform. It truly helps more than you know,
(51:41):
and I do appreciate your support. Be sure to follow
me on my socials. I do love hearing from listeners
and I always enjoy continuing the conversation there. You can
find I'm Medusa by Aana Gray on Amazon and at
Barnes and Noble. And if you're looking for an epic
fantasy inspired by the Trojan War, you can find my
Homeric Chronicles series on Amazon as well. I appreciate you,
(52:06):
and as always, drink your wine and be merry. Marmadon's
Welcome back, murmered on to another episode of Greek Mythology
Read Told podcast. Today's episode is such a good one.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ayana Gray,
best selling fantasy author known for her richly layered storytelling
and emotionally grounded characters. You may already know her from
(00:44):
her Beasts of Praise series, but today we're diving into
her newest book, I Medusa, and I have to tell
you that this book is so elegantly written. It's a
unique and deeply intimate tape on Medusa that really steps
away from the monster that we think we know and
(01:05):
instead introduces us to a young woman named Mehdi before
she becomes the mythological heroine that we remember from most
of the retellings that we hear. It is reflective and
fierce and thoughtful in a way that lingers with you
days after finishing. We talk about voice and rage and power, authorship,
(01:30):
and what it means to step into a myth that's
been told for centuries and claim it.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
As your own.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Now, let's dive in.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
What pulled you toward Medusa as a character. We're centering
do you want to if we could start there sure.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Well, thank you for having me. First of all, Oh,
you're welcome. This is exciting. So I have always been
a Greek mythology girly, you know, I think a lot
of kids, I don't know if it's nineties kids or
just kids in general, because it's we're exposed to it
so early. I mean, I think everybody goes through a phase.
Some people stay in that phase longer than others. And
(02:10):
so I was a big, big Greca Roman mythology fan
as a kid. I loved it. I loved it in media.
Two if my favorite stories were that of the minotaur
Minuitur and also Medusa. And then as like my interests changed,
she popped up at other places I read, like comic
books where she appeared with Wonder Woman. She pops up
(02:31):
in pop culture, you know, in fashion and music, in
all these different places. So she kind of stayed in
my periphery. And then one day I was just doing
a Google search to see, like where she might have lived,
and I learned that scholars have actually debated this for
a long time, and one of the places that they
have suggested she could have been from was on or
(02:51):
near the North African coast. And I had never thought
about Medusa having any proximity to Africa, even though Greece
is pretty close to the Africa the continent, right, And
it fundamentally changed how I saw her, and I was like, well, wait,
what if? Why not? And the story took off from there.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
As somebody who like yourself, likes the Greek mythology and
you said, like the nineties, did you ever watch like
the old like the Clash of the Titans.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Did you watch all that stuff?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (03:18):
For sure, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I feel like we kind of we were introduced to
a lot of that, and so it's nice to meet
other people that are into that as well. Medusa is
such a diverse, like her stories are divergent, just the
way like a lot of the mythology is. So everybody
starts to think they'll have like their own favorite telling
(03:41):
and then I think that's the one, like that's it,
but no, there's like so many other layers to the
characters and where they come from and depends on what
fragments or who you read. So I like that, and
I think that people forget that Grease is like literally
right there on the whole north of Africa, and there's
(04:02):
like a whole trade and integration all around the Mediterranean. Absolutely,
we kind of stand still, No, right, exactly what did
you want most for Medusa to be able to say?
What did you really want her to like bring forward?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah? I think, And I'll say it's difficult to talk
about Medusa without giving spoilers because her story is really
well known, but not everybody does know how her story ends,
so I want to be mindful of that. There are
two specific moments of Medusa's story that are remembered in
history and in mythology, and they both have to do
(04:41):
with violence. I won't spoil I won't spoil it too much,
but they both are defined by violence, and that's really
all we know about her when we think about her
in pop culture and all these labels that are assigned
to her. And what I wanted to do with this
story was give her a life before that and show
that she had nuance and she wasn't perfect, but but
had a whole life that could have been lived, and
(05:03):
that was lived before these two really violent, horrible moments
that people have come to define her with.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, you said at the bottom of this page, and
I underlined all this as she douses the temple's torch
and surrenders to the dark. Medusa thinks about monsters and
how easily she became one. That was so powerful to
me when I read that, I just whole the whole
(05:30):
opening scene. You just set the tone for what to like,
what we could expect from Medusa. You handled it so
well with that priest. I love that, and I think
that people oftentimes that's all they think about her as
is as like the monster, right and the famous artwork
(05:52):
you know of her head being held up. That's so
much more. And I love how you just went into
her character, her family life. Did you want to tell
us a little bit about how you structured her her
early years?
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Yeah? Sure so. The fun thing about writing doing a
reimagining of a very famous, well known mythical figure is
I had the outline of Medusa. I had an idea
of who her parents were, even though a lot of
people don't know that her parents are canonically see Gods.
I had her father forcas, her mother Cato, I her
(06:30):
She has several different siblings, but the ones who show
up the most in this book are Stheno and your Reale,
and in the myth she's the youngest of the three Gorgons.
So I had this outline of her family, but there
isn't a lot written about these members of her family
or how they lived, And so it was cool because
I had some structure, but I still had a lot
of room to imagine and play with things and kind
(06:52):
of introduce my own spin to it. But in this story,
we see she's METI. In the beginning of the story,
she becomes Medusa. Later we see this girl kind of
on this uncomfortable cusp between girlhood and womanhood. She's stuck
on an island. She's in a very dysfunctional situation. She
is the only mortal member of her family, so there
is an otherness that's already happening where she feels isolated
(07:14):
and like nobody can really relate to her desperately wants
to see the world. She knows there's a bigger world
out there. And I did that all on purpose. I
set her. I put her in a setting early on
where it makes what happens to her later makes sense.
Hopefully she is Ultimately, it's not too much of a
spoiler to say that someone targets her and they use
the fact that she's grown up in dysfunction and she's
(07:35):
grown up in this environment where no one has really
ever fully understood her. They come in and they say,
well I understand you, you can trust me, and they
use that. So, Yeah, she starts out with this dysfunctional
family situation that later influences some of the choices she
makes later in the book.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I really liked the relationship that you built with her mother,
and that was people can relate to that on a
human level. You know what I mean to have not
the closest relationship, maternal relationship. And there's that moment when
her her mother was rather explosive and then the you know,
(08:15):
the apology. How did you like come to develop that
dynamic between her and her mother? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, a big theme, one of the many themes in
I Medusa is that the story is never what we
see on the surface. There are layers to everybody's story.
And even though the focus is Medusa Mehdi in this book,
everybody around her has layers, and her mother, who is
someone again we don't see very much mentioned that. In
Greek mythology, her mother has a story. She was once
(08:46):
an incredibly powerful sea goddess who was feared and respected
and revered, and because of the dealings of men and God's,
her power was taken away, and we see the way
she responds to that and how ultimately her hurt people
tend to hurt other people. And even though it's not
an excuse, it does give her context and gives her
(09:07):
nuance to understand how these generational cycles are sometimes continued
ultimately because people are don't know how to handle hurt
and abuse, and so they end up perpetuating that cycle. Again,
not an excuse, but just kind of showing how some
oftimes this is really it's really complicated. Right.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Do you find that as a myth Reteller, that you're
able to touch those human elements, you know, like the
things that make us human, like you did with the
with her relationship with her mom.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yes. I think the reason well, these myths. I think
part of the reason these myths have endured and people
are still drawn to them is the human elements. Because
even these all powerful gods that are going to live
forever feel these very base emotions like jealousy and sadness
and anguish and fear at times, and pride appeals to
(10:00):
us two thousand and three thousand years later.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
As someone who like retells Greek myth too. I find
that sometimes building those characters, you're able to pull in
those elements of things that in our modern society we
have a label for it. You know, so when you're
building a character, you can't say, oh, a character is
having dysfunctional family, or they're having some sort of a
(10:25):
narcissistic trauma, or in my case, I do have Trojan
Warriors having PTSD. But you have to build those things
in without naming them, because they didn't. They didn't name
it that way.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
You know, we didn't. We didn't have labels for it,
but that it still existed. We just didn't study of it.
We didn't have the labeling that appears that appears all
over the book.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, exactly. Did you find that it was easy to
weave that in as a writer? Did you have did
you have to? Did you like deep dived psychology? I
don't know, I'm talking over you.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Sorry, no, no, no, no, no, get excited about it. I
think some things came pretty easily. I knew I wanted
to make some very like definitive I wanted to make
some definitive messages about kind of the predatory relationship sometimes
or the predatory strategies that sometimes people with power use
on people who don't have power, and so that was
(11:22):
always going to be there. And then you know, when
I the way I am as a writer, I outline
about eighty five percent of the story and then I
leave fifteen to ten percent open. I don't plot so
tightly that there's no room for variation, and so sometimes
as I'm writing, something will naturally click into place and
I'm like, ah, this is an opportunity to talk about this,
(11:44):
This is an opportunity to do this, And so I
leave that little bit of surprise for myself as I'm writing,
but I also kind of have an idea of where
I'm going.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, did you have any moments in that fifteen twenty
percent that when you were right that things popped out
for either Medusa or another character there? Oh? I had, like,
oh that it just the characters started to tell you
where they wanted to go in your story.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yeah. I think her parents are a really good example,
because I knew her parents weren't going to be great people,
but as I was writing and digging into them and
and just writing them, writing their dialogue, writing their behavior,
they surprised me. And in revision going back and fine tuning.
I would write a line and be like, oh, that's right.
(12:31):
So there were those moments, moments with Athena. She's a
pretty complicated character in this story where we see vulnerability
from her, and I wasn't necessarily planning to show that vulnerability,
but when I did, I was like, that that feels right.
I've talked before about how, for me, among other analogies,
writing feels like tuning an instrument where you're plucking along
and you're listening, listening, and then when you finally hit
(12:53):
that right no, and you've tuned it just right, you
just know in your gut you're like, that sounds right.
But so that it takes some times moremultiple tries to
get there, and you're just tweaking and messing with it,
hoping you're doing the right thing. But when you know, you.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Know, yeah, I've never heard it described like that before,
but I love that. I really do. It is like
a It's like sitting down at a piano or any instrument,
just like you said, and you don't know. Yeah, I
like that. So, in the context of your book, what
does monstrosity mean to you? You know, when we think
(13:28):
of Medusa as a monster. What does that mean to
you when you're writing this book.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Yeah, so I've talked about this with my previous books too.
When I was in college, I took a course called
political violence and it was like a special class that's
offered at the University of Arkansas every two years. Ten
students are picked for this class. We meet once a
week for three hours, and my professor, doctor Ryan incredible,
(13:56):
incredible man, incredible teacher. We would sit for this class
a week and discuss political violence. And it was so
interesting because we'd start out the class he would ask
us a question like, you know, is doing this atrocious
thing ever justified? And we would be like, of course not,
that's not right, that's terrible. And then in the in
the discussion that three hours that we were together, by
(14:17):
the end of it, we'd all be like, oh my gosh,
any of us would be willing to do a horrible
thing for a justified like for a reason we felt
was justified. And it was this beautiful experience, this you know,
kind of once in a lifetime class that I took.
What I took from it, like years and years later,
was that morality is so relative. You know, we see
(14:38):
this horror, this horrible act, and we're like, how could
this person do this? In what you realize is that
it doesn't take that much to you would do the
same in most cases if the atmosphere in the environment
was right. And I this is like a roundabout way
of saying, monstrosity is relative, you know, is it? I
can think of like a person, a parent trying to
(14:58):
protect their child doing quote unquote monstrous things to save
their child, or someone trying to save their loved one
or do something to protect their loved one. It's all relative.
And I think that's one of the I don't have stark.
You know, this is the message, but it's one of
those like implicit messages I put into I Medusa A
lot of the times when Mehdi is doing not all
(15:21):
the time, but a lot of the times when she's
doing these terrible things or thinking these really violent thoughts,
and you see the rage, it's in defense of someone else,
and so on the outside, she looks like this angry
girl who's just lashing out. But what you don't know
is that this anger has been building and that she's
doing it because she feels like she has to do
it to protect people.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
She loves, Yes, and that makes me think about Clydemnestra
because she's often framed as a villain. But what wouldn't
a parent or a mother do? Yeah, I think revenge
is sort of a that we could all understand. Yeah, well,
Agamemnon killed her daughter. Why wouldn't she want to plan something?
(16:02):
Why wouldn't she want revenge? You know, is it wrong
for her to want that? Is it wrong for her
to want him to be punished for what he did?
Speaker 3 (16:10):
And where does the where does the cycle stop? Because
with revenge, especially, you can go into this cycle of
well he did it, so I'm doing it, so she's
doing it, and this is how you have, like right,
generational blood feuds. Right, I think. I think another thing
to think about that I got from take that course
I took many years ago is whenever there's a narrative
about someone, we could say Clytemnestra, we could say Medusa,
(16:33):
we could say any woman or man or any person
in modern times. Anytime somebody is cast as a villain,
the question I immediately have is who benefits from that?
You know, if we say Medusa is the villain, who
does that make look like a hero? Now you know
who is absolved of responsibility. So I think that's something
(16:55):
else that hopefully this book encourages people to do not
just take the story at face value, but ask questions.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
And sometimes like villains don't always think they're villains. They
think they're the good guy. They think they're they you know, Agamemnon,
he justified what he did. I mean, you know when
you look at the ends, justifying the means or the
means just to find the end. That must have been
a really good class, interesting class.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
It was. It was so fun and there's no clear
to be there's no clear answers. You just like to
think about it. And I think, as children, when we
watch Disney movies, and I love Disney, but we watch
Disney movies and we are presented good and evil, are
presented as good bad and that's it. And so as
we get older and we become adults and we realize
that it's just rarely that simple, it can be a
(17:44):
jarring thing for some people. M M.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, there's all the gray area in the in the
real world. I call it being disney fied, you know,
wrapped up up and they're like bo and they make
it all nice and everything's beautiful, but you can break
it down, like all the way, female rage is often
like framed us something to suppress. And you open that
(18:09):
that very first opening, it's it's clear that we're going
to see a Medusa like layered and coming to this
because she's this rage. She doesn't have that in the beginning.
What did you want her anger to represent?
Speaker 3 (18:25):
I think about, especially on social media, like what are
the videos that go viral? It's the crash out videos, right, Yes,
it's someone losing their mind, whether it's somebody at the
store or getting into a fight, whatever, it's always that
thirty seconds of the absolute crash out, right. But we
never see the before, right, We never see we never
(18:48):
see the first three times the kid is picked on.
We see the time they snap. And so what I
wanted to I guess show is in this, in this,
especially in this digital age, when the rage and the
big moment is focused on that rage is for most people,
rage is not instantaneous. Rage is actually a slow build.
And you know, medi is very sweet at the beginning
(19:10):
of the book, but even in the very beginning, you know,
past that prologue where we see her as the gorgon,
we go back to her in chapter one as a
young woman kind of girl. The rage is still there,
and she's thinking about how what she wishes she could
do if she had power to protect people. It's there
and it's small, and then what happens throughout the story
is the rage grows and grows and grows, and then
(19:32):
one day she's like, hey, I have power. I can
actually do something with this rage. Now, the men who
come to her island, who she and her sisters returning
to Stone, they don't have any context of that beginning,
but now the reader does. So what might seem as
what might seem cruel and violent and terrible to those
men who are just walking into her story. Now you
as a reader are like, I kind of get it.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, we're in on the build up of that. Yeah,
did you ever worry about making her, you know, too
powerful or maybe not powerful enough? How did you find
that balance? Because in the end we're very sympathetic and
you see her differently, you know than a traditional telling.
(20:19):
Let's say, yeah, without giving all the things away.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Yeah, it's hard, it's hard. I'm like, it's a two
thousand year old spoiler to some extent. If you don't
know what happens to Medusa. Yeah, got to open up
your Greek mythology books. But I think there are moments
when Madi, well, at that time she's Medusa, her sisters
who are immortal and just don't have that connective thread
(20:44):
to humanity, are doing things and she's the one that's
pausing and saying, I don't know if this is right.
So we see her like the other thing. I think
we show good and evil as these two good to
evil and there's nothing in between, but we also show
people's progress and people digress, like we show it linearly
a lot of the time, and I just don't think
(21:06):
that's always what happens. So it isn't like Meddi becomes
Medusa and she just suddenly is all in on being
quote unquote bad, evil, violent. She still has these moments
where she's pulled back to humanity and really grappling with
that on the page. So she's powerful, but it's not
a clean like it's not a clean journey or a
(21:26):
straightforward journey where she just never looks back. She does
look back, and I think that's like anytime you make
a big decision, you do have moments when you look
back and you're like, is this the right thing? Did
I make the right choice? So I think I used
that her kind of going back and forth internally, not
to cut her power down, but to show that she's
still she's still a young woman throughout this whole book,
(21:49):
She's still struggling and trying to figure out what's her
purpose and who she wants to be. That's a very
natural thing I think at that age.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, it is right, and you kind of forget that
she's so young, you know, and she's still trying to
figure out her life or purpose and all of these
things are happening that are determining a course of action
for her. And sometimes I like that you said that,
because life will take you places where you did not
(22:19):
intend or did not expect, and you still have to
and you have to deal with that, you know, grieve
what was lost. But also here I am, and now
what's my next step? How do I move forward? And
what pieces of myself am I going to leave behind?
If I have to leave anything behind?
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Right? Yeah, and there's no guide map. I think we
as a society are really tough on I'm not going
to call them necessarily kids, but just young adults because
we say, oh, you're eighteen now, or whatever country you're
in the legal aid you're eighteen now, you're an adult,
but that's just a number. That's just an arbitrary age.
We decided that means you're an adult now. But I
(23:03):
don't think I felt like a real adult until I
was in my mid twenties. In my early twenties, my
late teens, I still felt like a kid, even though
the world didn't look at me that way. And it
was a strange sensation to be held to certain standards
that you didn't necessarily always feel ready for.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Right. I teach high school history, so I've got juniors
and seniors all day and they're seventeen eighteen at this
point of the year, but they're still they're still trying
to figure it out. You know. We have a lot
of good discussion about things, but it's it does seem
and we talk about that in class that it's even
(23:43):
though you're eighteen, you have a lot of responsibility, but
you don't. A lot of them are like stressed out
about college, but it's like, you know, you don't have
to have it all figured out at eighteen, and.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
No, that's okay, it's okay, and worth. I know, you
know this, eighteen can looks so different depending on the person,
depending on how they've grown up, if they've had responsibility
from a young age, if they have been through trauma,
Like one person's eighteen could look totally different from another
person's eighteen. Which is why I'm just not a fan
(24:15):
of holding people to say the standard of saying, well,
you're eighteen, you're an adult now. You need to be
able to handle X, Y and Z. Some people can't sell.
People need more time, and that should be okay.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Right, And a lot of the Greek mythology characters are young.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
They are and.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
They're doing these sort of extraordinary things, facing extraordinary situations
and events in their lives that are propelling them down
this course that you know, Greek mythology tells us is
their fate or their destiny. And I remember when I
was researching for Achilles, so I think it was easy.
(24:57):
It had him at like fifteen, yeah, getting to the
getting to the Trojan war, and I'm thinking fifteen, that's
called like a high school reshman. Yeah, like, oh my god,
So I guess that your mom is a sea goddess,
so you're a little bit you're you have a little
bit of an edge, but he was leading men at fifteen,
(25:19):
the closest historical character. I got to that when I
was trying to like how possible, how do I How
am I going to work? This was like Alexander the
Great because he was very young when he was doing
things for his father, and so I'm like, okay, that
kind of plausible. But I'm just I think that's that's
(25:40):
stunning that to be that young and to do something,
you know, to have a story that's so powerful, like Medusa,
like you said, she's she's young because we have her
in the very beginning, and for her to have to
face everything that she faced and rise above that and
move on and grow into her power, you know, that
(26:04):
was pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
That was pretty powerful. How did you how did you
approach the gods, you know, building Athena and Poseidon?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Mm hm, So I mean I think the gods, like Medusa,
some of them are very well known, very familiar. So
I wanted to I guess the term I turned to
a lot is familiar but fresh. So some thinks about
them feel familiar in some things you haven't seen before.
One thing I knew with Poseidon was that when you
(26:35):
think of Poseidon, you kind of think of like a
character that maybe looks like King Triton from Little Mermaid,
like old but muscular, white hair, you know, under the
water whatever. And I always thought like with Medusa's the
Roman version of Medusa's story where he violates her, you know,
I'm like, I wanted to paint that a little bit differently,
(26:58):
and so in this story, instead of him being kind
of like some old guy, in this version of the story,
a lot of the gods choose to present themselves as young,
and so it suddenly makes sense that Medusa, it could
be lured in by this young guy who only he's
thousands of years older but only looks to be a
few years older, and he's cool, and he's worldly and attractive.
(27:24):
Not to take away from what happens to her, but
there are versions of Medusa's story where she is implicitly violated,
and there are versions of the story where the text
suggests it could have been a consensual relationship. And so
I wanted to kind of play around with the different
versions and say, what if there was a situation where,
like a lot of young kind of girls on that
(27:45):
cusp of womanhood, she sees this older guy, and he's
attractive and interesting, and he represents the outside world she's
never seen. She's very sheltered and here's this guy who's,
like I said, as worldly and so anyway, that's a
long diet tribe. Like I wanted to change the way
Poseidon is presented. I think Athena is another character who
(28:06):
in a lot of the stories with Medusa and Athena,
she's just outright the villain, and she is still pretty
horrible in this book, but I wanted to give her
some nuance in this world. The way the gods are
in this world, their strength is based on their faith,
the faith others have in them, and so the more
people who believe in them and worship them, the more
powerful they become. And what we see in Athena is
(28:27):
that for all of her power, you know, she's this
this like cool alpha female character, she still has fear
because she's still living and trying to survive in a
male dominated world, atmosphere, environment, and past all of like
the toughness that you see on the outside, she's she's
terrified of losing it all. And I think that mirrors
(28:49):
what we see in the real world, where some of
the most accomplished women in their industries carry deeply misogynous views,
you know, because and you're thinking, well, you've made it
this far, why why wouldn't you be in favor of women.
But they have these deeply misogynous views because they're just
trying to survive themselves, and they pull the letter up
(29:10):
behind them and we see that. So I didn't want
Athena to just be like a flat that quote unquote villain,
because I think there's more to her story too.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I think you did a really good job of giving
us the three dimensional gods in the in this story.
But I was just talking with another friend of mine
this morning and we were talking about how sometimes in
Greek Greek mythology retellings, characters can tend to be two
dimensional because people have people go into the stories expecting
(29:48):
X y Z to happen, and it's a very it's
a challenge to write a three dimensional character, and especially
with the gods. You know, everybody has an xp tation
of of who Poseidon is, of who Athena is, and
to create characters that are well rounded and like you said,
(30:10):
giving Athena that vulnerability that's not something that we see
with her. You know most people, most people know her,
you know, as you know, telling Odysseus what to do,
and she's kind of like a like a scolding mother.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
And like almost in almost like a girl boss you
almost as a kid, she was my favorite goddess. Yeah,
full stop, like war goddess, like wisdom, smart, smart and
could fight, like doesn't take any crop from anyone, like I.
I admired her, and I'm still outside of the context
of my Madu. So I still do because when you
think of war and toughness, you think of men, and
(30:46):
here's this girl kicking butt. Yeah, we don't. We don't
normally see vulnerability in Athena familiar.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Right, exactly what does justice look like for you?
Speaker 3 (30:59):
And I'm a duce, so I think within the context
of im Medusa, you have this I go back and
forth between saying girl and young woman, because she truly
is on the cusp where it's not clearly defined. You
have this young woman, this girl who begins a story
with no power whatsoever, not in her family, not in
her home, nothing. She gets a little bit of it,
(31:22):
it's taken away. And I think that in some versions
of Medusa's story it's a tragedy because she is she
loses her life and then for the rest of eternity,
like she has all these unfair labels put on her
and she's remembered as a monster. But to me mehdi slash,
Medusa gets her justice because she's remembered and we look
(31:43):
at how she's remembered in pop Like I said, pop culture,
she has become a symbol of something powerful and beautiful.
Women get Medusa tattoos. I don't know that they get
Athena tattoos as often. You know, it was almost like
her her taking power in her is what has allowed
her to be remembered through the eons, even though I'm
(32:04):
not I don't even want to say the hero's name,
the hero who ends her life, even though Poseidon, even
though all you have all these different characters in myth
who have tried to kind of silence her and diminish her,
and it's like, actually, in what they did, they actually
helped her become immortal, even though she dies. So I
think it's a it's a strange kind of justice, but
(32:25):
it's almost like Medusa got the last laugh mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
That's I think a lot of like Greek mythology. The
immortality comes in the written word. And I think that
even for Achilles, it was, you know, the idea of
his name. We remember Clydemnestra. Like all of these stories
are so old. Medusa's story is so old, but we
continue to say their name, we continue to retell their story.
(32:54):
It's like every decade, it seems like we we work
through it, and as as our society is working through
its own issues, we go back to the myths and
then we we it's like we tweak them again for
you know, like the upcoming movie, the one that the Odyssey.
How many Odyssey retellings have there been? Right, but resonates
(33:18):
so much with us.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
I think, yeah, it builds this really cool bridge to
the past. And I think that's that is the most
honest beauty. That's the beauty of myth telling. And it's
taking a story. And we do this all the time
in our lives, right, You tell a story to a friend,
they take the parts that were important to them and
emphasize that, and then they maybe dismiss the parts that weren't,
and then they retell it to someone else, and then
(33:42):
the story is changing and morphing. Oh but the core
of the story staying the same. And I think that's
that's just part of the human condition. We like to
tell especially when it's a good story, we like to
repeat it and focus on certain pieces and not focus
on the pieces that we don't care about. We say
that we see that all over the world and all
these different cultures, and what's cool. I don't know if
(34:03):
you have done any reading, like outside of Greek and
Greco Roman mythology, but you'll notice that some figures, certain gods,
certain babels, pieces of folk or they're very similar, even
though they're in different parts of the world. You might
hear a myth that comes from ancient China that sounds
very similar to a myth from East Europe, and you're like,
(34:25):
have that happen? But it's the same story that has
been taken and it's traveled to different people and resonated.
So I think that's one of the really really cool
things about myth.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah, I think a lot about who gets to hold
these stories And did writing Medusa change how you think
about ownership of myth?
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Oh? Definitely, it creates It's kind of like what I
was saying earlier about good and evil and how there's
never a clear answer. I think the same thing is
true of myths. We know the earliest written accounts of
Medusa's story, but the truth is we don't know where
her story true began, and we don't know if it
was orally being passed on until if somebody finally decided
to write it, or if there was an earlier version
(35:07):
that was written that just was lost to time. I
do respect that certain myths come from different parts of
the world and have real origins. There absolutely but for
these stories to survive, like I said before, they're repeated,
and as they're repeated, and as people move, the stories
move with them, sometimes by force, sometimes by voluntarily. Another
(35:29):
good example is like if you listen to or read
about mythology and folklore on the West African part of
the continent, and then you go over to the Caribbean
and South America, some of the same figures have traveled,
and some of the same stories have traveled, sometimes by force,
sometimes not, and they've more often become their own thing.
(35:50):
And then there's a question of well, now, who owns
these myths And the answer is, I'm not sure anybody
really owns them, because they're not meant to be owned.
They're meant to move around, really changed with each generation.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Right, Yeah, let me think about that for a second.
You said a lot right there.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Sorry, I'm really at that. You can't tell.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, no, me too. I love I really love Greek
mythology specifically, and I'm not as familiar with other mythologies.
Oh no, mythologies I would like to be.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Oh no, there's so there's so much. And I've I mean,
I've written three books that pull from different mythology in Africa.
That's how I have some of that context. But it's
all just to say, like, myths move around, they're almost
like living things. And so when you talk about ownership,
I think it's difficult to say anybody who owns it
because they're not Greek myths, Roman myths, West African myths,
(36:46):
East European myths. They're not meant to necessarily be owned.
We can always honor where they came from, but I
don't know if that's the same thing as ownership.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Right And I feel like right now they're having a
really big discon discussion that there were no Greek actors
in the New Odyssey movie, and that's a whole that's
a whole discussion.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
In that space.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah, so that kind of makes me think about from
the Greek perspective, like that was our religion and now
you're retelling our stories And I hadn't as a reteller,
I hadn't ever thought of that. That was like a
new conversation that got put into my head.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Yeah, and it's some of these discussions aren't easy. I know.
I did quite a bit of research on like act
how actual priestesses in ancient Athens would have behaved, what
was required of them, because I felt like in order
to write about it, I needed to understand. And my
thing is always you can break rules, but you have
to know why the rules exist if you're going to
break them. So if you're you know, if you make
(37:48):
a choice to have a certain actor play a certain character,
I think that's fine, but you also need to be
prepared to answer questions about it and back up your
choice if you choose to deb eight you know.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah, I think the you know people are when we
they have this expectation when they come to mythology about
who the characters are going to be, how they're going
to act. And I when I was who was I reading?
I want to say it was doctor Casey do a
(38:24):
Hackney's paper, and she was talking about how the oral
storytelling that when you looked at say like the Trojan
War myths. And I'm sure this goes to what you
were saying earlier, that it's it's probably all myth was
oral at some time, and that it wasn't like it
was one storyteller. So people tend to think like Homer
(38:45):
was the storyteller. Now he's like, he's just one person
who happened to be the one credited with writing down
stories that had been told. Trojan War stories existed throughout
the Green world and probably at the edges and bled
into other areas. We don't know how many people were
(39:06):
telling these stories, so the name would be familiar and
maybe the the you know, the basic kernels of their story.
But each storyteller brings something different. And you as a writer,
you know that you brought a nuance to it that
nobody else could bring.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
So and you bring out, bring your own biases, you
bring your own perspective, and that's not a bad thing.
That's just a natural part of storytelling.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Right, And I think that oral storytelling for us is
you know, that's part of what makes it universal that
we can connect to these characters in different ways, different
aspects of their story. There is no one right way
to tell any of these characters stories.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Yeah, I think I always I always want to iarify that.
I Medusa is not a story where I'm saying history
got it wrong. Medusa was a black one and you
all got it wrong. I don't think that's productive or
helpful message. I think like one of the things all
I'm saying is a speculative author is well, what if?
What if she had lots? What if she had brown skin?
(40:19):
And also why not? Why can't we take when we
look at the North African coast and when we look
at Greece, why couldn't there have been an island somewhere
hidden between the two? Why not?
Speaker 2 (40:32):
You know?
Speaker 3 (40:32):
And I hope it encourages people to use their imagination
and ask why not? And ask what if?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
There's so much about the ancient world that we know,
but there's so much that we don't know. Yeah, I
was in grad school and was I think it was
doctor the late doctor Dan Harris in her class. We
were talking about how little of the extant writing that
we have actually like two or three percent of whatever
they of the total of whatever they wrote. And I was,
(41:00):
you know, to think about in modern society, what if
they only had like two or three percent of everything
that we ever produced in America? What would they think
of America? Because what would they get? What if they
just had a stack of like Cosmopolitan magazines and and
and they were building this whole ideology of what we were,
what we were about based.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
On that exactly. It's ludicrous. And so I understand that
there are people who dedicated their whole careers to studying
the ancient world and certain things we do know, but
like you said, there's a lot that we don't know.
And I don't think there's any harm in saying, well,
why not until we have definitive proof? Why not? We
do know for a fact that there were black people
in ancient Athens, and they weren't necessarily slaves. They there
(41:44):
were people there who built lives. Athens was a coastal
trade city. Of course, of course there were people from
all from everywhere who were there. So why not? You know, No,
I was, I was just that's that's I always go
back to that, the why not and the what if?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Right do you watch the sho show Spartacus by Chance.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Oh gosh, it's been remade, hasn't it.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
They did. They just had another season, the most recent season.
I feel like they do a really good job of
giving us a diverse cast in that ancient Roman world. Yeah,
because I think that's more representative of what was happening.
Because you've had you had immigration, you had, like you said,
(42:25):
people trading people, and they sailed all over the Mediterranean.
It wasn't like, oh we had to just wait for
some invasion to happen. People they were in boats, people
had things to sell and trade, and obviously people are like,
when you trade it, you have a business on the
other side, connections.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, I was going to say certain things, remember, like
it's so funny to see, like how certain things haven't changed.
People always want what's not accessible and a round. So
if there's a certain cloth dye pattern, a certain perfume,
a certain delicacy of food that isn't grown where you are,
people will pay premium prices to have this exotic thing
(43:07):
that's foreign and interesting. And so of course that you
develop microeconomies off of perfume and spice traders and clothing
textile merchants who are profiting off of the fact that
people want what is in high demand and what is
not available to them there. So once you start thinking
about it, you're like, of course, there were people from
all over the world in Athens, and it would make sense,
(43:31):
like you said, because of slavery, because of job opportunities,
because of love. People got married and were not necessarily
from the same culture. So once you think about it,
you're like, oh, actually, that does make total sense.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
How did you find the balance between the mythic tone
that you were setting and the intimate interiority of your characters?
I thought, And then this is kind of like a
side quest or off that question. I thought you handled
the the intimate scenes very cleverly, like as a writer,
(44:07):
and they were you know, they weren't graphic. They were
just so well done.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
How did you get to that, because that's that's so
hard to do.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
One thing is like and I did not understand this
until I was, you know, in my twenties. I would
read my first drafts of stories that I was trying
to write, and then I would read like books by
authors I really loved and be like, well, my writing
is not like theirs, so I just might not. I
just must not be a good writer not understanding that.
I you know, these books go through so many rounds
(44:39):
of revision. You have editors, you have copy editors, sometimes agents,
you have critique partners. So what you see when you
read I'm Medusa is the you know, I wrote those words.
But it's also like the reflection of a lot of
people looking at it and being willing to give me notes.
And I don't want to take away from my own work,
but I also want to be honest and acknowledge that
(45:01):
it takes a village as far as the intimacy and
some of the more difficult scenes, I just made a
decision that part of the problem. And I don't mean
to be too heavy yere, but one of the issues
particularly around assault in violent that culture, I'm trying to
avoid saying any words that will get this video flag
is one of the issues around that culture is silence,
(45:23):
the fact that we don't talk about it, the fact
that we euphemize it. And I'm having to euphemize it
right now because YouTube flags these things. But like I
did not, there's a particular scene in this book that
is uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable to write uncomfortable to think about,
and it's probably uncomfortable to read. But the thing is,
sometimes that discomfort is healthy because it is an uncomfortable
(45:44):
and inherently wrong thing. And so I thought about real
life examples, and I've been very open about talking about Aliyah,
pop star from the nineties, who was preyed upon by
another pop star named Dark Kelly, and I named him.
I name him on purpose because part of the problem
when she was being harmed was people wouldn't name him,
(46:07):
and they covered for him. And it wasn't until many
years later, after Leah had passed away, until he'd harmed
a lot more women that he was named. And so
I think, even when it makes us uncomfortable, sometimes the
most just thing we can do is tell the truth
and be honest and not shirk away or hide that said,
(46:28):
I did like tell my editor like it was one
of that was one of the things that I really
wanted to get right, and so I worked with her
to make sure I was not being graphic or explicit
or doing anything to sensationalize this really heavy thing, but
also being honest.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
It's a delicate thing to do in Greek retellings because
it happens to so many female characters. Yeah, across the board,
you know, through assault by gods or assault by other men,
and it's normalized.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
It's just it's so frequent, it's normalized, and that's another problem.
So I didn't want to lie about the reality of
what it would have been like for women in that
time when there were not there wasn't really a lot
of legislation to protect women and men from that kind
of violence. But I also, again, I just I didn't
want to sensationalize it. The art of telling a myth
(47:24):
and retelling it is you get to take the parts
that resonate with you and emphasize that, and the parts
that you don't care for or don't like you don't
have to necessarily focus on. And there are people who
are very purest and very protective, and I get that too.
But yeah, again, we don't know what the original, original
first time Medusa story was told. We don't know what
(47:46):
that story was. We know the versions that have been
written down and have been preserved through time. We just
hold those up as the official versions, but there's no
official version. Nobody owns the story of Thesa, the story
of Clydemnestra the story of Achilles, like these are all
and you said it before, kind of the amalgamation of
(48:07):
lots of different people with giving their input and emphasizing
the emphasizing the things that they care about. So I
think that's a very natural choice.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
How was writing I'm Medusa? How did that change you
as a writer?
Speaker 3 (48:25):
That's a good question. Every book I've written five now,
the experience of writing a book is never the same
because I'm never writing it in the same period of
my life. Right like I started I'm Medusa. I mean
I started to pray my very first book when I
was fresh out of college and feeling very lost and
like what am I going to do with myself? And
then I wrote I'm Medusa. I feel like that book
(48:49):
I wrote almost exclusively in my thirties. It was the
first book I wrote in my thirties. I think that
this book because it was an adult book, like I
figured out pretty quickly that it was not going to
be for kids. It was a book that encouraged me
to dig deep and write from a really honest place,
whereas I did write from an honest place with Beasts
(49:09):
of Prey in the two books, other books in that series.
But I was always aware that I was writing for
kids and that I needed to keep that in mind.
With I Medusa, I knew it was an adult audience,
and I didn't have to be quite as I didn't
have to sanitize as much. I could go into places
that were heavier and not necessarily worry as much. So
(49:29):
that was very freeing and larry liberating. And there were
times I wrote things and it was uncomfortable to write,
but then to get readers come back and say, I
really appreciated that you talked about this, or that you
showed this on the page, or you handled this way
this thing in a particular way was really validating. The
best time, the best art you make, I think is
the art that you're when you when you're putting a
(49:51):
little bit of yourself on the page, and it feels
very vulnerable and scary, but it's authentic. So it encouraged
me to write from an authentic place and to keep
digging into the places that are sometimes uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Yeah, and that came through on the page, and I
keep the word I wrote down in my notes was elegant.
So I thank you all that I'm gonna stick with
that one. So is there anything that you would like
to add that we haven't covered or.
Speaker 3 (50:22):
I think I've said everything. I just, more more than anything,
I don't write my books with a message like I
said where I'm like, this is what you need to
take away from the book. But I just I hope
this book starts conversations, whether they're angry conversations or impassioned
conversations or sad conversations. I've done my job when I
can create art that makes people think and makes people
(50:43):
want to have conversations about the things that they're taking
away from the book, whether they like it or not.
So yeah, that's my hope.
Speaker 2 (50:51):
Well, thank you, thank you so much for joining me today.
It was lovely to chat with you and get to
know you. And I will be sending this out to
the world with my message to read your book, and
I'm gonna put it Okay, I'm Medusa. It's gorgeous, by
the way, the cover, everything about this is gorgeous.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on
to this was really fun.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, I'll see you bye bye.
Well that's it for today.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Thank you so much for joining me for this deep
dive into Iana Gray's I'm Medusa. I hope you enjoyed
our chat as much as I did. It was such
a thoughtful and layered conversation. If you enjoyed this episode,
please take a moment and leave your rating on your
favorite podcast platform. It truly helps more than you know,
(51:41):
and I do appreciate your support. Be sure to follow
me on my socials. I do love hearing from listeners
and I always enjoy continuing the conversation there. You can
find I'm Medusa by Aana Gray on Amazon and at
Barnes and Noble. And if you're looking for an epic
fantasy inspired by the Trojan War, you can find my
Homeric Chronicles series on Amazon as well. I appreciate you,
(52:06):
and as always, drink your wine and be merry. Marmadon's
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