Ok, Ok, I’ve not changed my name, but if I did, maybe it would be to Vasiliou, which means “royal” or Athanasiou which means “immortal” or perhaps Anagnostopoulos meaning “reader.”

Dear reader, I changed Persephone’s name to Stephanie in my just released book Death of Persephone: A Murder so she could be everywoman, so she could be both the goddess abducted and she could be a mortal child kidnapped. I renamed Hades, Uncle H.  I call Demeter Terry now, and Athena is Thea. What can I say, I’ve taken every poetic license I could to tell the story of young Stephane, abducted and lied to by her Uncle H. (do note that in the Greek myth Hades is both Uncle and Husband [rapist] to Persephone). I tell the tale in poetry. My detective, Detective Boca, inspired by Bocca della Verità or “The Mouth of Truth,” an ancient marble mask in Rome, has his story told in numbered case notes that are linked sonnets. Go ahead, imagine poets with nothing but time and imagination! We really do eat bonbons and play, we are like the new gods, don’t you think?! For so many years, between other jobs, I’ve been plotting, editing, rearranging this book of poems that is also a verse novella, a noir mystery and a retelling of myth.

I’m certainly not the first to rewrite or re-explore myth and tell it anew. Nor the first to write a novel in verse, or less actual verse than poetry. I confess that it has taken me many years to write this book. I had B.C. Arts funding back in 2009 to begin, and spent a few weeks in Montreal mapping out the streets, the underground (Montreal’s vast underground is the inspiration for the world Hades works and occupies in Death of Persephone). I began to think of Stephanie as every woman; I thought if she is every woman, the city should be any city in the world. Though Montreal lingers in poems, the city is any city where women walk and where women are watched and marked; where courage and the myth of safety lingers in women’s echoing footsteps. 

One of the first books that inspired me and that I return to is Méira Cook’s A Walker in the City, in which a book sits within a book nested within a book. A woman who walks the city of the book is being written by an old poet who is being written by another poet.

One can’t enter mythology and the exploration of myth without reading Anne Carson. Her wit, humour and playfulness sing in her  retelling of old myths. I am a mere amateur in her presence. But the book I most want to talk about is her book of poems, Short Talks. The pithiness, the smarts, the rhythm and the ... what can I say, the brain explosion that these poems are is essential reading. I return to them, I strive to be as subtly quirky.  

Another favourite poet and novelist is Steven Heighton. I move easily between reading his poems, fiction and nonfiction. The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep is a complex novel of ruin set on Cyprus. Steven Heighton was a marvelous writer, he dove deep into the work and research, even studying Greek, his mother’s native tongue. In 2015 he volunteered at a Syrian refugee camp in Greece, which led to his book Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos. I recommend both books and all of his poetry books. 

As you can see, I moved between many genres and styles of writing as I read and researched for the writing of Death of Persephone. When I was at grad school in the UK, I read a haunting mystery in poems that I can no longer recall the author nor title of, but that settled in my bones and began to lay the groundwork for Death of Persephone. A book I read in my 20s also let me know it was possible to write a fully narrative poem, and that is Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. Here is a true verse novel, written in 590 sonnets, it explores a group of friends in San Francisco in the 1980s. You know that books have, as a friend of mine once said, “no expiration date” so I highly recommend you find a used copy of this astonishing book.

While we are on the sonnet, in Death of Persephone, I have 36 linked sonnets, written in a noir detective style. Friend and poet John Barton is a dedicated sonneteer, and I can’t recommend his book Lost Family: A Memoir enough. John’s book contains 136 sonnets, including six crowns.  John has written a total of 482 sonnets, with, as he says, “41 yet to write to match Wordsworth’s total of 523.” John has also written one crown redoublé or 15 linked sonnets. I closely edited the detective sonnets to ensure they have the essence of the form thanks to John. 

Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, though not forcused on the retelling of myth, is mythic in its lyricism and use of time. The novel begins with, “Perhaps we painted our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.” If myth is a way to help humans understand the incogitable, mind-boggling world we live in and create, then we must keep reimagining the stories and myths, we must keep asking questions and pondering time and time’s passage. Anne Michaels does this with such lyrical beauty, sorrow and grace in Fugitive Pieces. 

Kyo McLear is a writer I’ve recently been reading as my very small, slow, dedicated-to-books and words, book club recently read her Birds, Art, Life. I now must read all her books. She moves seamlessly, or so it seems, and conversationally between topics, blends her questions and wonder while navigating learning about birds while navigating her father’s health, raising her sons, living her life, and writing. The book also contains sketches and little quirky moments that delighted me. It is memoir, but it is also something else...nature studies, self as human being the main subject of study or contemplation.

Tanis MacDonald’s most recent book Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female explores the female body out in the world walking. It is a book which captures her mind at work, it is the shareable result of her walks and thoughts. She is a friend and she really is, as her T-shirt says, “A Feminist Kill Joy” and a real-life genius feminist too. 

The book I’m currently working on explores the unrecognized genius and early deaths of women artists and writers. It hopes to examine history, clothing, women and brilliance. Gwendolyn MacEwen is one of those writers, Canadian writers, who existed beyond the parameters set out for women in Canada, or the world, in the 1970s. She taught herself Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and French. I love her The T.E. Lawrence Poems, and the poem “The Children Are Laughing.”  When in a gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2012 I saw a magazine with a selection of her poems translated into Lithuanian. I sensed in that moment the world slow, the footsteps of women poets echoing inside me and outside the gallery on the cobbled streets of Vilnius. A reimagined excerpt from Death of Persephone won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize with Exile Editions in 2022.

Anita Lahey and Pauline Conley’s book Fire Monster is a must-mention and must-read book because Anita took poems about a real fire in Main-a-Dieu, Nova Scotia and fictionalized them with illustrations by Pauline Conley resulting in a poetic graphic novel. The cross-genre play and braiding delights me, the book is astonishing, and I have a hope-wish that Death of Persephone will some day be re-envisioned as a graphic novel. 

I will end on a recommendation to read This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for its blend of mythology and wonder, truth and play. I heard Leanne read at Open Space Gallery in Victoria, B.C. back in 2017 and was utterly blown away by her fierceness, her well-earned fire. I’m about to dive in and reread this book!

You can see that my reading over the years has been, and continues to be, eclectic, often female- focused. I’m looking at how writers play in the between space of genres and allow the will of the work override the rules of form and category. Hopefully, I’ve done the same with Death of Persephone: A Murder.

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Learn more about Death of Persephone: A Murder: 

In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him.

In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule.

Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?