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Rachel Lyon is the author of Fruit of the Dead and Self-Portrait with Boy, a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. An editor emerita for Epiphany, she has taught creative writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Bennington College, and other institutions. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Rachel lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and two young children.
Rachel Lyon's website
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Ashley Rubell: Tell me about the first time you heard the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter. What was your first impression?
Rachel Lyon: The D'Aulaires book is sort of indelibly printed on my memory. I was really interested in princesses and goddesses and I think that was probably what interested me in Persephone, if anything did. But to be honest, I didn't embark on writing this book with the intention of writing a retelling of Persephone. I actually started the book a couple years before I started incorporating the myth into it. It was almost happenstance.
I was thinking a lot about the #MeToo movement and sexual assault and how these stories were revived in our culture with this incredible force around 2017 and 2018. What really got me about the dialogue then, which got so intense so quickly and then faded so quickly, was the reaction of some men that I was seeing who were like, Why now? You know, How is it possible that this is all happening right now? And I was really angered by that, and I really wanted to tell a story that showed that this was an ancient problem. This is not a "Why now?" problem.
AR: I remember reading an interview you did a while back with Michele Filgate about ...
Asale Angel-Ajani is a writer and Professor at The City College of New York. She's the author of the nonfiction books Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade and Intimate: ... (more)
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Fruit of the Dead
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A Country You Can Leave
by Asale Angel-Ajani
Marcial Gala was born in Havana in 1963. He is a novelist, a poet, and an architect and is a member of UNEAL, the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. He won the Pinos Nuevos Prize for best short story in 1999. The ... (more)
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Fruit of the Dead
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by Marcial Gala
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