Myth Retold is a group of short stories written in the point of view of individuals of a marginalized gender or sexuality in Greek Mythology.
IPHIGENIA follows the story of damsel in distress, Iphigenia in the version of the myth in which she is rescued from becoming the sacrifice to Artemis only to find out that she has been rescued by the goddess herself. MEDUSA follows the story of the infamous monstress, Medusa who must face her fears and become friendly with one of the young warriors who is praised to hunt her; Perseus. ATALANTA follows the story of powerful huntress, Atalanta who struggles to take aim and make a choice to follow the life she was given, or the life she wishes to live.
Intention
This project sprung from a desire for inclusion. Greek Mythology as we know it comes from the writings of a few men but is a medium that was, more likely than not, a series of tales and folklore passed on by word of mouth. Suffice to say is a bit misleading to assume that even the stories the survived in written form are in any way correct. It feels pretty wrong, in my opinion, when people try to pin point what the correct version of a myth might be.
And I’ve been corrected about this sort of thing a lot in the last decade, primarily through another project of mine, The Myth About Myths. I thought it was interesting how folks were taking a word-of-mouth form of entertainment between an ancient society and trying to imply there is an actual canon version of events here.
The very few living texts we have about these gods and goddess, these figures in myth… many of them are from the point of view of men with a very narrow-minded view of society even back then. Myth Retold is a project, for me, designed to explore ways I might use these characters to tell love stories and tragic stories and dramatic stories featuring people like me. Queer.
We existed back then, in antiquity, enough that a lot of our identity is merely a footnote of an existence to the main characters on display.
I think its interesting that a lot of the goddesses were conveniently chaste. That Artemis, though she spends most of her time surrounded by young women, never once explored her sexuality with them. I find that hard to believe, that a culture with an island called Lesbos, there weren’t young Greek women also fawning over the moon.
That Athena maybe got a bad wrap from a few folks with modern ideals about being a woman who favoured our most famous male heroes. As if she didn’t perhaps aim to be seen as one of them in some way, though she was always sanctioned as woman.
That maybe the gods were all a little bit bisexual which was easily canonised in many of the men, but what of gender? We take words from myth and gods described with two sexes and we named them Hermaphroditus only for current day vocabulary to twist the word into something terrible, insulting when this god was once revered, and probably worshipped by many queer ancients that once lived.
This is also conjecture, speculation, wishful thinking on my part. But I’m finding that classics is a lot like history. People like to imply, ‘well it isn’t in the text so it cannot be proven’. But we’ve always existed. We’re taking the word of a small handful, most of them men, and deciding that this word is the entire gospel truth.
It isn’t. There are thousands of lives we will never know because they have been lost to time. Thousands of versions of these myths that will not be considered canon because they weren’t written down, even though writing was not an accessible medium to most at the time.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I don’t think there can ever be too many renditions of Greek Mythology out there. I’m just adding mine onto the pile. I think these stories become more and more interesting with each bias added onto them, with each twist and turn. Why did the writer choose to create this version of the story… does it really matter how accurate it is.
Literally, accurate to what?
Anyways. Myth Retold aims to smush existing versions of the myths, cherry pick the versions I like the best, rewrite the parts that fucking suck and turn them into something that makes me happy and that I love. Be it twisting it with greater tragedy or sprinkling an already tragic story with some softness. I’m having fun and I’m sticking my fingers in all of it.
Don’t take anything I say as educational. I’m half-Greek and took only 2 classics courses but like this is my shit.
If you want to know a little bit more about each one separately check each of their pages out here: