Nina MacLaughlin

In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I’ll tell it myself. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.

Ovid Resung

Wake, Siren

Clara Gauthier

“When you die, I say, "I would like to eat a bite of you. A small medallion of flesh from your flank or your thigh, cooked over flame. A bite of you to live inside me, to have you move all through my body, and then to release you from me. But not all the way, because some particles of you would get absorbed in my blood, and you would swim inside me and thud through me as my heart thuds. I want you to live on in me." 

And I say, "When I die, I would like you to have a bite of me, to take me into your body, to live in your blood. I would like to live on in you." 

Wake, Siren quotes

Join the club