Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, a re-telling of Ovid's Metamorphoses told from the perspective of the female figures transformed. She is also a frequent writer for The Paris Review, where she writes lyric essays on such transformational entities as the dawn, the solstices, and the moon. Her book Summer Solstice: An Essay, is a collection of her summer solstice essays, and it is a wonder. Her first book is the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter.

Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, Nina worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In addition to the The Paris Review Daily, she has written for The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. Nina lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On this episode, Nina discusses the power of giving voice to mythic she-creatures, the allure of transformational writing, and the changes that can occur when one writes about the moon.

CONTENT WARNING: This episode focuses on Greek and Roman myths, and there is a bunch of sexual abuse, rape, and incest in them. Pam and Nina don’t go into graphic details in their conversation, but they do discuss those topics at some length so just a heads up.

Pam also talks about the (super)natural magic of metamorphosis, and answers a listener question about a book manuscript that has yet to find its home.

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