Written by Maureen Medved | #NoOneSucceedsAlone

Over the years I’ve been influenced by the writers who’d come before me. I’m thinking of writers in every form and from every time, the archetypal stories that have been told through the centuries, to the contemporary writers in every genre who have inspired me over the years. I’ve always been most drawn to the stories where a person takes a dark journey that irrevocably changes them and the reader. One story that has always struck me is the Persephone myth of the character who is abducted and taken into the underworld and whose journey inspires Spring. That mythological archetype has surfaced in the work of storytellers from Fellini (The Nights of Cabiria) to Seidelman (Smithereens) and beyond. My novels The Tracey Fragments and Black Star have strong elements of the Persephone archetype working within them. These Persephone stories have always resonated within me, but it wasn’t until I studied mythology and cultural anthropology that I had a better understanding of the archetypes in stories and how they can work powerfully and mysteriously in contemporary storytelling.

 

See Maureen at the 2018 Whistler Writers Festival