Carol GOODMAN

 

Carol Goodman,
Artisan of the universe within

by Karine Leno Ancellin
July 2018

Carol Goodman has just been awarded The Mary Higgins Clark Award, for ‘The Night Visitors.’ she has written 24 books which have been translated into sixteen languages. Carol Goodman welcomed me in her home Upstate New York on a bright sunny afternoon. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family, and teaches literature and writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz, upstate NY. Connie, who had come as a rescue dog, now a faithful family member is a retired breeder, who was lazily nested under her chair. Our conversation digressed around and beyond Goodman’s literary achievements, which had been the object of my visit. We were summer settled on the deck chairs, overlooking a lush forest beyond the hill extending at our feet. The only visitors who allowed themselves to interrupt our work were a few dragonflies fluttering speedily by our cool drinks.

How did your interest in psychology, matrix of the The Other Mother, come about?

Probably as I moved towards the psychological suspects, though I think there was always some psychological element in my fiction before that. I have always been interested in psychology and psychological suspense right now is where the genre has been moved. For instance, Gillian Fynn’s book ‘Gone Girls’ is a success in psychological suspense. On my part it comes naturally out of the gothic as I have always loved the gothic and the psychological approach to character, with the unreliable narrator possibility. You can see that in ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne Du Maurier, so there is a combination between my gothic interest and the move of the current market into psychological suspense. The psychological jargon is becoming more common. It is a societal conversation now, and I know that it can be misunderstood as it is popularized in this way. People use the terms without knowing exactly what they mean. I am not a trained psychologist but I did a lot of research for ‘The Other Mother.’ I have always been interested in Borderline Personality Disorder, there was a term used before, Borderline Schizophrenic but it’s not exactly the same thing. I notice it in my students. They are more interested in psychology nowadays and I tend to think that it is because there is a lot of anxiety and depression. It is on the rise sadly. After I wrote The Other Mother and had my idea for The Night Visitors, I went and volunteered at a hotline called Family and I did the 60 hours training to work there. That’s where my character Matty comes from. It’s obviously not a psychological training but it’s what they call ‘mental health first aid,’ it’s training that gives you enough information to identify cases so that you know where to send the person, or help them as far as you can, or help them to get more help. I still work at Family and I dedicated the book to all the people who work there as they were very supportive. I made clear, though, that when Matty broke the rules, like when she invited a client into her home, that came from my imagination, but to my surprise a few of them even told me: “well it happens you know, people do sometimes host victims in their house, they do bring them home.” The woman who trained me came to a reading at Woodstock after the book was published and after the reading, she came up to me and said she would have asked Matty, why did you do what you did? Maybe there was a reason for her acting as she did. I had thought the people I worked with at Family would be horrified that Matty took Alice to her home, but they really weren’t.

 

What about the do-gooder’s side of some of these characters, “mental domination over the victims of abuse,” that you explicitly state through Alice’s voice?

That’s Alice who is harsh on Matty, because personally I find the social workers real heroes. Alice comes from the foster care system so she is suspicious. Like in any group, amongst social workers, there are some really good ones and some that aren’t so nice. Also, there could be those who mean well but just aren’t able to help so Alice’s attitude towards that whole class of social workers is colored by her experiences and it’s not my opinion at all. I’ve been amazed at the work they do at Family; when I started, we did a tour of the organization, because they run a number of shelters in Ulster county. I was in awe at the work of those people. Nonetheless I do have bad psychologist characters, and it comes from having had negative experiences with therapy. I even have to stop myself at times, not to allow myself to flaw the psychologist too much. My students call the self-righteousness ‘virtue signaling,’ people who are like “look at me I’m so great.” Having Alice voice her opinion on Matty, has the reader think: “Well, is Matty to be trusted?” It creates suspense; is Matty someone Alice can trust? does she really have Alice’s best interest at heart? Matty is slightly influenced by the fact that the boy reminds her of her own brother, so part of the decision to bring them to her home is self-centered. There is a lot of good to bringing justice but there is also an assumption of privilege, that you are in a dominating position to bring this justice to people, so there is an inequality obviously there. It can be condescending, even exploitative, so there is in my work the interrogation of someone involved in this. On the other hand, I’m a strong believer of the idea that it’s still worth it to go and try to do good, and too much suspicion of that is also inadequate. I see it in my students who are dismissive: “Oh! people who do that stuff it’s to make themselves feel good or to feel superior,” they have that cynical response which can result in you not doing anything. Both are traps, the assumption that you are the one to bring something to these poor people, and the attitude of why even bother because my motives aren’t pure. You can still do a lot of good, even if selfish motives are involved.

 

How do you perceive the #MeToo movement? Is it a legacy of your mother’s generation?

I think of the generation of my mother as a generation that was silent and unable to call out those men. Now we are calling out those abuses in straightforward ways. I think my mother would have probably said you just have to be careful, don’t put yourself in that circumstance and yet my mother was sexually molested when she was young, and I believe she suffered the consequences of that all throughout her life. I don’t know if she saw it that way. The legacy of my mother, born in 1923, is that her generation thought it was their responsibility to make sure that this didn’t happen. Smart girls were able to avoid it somehow. The feminist movement did not come out of my mother, though she worked when she was young and was progressive in many ways and I would even consider her a feminist, nonetheless she was very happy to be a housewife and take care of her children so she wasn’t at the forefront of the feminist movement. Obviously, the feminist movement came out of the women who came before us and the #MeToo movement comes out of that. Just the fact that women are now in a position to call out and have that agency is a big topic. Actually, in my next two books this is addressed, I consider these two books reflect more profoundly on abuse. In all of my books I am alert to abusive relationships and what they are like and how people get out of them.

 

The idea of motherhood is central in your work, is it you as a mother or does it relate to your own mother?

It starts with my mother, my relationship with her defined motherhood to me. I was at a family reunion last year and I hadn’t seen these relatives of my mother for some time, and we were talking about an incident during her youth, her mother died when she was seventeen, her father became an alcoholic, and she and her brothers all ended up in an orphanage. The brothers all ended up in prison and she was on her own, she was molested and that was all before she was eighteen and then WWII happened so she had a complex and tragic young adulthood, a hard fate. She told me a lot of those stories as I was growing up, she recounted her time during the Depression. So then, one of my relatives said, have you ever thought of writing about your mother? I answered that every single book I write is about my mother. It may be a slight exaggeration but it’s pretty much like that, I feel I am rediscovering the trajectory of her life now even though she died two years ago.

 

You have a focus on domestic violence, does that come from experience?

Well not from my parents then because their marriage was actually fairly stable and it rescued my mother. Before I married Lee Slonimsky, I was married to my daughter’s father who was abusive, so it is an experience I had. I had to flee my relationship with a young child, I didn’t get up in the middle of the night, though I probably should have, but I was afraid he was going to hurt me, thus I waited until we sold our house and I moved back to New York. I was afraid and I didn’t leave right away which gives me a lot of understanding because often people judge women and say, why didn’t you leave earlier? It’s hard to leave and some of the calls I get at Family are domestic violence victims, and some of them are ready to leave but others aren’t. You have to talk to them to see where they are at, they may ask for shelter, but they might also call up to find out about a shelter but not leave right away, or they are calling because they left and then they went back. I did ultimately leave but I was lucky I had parents to go home to, I took my 2 and a half-year-old and went to Long island where they lived. For thousands of years the men had the right to coerce women, so I am very alert to the issue and I always think, what would I have done if I didn’t have parents to go home to? Many of the premises of my books come out of this, what would I have done, where would I have gone?

 

What is your relation to trauma, what are your measures of trauma, beyond what you have said about the abuse of your mother and yourself?

I think I am increasingly interested in trauma as something to explore in writing. There are so many different levels of trauma, and trauma manifest itself in so many different ways, there are personal traumas and collective trauma. I had a revelation about that when I was watching the testimony of Christine Blasy Ford. Some guys were working in the house and they mentioned they were interested, so I was going to come downstairs and watch the testimony with them but I just wept through the entire testimony. I felt the frustration before and after but I didn’t expect to feel so emotional, I have not had that level of trauma, but it brought me to what happened to my mother. Listening to her, because she is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto and a psychology research scientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the way she explained the sequelae of the trauma was fascinating. Certain things you remember vividly and you are blind to other things. She explained that for the rest of her life she suffered from claustrophobia, she had panic attacks, being afraid, she had to put in a second door in her house, so that brought me to my mother who had needed having the light on while she splept for her entire life. When she was older and had trouble sleeping, I used to say: “Mom, maybe it’s not good for you to keep the light on like that,” and she categorically refused. Then it occurred to me that it was because she had been sexually assaulted in a hospital in a dark room when she was eighteen. It broke my heart to know that she had suffered that trauma, and the consequences of the trauma made her increasingly anxious as she got older, so I would say that was a visceral reaction to the trauma that I connected to my mother. There are also societal things that happen in a culture that are swept under the rug, are never acknowledged but they are going on. The phenomenon of homelessness says something about that, I lived in NYC in the eighties and there were a lot of homeless, then there was a period when you did not see as many people on the streets, they may have gone underground or been shipped out to other cities, lately there are definitely more homeless again. The opiate crisis is a response to anxiety and despair and it’s all ages, young middle aged, and older. It’s a lot in the Midwest cities where people don’t have jobs, or are in financial distress, or have a sense of loss of connection with family or the society, a deep loneliness. I feel it strongly doing the hotline at Family, people are more isolated and lonelier. The support networks have fallen apart, people don’t feel connected, so they just try to escape reality and pain that way. Hopelessness is on the rise and I think Trump’s election was a trauma, I was traumatized. In the afterword that I wrote in ‘The Night Visitors’ about the process of writing this book, I explain the book came out of two things, one a student came to me to ask for an extension on a paper because she had fled an abusive relationship and she had come up here with her two children, 4 and 5. I referred her to Family and thought, I should go work for them. It was the day after the election and I was just filling in the form and the woman on the phone said, what are you doing now? I told her I was just feeling crappy, so she said, “why don’t you come over and help with our mailing.” So, working for Family was in a way my response to the election, I felt I had to do something productive and helpful towards other people.

 

Does the past haunt you, or even your mother’s past maybe?

I am very tied into thinking both about my past and my mother’s past. I almost feel it’s an intergenerational trauma, because I grew up in a privileged white suburban community and had a fairly happy childhood whereas my mother had a traumatic experience, she also grew up in poor depression era Brooklyn and she told me about this all my life. She used to say that at some point they had practically nothing to eat so her father made this treat that was just bread, milk and sugar. MY mother made it for me. They were so happy my father got a job at the WPA, digging ditches. Her childhood was relatively happy until her mother died and her father became alcoholic when she was seventeen. My mother was the oldest and she had four younger brothers (One died as an infant) and they were all taken care of by the catholic orphanage system. She had tried to look after her brothers for about a year but she couldn’t do it. They were put in different orphanages, I always thought it was the Saint Vincent Orphanage in Brooklyn but her brother, Andrew, told me there were several ones. The crime organizations, like Murder Inc, would recruit kids right from the playgrounds at those places. They would pick those kids up and give them jobs, and then they were just funneled into it. Every one of her brothers ended up in prison for a length of time. My cousin Ben found her brother John’s parole report. I have it and it describes the household that my mother had grown in. The report said he lived in a “home of abject poverty” and reading it just broke my heart because I had heard the stories from my mother about her childhood but the report made it edifying. It also says that it is on her behest that he confessed his crimes.

 

Which one do you find is the hardest to recover from, physical or emotional abuse?

Both are really intertwined because physical abuse creates the psychological abuse, I don’t think they can be brought apart. Maybe the difference is that if you are being hit, it’s identifiable whereas when it’s emotional there are no traces. The only reason I would say that passive aggressive for instance, could be more insidious than the physical abuse is that, maybe you couldn’t identify it. On the other hand, not all physical abuse is identifiable either, the wounds are not always on the outside, they can be hidden as well. Sometimes you don’t even know you are being abused, you internalize it and feel awful and that you are worthless. Both do that, both make a person dehumanized and feel less of a person. So how do you recover from abuse? That’s the question I am exploring in The Night Visitors, how do you get out of abuse and how do you recover? What is the cycle, if you have been abused are you going to reproduce it or you may become a victim of abuse again and not be able to get out of it? That’s why I tried to use the Oresteia, and the idea of the fury, as way of breaking the cycle. Trying to break out of a cycle is hard, it’s also true of depression. People who are depressed are caught in a destructive mental cycle and it’s like a loop in their heads. They cannot break that cycle.

 

The Seduction of Water won the 2003 Hammett Prize, and The Widow’s House, won the 2018 Mary Higgins Clark Award. And now The Night Visitors also got the Higgins Clark Award! How does it feel?

It is a nice confirmation of my work. Through time it gave me more credibility in the mystery world than I had had before. Although my books were clearly mysteries, they weren’t sold as mystery, not in the Mystery section of bookshops. I don’t think it matters much anymore. I went to one of the big mystery conferences when I was nominated. I continued going to mystery conventions after that, so it gave me a place in that world. To be honest, I don’t think it did anything for sales or marketing, it would be nice if it was true, but it didn’t. It still is a nice recognition.

 

You have experimented many genres, melodramatic teen poetry, mystery, thriller, urban fantasy, so is that the urban fantasy period now?

I don’t think so as it has been years since I wrote an urban fantasy book, what I’ve been writing is mystery or you might call it suspensive thriller. I think of all my books as mysteries mostly. I went to a conference called Thriller Fest, and that question arose, what is the difference between a Thriller and a Mystery? The classic difference is that in a Mystery, you are wondering what happened in the past, there is a secret about what happened. In a thriller you are wondering what’s going to happen, the peril is at that moment, you might know who the murderer is but he is chasing the character and you are wondering what’s going to happen. Tom Clancy would be a thriller, or James Patterson as well, but still I would say those lines remained blurry. When I write there is always a secret from the past but there is a present peril as well. My main characters don’t usually die, they pick up and go on. First of all they are the narrators, I write in the first person so that would be sad. It would end rather abruptly. I think all my books end with a world that is different but things are back into shape, there is a reestablishment of order. After I have had a fantasy writing time, I have published four suspense and mystery novels, plus I have two other books finished, so that’s six mystery novels and I am just now beginning to feel I want to do something different again. The Juliet Dark books are paranormal, the Lee Carol books, that Lee Slonimsky and I wrote, were urban fantasy but again these are very blurry categories. All of these are basically fantasy and the young adult books are fantasy too.

 

You were at your husband’s mystery class; did he spark mystery writing in you?

Actually, I was already writing a mystery novel then, and that’s why I took the class. It certainly helped develop my interest and work more in the direction of mystery. I learned a lot from the class and the reading of different mysteries. We are actually working on a mystery novel together now since our collaboration on the fantasy trilogy Black Swan Rising. Lee Slonimsky gave the New York background details in Black Swan Rising, as he grew up in upper Manhattan, we used a lot of his neighborhood’s insight in the novel. Lee Slonimky has an encyclopedic knowledge of history. He is a real blessing on historical minutiae and his personal knowledge is much more fun than what one finds in books. The stories he can draw from his personal experience are a lot more alive and emotional.

 

The Shape Stealer, The White Tower, Black Swan, are novels you wrote together with your husband Lee Slonimsky, was that enjoyable?

Definitely, it was enjoyable. I was feeling a little restless with the mystery genre, and I branched out for a time, so Lee and I did the series for young adults. I think that my career had reached a few rough spots, in terms of sales, readership and publisher’s commitment, also the publishing market had changed. Borders closed as well as other independent bookstores. Amazon changed the market so there were major resets, newspapers went online and reviews were less frequent. There have been times when my career has been challenged, it was not an easy way to make a living and because of my initial success I had committed to writing being my life’s work. Though I teach part time, I am a full-time writer. If I hadn’t been given a large advance for my first novel, I might have taken a job as a high school teacher for instance. I didn’t do that because I was also raising my daughter and I didn’t feel that I could do three things, just two were enough, to write and raise my daughter. When I went back to mystery again, after a time with fantasy, it took me about two years to find another publisher, it had become more difficult. When you are published the first time, you are a new author, there is a lot of excitement, you are getting reviews and it’s inspiring. When you are a published author and you have a sales history, your expectations are higher and it can be hard to get back in the loop.

 

Gothic and mystery novels are known to be more didactic as they startle the mind and have a definite awakening quality, do you agree with this?

Obviously, I love mystery novels. I love the idea that it stimulates the mind. I love Gothic literature. I taught a novel class last semester and had to choose what books to include. I chose the Gothic novel from nineteenth century to modern times because I think the contemporary psychological novels are descended from these gothic novels. I try to draw a line with only five books, we started with Jane Austen Northanger Abby where she actually makes fun of the gothic. I knew that was the easiest and most fun way to introduce my students to the gothic. Then we read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which is my favorite book. After which we read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, so it’s a big leap through time. I would have loved to put Henry James The Turn of the Screw in between but I was afraid my students would have a difficult time with it, but both of these are in turn influenced by Jane Eyre. Then we went to Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House, then I threw in a book that has a gothic element to it, Beloved by Toni Morrison and I wanted some diversity in the books we were studying. Beloved is one of my favorite books as well. Then we ended up with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a contemporary psychological suspense novel. You can really identify the thread coming through all of these books. I love the gothic though I’m not sure if it’s good for young minds or not, but they are fun to read.

 

How does character perspective work for you, do you have more than one-character perspective?

I have started having more than one perspective fairly recently, as in my novels The Other Mother and Night Visitors. The latter is the first one I started which has two characters from whose perspective you switch back and forth. The Other Mother has that too, plus using the diaries as intertextuality. I have used diaries and journal entries to represent other points of views but most of my books have been first person and one single narrator. Presently, I am coming to the multiple perspective playing more with characters’ shifting points of view and also moving towards the unreliable narrator. I diverged from the single narrator when Lee Slonimsky and I wrote the middle book of Black Swan Rising, which is a two people narration with two different perspectives, so it’s definitely something that took me a long time to get to, but now that I have started I’m very happily playing around with the different perspectives. It’s great fun to do, I thoroughly enjoyed the Alice-Matty back and forth. I started in a book to come out (next year) with two shifting points of view. The main character is a woman who is investigating a #Metoo case and the other point of view is the wife of the abuser.

 

How did you first get published?

I don’t choose my book covers at all they do. I had written two books before The Lake of Dead Languages, that couldn’t get published. I had looked for an agent and could not find one and I had sort of given up then I met Lee Slonimsky and he was really supportive of my writing. Other people had been supportive but he said: “you’re a writer, and that’s what you should do.” It was really important because my parents were supportive, but they didn’t think writing was a way to make a living. After my second book I went back to University and did an MFA in creative writing at the New School, and my writing got better between the second and third book. So that’s when I got an agent who had me do two major revisions of the book before she tried to sell it. Then it went really well and I got a two-book contract afterwards, so from that time on, in the year 2000, I was launched. I am also lucky to have a wonderful editor, who edited my seven mystery books, Juliet Dark fantasy novels. Ten years ago, I had to change my agent, she has died now. I have another agent now, so I have had two agents in my career. I was with the same publisher and the same editor for my first ten books, which is a stroke of luck and rather exceptional in this world of publishing. I see a lot of authors who publish one or two books and then their editor leaves.

 

Have you impersonated male characters in your novels?

No, I haven’t my main characters are always female. In the young adult series, I write from young male, more like a child’s point of view. Honestly, I am not so interested in impersonating a male character because I feel they have had their voices out for millennia. There are plenty of men to do that. My daughter often writes from a male point of view and I find it fascinating. Personally, I have never felt compelled to do so and I don’t feel that I have to. The writer Nova Ren Suma was asked this question and said she was not interested because there were women’s voices that had not been heard, and those are the stories I’m interested in telling. It’s not that I am not interested in my male characters, but I don’t feel I have to write from their viewpoint. They have had their say and we have not caught up with them yet.

 

I would like to know about your engagement with Greece, The Ghost Orchid has classic references, so how do you relate your writing to Greek culture?

It does have some references but it’s not a big example of the use of classical mythology. There are a couple of ways to look at this, one is the language and having been a Latin major has really shaped my approach to language, having a sense of the history of words, etymology, and structure. It gave me discipline because before college I went to a hippie high school and read a lot so I had a good sense of language but I also did not know how to work steadily. Being a Latin major I had to go to work at the library every night. To be a novelist you need discipline. I was interested in Greek myths before I was a Latin major but it obviously grew during that period. Introducing an element of mythology in my fiction is a way of broadening the scope of the story. If you are telling a story about people here and now, by using allusions to mythology it creates sense of timelessness. There is extra added value to this because I love when my readers say, “I am grateful I learned about that.” I like books that do that for me as well. I don’t put it in my books for that reason but one likes writing a book they want to read, and I like that cultural-extra I find in the books I read. You learn about mythology, history, how people make stained glass, it makes the books richer. Then you look at a word differently like ecstasy, to stand outside of yourself and enthusiasm which is to be possessed by God. One may think being enthusiast and in ecstasy are the same thing but with their etymology you find out they are not. I love etymology, when I started writing I had an English dictionary and a Latin one, and I would stop and look up a word in both of these, and I loved the process of pausing and thinking about the shades of meaning, the possible double meanings in order to choose the right word, now I plug it in the internet and it doesn’t have the same feeling or rhythm. Your own personal association with a word is powerful as well, you think of a word because that association might lead you to some place different.

 

Are all your books contemporary in their settings?

Most of them are, but with backstory plots take place in some form of the past, it can be twenty years ago on a personal path, or some legend about a school that dates back a century or more. In some books I have used narratives from a further past, like the Shakespearian era or in The Night Villa, I have things going on in ancient Rome -79AD, or episodes that are taking place in Herculaneum before the eruption, but the main stories are always contemporary. I love books that combine them, and a book that did this powerfully was Possession by A.S.Byatt, it influenced me and made me want to write like that. There is the modern story of trying to find out about a poet, and you have the back story about the romantic poet they are researching that takes place during the Victorian era. My young adult books have been set in historical pasts, the Blythewood Trilogy takes place between 1911 and 1916, and The Metropolitans is set in 1941, based on my mother’s life as if she was 13 then (1941) but she was actually 18 then, and she had magic powers (laughs). The heroine’s name is Marge which is another version of Margaret, my mother’s name and my daughter’s as well.

 

Have your students read your books and what is that experience like, if they have read your books, or at least know about your literary career?

Most of them haven’t, it’s usually after they have been my students. The students at New Paltz they don’t know about my books or my name, they don’t take my class because I’m a writer, or because they like my books, they just take it because the class interests them. Then, they may look me up and be surprised, or they will google me and get my website and come up to me to tell me. I’ve had some of those, students then go on and read my books. The most embarrassing was a young man who said: I see you are a writer, I went and read ‘The Demon Lover’ [by Juliet Dark/Goodman’s pseudonym] and I said, “Oh NO! why did you read that one, it’s one with a lot of sex, I can’t talk to you about that.” I don’t engage in conversations around my books with them anyway. It’s private, but I will talk a good deal about my writing process, especially in a creative writing class, I’ll refer to it. I never use my own books because it would be awkward. I talk a lot about the emotional process of writing, because the issues young writers struggle with are self-doubt, or how do I know I’m writing the right thing? what it feels like to take criticism. I always tell them about discipline that “obsessiveness overcomes laziness” as I didn’t start as a disciplined person but I’m so driven to write that it counteracts that. I was not born a disciplined writer, but some people now call me prolific with twenty-four books, though I know writers who write more than I do, one of them went up to seventy-five! I am someone who writes steadily, but they are days, and every morning when I start to write I have a little resistance to doing it, as much as I love writing, but I push through.

 

Is writing a difficult exercise for you?

I think there are painful parts in any writing, as you are still facing painful parts of yourself or someone else’s history. I often feel it. I read the newspaper before I start to write, I waste time reading another article or checking my email, a sort of slight procrastination. Then it comes out of habit because I know that I feel a little resistance I have to go past. I know this is my experience and I know I am going to go through this.

 

Who are the writers and poets that have influenced you?

My favorite novel will definitely be Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In general, Victorian writers have had a strong influence on me. I read Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, I read a lot of nineteenth century writers in my twenties and enjoyed their work. Other contemporary writers have been influential on my work like Donna Tartt, Sarah Waters. In terms of poetry I have to mention Dragonflies in Love, that is in the Anthology HERE, by Lee Slonimsky. The anthology of Poems for the Planet was edited by Elizabeth J.Coleman with a forward from the Dalai Lama, and was sent to every member of Congress.

 

Since you are a classicist, what about the ancients?

Amongst the Greeks, I have to single out Homer because I taught a class where I had to reread The Odyssey, which I prefer over The Iliad. I was inspired by Greek tragedies such as The Oresteia, the trilogy by the ancient Greece playwright Aeshylus (458BCE) consisting of 3 linked plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, that served as a reference for The Night Visitors. As a Latin major I will say Ovid of course, and Catullus the Roman love poet with his famous poem “give me a thousand of kisses and a thousand more”

 

Karine Leno Ancellin is the Author of The Missing Angle
https://rizapress28552698.wordpress.com/karine-ancellin/
www.apoetsagora.com

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