Nina MacLaughlin reimagines classic narratives through a fresh lens, focusing on transformation and metamorphosis from the perspective of those often silenced. Her work delves into the depths of human experience and the enduring power of myth. With a voice that is both incisive and lyrical, she invites readers to consider how stories are told and by whom. She is a keen observer of how the past shapes the present.
"A companion to Nina MacLaughlin's luminous Summer Solstice. The year is fading. Light is fading. Solstice means sun-stilled. It's a wild sort of stilling, a thrashing frenzied sort of stilling, a stopping of time, a de-metering, a holding of the breath as the tension builds, as the dark expands, until it cracks and the light drives in. That's the hope. Pomegranate, holly branch, birch switch, mistletoe. We'll leaf with life and pass below the secret places of this earth"--
Nina MacLaughlin captures the essence of summer in this brilliant, beautiful, sensuous essay.
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.
A warm and inspiring book for anyone who has ever dreamed of changing tracks: the story of a young woman who quit her desk job to become a carpenter.
Rescuing Kropotkin's anarchist philosophy from the neglect and misrepresentation it has suffered.