If you hadn’t heretofore been excited about Maya Deane’s upcoming retelling of the Iliad where Achilles is a trans woman, don’t worry, we’re here to make sure you become so! It’s out in just about a week and a half so plenty of time to preorder still. In the meantime, though, we have an interview with the genius mind behind the book herself!
Don’t forget, too, that you can follow Maya on twitter.
Have you always known you wanted to be a writer? How old were you when you wrote your first story?
I wrote my first “Iliad retelling” when I was seven or so. It was a garbled plot summary obsessed with Athena and Achilles and virulently anti-Alexander, whom I despised in those days. I was also low-key in love with Diomedes because I have strange taste. When I was a child, I was convinced that writer was the noblest and most powerful of professions, so it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a thing I could actually do for real. I finished my first novel at 16 and have a massive trunk full of unpublishable juvenilia; I’ve written a few million words that the world will never need to see.
What are your favourite genres to read and write, and are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?
I generally read fantasy and science fiction, but in these apocalyptic times we’re witnessing a flowering of trans literature in many genres, and I will read trans women in any genre: brilliant horror writers like Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin, subversive litfic writers like Jeanne Thornton and Casey Plett, arch upmarket satirists like Torrey Peters, insightful romance writers like Penny Aimes, SF writers like the cunning and formally innovative Ryka Aoki or Charlie Jane Anders, and more. Perhaps such an efflorescence could only happen at the end of an era while empires collapse and the world trembles.
When you close your eyes and imagine an apple, what do you see? An actual apple, a sketch of one, a blackness? Do you think that impacts your writing process?
I can quite easily see an actual apple, a sketch apple, a blackness, or a golden apple glowing in the blackness, crackling with otherworldly power and streaming out shining virtual letters and numbers and diagrams. I think my hypertrophic visual imagination definitely impacts my writing process; I work fairly hard to see what I need to see in the realm of images, and then I form it into a body of words.
Which three authors would you say influenced your writing the most?
Without a doubt my greatest influence is Tanith Lee, whose darkness and light saved me from an awful fate and taught me how to love in a world that determined to destroy my soul. For me, Tanith Lee is one of the great wellsprings of late 20th century English literature, a secret powerful influence that far too few people encountered firsthand. But her echoes have spread far.
When you’re building your world, what do you focus on? How do you try to make it come to life?
Oh gosh, that’s a great question. I need to know a LOT about the world — how and where people live, what they eat and where their food comes from, what the sights and smells are like and the diversity of reactions people have to their own environment — but all of that is useless until I understand the nature of desire, the way the protagonist’s need permeates the story and determines what we see at any moment. There’s so much I know about Achilles’ world that she barely notices, that we see only in passing or by the way its gravity invisibly perturbs her orbit.
What projects are you currently working on? Can you share any details yet?
I recently drafted a story for the myth retelling anthology Fit for the Gods. It’s called No Gods, No Kings and is about the Amazon role in some versions of the Titanomachy. I’m also currently working on an as-yet-unsold novel exploring trans elements in the story of Joseph/Yusuf; it’s set at the height of 18th dynasty Ancient Egypt’s colonial empire. In ancient Kna’an, two once-close sisters struggle for power, and the defeated sister, sold as a captive to the Egyptian overlords, rises through sorcery and intrigue to become a collaborator in the Amarna-era Aten cult and wreak terrible vengeance on her own family.
Three images that capture the aesthetic of your book?
Well, obviously the cover, by the amazing Marcela Bolivar. Beyond that, I’m heavily inspired by Yoshitaka Amano (1), Anne Bachelier (2), and a bunch of dead Art Nouveau artists like Charles van der Stappen (3). I’ve also been heavily directly influenced by Mycenaean art and architecture and military equipment, Ramesside-era Ancient Egyptian art and architecture, and more.
Three songs you would put in your book’s soundtrack?
Hidden Citizens, Paint It, Black
Jessica 6, White Horse
Philip Glass, Monsters of Grace, In the Arc of Your Mallet (but I might equally likely use Where Everything is Music or My Worst Habit, there just aren’t easily accessible video versions of those)
Nobuo Uematsu, Dancing Mad (I know the organist who played for this version!)
What would be your dream project?
Wrath Goddess Sing was my dream project. I have eight more planned, of which I’m currently working on two.
Which of your characters would you most want to fight a zombie apocalypse with?
Achilles.
You’re stuck on a desert island and you’re allowed only three (LGBT) books. What are you taking?
Oh dear. Well. I guess I’m taking Alina Boyden’s Stealing Thunder, because that book will silently judge me until I find a way off the island; Wrath Goddess Sing, to remind me who I am; and probably a good translation of the works of Enheduanna, to really start at the beginning and keep my soul alive.
You can collaborate on anything with anyone in the LGBT community: who would it be and why?
I guess I would collaborate with Wendy Carlos and the ghost of Angela Morley to write an opera about Elegabala (we’ll call her that), a trans teenager whose mother and grandmother schemed her way onto the throne of the Roman Empire. Such a musical collaboration would hopefully make me cool in the eyes of the hip trans music crowd (it would not; they would call me a dork) and would be on brand given my interest in trans history and exploring the nature of power.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maya Deane (she/her) is a novelist, visual artist, and avid student of all the arts of civilization attributed to Inana by the first known writer, Enheduana.
She would love to talk to you about the history of forks, cannabis-hotboxing Amazons in the archeological record, the top three most famous 18th century French trans women, how to cook ancient Canaanite food (hint: import bananas from India), and what it’s like making friends with a scholarly feline. (Shout out to Apollo!)
She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Camden MFA in creative writing.
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