Monica Robinson’s new novella, to rule the desert, a sapphic adaptation (loosely) of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, comes out in just two more days, and we’re delighted to be able to feature her on the blog in the lead up to that. This piece looks at how the idea for the novella grew and how her own experiences growing up inform her works.
Before you dive in, don’t forget you can still preorder to rule the desert here!
When I sat down to write this article, I tried to trace my own relationship with personal mythologies and found myself at somewhat of a loss, not because I couldn’t trace a history at all, but because this is something that has influenced me for much of my life, as a writer and artist, and otherwise, and unraveling the thread to its base proved more difficult than I might’ve thought.
I was raised in an Evangelical Christian household with Jewish roots that were either hidden or ignored, which means that my first exposure to mythology and religion was an understanding that I would always come second, to men, to the Christian god, you name it.
A morbid start, but it was here that my love for creation myths began, and my desire to insert myself into them was first ignited. I have always been an avid reader and so, aside from learning the ins and outs of the Christian pantheon, I was also reading every book about spirituality, mythology, etc that I could get my hands on, and every fiction and fantasy book that caught my eye on top of that. I spent many of those years dreaming a world inside of my head, aided by books and the strange things I might’ve heard in church, that I did not fully understand.
I lived in a small town in rural Indiana until I was 18, when I moved into a slightly bigger town in rural Indiana, before finally moving to an apartment outside of Indianapolis at 19. I’m grateful for this upbringing in a single respect: that it taught me to appreciate the folklore that met me at every turn.
I was surrounded by cornfields on all sides, star-gazed in vast, grassy expanses virtually untouched by light pollution, ran barefoot through the yard from spring to fall, played in every creek bed I could find, and, later, when I could drive, would disappear onto night-washed backroads for hours, no lights aside from the stars and my headlights, surrounded by an encompassing blackness that I find impossible to replicate now that I’ve moved to an East Coast city.
When you are young, in such a place, the darkness is many-limbed; it contains kindly guardians and regional haunts alike. You learn a very specific brand of superstition: we do not track graveyard dirt into the house, we do not respond to voices that sound like our loved ones when our loved ones are not within our line of sight, we do not step into the cornfields at night, we do not leave the passenger seats empty. I was raised in a landscape of abandoned farmhouses rotting on wooded land with their contents still sitting, waiting, inside, of unincorporated townships and unused railroad tracks and forgotten cemeteries. My childhood was the beginning of my own creation myth.
Reading and writing poetry, as I’ve done for so many years now, was also obviously a formative influence, but the true pivotal moment happened a couple years ago, when I submitted some of my regional gothic-inspired work to Sword & Kettle Press for their Cup & Dagger series, a collection of chapbooks that reflected inclusive authorship in speculative fiction and fantasy. I submitted my work on a whim, but was accepted, and spent the next year working on and off on the publication of bury me in iron and ivy: a midwestern gothic, relayed in pieces, which became a very important part of something much larger.
Sword & Kettle Press put out a call for a social media manager at some point during the publication process, and with a background in that very thing, I submitted an application, became their social media manager, and eventually, transitioned into an editorial position. This is all relevant because, in my position as an editor, I coined the next chapbook theme: personal mythologies.
Sifting through submissions, I found myself immersed in beautiful queer creation myths, reimaginings of mythology that centered the writer and their culture at the forefront. And all the while, I was writing and editing one of my own.
It started as a “what if”, as these things often do. “What if the ferryman on the River Styx was a truck driving highway woman? What if the diner witch from one of my short stories was in the same universe as the highway woman? What if there was an abandoned, deeply haunted motel?” Slowly, surely, the pieces came together.
I had already been writing a number of short fiction pieces about liminal spaces, and this gave me the final jumping off point for to rule the desert. Liminal spaces in and of themselves have a strange, convoluted holiness to them, a reverence that pervades the strangeness of the space. It was in this lingering, reverent space that I truly began to create to rule the desert.
There is also, of course, the Orpheus and Eurydice inspiration. I admit that I’d surprisingly not seen or listened to Hadestown before writing this work, and I’ve only seen it virtually since – the appeal of the original myth was moreso in my infatuation with the idea of being unable to look back at one’s lover when traversing an unfamiliar, terrifying new landscape in order to return to a life once lived, and what that might mean on many different levels.
Did they really want to return, for instance, or was there a new path to be foraged, a third option? I consider this more of a reimagining of the source material than a proper retelling, but I do think it does help me find my readers to “cite my sources”, so to speak.
The final piece, though, was the most important. I wonder sometimes if I put too much of myself or my relationship into my work, but the truth is that so much of my writing is driven by my identity as a queer woman and by my experiences in my long-term relationship. This would never have been a story about a straight couple, because I’m not even sure I would know how to write that. Instead, this became a deeply personal examination of love, loss, and myth, all a shade too familiar to ever fully remove myself from the equation.
I think the biggest compliment I’ll ever receive on this work (no offense to my lovely ARC readers, who I appreciate deeply!) was from my mom. We haven’t always seen eye to eye in terms of my identity and relationship, though we’ve come a long way over the years. She admitted to me, after reading a very early copy, that she cried many times while reading it, that the relationship was tender in a way she had never seen before. I finally felt understood, and it only took me writing a few thousand words to get there.
From the driving relationship and the characters that I’ve probably poured too much of myself into, to the liminal, haunting folklore that has followed me since I was very small, to rule the desert is a deeply personal mythology that follows a narrative of finding oneself amidst long-lost memories, past ghosts, and the rubble of a life collapsed to create something sturdier, if not more vicious – a tale of becoming more equipped to protect oneself after learning the often unfair lessons of the myth and emerging not unscathed, but at the very least, newly restored.
About Monica Robinson
Monica Robinson is a queer experimental poet, artist, photographer, writer, editor, reader, and explorer.
She is the author of Exit Wounds, EARTH IS FULL; GO BACK HOME, and peeling the yellow wallpaper, and is the founder and manager of Capta Lucem, her own photography and art business which focuses heavily on typewriter and word based art and appears in-person at pop-up events and markets around Philadelphia.
Monica has also been published in Persephone’s Daughters, Stone of Madness Press, Lammergeier, Interstellar, and Mookychick, and is additionally the author of bury me in iron and ivy for the Cup & Dagger series (via Sword & Kettle Press), the self-created witches zine, and after the flood for the Beyond the Veil anthology (via Ghost Orchid Press). She has been a contributor for Fast Jackal Media and Wolfsbane Music Co. and currently works with Frayed Edge Press on social media management and public relations and is an editor with Sword & Kettle Press.
She currently resides with her partner and her husky in Philadelphia.
Monica plans to someday own a library and retire to a remote lighthouse in Maine, but has rather extensive plans to change the world first. She believes in the inherent magic of the world around her, and is eternally tied to the rural Midwestern town where she grew up.
