LitFest in the Dena, Saturday May 3, 2025 1:00 p.m.
Join me and authors Lisa Alvarez, Sarah Rafael Garcia, and Andrea for a discussion on “Matriarchs and Other Monsters.”
Characters, in real life and on the page, are more than one thing. Even the worst villains are sometimes kind to their mothers. While the Christian world generally defines their female saints as benevolent, matronly, and often virginal, mothers are not always saints.
Other cultures have female goddesses who are much more dimensional. For example:
- Coatlicue (the Aztec mother goddess) could be a loving and nurturing “Mother Earth” type figure who created Eden-like conditions for human beings. But, Coatlicue could be unforgiving and terrifying, devouring human life through floods, fire and famine.
- Kali (the Hindu Mother Goddess) was both a destroyer and a protector, a loving mother and an insatiable monster, who ultimately devoured her children.
- Sekhmet (the Egyptian lion goddess) was the goddess of both warfare and healing and almost destroyed humanity during one of her rages.
As Walt Whitman said, we all contain multitudes. We all have a bit of the monster in us. The human experience includes joy and terror, life and death, good and evil, happiness and grief. Good storytellers understand these contradictions and that realistic characters must be multidimensional.
In this panel, four multi-genre authors discuss the influences that matriarchs and other monsters have had on their writing.
