Melinda Salisbury On Crafting a Contemporary Version of Persephone’s Story In Her Dark Wings
Books Features Fiction
Greek mythology retellings are everywhere in the publishing world these days, though we see fewer of them in the young adult space than you might expect. (With a few notable exceptions; Claire M. Andrews’ Daughter of Sparta series, for example, is excellent.) But Melinda Salisbury is working to change all of that with her latest novel Her Dark Wings, a contemporary retelling of the story of Persephone with a thoroughly modern heart.
Set in a modern world whose culture and religion still revolve around the Greek gods and their various aspects and feuds, Her Dark Wings tells the story of Corey, a teenage girl who is devastated—and rightfully furious—when she discovers her boyfriend Alistair and her best friend Bree have both dumped her for one another. But when Bree dies tragically during the ancient festival of the Thesmorphia, Corey grapples with many conflicting emotions, including grief, guilt—she hadn’t exactly wished her former friend well at the end of her life—and a still simmering fury she can’t seem to let go of. And when she is accidentally drawn into the Underworld herself, she’ll come face to face with Hades, and be forced to reckon with her understanding of what words like justice, vengeance, and punishment.
We got the chance to chat with Salisbury herself about writing Her Dark Wings, what drew her to the myth of Persephone, finding the female rage at the heart of Corey’s journey, and more.
Paste Magazine: Tell us about Her Dark Wings! What made you want to tell this very contemporary sort of story using themes and characters from classic mythology?
Melinda Salisbury: I think the main reason that the classics have endured and remained popular is because there is a core truth at the heart of each of them that speaks to us, as readers, really, really deeply. And then you have Persephone—a character everyone has projected something onto, a character whose story is so well known surely there is nothing else to say about it. She’s the victim of a powerful man and simultaneously the wilful daughter of a caring mother. She’s a pawn in the wily games of Olympus, and she’s the reason we have winter. But we know almost nothing about her as a person removed from the circumstances that create her mythology. Persephone doesn’t often get to be more than a myth.
And I realized as I was developing Corey that I had a chance here to write a completely new kind of Persephone reimagining, where she is real and she does have flaws and desires and history and she does make real choices to become who she is. A Persephone in full control of her own destiny, where Hades and Demeter and the other gods are almost irrelevant to what happens to her—she chooses. And I couldn’t resist that. And I’d wanted to shift into writing in the contemporary world with speculative elements
Paste: Persephone is one of my favorite Greek goddesses — I blame Hadestown for my reawakened obsession with her relationship with Hades—what do you think keeps us coming back to her/their story?
Salisbury: I think the tale of Persephone is one of the best coming-of-age stories ever told. It’s a story about a young woman who has spent so long under her mother’s well-controlled wing and influence, and who is then (forced?) to make a life somewhere completely new to her. She becomes something completely unexpected, going from being a minor nature goddess to the Queen of the Underworld and she only has to do it part time!
There’s something about it I think that appeals to young women especially, this idea that there is more than we’re told we can be, we just have to be bold enough to take it and canny enough to move with the circumstances. As girls, we’re told so often what we are, what we ought to be. Persephone is an icon in defiance, for that reason. She carves a whole new place in the world out for herself.
Paste: Her Dark Wings is set in a relatively familiar modern world, albeit one whose culture and religion still revolve around the Greek gods and their various aspects and feuds. How did you go about finding a way to blend the two?
Salisbury: It was harder than I thought! I figured, as a relatively secular person, that it would be easy just to trade out the big things for their Ancient Greek equivalent, but, of course, it’s more complicated than that. I forgot how deeply embedded Christian terminology still is here in the U.K., even if you aren’t someone who practices it as a religion. I say “Oh my God”, I say “Jesus Christ”, I say “Go to Hell”. I was raised on superstitions about when you can cut nails, why some days are considered very bad luck, and what rainbows mean. Turns of phrase that are rooted in Christianity are still quite pervasive in the U.K. in an everyday cultural way, and it was some work to unpick that and remake it in a way that was authentic to the world I was creating, but without being all heavy-handed and telling about it.
I needed the reader to understand that Corey’s world is exactly the same as ours, the only difference is that instead of Christianity becoming the predominantly practiced white western religion, it was the Greek pantheon. I wanted to do that without info-dumping or spoon-feeding it, which meant giving just enough information and then trusting the reader to be able to meet the world where it is in the book.
Paste: Corey, for me, is such a fascinating character because she’s allowed to be so fully angry and ugly about her feelings. She’s got good reason to, of course, but so often young women are encouraged to ignore or bottle up those emotions. How do you see her emotional journey over the course of the book? What was most important to you about her arc?
Salisbury: I didn’t want her to change too much—she starts angry and she doesn’t lose that fire. I strongly dislike this Western storytelling rule which means that, by and large, a protagonist has to be a different person by the end of a book and “earned” our attention by promising to do so. The coward must become a hero, the cynic must learn to be open-hearted. It’s this really gross idea that the only way to become “worthy” is to change fundamentally who you are, and we’ll know if you succeeded if you can be declared ‘likeable’ by the last page. To hell with that, frankly.
I wanted Corey to learn to manage her anger, because that’s a lesson worth learning. And I wanted her to learn to love and trust again after being betrayed by the two people who were, at the time, most important to her. But I didn’t want her to lose the core of Corey! I wanted to write a character who learned to work with what they were, instead of changing completely. I’ve never been great at writing “worthy” characters, I can’t offer my readers something transactional in that way—I can’t promise they’re going to like my characters by the end of the book and I don’t want to. There are a million books about perfectly nice and worthy young women who are aspirational and who your mother would approve of. I don’t write those books and I don’t write for those girls. Or boys. I write ugly and messy and unsure and my characters still get good stories. Because even the hot messes deserve a good story.
Paste: Friendships between teenage girls can be so fraught and I feel like this book really captures the sort of mix of love and tension that can exist even between the closest of best friends. Tell me a little bit about how you see Bree and Corey’s relationship.
Salisbury: I think for most of us the first real heartbreak you have is inflicted by a friend, not a lover/crush! It’s at age six when Jenny picks Hailey to be her partner in dance and you have to work with a teacher. It’s age eight when Molly invites Ava to come to swimming with her that weekend even though you got your mom to get you a new bathing suit especially. It’s age ten when you find out Kacey had a sleepover and you weren’t invited. It’s age twelve when Pia doesn’t answer your messages and later you see photos of her with Maeve and Bella at the cinema together. It’s age fourteen when you’re frozen out by your so-called friends, inch by inch, because you’re suddenly not cool enough anymore and you don’t know what you did wrong. It’s when you’re sixteen and you’re so in love but that doesn’t stop your best friend making a move on the person you’d die for. It’s when you’re eighteen and you realize that circumstance and proximity were maybe the only things you ever really had in common.
We learn heartbreak so much sooner than any partner ever teaches us but it hardly ever gets explored. Like Corey says in the book, there is no ritual to process the loss of a friend, you’re simply expected to carry on as if the grief never happened. I wanted to honor that it does happen and when it does, it guts you. I wanted to reflect that with Bree and Corey. One girl who was thoughtless and reckless but ultimately didn’t mean any real harm, and one who has to deal with the aftermath of it. I wanted it to feel real.
Paste: Tell me about your take on Hades—he’s very sensitive and introspective, which I think is not always how most people tend to see this particular god.
Salisbury: Well, I didn’t think a super horny Hades was appropriate in a YA book and he is so often written as a total horndog—this brooding, powerful, dark god who makes a minor goddess his queen because he falls in love with her on sight and simply has to whisk her away to his realm and make her his.
More seriously, I thought about what it would be like to really be Hades and what effect that might have on you. Essentially exiled from Olympus to rule the Underworld; the other gods and nymphs avoiding him because he reminds them of ew, death; humans won’t worship him properly because they’re scared of him too; they even named his realm after him, he can’t ever escape his work or the associations of it. So you have this guy who has been stuck with this task that should be—and is!—really important (the MOST important) but he’s treated as a pariah and a curse and a joke.
And I think that would make you introspective and a little sad and also, you’d start to believe it. You’d start to believe bad things about yourself if it’s all you ever heard. He’s been treated by his family and peers like something unworthy, so he assumes Corey will see him the same way if she knows who he really is, little realizing that his behavior has become self-fulfilling. I wanted him to go on a journey in the same way she does – to learn to become himself, as she becomes herself and together they become a formidable partnership.
Paste: What inspired your particular take on the Underworld that we see in this story?
I wanted the Underworld, when Corey first sees it, to be a reflection of how Hades sees himself, and so it is flat and empty and lonely. It has vestiges of how it was before, but since it’s been his domain, he has let it stay blank and featureless. I wanted it to be clear that as Corey brings life to the Underworld, she reminds Hades of what it is to be alive too. That life is what you make it, and sometimes you have to grow it to get it where you need it to be.
Paste: Who was your favorite figure from Greek mythology to try and adapt for this story that wasn’t Hades or Persephone? (I think your Hermes is great, by the way.)
Salisbury: Hecate, or the Oracle, as she’s known in the book.
I loved the idea of making this incredibly powerful goddess someone who is having real fun with her immortality. She’s living on her island, with her dog, wearing the face and mood that suits her most when she wakes up in the morning.
Paste: Other than Hades and Persephone, what are your other favorite Greek myths?
Salisbury: I like the dark ones with the messier, angrier women. Clytemnestra and Medea are particular favorites, but I’ve also always loved (though loved is not the right word at all) the story of Iphigenia, who was sacrificed to appease Artemis so Agamemnon could have his war. It’s so bleak and tragic and pointless and awful.
I also love Orpheus and Eurydice—I’d love to read a really good reimagining of that. It’s such a ubiquitous story, but the only version that’s come close to hitting it for me is, OBVIOUSLY, Hadestown, which is an absolute work of genius.
Paste: What’s next for you as an author? Are you working on anything you can tell us about?
Salisbury: I am working on a bunch of things but I’m not allowed to talk about any of them yet. Next up in terms of things I’m allowed to discuss is three teen tech thrillers I’ve written for a U.K. publisher who specializes in books for reluctant and dyslexic readers. I’ve never written sci-fi, or teen, or thrillers before, so it’s been really exciting to flex new muscles. In my more usual YA, there should be an announcement soon.
Paste: And my favorite question, always—what are you reading right now? Are you excited about anything in particular hitting shelves in the next few months?
Salisbury: I’ve just finished Melissa Albert’s The Bad Ones, which is my favorite of hers yet! I think she’s the most exciting writer—she doesn’t shy away from messy, complicated characters and really macabre stories, and best of all, she trusts the reader to fill in the gaps
I hate being spoonfed stories and she always leaves me feeling like I’ve had to tithe part of myself to get out of her books. I love her writing so much.
Her Dark Wings is available now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB