News from Stephanie Dray

Springtime is a season of showers, flowers, eggs and baby animals. It's also, not incidentally, the month in which we celebrate Mothers Day. During this time of year, the ancient Romans honored Bona Dea, the mysterious "good goddess" who was sometimes called Maia (after which our modern month is named). That wasn't her only name. She was also known as Ops, Magna Mater, Terra, Demeter...and to Cleopatra Selene, she would almost certainly have been known as Isis.

Celebrating the festival of the good goddess was the domain of women. Her rites were overseen by the Vestal Virgins and had much in common with other fertility rites including music, dancing, wine, and blood-sacrifice. The rituals are shrouded in mystery because men were forbidden from taking part. Even male animals were removed from the household and portraits of men taken down. If a man so much as glimpsed the sacred rites, he could be punished by putting out his eyes. Nonetheless, curiosity flourished and one Roman nobleman, Clodius Pulcher, was tried for disguising himself and infiltrating the celebration with the alleged intent of seducing Caesar's wife.

Clodius was eventually acquitted, but the damage had been done. Caesar divorced his wife because being innocent wasn't good enough--she must also be above suspicion. Clodius' career was over. And the reputation of the festival was tarnished. It wouldn't be until years later that Augustus' wife restored them to prominence. Livia was, perhaps, the best choice for this task because, as a Claudian, she was distantly related to Clodius. It may have also been a political gambit by her husband to appropriate the divine feminine.

This is because when Cleopatra was alive, she had represented herself as the incarnation of Isis. By the time her daughter was a prisoner in Rome, Isis worship was flourishing throughout the world--even as Augustus cracked down on the cult. Something about the idea of a universal mother appealed to all social classes and her sacred rites elevated the status of women. Augustus was eager to supplant the Egyptian goddess by appealing to older Roman traditions. Bona Dea fit the bill!

After reading the amazing entries of talented young women writers, my judges have had their say. Now the field is narrowed down to four semi-finalists in each category. Winners will be chosen in early autumn. Keep your eye on the blog to read interviews with these young writers. In the meantime, I'm so proud to introduce them to you:

Teens
Emily Cutler, To Virgil
Abigail Gant, A Fear Unrelenting
Diane Ward, Zhaojun
Page Whisnan, A Coin Flip

Young Women
Catherine Campbell Zielinski, My Life as an Addict
Riti Kanthan, Blackout
Anna Nygren, The Poem of Sister Unseen
Rebecca Wilson, A House Is Not A Home

In the coming months, I'll be trying to make a place for these young authors to come together as a group online. In addition to the interviews I'll be doing with them, I'm going to encourage them to submit guests posts on my blog so that they get a leg up on how to effectively network with other writers and use a blog to market their work and build a platform. I look forward to getting to know them and their work--I hope you will too!