Author: Alexandra Sladky

The need to justify teaching and reading these stories continues to grow and so does the need to explain these stories and their significance to the young people who read those stories. The stories are influential to

I wonder sometimes about how we got here. Often this comes back to Greek and Roman myth for me, whether I like it or not, those myths and histories (which are also mostly myth) are the foundations for our own culture. They are also rhetorical, writers crafting stories that argue for the supremacy and power of Rome or Greece. Is this the start of shame? Is this where it comes from and why it is so ingrained in us? The beauty of myth is that it explains how and why we believe something, or how and why something exists. The histories are foundations for Graeco-Roman culture, and for our own.

When I think about who I write for, I often think about my students, specifically my Latin students, who need to know about the ways that the stories they wade through and read and translate have some kind of wider impact outside of the classroom, that they matter.

Translation is just one way to be involved in classics, to use ancient languages, and it is one way that makes those stories and texts more accessible to those that don’t have the language. Perhaps this is why it is so important.

The culture that receives the text has a certain way of looking at and thinking about a text from another time. The themes are there in the original, however, depending on the time and the culture, certain messages might be drawn out and more clearly exposed. Is this one of the rhetorical features of translation?

Making puff pastry on a Sunday afternoon, while piping the pastry onto baking sheets, Jen asked, “Are you prepared for me to be emotionally devastated if these don’t turn out?”

Today, we are calling for reforms in representation. Not only in the political offices that we hear about daily, but also in the stories that we read, the history we learn in school, and so many other places. Representation in stories is powerful.

Throughout the entire story of Daphne and Apollo, from the beginning where Cupid hits her with an arrow that makes her uninterested in love, to Apollo’s speech convincing her to stop running from him, to the end where she prays to her father to be taken away from the situation, Daphne has given us no reason to believe that she would willingly give in to Apollo. And yet, here we are with the word “consent.”

In these retellings, I found the voices of female characters that had been silent for most of history. I started to wonder about these retellings: how do these representations of women, the retellings of these classics from the woman’s POV fit into the larger landscape of fiction about women and LGBTQ+ people? How do these fictional stories about women tell the truth about the lives of women? 

Even as I tried to find ways to make the experience low-stakes, I think I have found writing a blog to be a little bit daunting: who am I writing to? As a student of rhetoric, this is probably the greatest crisis of writing a blog.