![]() When I was first writing the book, some people were advising me to try to sell it as a novel. The underworlds of all these epic traditions became my world.Įven though it was really challenging and overwhelming to parent a small child through my treatment, in some ways that child-my daughter, Mira-became a figure who led me out of that dark place, in a way that lots of epics’ descents to the underworld involve being guided (though usually not by a three-year-old who’s just learning language). With this book, it’s all underworld, because I felt sucked into a bit of an underworld at that point in the middle of my life. They get sucked into this black hole: the world of the dead. At the center of so many of the epic poems that we read in that class, there is a descent to the underworld, where the world that characters thought they inhabited turns out not to be the world they thought it was. What ended up happening was I wrote an epic turned inside out. Life and death, right on top of each other. I started writing Underworld Lit in 2012, right after my last book came out, and a few years after I had a cancer diagnosis and my daughter was born. So I’d always intended to write an epic in the least heroic possible way, which was part of the fun and the challenge and the excitement of writing a book that was framed by my reading and teaching of epics in the Readings in World Literature College Core course. ![]() His book Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020) is a long narrative poem cast partly in the form of lecture notes for an imaginary course in the humanities. Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy is a professor in English Language and Literature and Creative Writing.
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