Ever since reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology as a child, the ancient Greek world has fascinated me. Spending a year in Cyprus with my family where I taught on a Fulbright grant made that imaginative domain real. Aphrodite was born of the seafoam on the southwestern coast of Cyprus near the town of Paphos, and the island’s archeology dates back eons. That year we explored it all.

My husband and I had alternating teaching schedules so one of us would always be home with our small children, and on our free weekends we travelled every inch of the island, often the only visitors at archeological sites. Tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots required UN troops to keep the peace, but we were waved through checkpoints, thanks to the three children crowded into our Fiat.

This Cypriot adventure grounded my longtime love of Bronze Age Greece. The unique angle of light, the geography, the atmosphere, and the settings struck me—even if all that remained were ruins, mosaics, and museum collections.

At Santa Barbara City College on our return, I taught world literature from Homer to Dante every fall term, giving me the chance to immerse myself in Homer, Sophocles, and Ovid and company. After my kids were grown I earned a PhD in Religious Studies from UCSB, focusing on myth and literature, and afterwards began writing the first draft of Teiresias’ story. Fortuitously, Athens became a summertime home base over the years, with visits to islands from Crete, the largest, to Ithaca and Skiathos and many in between.

Fate—a theme in Serpent Visions—shifted my focus from Greece to England when I was asked to develop a study abroad semester program for SBCC in Cambridge. Subsequently spending eight semesters in Cambridge and London with its vivid theatre and literature, I was inspired to write three novels set in Shakespeare’s London: The Secret Player, Dark Venus, and Bedtrick. Now and then over the years, I returned to Teiresias, but only after taking early retirement did he become my focus.

Two invaluable writing retreats allowed me to edit drafts of this novel in settings where the gods once walked the earth. The first was at the Cyprus College of Art in Lemba village above Paphos, Aphrodite’s birthplace, near the prehistoric village Lakkoi. Later, Nikos and Georgia Dimitriou hosted me at the Evia writers retreats on the island called Euboea in Homer, where Agamemnon gathered the Argive troops in preparation for attacking Troy.

Myth evolved in preliterate times. That lost era of story-telling inspired the structure of Serpent Visions. It reimagines the enigmatic myth of the gender-switching seer Teiresias as he tells his daughter Manto about his long-secret past, steeped in the mystery of those ancient days when divine intervention, mystery, and fate played out dramatically.