Maddie Martinez chats the magic of mythology retellings
Discover why myths endure in Maddie Martinez’s The Maiden and Her Monster—a powerful retelling of the Jewish legend of the Golem of Prague.
What happens when an ancient legend collides with fierce modern storytelling? Maddie Martinez’s The Maiden and Her Monster reimagines the Jewish myth of the Golem of Prague in a dark, romantic tale of creation, power, and survival. When Malka strikes a desperate deal to save her mother from execution, her hunt for a murderous creature leads her to a web of secrets that could doom them all. In today’s post, Maddie shares why myth retellings matter—and what drew her to give this timeless story new life.
The guest post is written by Maddie Martinez, author of The Maiden and Her Monster.
Stories have a stubborn habit of persisting.
It’s one of my favorite things about them. This is especially true when it comes to tales conjured from folklore and myth, which are often passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition. I have vivid memories from my childhood of sitting around a storyteller as they recounted myth and legends from the Jewish tradition. These stories were formative for me, and getting reacquainted with Jewish mythology to write The Maiden and Her Monster was comforting, and made me feel closer to the culture that raised me.
Mythology is familiar like that; it ties us to our communities, to our families. Myths represent our morals and reflect what we value. It can vary so much from culture to culture, but has something unique hidden within its depths that ties all of us together. It’s this familiarity which I think draws us to retellings of these myths—both reading and writing them. The stories are known, long cherished, and retellings offer readers the opportunity to engage with material they’re already comfortable with. But this time, through a new lens.
Retellings often give voice to marginalized perspectives—they seek dimension and diversity, and act as a sort of reclamation. To say, We have always been here. We have always had these stories inside of us. Now you see us. We write and read retellings to see ourselves in the stories so intrinsic to our communities as a sense of belonging, and a way of taking up space.
Or, perhaps, it is something else. Maybe we gravitate towards retellings because they offer us a way to connect the modern with the ancient, to make sense of the world and offer us control during a time where a lot of us feel very uncertain about the future. We look to myth retellings for personal connection, to feel that familiarity in a new type of way—a way that feels more tangible than the myths alone.
I think it’s a bit of both. In the face of destruction, mythology acts as an ever-present flame. It’s a source of hope, of everlasting culture, of knowledge and values. It’s community, questioning, and inclusion; it’s dissecting and rebuilding. And in a way, this is the potion which drew me to retellings in the first place, and why it felt so important to me to retell the Jewish myth of The Golem of Prague.
