Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner discussed by Susan Hawthorne, 23 November 2025

Susan Hawthorne has been reading about prehistory for nearly 50 years.She even enrolled in a Philosophy PHD entitled ‘Belief Systems in the AncientWorld’ in 1979. One year in it became impossible because all the philosopherswanted her to read was postmodernism. She threw in the PhD and began studyingancient languages, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and some Latin. Instead of her PhD,she wrote a novel, The Falling Woman (1992) which includes some mythicmaterial. Her main work in the mythic area is poetry. In The ButterflyEffect (2005) she unpacks lesbian language and metaphor; in Cow(2011) she follows a cow called Queenie from her invention of the universe tothe present; in Lupa and Lamb (2014) she pulls apart the history ofRome, its wolves and lambs and lost texts found in an ancient museum; in TheSacking of the Muses (2019) she follows myths from India and Greece,including several translations. Poetry allows for experimentation and formaking things up in order to show a different way of seeing the world. She iscurrently working on a book, Ulyssea in which she imagines alesbian-centric Amazon world.