With the Covid-19 pandemic, there have obviously been dozens of books that haven’t received the shine they might have under normal circumstances. One new release that I hope gets all the attention and more is Thea Prieto’s novella From the Caves, winner of the Red Hen Press Novella Award. From the Caves exists in an ethereal place, one indebted to myth but also the very real environmental catastrophe that we are currently immersed in. Prieto’s debut volume is shadowed by fire and darkness, but within that veiling there yet exists hope, a certain hope. Below Prieto discusses the centrality of storytelling to all swathes of humanity and how, after some fits and starts, From the Caves came to be. A highly recommended first book.
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On From the Caves and Reframing Mythologies
I was nineteen when I first heard a story told by a bard.
As an undergraduate student, one of the ways I kept myself from missing my rural home while living in the California Bay Area was by studying storytelling. Beginnings and endings felt similar those days, so I gravitated to courses that would introduce me to origin myths from diverse cultures, and I remember one class in particular that started early in the morning. A friend and I would get coffee beforehand, we’d settle into the large auditorium with about a hundred other students all sitting close together, and the chairs would be soft, the light dim, and the professor would tell us stories from Greek mythology.
The professor’s style of storytelling, I know now, was what left such an impression, the way he began by sharing a small moment in a creation myth, allowing its meaning to reverberate outward into the larger belief system and reveal information about that early civilization. It was in the outer ripples of those lessons that we studied archeology, and one day we learned about the excavation of what was believed to be the ancient city of Troy. The ruins were enclosed by sloped walls and cracks were discovered in the stones, the findings suggesting that an earthquake had occurred around the same time the story of The Iliad might have taken place.
Those cracks, like a growing line of questions, would work through my mind for years to come. In Greek mythology, Poseidon is the god of the sea, but he is also the god of earthquakes—and horses. How long does it take news of a catastrophic event, traveling hundreds of miles and conveyed by word-of-mouth, to become fundamentally altered? For the story of an earthquake to become “Poseidon broke the walls of Troy” then “a horse broke the walls of Troy,” the event eventually transformed into the story of the Trojan Horse?
If I had to pinpoint a single moment that inspired From the Caves, it would be the instant I became curious about this large-scale game of telephone people have been playing for thousands of years. I began to notice the connective mythologies within and across different cultures and disciplines, in storytelling courses, or film, history, or physics courses, it didn’t matter—those webbings were there, the threads of information tangling as they passed from one person to the next and to the next, at each transfer the stories and theories and philosophies changing slightly or dramatically in revealing ways. Cases of repetition, like nodes in the web, were especially charged discoveries—origin stories from opposite sides of the planet with the same cosmic eggs, bears, floods—and over time it felt natural to start writing down the connections, to move the pieces around on the page and observe the patterns.
It would be years, though, before something resembling a manuscript would take form, and if the mythological stories-within-stories are the oldest parts of From the Caves, then Green’s death in the opening paragraph is the newest. For a long time, the drafts I wrote were more like collages of genesis stories and adventure tales, but after my father suddenly passed away, every notion I held that had anything to do with beginnings and endings was forced into a reframe. The storytelling characters in From the Caves and their cave at the end of the world are a part of that reframe. At their earliest and most stick-figure manifestation, the characters represented the different stages of grief—Mark, anger; Tie, sorrow; Teller, bargaining; and Sky, denial at first but later, acceptance. Adding the death of a loved one to the first paragraph of From the Caves was a form of acceptance, too. It is both an ending and a beginning, for the story and the final manuscript.
In this way, Green’s death is the closing moment that expands the story into being. Just as a simple character interaction in Greek mythology can ripple through the minds of the collective and grow to teach us something about our own churning human existence, so do the stories we tell each other, about our past and our future, show us much about ourselves as we are today. From the Caves is only one thread in this vast web people will continue to weave with one another, as we reverberate our stories and patterns outward, and discover what is still left to create.
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Thea Prieto is the author of From the Caves (2021), which won the Red Hen Novella Award. She is a recipient of the Laurels Award Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the international Edwin L. Stockton, Jr. Award and Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. She writes and edits for Poets & Writers and The Gravity of the Thing, and her work has also appeared at Longreads, New Orleans Review, Entropy, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches creative writing at Portland State University and Portland Community College.