Joanne Taylor • Ajatar Editing

Do you have interests that people sometimes misjudge you on? This is mine! I recently had immense fun talking about one of my favourite topics to lovely editor colleagues. Here’s a quick recording of the session introduction, which I made after the meeting for friends who couldn’t attend. We then went on to discuss related books and films. A full blog post is in the works, but for now, here’s the video with transcript below:

Hi everyone. Thanks for indulging my slightly odd interest in monsters and mythological creatures today. This is a niche I work with both with independent fiction authors and with World History Encyclopedia. I kind of got into this niche by accident, but then I realized that this fascination goes back to when I was at least nine years old.

I remember we had a teacher who introduced us to myths and stories from around the world. So, we studied Romulus and Remus, the founding of Rome; I remember doing a very detailed cartoon of Rama and Sita with Hanuman the monkey god saving the day with his tail on fire. And crying, embarrassingly, when the Welsh prince killed his hero of a dog, Gelert.

So even as a child, I was fascinated by the involvement of creatures and animals in stories. So when I talk about monsters, I’m also including creatures. Because it’s not always clear cut whether something is a monster or not. It depends on the perspective of the characters, usually.

They can be anything from something very much like an animal to something that appears to be human. They could be immortal, mortal like us, or undead. And this breadth brings so much to storytelling.

When I started editing, it was on scientific papers for a biochemistry lab, which might seem like a stark contrast. When I started freelancing, I gravitated towards topics that I thought, Oh, that, that sounds interesting.

And that’s how I ended up working on a series of books about mythological creatures from around the world. I continued working with the same author who went on to write about women in different mythologies. And the monsterification of women across different times and cultures is also fascinating.

Although I’ve discovered my niche by accident, it’s something I’ve always been interested in. I proofread for World History Encyclopedia, which used to be Ancient History Encyclopedia. So there’s a lot of mythology on there. And our most ancient literature contains all sorts of monsters, creatures, and of course, gods.

And there’s a great example on there, it’s a Mesopotamian praise poem, an article about that, and the poem is called The Song of the Hoe. And it just casually mentions, oh yeah, there’s dragons in the forest, as if it’s as mundane as a hoe in the ground and a dog in the reedbeds, yeah, of course there are dragons in the forest.

You find different monsters all around the world in various types of societies and across different times. [Now,] I would say I’m a generalist. It’s my authors who are the experts – so I’m not an expert in a particular type of mythology. My authors are the experts. But living in Sri Lanka, with family here, I’ve got an interest in Sri Lankan folklore. But yeah, overall, I’m a generalist.

[Anyway,] in Inuit mythology, there’s a giant she-wolf called Amarok, and she shows how monsters are complex characters, not just evil, and can represent the elements as well as other things. In more urbanized societies, you often see human-like creatures and human-animal hybrids reflecting different societal fears and concerns. I suppose an example of that would be in ancient Greece, the idea of dangerous women, ensnaring you. They may or may not be half-snake, like Echidna.

These themes continue into modern fantasy and other types of literature, from dragons to vampires to more unusual monsters. And even completely made-up monsters and creatures in modern stories usually come from somewhere deeper than “Oh, that sounds cool, I’ll put it in my book,” ideally.

So to wrap up, monsters and creatures in literature and storytelling offer unique insights, I think, into the societies that created them, into the human condition, our relationship with nature and with each other. They reflect both our fears and our endless creativity. If you’ve got any book recommendations, books that you’ve enjoyed with gods or monsters or creatures, I would love to hear them, especially if it’s outside of just pure horror, that would be infinitely fascinating to me.

Thank you!