Longtime Local English Professor Pens Second Novel

Thursday, September 4 6:00 PM 

Chaucer’s Bookstore (3321 State Street)  hosts author and longtime local English professor Jinny Webber for a signing and book talk of her latest novel Serpent Visions.

Description  Set in pre-literate Bronze Age Greece, Serpent Visions reimagines the myth of the gender-switching seer Teiresias. Walking in the deep woods, he strikes apart two coupling serpents and transforms into a woman. Seven years later, she, now called Teira, encounters mating serpents, strikes between them, and becomes male again. When summoned by Zeus and Hera to answer who enjoys sex more, man or woman, Teiresias replies Woman. Enraged, Hera blinds him. In compensation, Zeus grants him second sight, and he becomes the soothsayer entwined in the tragedies of Oedipus and his descendants. During these fading days of Mother Goddess religions, Teiresias relates his long-secret history to his daughter Manto, in hopes that she will keep it alive as a rhapsode—a story-teller.

About the Author Before Jinny Webber began her long career as an English professor at Santa Barbara City College, she spent a year teaching on a Fulbright grant in Cyprus, island of Aphrodite. Her fascination with ancient Greece deepened while exploring archaeology and museums of the island and led to her in-depth studies of mythology and Greek tragedy and, eventually, this novel, revealing the enigmatic story of Teiresias.