EPISODE 03 | SEASON 01 What makes a story survive for almost 3,000 years? And what can one of the oldest stories in Western literature teach us about storytelling, creativity and making work that lasts? In Episode 03 of Makers Workshop, we sit down with Erica Stevenson, historian, classicist, creator of MoAn Inc. and author of The Odyssey Effect, to explore her remarkable journey into the ancient world and the process behind turning a lifelong fascination with Homer’s The Odyssey into a book. Erica first read The Odyssey at 16 while a patient in a mental health hospital. Isolated on a ward, Homer’s story offered something unexpected: an escape. Through Odysseus, she could temporarily leave the hospital and travel somewhere else entirely. It created a deeply personal connection with the story that has stayed with her ever since. But Erica’s route from that first encounter to becoming an author was anything but straightforward. After studying classics, she planned to pursue a career in the circus, training as an aerialist for 15 to 25 hours a week alongside university. An injury changed those plans. She returned to the ancient world, kept reading and, after a conversation with a regular while working in a pub, started a YouTube channel dedicated to making classics accessible to people who might otherwise never engage with them. That journey eventually led to The Odyssey Effect, Erica’s new book exploring how Homer’s epic has shaped literature, art and popular culture, and why generation after generation continues to reinterpret and retell it. HOW DO YOU MAKE PEOPLE CARE ABOUT A 3,000-YEAR-OLD STORY? That question sits at the heart of our conversation. Erica explains why knowing your subject is only part of the job. The real challenge is understanding the person on the other side of it. She shares how she learned to switch off her “classics brain” and meet audiences where they are, including the brilliant story of teaching a room of completely uninterested schoolgirls The Iliad by getting them to rank the ancient Greek heroes by how attractive they were. Suddenly, they were searching the text, debating characters and, most importantly, caring about the story. It leads us into a much bigger discussion about storytelling, communication and why some ideas survive while others disappear. We explore why The Odyssey remains so relatable thousands of years after it was created, from Odysseus’ longing to return home to the flawed decisions he makes along the way. We also look at how our definition of a hero has fundamentally changed. In the ancient Greek world, being a hero did not necessarily mean being good, moral or noble. You could be deeply flawed and still unquestionably be considered heroic. Erica explains how religion, war and changing cultural values have transformed what society expects a hero to represent. THE MAKING OF THE ODYSSEY EFFECT As with every Makers Workshop conversation, we also want to understand how the finished work actually got made. Erica takes us behind the scenes of writing her first book. Given just three months to produce around 40,000 words, she spent her first month doing almost nothing but reading, her second writing the manuscript from beginning to end, and her third editing it. We discuss working with publishers, deciding what belongs in a book, writing for an audience rather than yourself, finding a less academic voice and learning to balance expertise with accessibility. THE PROCESS BEHIND THE WORK Ultimately, this episode is about more than Homer.It is about curiosity, storytelling, writing, learning, obsession and the process of making something. Her advice to anyone writing a book or embarking on a creative project is deceptively simple:Surrender to it. Allow research, experimentation and discovery to change the work. Rather than forcing an idea into the shape you imagined at the beginning, let the process reveal what it should become.
