Κostoula Maki was born in Ioannina. She lives and works in Agrinio as a critical social psychologist. She studied Education and Psychology (University of Patras and University of Birmingham), completed a Master’s degree in Critical Theory (Manchester Metropolitan University), and earned a PhD with a scholarship in Discourse Analysis at the University of Ioannina. For three years, she specialized in art psychotherapy.

Her articles, literary works, and critical essays have been published in newspapers, magazines, and conference proceedings. To date, the following books of hers have been published: Partial Sunshine [Metronomos–Poiein, 2017]; Oblique Landscapes [Metronomos–Poiein, 2019]; Alice After [Metronomos, 2021]; Yellow Luminous Wolf [Oursa (Isnafi), 2022]; The Eye of the Hippogriff [Oursa (Isnafi), 2025].

Your latest writing venture To μάτι του ιππόγρυπα [The Eye of the Hippogriff] was recently published by Oursa Editions (Isnafi). Could you tell us a few things about the book and elaborate on its title?

The book is a fragmentary poetic wandering – a collage of images, landscapes, events, commentaries and emotions concerning the things that preoccupy me. It is, rather, an open response of reactions and transformations to the bleak landscapes of reality, unfolding in different directions and labyrinthine paths that seek what remains elusive, marginal, sometimes threatening. In simpler terms, I wish to create spaces where we may reclaim and invert various forms of frustration: in relationships, in the critical and poetic fields, in all kinds of manipulations, political impasses, and the return of a monotonous conservative narrative about nation and history. I hope that the poems inscribe a poetic historicity that brings together the personal and the political, along with gendered perspectives on the multiple categorizations that impose restrictive norms – those that, metaphorically, “cut off one’s legs.”

Half horse, half griffin, the Hippogriff moves between air and ground, retaining the ability to produce surreal versions of reality. Its eye functions for me as a panoptic refraction and an intensive gaze beyond the routine forms of everyday movement. In that gaze, subjective details can surface, insisting on and sustaining alternative perspectives. The Hippogriff’s eye, kaleidoscopically, illuminates mythic aspects of images and encounters that sustain non-essentialist approaches. The Hippogriff remains fascinating even when it appears, at times, as an ordinary person in work clothes — no one suspecting who he is. Yet let this stand as a reminder: he has sharp claws, and he is not ashamed to use them.

There’s a clear interweaving of myth, memory, and loss throughout the collection. How do you approach the mythological not just as inherited narrative, but as a living structure for personal or collective meaning?

The themes you mention – and I’m glad you’ve traced them – are recurring personal obsessions of mine. In the poems, mythology is, I hope, dethroned from what you describe as a linear, inherited narrative and becomes a pretext for other appropriations: of myth itself, of tradition, of desire. Often stubbornly – and perhaps at times like a defiant adolescent – I am frightened by closed collective meanings that remain fixed through changes in time, history and circumstance. Here, memory serves as the key-holder of other appropriations while retaining its historicity, as it speaks through different subjectivities.

Against definitive losses, the political perhaps returns and persists through new narratives that continue to insist. Again, the wandering between theory, practice, desire and its frustration remains pivotal. It maintains its right to exist beyond predictable limits of what is deemed permissible. Myth, memory and loss form a triad not only of personal stories but also of the historicity of the Left itself. Myths are dismantled and demystified, yet events, faces, histories have been performed and remain. Memory persists, opposing its more museal versions, and loss does not signify the death that Fukuyama once hastened to proclaim when he spoke of “the end of history.”

In what I write, desire raises responsibilities, demands and hauntings. Each of us performs our own “voodoo rituals” to bring back our beloved dead – while, let’s admit, the living are sometimes deader than the dead. This triad as a living structure challenges us to tell our own stories, which are always political even in their most personal folds.

Themes of time, passage, transformation recur in your work. Which moments—either in history, personal life, or collective memory—do you feel your writing is trying to attend to or preserve?

Transformation becomes both a wager and a field of constant dilemmas — personal, ideological, historical, political and aesthetic. Rescue is always bound to the “what could have been” and the many “buts” along the way; it intertwines emotion and fact, demanding the maintenance of desire at some cost. In the personal sphere, I often transform scenes from encounters with beloved people, imagined dialogues with those no longer here, or incidents that made me feel erased through oversimplified categorizations.

I speak of gendered manipulations that often demand obedience, politeness, silence, modesty – the refusal to voice or claim what one truly wants. I speak also of continuous compromises and of being treated like an exotic bird. As commonplace as the image of the cage may be, it remains present wherever everyday interactions enact their subtle confinements. When I sense that someone wishes to place me in such a cage – to comment briefly on my oddities, then move on, or try to “train” me – and I resist.

From history – again with a sense of urgent preservation that rescues faces and events from formaldehyde and sterile sanctification – I remain passionate about the history of the Left, here and globally, and all its revolutionary movements that altered the course of discourse, of human relations, of history itself, even when they did not endure. If a collective memory is still possible, it is one that produces moments in the present, using time’s continuity in Benjaminian terms. Those who invent homeland, history and love while enduring the dreadful extensions of hegemonic theological and metaphysical narratives. A sentimentality – sometimes extreme – that mocks everything, knowing the inevitability of decay.

Your poetic language feels meticulously constructed, yet emotionally resonant, while sound and rhythm seem as primary concerns. What role does language play in your writings?

For many years, comments on my earlier books described my poetry as cerebral and obscure – lacking rhythmic cohesion and ruled by a “tyranny of concepts.” I was mainly concerned with articulating ways of seeing the world and expressing them as another fragment in the public space, while knowing my position and refusing the label of “poet.” That refusal was linked to an awareness of my limits and to my discomfort with the use of poetic identity as a display of cultural consumption or self-affirmation — a performance of cultivated elitism that often circulates in literary gatherings.

Over time, I worked more intensely on rhythm, style, and structure. The emotional element you notice remains essential, and I hope it is not melodramatic. My constant poetic wager is the conjunction of the personal and the – however overused that phrase has become – and the construction of images, moments that resist normative, restrictive narratives of the self, of others, of history. I increasingly recognize that intentions in poetry and literature are never enough. It is language itself, in its multiplicity, that determines whether a text “stands” aesthetically or functions merely as a manifesto of intentions, an informal propaganda. Each text is, after all, judged by its readers.

You have a background in psychology, discourse analysis, and literary criticism. How do these disciplines shape your literary writing? Would you say that in a way they constitute communicating vessels?

Yes, I think there is constant filtering and communication between psychology, discourse analysis, and literary criticism. What binds them are questions about critique itself – its forms, its limits, its performativity. I see the critical faculty as a continual exploration of reflexivity, a performative practice of transitions and dilemmas. The weaving together of the three – or rather four, if we add poetry – is activated through language use and through the shared understanding that language does things and is never neutral.

In the convergences of poetic and theoretical discourses, insights from social constructionism and discourse analysis traverse the various versions of myself. And although all these retain a fragmentariness that constantly escapes, the conversations between different discourses generate unpredictable shifts and open new possibilities for change — with a historicity that endures.

You’ve published in a wide range of journals and participated in vibrant literary communities. How important is dialogue—critical, aesthetic, or otherwise—in your writing life?

Every form of dialogue – aesthetic, critical, personal – remains a lasting desire that keeps me writing publicly. Its absence, too, weighs heavily, especially when public dialogue is replaced by mutual flattery or total proximity. Dialogue exposes textual gaps and dismantles closed belief systems. Every text is subject to critique – not from relativism but in recognition of Benjamin’s insight that one can offer both positive and negative critique of a text using different tools, positions, languages, and political traits.

Conflict and disagreement are desirable when they occur under critical terms, not through personal invective. I feel profoundly fortunate to have participated in diverse spaces and communities. I keep wondering how – or whether -and such dialogues, or their absence, affect different readers or end up circulating within closed circles, losing touch with the real world in its acute dystopias.

Thank you, Athina, for giving me the chance to speak about The Eye of the Hippogriff and to share my reflections on your readings.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE