We’re the Nine Muses, and We’re All Exactly Sixteen Years Old

“The previously unknown ‘muse’ of famed novelist Cormac McCarthy has revealed herself in a Vanity Fair profile… Complete with excerpts from love letters and the first-hand testimony of a woman named Augusta Britt, the article alleges the two met when she was just 16 and the late author was 42. McCarthy died in 2023.” — USA Today

Hail, mortal man! Yes, you there—leaning over your vintage typewriter, tapping out a screenplay. It’s your lucky day. Out of all the artists on earth, we have chosen you to channel our primordial spirit of creative inspiration that transcends space and time.

Also, have we mentioned that we’re sixteen years old?

We’re not sure why. Our age just seems to be important to you.

To be clear, when we say “you,” we don’t mean you specifically. You’d be surprised how common a request this is! As Muse of History, Clio’s been keeping the list, and, whew, there sure are a LOT of you guys.

But enough about them. We’re here to talk about your autofiction or something.

Only you deserve our attention, because of your singular ability to look beyond the surface of the physical world and glimpse our old souls trapped inside these dewy, nubile containers.

Back in Milton’s day, we used to just sing in writers’ ears, but according to centuries of customer-satisfaction surveys, you guys like us to have bodies. Bodies that are sixteen. (Eighteen, if the cops are listening.)

We’d give the same aesthetic advice anyway, but it hits different from someone with no collagen loss.

Or maybe you don’t need any advice? Polyhymnia is the Muse of Mime. She’s really good at nodding. All artists need an attentive nodder.

We want nothing more than to help you write the next Great American Novel, which will be adapted into a film that we can see only accompanied by you, because it’s rated R.

Oh, and after you get the tickets, can you buy us popcorn? Calliope just got her braces off.

Got a great idea for a standup set? Call on Thalia! You can find her reading Philemon at a bus stop, but she can suck on a red lollipop if it makes it easier to spot her.

We do our best to appear in the shape that you’re looking for.

We tried adding a Tenth Muse, who was just a forty-six-year-old guy named Gary, but he got zero takers. People said Gary just didn’t seem like a poem. A poet, perhaps. But never a poem.

There is nothing quite as poetic as a sixteen-year-old girl. One of us inspired one of you to write that

A teen girl is a prism who casts the most vivid rainbows as long as you look right through her.

Great art requires raw material. Raw feeling. Pure, undiluted youth. Nothing clouds the creative third eye quite like decades of perspective and life experience.

We notice your fingers creeping toward Melpomene’s knee. Go for it! She writes tragedies, not sins. And she saves the drama for the page.

For your page.

Art is a machine for turning girls into women and women into plot.

Let’s play Pygmalion. You have sculptor’s hands, and our prefrontal cortexes still have some flex.

By the way, after this, is there any chance you can help Erato with her algebra homework? There isn’t a Muse for math.

We’re totally keen to burn the midnight oil talking about your resentful sense of indebtedness to Polanski’s idiom, but can you drop us off at ours by ten? We still live with our mom. And she’s got a long memory.

Not that we’re suggesting that you mean anything untoward. And if you did, it would take us another decade to process.

So, let us give you what the seraphs—those misinformed, simple, noble-wingèd saps—envied.

Worship at our feet. Put us on a pedestal. Put that pedestal at least fifteen feet from a school.

We’ve never been to a school. At least, we’ve never ventured outside the teachers’ lounge. We’ve never spoken to a human sixteen-year-old girl.

They don’t call to us.

They don’t get Muses.

They have to come up with their own ideas.