Nereid Name Origins

I get asked about our name a lot. Mostly about its spelling. A lot of people try to put the I before the E. I guess they’re just following the old saying, though, right? For those who don’t know, a nereid is a creature from Greek mythology. They are ocean spirits, daughters of the sea god Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea. They were depicted as beautiful young women and represented everything kind and beautiful about the sea. So now you may be wondering: why did a bunch of kids from land-locked Nebraska name their publishing site after a sea creature??

The answer, as with many things on our site, comes from our friend, Regan. The five of us writers met in a creative writing class at our university. The way the class was set up, a few students would submit a section of fiction they had written to class and the rest of us would read it and share our thoughts. Throughout the entire year we were in that class, Regan submitted sections of a novel she was working on called We Were Told. At the beginning of the novel, the main character is described as being drawn to the sea, waking up from a dream at the edge of an ocean cliff. This description, at least to myself and another friend of mine in class, was obviously hinting that this character was secretly a mermaid. Regan insisted that she wasn’t doing anything supernatural, and did not have any fantasy elements in it, but we were utterly convinced. It quickly snowballed into an inside joke among the members of the class. We even decided as a group to always sneak a mermaid into our own submissions in some way, and dubbed ourselves the Mermaid Writing Club.

When it came time for us to name our group, our first instinct was to use Mermaid in the title. It had become our symbol. But unfortunately, the name had already been taken. So, being the Greek mythology nerd that I am, nereid came to mind. We discussed and the name stuck! And that’s how it all began.