Irrepressible Life, Crossing Genres and Female Poets

Mixing up Your Genres?

At a recent Indie Writers meeting in Glasgow, we were discussing how to market your work if you have written or write in more than one genre - for example if you write both for adults and for children (hello, JKR!), or if you write crime fiction and also erotica or self help, etc.  The old school wisdom was “stick to one genre”…or use pseudonyms for different ones…

But I, the maverick I have always been, don’t agree.  Of course it can make it trickier to build your audience but…why not multiple audiences?  And it harkens back to my early days in training as a writer at universities when you were told you MUST choose one genre (“Are you a poet?  A short story writer?  A novelist?  A playwright?  CHOOSE!!”)

Which reminds me of the first writing workshop I ever attended, back in the late 60s, where I was the only female in the room and one of the (up and coming) male poets smirked at my poem being passed around the circle and said, in the most dismissive tone, “I just don’t relate to female poetry.”  (He didn't even bother to read it, just passed it to the guy on his left.)  We hadn’t yet gotten them to call us Women…and he was decidedly someone who was going to need some serious Awareness Raising.  I’m sure, in time, he did get it, no doubt some feminist woman or other set him straight…

Maverick Freedom!

Anyway, once told my poetry was “female”, it didn’t seem to matter much what genre I chose, it gave me a sense of freedom to be labelled an inconsequential maverick from the get-go, so I could go experiment with whatever I wished!  It only spurred my muse more furiously when, next, my writing was described as “…so strong, I thought a man wrote it”.

So I did experiment.   I have been, at various turns, a poet, a short story writer, a novelist, a non fiction writer and a playwright.  From each genre I have pulled skills and methods so that my characters and scenes are lit as on a stage, poetry skips along in my prose, and I have dared to mix it up with fact and fiction with great abandon.

Now I have dared to blend the Paranormal, New Age and Murder in my upcoming book Guardian of the Dark School.  And I will be publishing a children’s book this year as well.

Still Ranting After All These Years…

Anyway (pardon my unexpected rant), my two cents worth at this recent Glasgow meeting was that if one could find one reoccurring element that linked all their work together, no matter the genres or audiences, and find a tag line to use in self marketing that revolved around that element…maybe that would help?  

You know, for example, if you were writing about a reoccurring character who appeared in your poetry, fiction, plays and even your Tweets…say, a guy who lived in the French Quarter, smoked brown clove cigarettes, wore a beret and professed that he could not relate to female poetry…you could say your theme was “The Female Novelist who Writes about Men Who Can’t Relate to Female Poetry”. 

Not that it would bring you a lot of readers…but just by way of example…

(In fairness, to tie a bow on that rant, over the decades I have thankfully met many men who appreciate Women’s writing and who, like me, actually don’t even bother to differentiate between Men’s and Women’s writing…just as long as it’s Good writing.  Though I was startled to read somewhere on the BBC news, when I moved to Scotland in 2005, that no man would be caught dead on a beach holiday, lying in the sun reading a book written by a woman!) 

The Green Man

So I came home from the Indie Writers meeting and sat down and wondered, “Ok, easy to give advice…so what is MY reoccurring theme?  In the plays, novella, novels, poetry, now even in the murder mystery…even in the children’s book?”

And there it was:  the “supernatural” or “paranormal” or…”spiritual” or…to be very specific…The Green Man.

I have explored various faith and myth systems and, over time, the one that has most appealed to my sense of imagination, mystery and wonder is the regenerative figure of the Green Man.  He began to creep into my books…after a series of other kinds of nebulous figures (for example, a ghostly bonsai gardener…a spider woman…a beloved dream character called Motorcycle Woman…) played out their roles in my plays and novella and novels…but I seem to have fixated on the Green Man for the past 15 years.  There is so much richness in the image, it/he speaks to me both as a writer and an environmental activist.  He is also an important element in the name of my publishing company, Green Phoenix Productions.  If you look at the logo, the feathers of the phoenix are actually leaves…   

The Green Man is simply defined by William Anderson:

“The Green Man signifies irrepressible life.  Once he has come into your awareness, you will find him speaking to you wherever you go.  He is an image from the depths of prehistory: he appears and seems to die and then comes again after long forgettings at many periods in the past two thousand years…In all his appearances he is an image of renewal and rebirth.”

From:  Green Man:  The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth.  By William Anderson with photography by Clive Hicks. (HarperCollins 1990, ISBN  0—06-250077-S).  Really it might be the first of such books, and now there are many, many more.

I was also excited, in the early 2000s, to find a website by a UK sculpture artist and Green Man aficionado, Simon Todd, in which he had researched and discovered that almost every country on the planet had some form of a Green Man.  I don’t know if that website still exists, I have had trouble finding it again, hope at least he kept the amazing list of them. 

My mental image of the Green Man is now so specific, that I have had to be careful that I haven’t duplicated the description of him in my murder mystery with my description of him in the children’s book…it’s on my “editing to do list” before finally clicking that “Publish” button for Kindle this spring/summer.   

Regeneration...

It certainly isn’t a religion for me, I don’t have one…but when I tap into the spirit and potential of the Green Man, things begin to happen in my life that feel magical.  Synchronicities, doors opening, other people who know him…rustlings in the leaves where I walk…regeneration at every level.  Regeneration of our local river through environmental clean ups…regeneration of my own creative spirit through the new self publishing adventure…regenerative relationships with those people in my life who continually recreate themselves anew…

So if there is a common theme in my writing at this point, it is he.  Now to figure out my tag line.  I’ll put it on this blog when I do.

PS:  Just to see if I can, I am also writing a traditional murder mystery that has NO supernatural element and NO Green Man…hmmm, although one of the characters might at least wear a Green Man t-shirt in a pivotal scene.  Just a nod to the old man, eh?  That one is entitled Rough Courtship, it takes place in Scotland, and I hope to publish it before Christmas 2014.

Happy writing/reading and I hope you meet a few of his incarnations along the way.  His address is:  Google: Green Man.  He also resides at Google Images:  Green Man.

  

Image:  Spirit Tree by Quicky, Courtesy of Shutterstock (c) 2013