Author JoeAnn Hart Embraces Her Inner Earth Goddess In Her Fiction

I love all the interviews and guest posts on Women’s Fiction Writers, but sometimes I feel like a hoarder. Just hanging onto all the good stuff until…it’s time to share. And that’s how I feel about JoeAnn Hart’s post today. Reading this made me think about more than women’s fiction as a genre (or not, that’s not really an argument here) and about more than whether I’m a plotter or a pantser. As I embark on next part of writing my now-unnamed second novel, I have to, I must, remember what is most important to my characters. What matters to them? What do they want to change outside themselves that will impact their inner selves? What drives them besides themselves? It’s fiction. It can be ANYTHING! 

Please welcome JoeAnn Hart to Women’s Fiction Writers!

Amy xo

With the Summer Solistice just passed, it’s a good time to revisit the Earth Goddess and her literary legacy. In sync with the first Earth Day in 1970, when I was an impressionable 14 year-old, women were throwing off the shackles of patriarchy in the streets and in their homes, even in churches, chucking out any male god who lived on a cloud. Many turned to the Old Religion, governed by the Goddess, who once reigned over a peaceful, matrilineal world in harmony with Nature. Then, according to legend, the priests came, driving her and her followers underground where they were called witches, and thus began civilization’s slide into constant war and ecological devastation.

Women writers of the 70’s and early 80’s incorporated this mythopoeic vision into their novels, and I read them all. Marge Piercy, in Woman on the Edge of Time, wrote about an ideal society based on the assumed female principles of peace and love of the earth, set against a cautionary tale of continued male domination and its attendant disregard for the planet. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood created a dystopia of sexism and violence after men become infertile by a toxic event of their own making. Other writers contemplated the past instead of the future. Marion Zimmer Bradley retold the King Arthur myth from Morgan le Fay’s point of view in The Mists of Avalon, making the goddess worshipper the heroine and not the villain. Jean Auel, in Clan of the Cave Bear, placed the goddess plunk in the center of the Stone Age.

By the mid-80’s, as women put on their shoulder pads and floppy ties and went to the office, feminism began to pull away from the Earth Goddess. Flouting one’s fertility and innate peaceful nature at the office was not going to break any glass ceilings. The focus had turned to job equality and pay equity, so academic and political interests set out to prove there were no differences between the genders. And rightly so. It’s a small step from archetype to stereotype.

But I believe there’s still a place for the goddess and her reverence for the earth in fiction, perhaps now more than ever. As individuals we recycle and consider our carbon footprints, so why not ask the same of our characters? In my novel, Float, the protagonist goes to the beach to examine some mysterious words in the sand and ends up rescuing a seagull strangled by a plastic six-pack holder. This sets off a series of events that leads to a search for a true biodegradable plastic. I hadn’t intended for my character to get so environmentally involved, but just the act of having him notice the plastic was enough to move the plot in that direction.

Some writers may be afraid of opening up the Pandora’s Box of climate change or toxic waste because they don’t know what can be done about it. But fiction does not have to provide the answers, as Chekov said, it only has to ask the right questions. Let’s celebrate the Solistice by incorporating a little Goddess into our writing, and let our characters start asking a few pointed questions about the mess around them.

Photo credit: Brendan Pike

JoeAnn Hart lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, America’s oldest seaport, where fishing regulations, the health of the ocean, and the natural beauty of the world are the daily topics of wonder and concern. She is the author of the novel Addled (Little, Brown, 2007) a social satire that intertwines animal rights with the politics of food.

JoeAnn’s essays, articles, and short fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals and national publications, and she is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe Magazine. Her work has won a number of awards, including the PEN New England Discovery Award in Fiction. She and her husband tend a few farm animals, including two donkeys from Save Your Ass Rescue. In fair weather, Hart rows a dory around the harbor.

Float was a finalist for the Dana Award in the Novel, and the first two chapters, slightly modified, won the Doug Fir Fiction Award for a short story relating to environmental issues.