Susan Rowland's Blog, page 2
January 12, 2023
Create! Via Jungian Arts-Based Research!
Susan and Joel will present on their book Jungian Arts-Based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico (2021), which offers something new to the Jungian community. While arts-based research is now established in the social sciences, this new research paradigm has not yet explored the potential of a Jungian frame. Similarly, Jungians have not fully come to terms with the potential of art for doing therapy of the collective.
Joel Weishaus will present his Jungian arts-based research epic which provides experiential treatment for the nuclear complex that emerges from New Mexico.
Susan Rowland will present her JABR novel, The Sacred Well Murders, which explores the effect of climate related trauma and the yearning for a more indigenous, nature-based religion. Attendees might like to read the novel beforehand: https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Well-Murders-Susan-Rowland/dp/168503005X
December 14, 2022
Great Reading for the Holidays and 2023!
https://shepherd.com/best-books/female-centered-humorous-plots
WISE CHILDREN by Angela Carter
LAST DITCH by Catriona McPherson
FEARLESS FOURTEEN by Janet Evanovich
HER ROYAL SPYNESS by Rhs Bowen
CATERING TO NOBODY by Diane Mott Davidson
October 28, 2022
Coming Soon! The Alchemy Fire Murder: A Mary Wandwalker Mystery
New in 2023: another story from the inexperienced detective trio: Mary, Caroline and Anna.
Mary Wandwalker hates bringing bad news. Nevertheless, as a scrupulous former archivist, she confirms to her alma mater that their prized medieval alchemy scroll, is, in fact a seventeenth century copy. The original scroll vanished to colonial Connecticut with copyist and alchemist, Robert Le More. Later the medieval scroll surfaces in Los Angeles. Given that the original is needed for her
Oxford college to survive, retrieving it is essential.
Mary agrees to get the real scroll back as part of a commission for her three-person Enquiry Agency. However, tragedy strikes in Los Angeles. Before Mary can legally obtain the scroll, a young man is murdered, and the treasure stolen.
Murder and theft are complicated by the disappearance in the UK of a witch mysteriously connected to the scroll. While Mary’s colleague, Caroline, risks her sanity to go undercover in a dodgy mental hospital, her lover, Anna resorts to desperate measures. These, and Anna’s silence over blackmail, threaten the survival of the Agency.
Mary teams up with D.P.’s brother, Sam, to track the killer, and the real alchemy scroll. Solving crimes on two continents will involve a rogue pharmaceutical corporation, the witch, Janet, the Holywell Retreat Center near Oxford, plus the trafficked women they support, a graduate school in California, and a life-threatening mountain-consuming wildfire.
Can these woefully inexperienced detectives triumph over corrupt professors and racist attempts to rewrite history? Can they remake their fragile family? Will the extraordinary story of Robert Le More prove a source of hope for today? Follow me on BookBub for the release, giveaways and more news! https://www.bookbub.com/profile/susan-rowland
August 3, 2022
One helluva review!
CLAIRE DYSON REVIEWS THE SACRED WELL MURDERS (Chiron, 2022)
*****Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 July 2022
Loved this book! I wasn't sure what to expect, Susan Rowland is an academic and a Jungian. I'm definitely not a Jungian, and despite my strong Feminism, I tend to wince at the words Goddess and Crone -and there's a lot of that in this novel. But - I was hooked straight away. The bottom line is that this is a page turner. And despite my allergic reaction to all things Goddessy, it was such an absolute pleasure to immerse myself in 329 pages of a female driven narrative. And what females! Beautifully drawn, intelligent, flawed and intriguing personalities who, when they blend as a "whole", are unstoppable. The plotline is muscular, intense and pacey. It doesn't shy away from some very grisly murders, so if it's blood you're after it doesn't disappoint. And it takes some very unexpected turns with an urgency that means you can't put the bins out - you have to keep reading! If you are looking for a truly original kind of crime fiction with style, magic and chutzpah, and importantly, with characters you want to meet again - then buy this book. I sincerely hope this is a series, and that the second book won't be long behind.
July 10, 2022
Feminine Heroism and Jungian Arts-Based Research
To know more about Jungian Arts-Based Research, my project on feminine heroism and mystery novels, and discuss your own projects, come to....
Online: OCTOBER 19TH: exploring feminine heroism via Jungian Arts-Based Research:
https://junginla.org/event/individuation/
February 22, 2022
Why Cozy Mysteries Find the Holy Grail!
Why do I write murder mysteries and why choose 'cozy' murder mysteries? The answer has to do with the quest for the holy grail and my desire to write a new kind of hero: a sleuth who is a flawed and marginalized woman who needs others to succeed.
Think about it. Fictional detectives are summoned to go on a quest for a truth that has a big impact on the world of the book. They are questing knights looking for a holy grail of 'truth' that will transform the pain and hurt around them (the wasteland) into a good place (the grail's renewal of fertility). Cozy mysteries in particular, heal all the hurts discovered in the novel. Hardboiled or tough guy sleuths do solve the murders but discover them to be connected to a bigger web of corruption. Instead of succeeding with the grail, they become another character in the myth, the sick Fisher King, human emblem of the world as wasteland.
Therefore I write stories of rebirth and renewal in which my fictional detective, Mary Wandwalker, succeeds with the help of a chronically depressed woman, Caroline, and a formerly trafficked young woman, Anna. I write to find ways that impossible hurts can be ameliorated, illnesses that won't go away can suddenly bless, and the damaged person become an incredible hero. See my first Mary Wandwalker mystery with more to come. (her name means 'windtalker' old woman who talk to the gods).The Sacred Well Murders https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Well-Murders-Susan-Rowland/dp/168503005X
January 20, 2022
Why Write Mysteries?
Think about it. Fictional detectives are summoned to go on a quest for a truth that has a big impact on the world of the book. They are questing knights looking for a holy grail of 'truth' that will transform the pain and hurt around them (the wasteland) into a good place (the grail's renewal of fertility). Cozy mysteries in particular, heal all the hurts discovered in the novel. Hardboiled or tough guy sleuths do solve the murders but discover them to be connected to a bigger web of corruption. Instead of succeeding with the grail, they become another character in the myth, the sick Fisher King, human emblem of the world as wasteland.
Therefore I write stories of rebirth and renewal in which my fictional detective, Mary Wandwalker, succeeds with the help of a chronically depressed woman, Caroline, and a formerly trafficked young woman, Anna. I write to find ways that impossible hurts can be ameliorated, illnesses that won't go away can suddenly bless, and the damaged person become an incredible hero. See my first Mary Wandwalker mystery with more to come. (her name means 'windtalker' old woman who talk to the gods).The Sacred Well Murders
January 18, 2022
Coming in February 2022: ancient Celts & twentyfirst century problems!
The Sacred Well Murders by Susan Rowland
Mary Wandwalker, a novice detective, is hired to chaperone a young American, Rhiannon, to the Oxford University Summer School on the ancient Celts. A simple job turns deadly when Mary and her operatives, Caroline and Anna, attend sacrifices at various sacred wells. Mary may lose everything in discovering that those who need the gods, become possessed by them.
Trouble begins when Mary learns that the so-called Reborn Celts, who run the Summer School, have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Is their rhetoric of blood sacrifice not so much a symbol of psychic wholeness but rather a sign for literal bloodshed? Who better to penetrate occult rites than a harmless woman of a certain age?
Mary agrees to spy on the Reborn Celts, then learns, to her horror, of Anna’s wild affair with the chief suspect, Joe Griffith. With Griffith also the object of Rhiannon’s obsession, Mary realizes too late that that these 21st century Celts mean murder. The Reborn Celts plan three rites to summon the old gods: in an Oxford sacred well, near the Thames, and in Celtic London, where a new sacred well will restore one of the Thames’ “lost rivers.”
Days before the summer solstice, Caroline and Anna race to London searching for Mary, who has been kidnapped Will she end as the crone sacrifice, or will the three women re-make their detecting family out of the murderous emergency?
https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Well-Murders-Susan-Rowland/dp/168503005X
January 10, 2022
Art and Creativity Online Course
Jung & Art: New Course wholly online at a time of your own choosing!
Jung identified the common predicament of the artist (here standing for one engaging in any kind of material creativity from writing and sculpture to performance and filmmaking etc.) as “stuckness,” colloquially known as artistic block. Crucially he saw it are the very same problem as that which drove patients into psychotherapy. We ask for help from a therapist because we are stuck or blocked in our lives. Therefore, exciting opportunities arise in Jung’s insight that artistic blocks are psychological and vice versa. For as I show in this JungPlatform course, “Individuation through Creativity and Artmaking,” individuation is a creative practice, and is available to everyone through the activity of making art. Moreover, artists can find strange and wonderful transformative powers through individuation’s focus on the soul or psyche. https://jungplatform.com/store/individuation-through-creativity-and-art-making
April 14, 2020
Aphrodite in Detective Fiction!
While the erotic body can be an organ of knowing for the detective as we will see, the body is also the primal site of the mystery. In fact, a corpse might be doubly crafted for Aphrodite. It is both corporeal matter requiring animation by the sleuth’s connecting to its injuries as meaningful, and, additionally, may have fallen foul of Aphrodite’s powers more directly. Its death may represent the darkness of this frequently dazzling goddess.
With lust and lucre as frequent motives for murder, a corpse is likely to be scrutinized for sexual clues as to its demise. Aphrodite as inspiration for sexual desire can also be goddess of death, as her affair with Ares, god of war, indicates. Sex can be deadly. Aphrodite’s bright divinity has a shadow aspect of the demonic in such underworlds as sex addiction, pornography, domestic violence, rape and the desperation engendered in those abandoned.
Mythically, the fate of those who reject Aphrodite is a warning of sexuality’s potency in human agency. Hippolytus, moon and Artemis worshipper, spurns Aphrodite by turning away his stepmother Phaedra’s advances. Falsely accused by her, Hippolytus dies at the hand of his father, Theseus; a murder pre-figuring many domestic sacrifices to Aphrodite. Those who refuse sexual desire refuse Aphrodite. They do not fare well because they are ignoring an aspect of the psyche that is essential to life. On the other hand, Aphrodite alone is no haven. In choosing Aphrodite as the fairest who will receive the golden apple, Paris accepts her offer of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. The consequence is ten years of war and the destruction of his city of Troy.
Aphrodite rejected or despised wreaks vengeance in sexually driving us into the dark. Alone, Aphrodite offers neither peace nor permanence. So other goddesses and gods are essential to mediate and weave Aphrodite’s radiance into something more nurturing for the psyche and the community to survive. Aphrodite’s beauty requires Athena’s reason and necessity, and the wild ecology of Artemis, as well as Hestian centering, in order for a relationship to endure beyond this goddess’s native spontaneity and irresistibility.
And yet Aphrodite inhabits mysteries because her dazzling erotic energy is fundamental to desires that both destroy and restore. The goddess who kills for, or because of, sexual love is also the drive to know the beloved in healing, restorative Eros. Since solving murder is often motivated by the desire to redeem individuals or a community, Aphrodite inspires the sleuth as much as she may tragically or demonically inhabit the sexuality that kills. Here Aphrodite is the drive to animate the dead matter of the corpse into meaning, clues, the connection of completing an-other’s story that the sleuth embodies. Aphrodite is the Eros of knowing that drives detecting.
Therefore above all Aphrodite gives us embodiment as erotic knowing and sexual connecting. She is the orgasmic energy of life that intimately knows extinction. For Aphrodite, orgasm is sacred, and if not respected it can be an initiation into hell.
So yet another precise aspect of this goddess in mysteries is their pivotal axis around murder itself. Aphrodite in detective fiction reminds us that a murdered person is a violated body. Whether or not sex was part of the murder, the corpse has suffered death inflicted by another, rather than life ending according to the necessity of nature. Corpses are not beautiful, or at least are destined to lose their appeal in decay. Although capable of exciting desire in some who have a torturous connection to this goddess, the dead body is of itself an offence to Aphrodite in its premature loss of carnal pleasure. Hence the re-reading of the body marked by unnatural death is to take violated matter, such as blood on a floor, and animate it into meaning as a service to this goddess.
