A down-on-her-luck Lady of Shalott, and other tall tales

August's monthly newsletter

Please read on for a Hagitude giveaway and other book news, first news of an exciting new project around If Women Rose Rooted, and the usual reading recommendations and poem.

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Dear friends,

After a hiatus of over two years due to lockdowns and illness, it seems that every time I write this monthly newsletter I’m on the road again. Last week I was in London for a second time, to record the audiobook of Hagitude. (It’ll be out via Audible and other suppliers in September.) I picked the worst possible week to spend in a concrete urban jungle, with record (for the UK) temperatures of over 40 degrees centigrade forecast on my first recording day. But amidst the inferno, and in spite of being – oddly appropriately! – confined to a tiny, dark, padded cell for three long days, I found myself curiously happy to be located in North London, close to the places I lived as a very impoverished PhD student in the early 1980s.

Although I’ve spent plenty of time in London in the interim decades, I haven’t been back to North London since 1985. And although so much has changed in London since I lived there, the elegant, Edwardian streets of Highgate and Muswell Hill didn’t much seem to have, at all.

I find it a curious phenomenon at the best of times, to return to places I once lived. But to return to those places after almost forty years was an even stranger thing – really, honestly, like walking back through time. I felt as if I were walking along with the ghost of my younger self by my side, and it troubled me. Because I was pretty troubled myself, in those days. I should say that although I always longed for wilder places, there were many things that I loved about London (and still do). And I was fortunate in the bits of it I got to spend time in; as well as finding footholds in those rather desirable areas of North London, my university base was in Bloomsbury. But when it came to participating in London life, I just couldn’t make any sense of it. As my not-always-kind PhD supervisor pointed out, I was decidedly ‘provincial’ in those days – widely read, but not especially sophisticated. London perplexed me, intimidated me, and I didn’t really know how to be in it. I couldn’t seem to make friends, to make connections of any meaningful kind. I couldn’t find anyone who was in any meaningful way kind. For the three years I was there, I felt voiceless – except in my academic work, in which I excelled. I don’t think I’ve ever been so lonely. Out of all the times in my life when I felt different, exiled – and really, you know, that covers most of it – this was probably the hardest time of all. I just didn’t fit in, and it was painful. It took a garrulous, charismatic older husband who’d spent his entire life there to happen along and tutor me in how to do small talk before I finally learned to ‘pass’ as (nearly) normal. But at the time, I probably just came across as weird.

Anyway – I wanted to revisit these old haunts because, as always, I’m writing about place. A new book, more of which in due course. I’m always interested in the ways in which place shapes us – especially the places in which we don’t, can’t, ever possibly feel at home. The places we resist, or that resist us. I’m still on that strange but urgent circling-back-around pilgrimage that I’ve previously written about in these newsletters – the one that sent me back to my earliest roots in the north-east, to see how those challenged and challenging places now made me feel. So, circling back to those hard years in North London as a desperately unhappy young academic, trapped in a series of grimy bedsits in various multiple-occupant flats like a rather down-on-her-luck Lady of Shalott, only ever able to see the world through a glass darkly, longing for something or someone to happen along and rescue her from her ivory tower, to smash the goddam mirror and let it curse her how it would ... how would that make me feel? What had I learned from that place, that awkward way of being, in yet another world I couldn’t ever belong to?

In Hagitude, I wrote – of looking in the mirror at my ageing face – ‘The ageing body is like the crumpled, much-used, lightly stained map of a life. That’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror, then – the faded impressions of everyone I ever thought I was; the ghostly etchings of everyone I might still become.’ And: ‘as we grow older, we too carry forward with us the selves we once were; like geological strata, the layers of experience accumulate and live on in the face we present to the world.’ So what I learned – I think; I’m still taking it all in – is that the ghost of that young woman wasn’t walking alongside me through the streets of Muswell Hill: she was still inside me, the rock strata of self shifting, buckling, thrusting her up to the surface and out into the world again and taking me over. So that for a moment, I could feel those North-London streets as she felt them, taste that world as she tasted it, still lost as she was then, still desperately clutching for anyone – anywhere – that could make her feel safe.

I realised then, I guess, how far I’ve come; how grateful I am for the years and the distance. But I learned, too, that – contrary to everything I’ve ever imagined – I’ve never really shed a skin at all. I’ve just grown new ones over the top of the old, and it doesn’t take much to peel back the layers and uncover those former selves. I find that somehow disconcerting. I’m not sure exactly what it means. But I’m hoping that as I find my way into this new book I’m just beginning to write, the act of writing (as always) will make the murky waters run clear.

In the meantime, as always, I wish you the fruits and the flourishings of whatever season you find yourself living through.

Sharon

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Hagitude membership program – final chance to pay in instalments

Just a reminder that the possibility of paying for this program in four monthly instalments ends this coming Monday, August 1. This is because we need to have received most of the program fee before the program begins on October 1. So if you’re still thinking about signing up and this method is easier for you, please do head over to the program page to join, by clicking on the button below.

I’m excited to have added some new threads and tools to the program since I first introduced it to you here:

– I’m thrilled to bits that the very wonderful writer and artist Tanya Shadrick (whose memoir The Cure for Sleep I recommended here a few months ago) will be joining us as a team member. All of Tanya’s work seeks to call forth stories in others – a practice which earned her Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts in 2018. She will be offering community members monthly writing prompts and sharing regular live conversations around our own stories of change in the second half of life, so that we can build a collection of rich and inspiring stories of meaningful elderhood. Tanya will also be working with ‘personal mythmaking’: helping members to consciously engage with the mythic and archetypal in their life stories, and to navigate the ways in which they change and transform as we journey on.

– As we progress through the year, we’ll be using the framework of ‘The Fool’s Journey’, an archetypal map based on the Major Arcana of the tarot, to explore our journey through the second half of life. Those of you who’ve been subscribed to my newsletter for a while will remember that I had planned to run a full course on the Fool’s Journey three or four years ago, but somehow never found the time. Well, this is as close to it as I’m ever going to get!

– A third tool which we’ll be using through the year is dreamwork, and Katharine Donovan Kane will facilitate a class on Dream Circles – what they are, why they can be important vehicles for dream appreciation, and how to work with them during the coming year. In addition, every month she will host an interactive drop-in session on different dreamwork topics such as: how to be an effective dream group facilitator, different types of dream narratives, how to work creatively with dreams to interpret for ourselves deeper messages, discussions on dream symbology and more.

The program is priced at just £260 for the full year, whichever way you pay.

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Other Hagitude news

I have advance copies! – and, as you can see, Maeve, the Kitten of the Apocalypse seems to have crept in here … along with me, all dressed up for a Saturday night out on the broomstick.

A reminder that you can still order pre-copies of the collector’s edition of Hagitude – but directly from my UK publisher’s website only. It comes as a luxury slipcased hardback, with a unique design and with a new, original story from me, based on a character of mine that some of you might remember – Old Crane Woman. Each copy will be signed and numbered by me (these are the only signed copies of Hagitude that will be available), and there will also be a numbered, limited-edition A5 art print by artist Natalie Eslick, featuring her beautiful portrait of Old Crane Woman. This limited edition is available to pre-order now via the button below: do order yours now in time to be sent out for the September 1 publication date. (Please note that overseas orders might take a little longer to arrive.)

New podcast episodes

From Monday August 15, each week for 7 or more weeks, I’ll be releasing a new episode of my ‘This Mythic Life’ podcast, themed around Hagitude. They’ll involve conversations with remarkable women about the challenges and opportunities they found during menopause and in the second half of life. You’ll be able to listen on the Hagitude podcast webpage, or do subscribe to ‘This Mythic Life’ and listen in wherever you get your podcasts.

From August, I’ll also be slowly adding the full text of the stories of elder women in European myth and folklore which I refer to in Hagitude – and adding others, as I find them.

Forthcoming Hagitude launch events

As new events are added, they’ll be included in future monthly newsletters.

SEPTEMBER 24, 2022

‘Hagitude: Uncovering Your Inner Hag’: an online event at the Rowe Center, Massachusetts. For more details, please visit the event website.

OCTOBER 16, 2022

Join me for a live online conversation and Q&A about Hagitude at Banyen Books, Vancouver. Register for free here.

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Giveaway – a signed copy of Hagitude

This particular giveaway is confined to subscribers outside of North America, because I’m offering a signed copy of the UK version of Hagitude, which is published on September 1. (When the North American edition is published in October, I’ll be offering a signed copy giveaway exclusively for US subscribers.)

So ... if your mailing address is outside of the USA and Canada, please enter your details on this webpage to join the draw via Rafflecopter. The draw will close at midnight on Friday August 5, and after the winner has been randomly selected I’ll email them for address details.

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Announcing The Rooted Woman Oracle

I’m delighted to tell you that I’ve been commissioned by Hay House to create an oracle card deck based on If Women Rose Rooted. I’m equally delighted to announce that the very wonderful artist Hannah Willow, whose art I’ve admired for a very long time, will be working with me and creating the card images, and what she’s produced so far is absolutely stunning – see the example below: ‘Tir na mBan: The Land of Women’. The deck will be called The Rooted Woman Oracle, will have 53 cards in three ‘suits’, and will be published just in time for Imbolc on January 31, 2024. This is a bit of a radical departure for me, but I couldn’t resist the invitation to expand the archetypal themes of the book, and to explore some of the deeper psychological meanings in our native myths and folklore. I’ll update you all again as the deck is completed and becomes available for pre-order.

This month on ‘The Art of Enchantment’

During the first few weeks of this Substack publication, I’ve offered the following articles and recordings for paid subscribers:

– Reflections on the nature of ‘home’

– A discussion of the motif of ‘the question that must be asked’ in myth and folklore

– Reviews and discussion of a number of recent novels written by women, which seem to imagine a world without men

– An audio recording of a wonderful, previously untranslated story from the Samoyed tradition of Siberia, including an old woman who lives in a cave surrounded by dead people and monsters, who sleeps on the ashes of the bones of a dead hero to bring him back to life.

If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, you can do so at the bottom of this email.

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Reading recommendations

Although I haven’t finished it yet, I’ve been utterly captivated by The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn. As a historical saga, it’s not the kind of book I’d normally read, but it was recommended by a friend, and she was absolutely right: I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s so beautifully written, and the characters are vividly drawn. The publisher’s blurb:

'Maudie, why are all the best characters men?'
Maudie closes the book with a clllump. 'We haven't read all the books yet, Miss Cristabel. I can't believe that every story is the same.'
Cristabel Seagrave has always wanted her life to be a story, but there are no girls in the books in her dusty family library. For an unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, there is no place at all for her in a traditional English manor. But from the day that a whale washes up on the beach at the Chilcombe estate in Dorset, and twelve-year-old Cristabel plants her flag and claims it as her own, she is determined to do things differently. With her stepparents blithely distracted by their endless party guests, Cristabel and her siblings, Flossie and Digby, scratch together an education from the plays they read in their freezing attic, drunken conversations eavesdropped through oak-panelled doors, and the esoteric lessons of Maudie their maid. But as the children grow to adulthood and war approaches, jolting their lives on to very different tracks, it becomes clear that the roles they are expected to play are no longer those they want. As they find themselves drawn into the conflict, they must each find a way to write their own story ...

I also took great pleasure in Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s remarkable, and distinctly more experimental, A Ghost in the Throat:

When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.
A true original. In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ní Ghríofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, famously referred to by Peter Levi, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, as 'the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.’ In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A Ghost in the Throat is a devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.

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This month’s poem

I Am Not I

Juan Ramón Jiménez
Translated by Robert Bly

I am not I.
                   I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems. Beacon Press (1973). Translation copyright © 1973 by Robert Bly.

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