Away with the Cailleach

Newsletter, December 2024

Read on for a seasonal 25% discount on paid subscriptions, news of what’s coming up at The Art of Enchantment in 2025, a repeat online fairy tale program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and this month’s reading recommendations. This message is highly likely to be truncated by your email provider, so please think of clicking through to Substack and reading it in your browser. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

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Dear friends,

By the time you receive this email, I’ll be installed in a cosy waterside cottage in beautiful Argyll, a part of Scotland which is very dear to my heart. It’s the third time I’ve stayed here, and it’s another one of those places where I’ve felt inexplicably at home right from the beginning. Argyll – Earra-Ghàidheal. ‘Coast of the Gaels’ (probably). In the fifth century it was part of the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata, and there has always been much coming and going across the waters, so perhaps not so surprising after all that it has an air of home. It’s also peak Cailleach territory, and I’m hoping for a conversation or two while scouring a couple of her favourite haunts. This is me being silly and playing at being that Old Woman while stumbling around those hills of hers in the fog, in 2017. A few of you might have been there with me; I ran a couple of weeklong women’s retreats in this territory, back in the day.

Most reasonable people take their holidays, if they indulge in such things at all, in the more temperate months. But as you will all know well by now (leaving aside the question of whether I’m reasonable) winter is my favourite time of year and there’s nothing that improves a holiday for me more than dark days, bad weather and maybe even the occasional storm. Even better – no one else will be quite so obstreperous as to take their holiday during the first week in December, so I plan on having the entire county to myself. On Wednesday I did the last of what feels like a long line of book events to support the publication of Wise Women, and although it’s been an absolute delight to meet readers and to speak to such lovely big audiences, I’m ready to batten down the hatches for a good long while to finish my next contracted book. I’ve a few live events close to home in spring (the lovely Westwood Books in Sedbergh, date tbc, the spring Wigtown Book Festival in early May, and Words by the Water in Keswick in March) but I really need to step back a bit now and focus in.

This week is only a sort-of-holiday, then; the truth is, I’m heading off alone to write. It’s not that I can’t write at home – of course I can, and do. But sometimes, when I’m really beginning the hardest part of writing a book – the part where you’ve figured out what you want to say, and you have the 40,000 words of random notes and fragments and even maybe the odd finished bit, but now you have to take a very deep breath and grit your teeth and whittle it down and try to begin the long hard slog of knocking what’s left into shape – I really need some time to myself without interruptions. Without meals to cook and kitchens to clean and creatures to look after and maybe even, shockingly, without dogs to walk.

So I’ll be writing in the mornings, and – if the weather is marginally less biblical than it has been – walking at lunchtime before picking up again for an hour or two, if the old brain cells are still holding their own. A log fire and a glass of wine will see me nicely through the evenings, and I have a couple of Barbara Pym novels (I’m only just discovering her, and very much enjoying her, rather to my surprise) to keep me company. I won’t be much online – but then the truth is, I rarely am these days. Social media has become largely a thing of the past for me, and it’s only really Substack that excites me still. Though I do see that Notes is taking on a decidedly social media-esque air these days, with so many people beginning now to use it as a substitute for the Twitter scrums they’ve abandoned – and posting random, snappy single-sentence thoughts or put-downs, or informing us all about what they’re fancying for tea, rather than engaging in the meaningful conversations it was supposed originally to facilitate. So you likely won’t see me there a whole lot, unless there’s a particular moment of enchantment I especially want to share with you. I think I’m becoming a bit of a relic. More of which … another time.

This will be my last newsletter, then, till early January; and as I do every year, I’ll be taking a chunk of time offline over the holiday period too. And so I wish you many joys, richnesses and deepenings during the holiday season, wherever in the world you are.

Sharon

Seasonal gift-givings

For those of you who have older women in your circle – or, for that matter, younger women who want to be sure that there’s something to grow older for – a reminder that:

1. The Wise Women hardback would make a beautiful as well as an inspiring gift! Use the code WISE-WOMEN to obtain a 20% discount on copies of the lovely edition sold directly by Virago: find Wise Women at the online Virago store here. This discount code is valid to the end of the year. With apologies, this offer is not available in North America, where there is a different publisher and book edition.

2. And ... September Publishing still has a few copies of the gorgeous collector’s edition of Hagitude, which comes as a luxury slipcased hardback with a unique design and with a story from me, based on a character of mine called Old Crane Woman (more of whom below). Each copy is signed and numbered, and includes a numbered, limited edition A5 art print by artist Natalie Eslick, who illustrated the book. The print features her beautiful portrait of Old Crane Woman. This limited edition is available to purchase at this link only.

3. Or ... you could give a gift subscription to The Art of Enchantment! Which, as well as helping create the the possibility for me to write for you all, also creates a lovely opportunity to discuss the writing and ideas here with those you’ve gifted during the year ahead.

A 25% discount on paid subscriptions to the end of December

In the spirit of the season, and to add a little extra light to these days of the long dark, I’m delighted to offer those of you who’d like to upgrade a 25% discount on a paid subscription for the next year. Please note that this just applies to annual plans, and is only available until December 31. With this discount, an annual subscription is just £52.50 – £1 a week for all the benefits and offerings which you can read about here. You’ll also have access to my full archive, including the long series of posts and conversations relating to my original conceptualisation of the Fairy-Tale Heroine’s Journey, which we delved into for several months this year.

(Whenever I offer a discount here I receive irritated messages from people who have just subscribed at the full price. Please don’t! The only solution to that would be never to offer a discount at all, which would be a pity for those who couldn’t otherwise afford to subscribe. I only offer the discount once a year, but it pleases me to do it.)

Please click on the button below to obtain your discount:

Stories from the wisest old bird of all: Old Crane Woman

Speaking of Old Crane Woman: on December 7 and 14, paid subscribers will receive two special story-collections about her. If you have no idea who Old Crane Woman is: some of you will remember that back in December 2015 and 2016 I wrote a series of stories and fragments about a character I called Old Crane Woman, and published them on my blog. ‘Grey Heron Nights’, I called them: a Celtic antidote to the mythical Greek ‘Halcyon Days’, which bridged the Winter Solstice. She seemed to have her own voice, her own rhythm – incantatory, the rhythm of place – or the power of place, speaking. Those story fragments haven’t been available for several years now, since the old blog was taken down, and every now and again I get an email asking me whether they can be found anywhere these days. So I’ve collected them together and lightly edited them, and they’ll be available for paid subscribers to download in two PDFs, one each week. (NB If you already have the special edition of Hagitude: these are significantly extended versions of the Old Crane Woman story that’s in it, so there’s much more material.)

2025 at The Art of Enchantment

For paid subscribers

Our monthly live Myth & Fairy Tale Salons will continue throughout the year. To add a little variety and expand the scope of our conversations, in 2025 there’ll be a mixture of fairy tales and the odd myth, along with a couple of sessions on the beautiful old British and European Arthurian and Grail legends and romances – including at least one little-known gem. It always feels important to me to offer a variety of ways of working with story, so there will also be a couple of guest sessions in the mix from New York-based story-witch Audrey di Mola.

And as always, there’ll be plenty of other offerings in your inboxes to keep my commitment to give you something new each week.

For members of The Hearth

As I wrote in this newsletter last month, from January 2025, members of The Hearth (i.e. ‘founding members’ of The Art of Enchantment) will be invited to participate in conversations around women’s faith and spirituality.

Some of the questions we will engage with include:

• How do we find meaning in an increasingly secular – and challenging – age?

• Why are women still not accepted as equals within traditional faith hierarchies?

• How do we find our own authentic ways of honouring the divine and the sacred feminine, independently of those institutions and hierarchies?

(Please note that although our scope will be wide-ranging, the focus will not be on neopagan traditions – Wicca, Druidism, Heathenry etc – as there are many other forums for such discussions if that’s your thing.) I’ll be producing monthly written or video posts, or discussion threads, to introduce a topic for conversation around contemporary faith and spirituality. Chat around these topics will also be available to all members. And there will be four online sharing circles during the year to explore more deeply.

The Hearth is also focused on the ways in which mythic imagination practices, contemplative practices and a practice of paying close attention to the land we live in can help us to ground ourselves in the seasons and cycles of the year – and so in the seasons and cycles of our lives. We have four seasonal 90-minute online retreats during which we consider the ways in which we can be present in the world with intention and awareness.

Links to all of the articles and threads which fall into this category, along with any other resources, will appear on this page: https://sharonblackie.substack.com/p/temenos

You can upgrade your subscription and become a member of The Hearth (£120 a year, including all paid subscription benefits too) by clicking through here.

Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales, at Pacifica Graduate Institute

I’m delighted to be running my popular program 'Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales: A Narrative Psychological Approach' for another year at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

This is an 8-month online Graduate Certificate (with CECs available, if you can use them). It consists of prerecorded lectures, live sessions with me, and an online forum for students. The program is open to all and will be suitable both for clinicians and for individuals who are interested in deepening their personal work with fairy tales and the many forms of storytelling.

This unique program draws on my academic and professional background as a psychologist and folklorist/mythologist, and offers an archetypal and imaginal approach to understanding and working with fairy tales. We’ll use my conceptualisation of the Fairy-Tale Heroine’s Journey as a framework for exploring the archetypal feminine in fairy tales and the ways in which these stories can illuminate the process of individuation. We’ll excavate fairy tales to interrogate our self-narratives, identify problem-saturated stories and externalise them, and then learn to rewrite them so that we can more fully participate in the process of our own becoming.

Full program details, registration forms and other info here: https://extension.pacifica.edu/graduate-certificate-finding-ourselves-in-fairytales-2025/. (All enrolment, CEC and related queries directly to Pacifica, please, at the email address provided at the link – not to me, because I won’t be able to answer them, and not in the comments here.)

Reading recommendations

Amidst the collected works of Barbara Pym, here are a couple of the books on my pile right now:

Deborah Levy, The Position of Spoons – and other intimacies. I adored Levy’s three short memoirs (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate) and so this new one is coming to Argyll with me. The publishers call it a ‘composition of the questioning self’, which certainly sounds good to me.

I was lucky enough to receive a proof of Rob Cowen’s forthcoming masterwork, The North Road. ‘At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves.’ It’s out in April. Don’t forget – pre-order now!