Calling all rooted women ...
Monthly newsletter, November 2023
Read on for a sneak preview of The Rooted Woman Oracle, other writing and course news, and for this month’s reading recommendations and poem. This message might be truncated by your email provider, so please think of clicking through to Substack and reading it in your browser.
Dear friends,
Well, at Samhain we’re supposed to think about our ancestors, and I’ve been doing a bit of that, because for the next few months I’ll be hunkering down, as much as I can, to focus on dreaming my next book into being. It will be called Hearth, and it’ll be published (gods willing!) by September somewhere round about May 2025. It’s about home, and belonging, and my eternal love for the idea and the reality of the North. (This is the only time of year when I seem to be able to begin new books. The lush, secretive darkness that tops and tails the day, and the storms whistling around the house, and the fire – all of that kindles my best writing. I can finish a book in summer, but it wouldn’t ever be possible to begin one!)
Anyway: I’ve written so much, in my other books, about my love affair with Scotland (where my father’s family are from, as far back as can be traced) and Ireland, where part of my mother’s ancestors are from. But I’ve spent a lot of decades trying not to have to grapple with the fact that I was actually born and raised in the far north of England, and that the vast majority of my ancestors were from a band of land which stretches coast to coast across Britain, and which incorporates the far north of England (Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham) and the south of Scotland. It’s all there, in those shifting borderlands which once always refused to be confined by a map.
When we were planning to move back north and I began to get excited about the old Brythonic heritage of this part of the world, my husband laughed and said, ‘You think the Gododdin are still there, don’t you?’ And I laughed back and told him that they were, actually, because I was there now. (For those of you not familiar with the terms, Brythonic, or sometimes Brittonic, is the name given to the languages once spoken by people from Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, England and parts of Scotland. Gaelic is the name given to the other group of Celtic languages, from Ireland, Scotland – except for the Brythonic bits – and the Isle of Man.)
The Gododdin. The name sends shivers down my spine, but I’m imagining that most of the people reading this post won’t really know why that might be the case. The Gododdin were a large tribe of people in the north-east of Britain, roughly from Edinburgh down to the River Tyne (again, overlapping contemporary country lines and refusing to be confined by maps). They’re best known because of the old poem which celebrates them – Y Gododdin. It’s often referred to as a Welsh poem, because it the only text of it was written down in Middle Welsh, but actually it’s a much earlier poem from Y Hen Ogledd – the Old North. It’s attributed to a bard called Aneirin, who is believed to have been a bard or court poet at the court of the Gododdin in Edinburgh. There, Aneirin would have spoken the Cumbric language, which is very closely related to Old Welsh as well as to Cornish, Breton and Pictish. There are no surviving texts written in Cumbric; evidence for its existence comes from placenames, proper names in a few inscriptions, and later non-Cumbric sources. But the originals of a number of important early Welsh texts were attributed to the Gwŷr y Gogledd, the Men of the North, including Taliesin and Myrddin Wyllt.
The poem Y Gododdin, by the way, is about the heroic men of the Gododdin and its allies who died fighting the Angles at a place named Catraeth – believed to be modern-day Catterick – in about AD 600.
The point of all this? We tend to forget that England was a Celtic country too, and that the history, myth and folklore of the north in particular is rich and beautiful. One of my focuses right now is on bringing that understanding back to life, and looking for ways to reimagine those old traditions for a very different world. Watch out for more news on Hearth.
In other news, I’m just back from Whitby, where we often used to head for a day trip when I was a child living on the coast further up north. The Whitby Bookshop held a lovely Hagitude event there, and I’ve been blessed over the past few weeks with similarly sold-out events at bookstores in Frome, Bath, Edinburgh, Kendal and Oxford. Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm when you come to these events – it makes such a huge difference to meet real live readers rather than always just seeing you online.
But anyway: Whitby. Oh you big old bad old North Sea, I love you so. So strange to live in a place which is only an hour and a half away from it and from so many childhood haunts. It was cold and windy and pouring down when I arrived, so of course ice cream was essential. And in just one lick I was a child again, getting on the bus from Hartlepool with my mother for the rare treat of a day out with chips and ice cream and penny arcades. Well, it's very much busier 53 years on, and the gulls are very much wickeder, but I feel more at home on the coastline of this old sea than anywhere else on the planet. And that's a revelation.
When I think of the North Sea I think of it as male, unlike the west coast ocean, infinite and unfathomable, where I've spent so much of the last couple of decades. It's a grumpy old giant of a sea, overworked and underloved. More Poseidon than Amphitrite. Exploited and travelled over (or under) just to get somewhere else and never for its own sake. When it bites, it bites hard, and I can't say that I blame it.
Meanwhile, back in the beautiful vale of Mallerstang: the red squirrels have stashed a good kilo or two of hazelnuts from the feeder round and about the place for their winter store, and there are snow buntings up on Wild Boar Fell. Wishing you all the joy and abundance of whatever season you find yourself in,
Sharon
What’s new in Substack bestseller, ‘The Art of Enchantment’
Here’s what’s been offered to paid subscribers during the past month:
1. A ‘drop of enchantment’ on dreamwork, including a workbook full of practical guidance and an accompanying audio journey
2. A prompt about the ways in which we remember our younger selves
3. An interactive fairy tale salon on ‘Wild Women and Wolfskins’
4. An exclusive video on the work of mythsinger Daniel Deardorff, author of The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, & Psyche
5. For members of The Hearth, there was a Samhain-themed online workshop on Saturday October 28.
First copies alert! – The Rooted Woman Oracle
A couple of weeks ago I received a package in the mail containing my first preview copy of The Rooted Woman Oracle, which is to be published on 30 January. It was a strange feeling, because although I’m used now to unpacking the first copy of a new book (though I promise the novelty never wears off) I’ve never written an oracle deck before. But writing this was particularly special because it gave me the opportunity to extend many of the ideas I wrote about in If Women Rose Rooted. This deck, then, has many more examples of archetypes of place, many more women from the old stories who might be our allies and teachers, and many new ideas about the various stages and possible shapes of the Heroine’s Journey.
So, here’s a video made by the lovely Hay House team in London (tragically, those are not my fingernails ...) to show you what this gorgeous contraption looks like. And of course, to show off the beautiful illustrations by Hannah Willow.
For more info, please do head over to this page on my website, where you’ll also find pre-order information – yes, this deck is available worldwide.
And I’m delighted to tell you that I’m working on another oracle deck for Hay House, in collaboration with the brilliant artist Amanda Clark, whose gorgeous fairy-tale art I’ve admired for a good many years. More on that soon!
Last call: 25 November – The Descent
Saturday November 25, 3pm – 7pm UK time: The Descent (£60)
This online Bone Cave gathering – the last for 3 or 4 months – will be anchored around a new and unique visioning of Persephone’s cyclical descent to the Underworld and re-emergence into the light. We’ll walk alongside Persephone for a while; we’ll sing over the bones of her story to reveal its wisdom and allow it to work its magic on us.
What kind of soul journey is required of us at a time when the world around us – social, political, environmental – is in crisis? What happens to us when we ‘fall out of myth’?
How can we hold ourselves together during these long, dark nights of the soul? How can we express our grief, without allowing it to paralyse us?
How can we prepare ourselves for a journey through dark times, and understand the lessons of the Underworld?
How can we thrive and transform in this place of mystery and uncertainty?
How can we learn to walk side by side with Death, and befriend her?
And, ultimately, how can we be reborn – how can we shapeshift into a form that enables us to bring back our own unique song as a healing gift for an ailing Earth?
This deep immersion into the miracles of descent and re-emergence will be focused around the following topics:
The Underworld Journey – the myth of Persephone
The Time Between Stories – taking stock
The Dark Night of the Soul – exploring grief, depression, weariness, burnout
The Gifts of the Dark – creative regeneration; exploring the mystery
Death and Rebirth – the cycles of life; ritual and ceremony
The Return of the Light – navigating the ascent; imagining the year ahead
In this gathering, we’ll prepare both for our descent into the long, dark half of the year, and our ultimate emergence into the light.
Hagitude bags and t-shirts – last call!
From September Publishing:
Share a piece of your favourite myth-infused manifesto with our limited edition t-shirts and bags. The perfect gifts for women who are reclaiming the second half of life, both items are made from organic and recycled cotton and printed with water-based eco inks.
Choose from our 100% GOTS organic cotton relaxed fit t-shirt or our large, recycled cotton woven shopping bag.
Orders will be taken on a pre-order basis with our shopping window open now until 13 November. All items will be shipped w/c 20 November – in plenty of time for Christmas!
LINKS TO PURCHASE
https://septemberpublishing.org/product/pre-order-limited-edition-woman-with-hagitude-t-shirt/
September Publishing newsletter
So my dear publishers, September, now finally have a monthly newsletter. And this first edition is a gorgeous one, with a lovely article by Hannah MacDonald about books, why we read, why we write, how she commissions books and so much more. Read that edition here, and then do subscribe: the button is on the top left of the web page.
I wrote two novels because I’d always read. Why wouldn’t I want to do it myself? It would be like enjoying good food but refusing to cook, I felt. Reading is my home. Whatever else life delivers, I know I will be able to turn inwards to the gentle fleck of a paperback page, bend my head into a pool of light and it will just be me and someone else’s story. It’s the one reliable encounter I can always return to. It is escapism, of course, and I have a lot more tolerance of the addictive nature of smartphones than my novel-a-week habit might suggest. Unlike vegetables, novels aren’t inherently good for you. I am not sure my obsessive consumption of books has always been the healthiest of habits, and it took too long a time (perhaps having children) for me to appreciate the magic in the physicality of life as much as in imaginary lives.
Oh, and there’s also a 10% discount code off Foxfire, Wolfskin and many other autumn-themed books …
Reading recommendations
My reading pile is overflowing again, with the receipt of a few more review copies, including this one from Allen Lane/ Penguin – The Brittanias: An Island Quest, by the lovely Alice Albinia. I recommended Alice’s novel Cwen to you all a good two or three years ago now. It’s a big book and I haven’t had time to read it all yet, but she’s an excellent scholar and I’m sure I’m going to love the whole thing. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.
The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles – from Roman colonial-era reports to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias – transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.
Sophie Anderson kindly sent me a copy of her latest beautiful book, The Snow Child. I wrote about Sophie’s brilliant Baba Yaga story, The House on Chicken Legs, in Hagitude. This one really would make a brilliant Christmas present for any young thing you know who has a love of fairy tales:
From award-winning and critically acclaimed Sophie Anderson, comes a fairy-tale story of friendship, belonging and bravery, in an adventure through a winter wonderland.
I wish the snow girl would come to life. Then I would have a friend, a real friend I could trust, and I wouldn't feel so alone.
When Tasha builds a snow girl with her grandpa, all she wants is for her to be real. If only wishes on snow could come true ... Then Tasha meets Alyana, a friend made of wishes, starlight, snowfall and magic. But when your best friend is made of winter, what do you do when spring comes?
GOOD NEWS: I’ll be recording a podcast conversation with Sophie for paid subscribers next week, and it’ll be ready to listen to later in November.
I’ve also had a really enjoyable time reading a memoir from September Publishing: Rory Cellan-Jones’ Ruskin Park. My British readers will probably know Rory, who was a reporter for the BBC for most of his life. But the reason why I wanted to read this book was because it was about his childhood with his mother, Sylvia, a single parent who also worked at the BBC. Sylvia’s story – the difficulty of being taken seriously as a woman back in the 1960s, the challenges of being a single mother in very much more traditional times – reminded me of my early years with my own mother, just as vivacious as Sylvia, trying to scrape a living as a legal secretary, taking on more and more court work – but ultimately always being looked over for the married women, and certainly for the men. It sheds a fascinating light on a time that most of us who lived through it have likely forgotten (or repressed!) and one that those who didn’t live through it would, I think, find fascinating. It’s a gentle book, searching but – refreshingly – not excessively emotional in tone. For me, it was the perfect companion to a similar book by BBC Radio 4 Today show presenter Justin Webb, whose The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and Other Trainwrecks also covered the complexities of growing up with ... complicated ... mothers.
Can we ever really know the truth about our parents? From the popular journalist, podcaster and tweeter about his rescue dog #SophiefromRomania comes a moving memoir in search of the truth behind his isolated childhood and absent father.
Rory Cellan-Jones knew he was the child of a brief love affair between two unmarried BBC employees. But until his mother died and he found a previously unknown file labelled 'For Rory' he had no idea of their beginnings or ending, and why his peculiarly isolated childhood had so tested the bond between him and his mother. 'For Rory,' his mother had written on the file 'in the hope that it will help him understand how it really was ...' This is a compelling account of what Rory uncovered in the papers, letters and diaries; a relationship between two colleagues (two romantics) and the restrictive forces of post-war respectability and prejudice that ended it. It is also an evocation of the progressive, centrifugal force at the centre of all their lives – the BBC itself. Both tender and troubling, the drama moves from wartime radio broadcasts, to the glamour of 1950s television studios, to the golden era of BBC drama.
This month’s poem
Being a Person
by William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
I agree, the Gododdin are definitely still here - I consider myself one of them too, and am SO excited for Hearth when the time comes!
Oh I love that poem by William!