Growing up and growing in

Newsletter, October 2024

Read on for book and event news, for a video of me talking about some of the stories in Wise Women, and for news of a special gift for paid subscribers. (This message might 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

One of the deeply discombobulating things about being as old as I now am (63) is noticing the continuous demise of the cultural icons of my youth. Such a realisation usually coincides with the death of parents and other elderly relatives, and sometimes the untimely deaths of friends and colleagues of a similar age, and it adds up to such a strong sense that a whole era – a whole culture, sometimes – is dying along with them. This past week has seen the loss both of British actor Maggie Smith (whose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie mesmerised and changed me when I was newly in my teens) and American singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, whose songs formed the soundtrack to a deeply transformative period in my life.

The death of Kristofferson hit me especially hard, because it took me all the way back to the only time in the second decade of my life when I was happy. Adolescence was fairly hellish for me, but when I was sixteen I happened upon my (very unlikely) tribe, who not only thoroughly populated the next eighteen months or so of my life, but changed it profoundly and in ways that have been enduring.

My mother, who had been an alcoholic for several years, suddenly stopped drinking, then promptly took a job as an administrator in the alcoholism centre that had effectively saved her. Their offices were upstairs in an old building in Coventry city centre; downstairs was a large, rather dark space which was furnished with chairs and sofas and a kitchenette, and was simply called ‘The Room’. It was open day and night, and provided a safe space for men (and a very small number of women) who were trying to stop drinking, along with those who already had and who wanted to offer support to others.

The denizens of the room were an eclectic crowd. There were former sergeant-majors, Catholic priests, binmen, businessmen, labourers, conmen, musicians; they came from all parts of Britain and a fair few from Ireland. Over half of them had lived on the streets and a good many of them still did from time to time, when their longing for the drink got too much. But whatever happened, The Room would still be there for them, and the chances were, some evenings and all weekends, that I’d be there too.

I went into The Room with my mother one Saturday morning while we were doing whatever passed for shopping back in those days, and for the next eighteen months I hardly left. I adored the lot of them. I’d grown up with men like this, and they didn’t faze me, with all their swearing and tough talk. I listened, wide-eyed, to their life stories; I let them teach me to play darts (spoiler alert: I was really, really good). I went with them if they needed a respectable looking (if rather blonde and youthful) friend to put in a good word for them to a prospective new boss or landlady. I baked them chocolate cakes and made them tea and held their hands when they cried. One of them became a friend, and that friendship lasted for a good few years; a musician himself, he was the one who introduced me to the music of Kris Kristofferson, and I’ve been listening to it ever since. The people he wrote songs about were the kind of people I met in The Room; ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ was their anthem.

I wouldn’t give back those eighteen transformative months in The Room for the world; I wouldn’t give back my friendships with Tom, Pauline, Billy, John, Hubert, Vince and so many others. They grew me up, and those bits of my growing were some of the very few that were good. There were downsides, though; there always are. I very rapidly lost the knack of talking to people my own age – they had so little, I thought, to say! – and I completely lost the knack for tolerating any kind of small talk at all. I wanted instead to cut through all the crap and just get right to the heart of the matter of who you were, and why. No, but why? were probably the defining three words of my adolescence. I wanted only to talk about the meaning of life and the meaning of death. I wanted to understand all the ways in which it was possible to fail, and all the ways you could pick yourself up again when everyone around you had written you off for good. I wanted to talk about about bottomless pits and soaring heights; I wanted to know how you still got out of bed in the morning when hope had fled screaming in the night. It all made me, without a doubt, quite difficult to know. I’d heard too many confessions, been told too many secrets. I was ‘really quite intense’, as one failed boyfriend announced; I had no patience for anything but the heart of the matter.

It was a rich old time of longing, loving and a whole lot of laughing, and that crowd of ageing, broken, recovering alcoholics were my tribe. I’ve never been part of another tribe since – nothing has even come close. But the centre closed suddenly for lack of funding, and shortly afterwards I went away north again, to university. The years pass; some things change and others don’t. But the music of Kris Kristofferson has been a constant north star in my life; it reminds me of those days, and it reminds me of the sixteen-year-old woman-child I once was. She had heart, that one, and she had courage. She was a bit of a mess (and later, she certainly took a couple of wrong turns) but that funny old tribe of hers showed her how to get through it. Because, as one of them announced to me very seriously, one rainy too-late evening in The Room after I’d split up with the failed boyfriend, ‘There’s no way through it but through it’. That might sound a bit tired today, but I found it quite profound at the time, and at difficult stages of my life, his raspy voice with its County Clare accent has fluttered back into my head, and I’ve found myself repeating the words like a mantra.

And so, for old time’s sake, here’s one of the songs that used to make the grown men of The Room cry. I think this PBS concert must be from the early 70s; the video notes don’t say. Anyway. This one’s for all the guys who didn’t make it, and especially for John and Tom.

And on a lighter note, for those of you who have been kind enough to ask how we’re getting on with settling in our new rescue Border collie gentleman, Chase, I’m delighted to say that after much patience and persistence, the mission has been accomplished. Everyone can now be safely together, inside and out, and Chase is officially one of the Three Woofsketeers. Here he is with one of his new friends. (Luna, on the left and using his bum as a pillow, has clearly forgiven him for biting and puncturing her nose in a panic when they first met.)

Wishing you all the blessings of the season, wherever in the world you might be,

Sharon

Finally, Wise Women is out in the world! And here’s a new video – and a special gift for paid subscribers

Thank you to all those of you who’ve let me know about the many copies of Wise Women that have made their way to you. If you didn’t preorder your copy, you’ll be able to find it in real live stores now, as well as online via all the usual suspects. (Blessedly short) Oscar speech alert: I’m so grateful to Sarah Savitt and the team at Virago/ Little, Brown for all their support and hard work on the book, and to the finest and loveliest of all possible literary agents, Jane Graham Maw, for nursing me through an unexpectedly challenging few months of writing.

If you loved the book and bought it from somewhere like Amazon, where it’s possible to leave a review, please do review it if you can, even if briefly; it makes such a difference to a book’s visibility.

I’ve been asked a few times which of the stories in the book is my favourite. Well, that would be a hard choice to make. So instead, here I am riffing on three that are especially dear to me. If you already have your copy of the book and have a favourite of your own already, do tell us about it, and why, in the comments.

Just a reminder that, for paying subscribers, there will be a PDF called Old Wives’ Tales, containing five (possibly six; I’ve just unearthed another) new stories of wise women, exclusively winging their way to you next weekend. These are the best of the stories I’ve uncovered since I handed in the manuscript at the beginning of this year. They both complement and extend the range of stories in the book.

And for members of The Hearth (i.e. founding members), on Saturday November 2 we’ll use our usual online Samhain retreat to have a conversation about the nature of the Wise Woman archetype. What is the nature of feminine wisdom, and how does it reveal itself during the second half of life?

In the meantime, I’d love to see some of you at one of the Wise Women events I’m doing in October and November; after that, I’ll be staying indoors and hunkering down for a good few months while I finish my next contracted book – more of which early next year. Here’s the final events list:

• October 5, Exhale Festival (online): ‘Wise Women: Reimagining the second half of life’. Book here.

• October 7, 5–6pm, ‘Hags and Wise Women: An Analysis of Older Women in European Fairy Tales’. Online lecture, Cambridge Research Network for Fairy-tale Studies, University of Cambridge. Book here.

• October 13, 2.30pm, Ilkley Literature Festival. Book here. SOLD OUT

• October 15, 8pm, Dartington Trust, Totnes: ‘Wise Women: In conversation with Sharon Blackie’; book here.

• October 16, 7-8.30pm, 5×15 Bristol: ‘Wise Women: the menopause and beyond’. In conversation with Kate Muir. Book here.

• October 21, 7.30pm, Topping & Co, Edinburgh: ‘Wise Women’. Book here

• October 22, 7.30pm, Topping & Co, St Andrews: ‘Wise Women’. Book here

• November 6, 7pm, Bookends, Carlisle: ‘Wise Women’. Booking info here.

• November 8, 6pm, Bookshop by the Sea, Aberystwyth: ‘Wise Women’. Online event.

• November 23, 10am–4pm, Alternatives London: rare daylong workshop on Wise Women and navigating the second half of life. Book here

• November 27, 6.30pm, Collected Books, Durham: ‘Wise Women’. Book here.

Other publishing news

Many of you who are reading this newsletter are writers or aspiring writers who, I know, are interested in the mechanics and processes of the publishing business. My dear longstanding UK editor and the founder of September Publishing, Hannah MacDonald, writes a thoughtful and insightful regular column for September’s newsletter. In this quarter’s email, she writes (among other interesting things) about what a publishing imprint is – in the context of the very good news for her authors that a short while ago September became an imprint of Duckworth books, the oldest independent publisher in the UK. You can read this edition, and subscribe to September’s newsletter here.

Coming up

While I’m off gallivanting around the country to support Wise Women, October’s live online Fairy Tale Salon for paid subscribers will be taken over by the very wonderful New York-based story-witch Audrey di Mola, who hopefully you’re all familiar with by now. It’s on Saturday October 19, from 16.00 – 17.30 UK time. Cathy Martucci will host Audrey, and paid subscribers will receive a Zoom link the week before.

Secret City: Encountering the Urban Mythic

The mythic world has no bounds, and yet it’s often easy to ascribe soul to a forest but not to a city. Are you open to seeing the urban landscape in a new way — one alive with the guidance, stories, and the resourcing we find naturally in wild places? New York City dweller and storyteller Audrey di Mola was born and raised in a post-industrial neighborhood along the East River, in which tapestries of birdsong and native plants bursting out of sidewalks were as common as active warehouses, grinding steel and illegal trash dumping. Audrey became increasingly and intimately attuned to what she calls ‘the urban mythic’ as a matter of energetic and emotional survival, not only grounding and regulating with the wild she could find in the city, but receiving unique mythologies and creating lasting relationships with the beings she encountered there. The co-presenters/facilitators of this gathering are the beings themselves, and during the course of this session while sharing their images and stories, we'll discuss the practicalities and perceived obstacles to communion with the urban mythic and sound inspirations for meeting these places (and the reflections and teachings they offer us) where they are.

Book recommendation

A lush cornucopia of writing and other deadlines, along with much time spent in the rehabilitation of Chase the Case, means that I have little in the way of reading recommendations to offer you this month. Normal service will resume next time! In the meantime, this magisterial work by

John Lewis-Stempel

has just landed on my desk. For the lovers of nature writing, whatever you imagine that to be, and for lovers of England, this is for sure going to be that rarest of creatures: a definitive text. His prose is stunning; his long view second to none. I find it hard to argue with The Times’ description of him. This is going to be one for the long winter nights.