Long, Delirious, Burning and Blue
The rebirth of a novel
Dear friends
So two days ago, the novel that I wrote between 2004 and 2006 – my first book, The Long Delirious Burning Blue – was reissued with a beautiful new cover. I wrote here about how that came to happen, so I’m not going to repeat it now. I’ve also written a handful of times about how I came to learn to fly to overcome a fear of flying, during what felt like my third midlife crisis, which provided me with the narrative backbone of that novel (and of the rest of my life). And what I love about this novel, in retrospect, is that its key characters are forty and sixty years old. I was writing for women like me. And so to celebrate its rebirth, I wanted today to spend a bit of time writing about some of the key themes in that first book of mine.
Competition
But before I go on, I also wanted to let you know about a competition which is being run by my publishers in the context of the novel’s release; please find details below. And at the bottom of this email, you’ll find an ‘ask me anything’ opportunity.
To celebrate the release of The Long Delirious Burning Blue we are giving six lucky winners the chance to chat with Sharon Blackie via an exclusive Zoom session. Ever wondered about a writer’s process or the inspiration behind their work? Keen to talk themes, characters or style? Got burning questions about myth and folklore? Want to know more about the ground-breaking If Women Rose Rooted or the life-changing Hagitude? Now is your chance.
To enter, send an image of your proof of purchase of The Long Delirious Burning Blue to competitions@septemberpublishing.org by midnight on Wednesday 24 April 2024.
All UK and US retailers accepted. View full T&Cs here:
https://septemberpublishing.org/competitiontandcs/
Winners will be contacted on Thursday 25 April 2024 and the Zoom session with Sharon will take place on Saturday April 27 at 2.30pm UK time.
The poem in question
I also wanted to share with you the poem that inspired the title of the book; it expresses exactly how I felt, every time I took to the skies. It’s called ‘High Flight’ and it was written by John Gillespie Magee Jr, an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force who served in England during the Second World War. He wrote the poem in a letter to his parents; he was killed in 1941.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ....Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
This is a jug that my mother had specially made for me after I obtained my pilot’s license, with lines from the poem:
Photographs
Although I’m not going to write again about that process of learning to fly, which began in Louisville, Kentucky at the age of 38, I wanted nevertheless to share some photographs with you, which I’ve just scanned in from an old photo album. I made the decision to learn to fly a few days after JFK Jr had died in a plane crash, in a small plane that he was piloting, in July 1999. No, that doesn’t seem like an obvious thing to do to me either, now! – but it certainly did at the time.
I lived fairly close to Louisville’s Bowman Field airport, and booked a first flying lesson with an instructor at Cardinal Wings flight school. This is me with my first instructor, C.J., on my second or third lesson. He was from Montana but unlike Jesse, the flying instructor in my novel, he was only about twenty years old. He didn’t say much, but it was clear that he thought I was crazy. We’re standing beside the Cessna 152 that I learned in. Tiny, flimsy tin can that it seemed to be.
