Red fur and flourishings

Monthly newsletter, May 2023

Dear friends,

As I write this note, a pair of red squirrels are flying through the trees outside my window to find their way to breakfast: a box full of hazelnuts which we leave for them. It’s such a joy to live in a place that is a haven for these gorgeous native animals, and it’s a rare day when they don’t make us smile. Their agility, quickness, their funny chattering call, the twitching tail – all of it speaks to me of the joy of the dance, and of the need for lightness in a world which so often feels heavy. They’re such magical creatures; that ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ ability to appear and then vanish in a flash gives them a strange Otherworldly, shapeshifting quality.

That’s the problem when your computer is at a close angle to a window which looks out onto such a beautiful place. I hadn’t meant to begin this month’s newsletter this way, but the squirrel clearly had other ideas. And indeed, I’ve been squirrelling away a pile of treasures to reveal to you this month! And because there’s so much to say about them, I’m going to keep this month’s introductory comments short, and write an additional free article for all subscribers next week.

But: first, I did want to draw your attention to Substack Notes. Notes is a new space where writers can publish short-form posts and share ideas with other writers and readers on Substack. Unlike my usual long-form articles, a Notes post does not get sent to subscribers by email, and so here’s how to see what’s going on: head to substack.com/notes or find the ‘Notes’ tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to ‘The Art of Enchantment’, you’ll automatically see my notes there, along with those of other publications you subscribe to. Please do ‘like’, join a conversation, or share them with others. Substack really is my favourite place on the internet right now; real conversations happen there, and that’s an increasingly rare thing on the web today. So I look forward to seeing some of you there.

Finally: my guest on the latest episode of my podcast ‘The Hagitude Sessions’ is the lovely Katherine May, author of Wintering and Enchantment. We talked about life and death, about creativity and joy, and so much else. Listen via all the usual providers, or on my website here.

On that note, as always, I wish you all a season full of richness and restfulness, wherever in the world you might be.

Sharon

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The Rooted Woman Oracle – now available for pre-order

As someone whose inclinations have always been on the academic side as well as the literary, I wasn’t entirely sure when Michelle Pilley, MD and Publisher at Hay House UK, invited me to create an oracle deck for them. But after a conversation with her, I was soon persuaded. And what I’ve loved about the process is the ability to work with both word and image – the foundation-stones, of course, of depth psychology – to produce a set of cards which both deepens and extends some of the ideas I offered in If Women Rose Rooted. It’ll be published in January 2024, but The Rooted Woman Oracle is now available for pre-orders worldwide. It’s very beautifully illustrated by the remarkably talented Hannah Willow, an English artist whose work many of you are already familiar with.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Discover the transformative power of the hidden feminine with this beautiful oracle, and unlock spiritual nourishment, inspiration, and a deeper connection with nature. The Rooted Woman Oracle is a mesmerizing 53-card oracle deck from Sharon Blackie, an award-winning writer and internationally recognized teacher in the field of mythic imagination. Follow the path to unlimited creativity, greater strength and endurance, and create more flow in your life with this magical oracle. Distilling decades of knowledge and wisdom, Sharon has created a unique and magical oracle that entwines three different threads: Places, Allies, and Journey. From the inspirational 'Mountain' to the flowing 'River', you'll experience the archetypal qualities of specific places and take spiritual strength from the land. You'll feel supported by women from Celtic myth and folklore―your Allies―like initiatory Ceridwen and The Cailleach, protector of the wild; and you'll find Journey cards that reflect the different stages of the Heroine's Journey and help you follow your unique mythopoetic path through life. The Rooted Woman Oracle will help you to renew your sacred connection with nature, reclaim your power, and find authentic and meaningful ways of being in this world.

In the UK, you can pre-order from Amazon at this link.

In the US, please find links to several places from which you can pre-order on the Penguin Random House website, at this link.

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Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales

My new short online course, ‘Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales’, is still available for registrations. Details below:

A SERIES OF THREE ONLINE GATHERINGS

We are storytelling animals, hard-wired for story. We begin to perceive, explain and make sense of the world through the stories we find in childhood – or the stories which find us. They are the stars we navigate by. Stories teach us everything we know, and their lessons are deep and rich. In fairy tales, for example, the tasks which must be undertaken are the stuff out of which souls, not just shirts, are forged. These stories help us to reimagine ourselves, because at the heart of them is transformation: they help us to believe in the possibility of change. We come to see that there are other ways of imagining the world and our place in it – and of living more intensely, and more richly, in a world that is often filled with challenge, and sorrow. I’ve worked in this way – as a psychologist, academic, writer and teacher – with fairy tales now for more than two decades. Join me to explore the ways in which, even as adults, we can find ourselves in fairy tales.

COURSE STRUCTURE

SESSION 1: SUNDAY JUNE 11, 16.00 TO 18.00 UK TIME
What are fairy tales, and how and why do they change over time?
How do they help us?
Where does their magic come from, and why are they so memorable?
Working with images and other elements in fairy tales
Reimagining fairy tales for our lives and the times
Homework: rewriting a fairy tale

SESSION 2: SUNDAY JUNE 18, 16.00 TO 18.00 UK TIME
Discussion and sharing: rewriting a fairy tale
Archetypal patterns in fairy tales
The fairy-tale heroine’s journey
Writing life as a fairy tale
Homework: rewrite your own life as a fairy tale

SESSION 3: SUNDAY JUNE 25, 16.00 TO 18.00 UK TIME
Discussion and sharing: writing our life as a fairy tale
Other ways to work with stories

Please note that this particular program is only available live; the recordings won’t be available for purchase afterwards. (Though the sessions will be recorded for participants, for later viewing or in case you have to miss one of the sessions.)

Fee: £90. Please register here.

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Events

I had a lovely session recently at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival, and am delighted to say, for those of you further north, that I’ll be appearing at Bradford Litfest in late June. First, as part of a panel discussion about the menopause, along with Alice Smellie (co-author of Cracking The Menopause with Mariella Frostrup) and Dr Pragyar Agarwal. And second, a lunchtime lecture entitled Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales. Details and tickets for both events by following the links.

For those of you on the other side of the world, I’ll be in an online conversation with Integral Counseling Psychology Associate Professor Rachael Vaughan of the Californian Institute for Integral Studies on July 28. Our topic will be ‘Mythology, Land, and Life’. Which about covers it! Find out more and register here.

And mark your diaries for this coming autumn: I’ll be doing a mini-book tour to celebrate the launch of the paperback edition of Hagitude here in the UK. Dates so far confirmed are:

12 September at 6pm, Blackwell’s, Oxford
13 September at 7pm, Winstone’s, Frome
14 September (time tbc), Topping’s, Bath
12 October at 6.30pm, Waterstone’s, Kendal (tickets already available here)

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Reading recommendations

Once upon a time, in a country a little way to the north of here, I founded a small literary publishing house. It had its ups and downs, as all such ventures do, but one of the more enjoyable experiences over the years that we existed was publishing a book by a human dynamo called Kate Rawles. Kate described herself as an ‘outdoor philosopher’ who, at the time, was lecturing in environmental philosophy at the University of Cumbria. She and her partner, Chris Loynes, a lecturer in Outdoor Studies, soon became good friends of ours.

That book that we published was called The Carbon Cycle, and it chronicled Kate’s remarkable 4553-mile-long bicycle journey from Texas to Alaska, following the spine of the Rockies and exploring North American attitudes to climate change. The book was shortlisted for the Banff Mountain Festival Adventure Travel Book Award, 2013. But as if that wasn’t quite enough for one lifetime, Kate decided on another, even more arduous challenge: a solo cycling journey of 8000 miles through South America, on a bike which she made herself, from bamboo. For those of you who already find that awe-inspiring, I’m sure Kate won’t mind me telling you that she wasn’t exactly in the first flush of youth when she made that journey in 2016! The resulting book, The Life Cycle, is now available from Icon Books, and it’s another cracking read. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

One woman's journey through South America – and the devastating story of our planet's disappearing biodiversity

Pedalling hard for thirteen months, eco adventurer Kate Rawles cycled the length of the Andes on an eccentric bicycle she built herself. The Life Cycle charts her mission to find out why biodiversity is so important, what's happening to it, and what can be done to protect it. From the Pacific Ocean to rainforests and salt flats, Kate learns that armadillos can cross rivers by holding their breath, that Colombia has more species of birds than North America and Europe combined, and that in threatening species and ecosystems, we're tearing down our own life support system. En route, she witnesses the devastation of goldmining and oil drilling but finds hope in the incredible people working to regenerate habitats and communities. As she reaches the 'end of the world', she realises that to tackle biodiversity loss we all have a role to play.

Find out more about Kate and the book here.

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I absolutely loved Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s The Grassling, a beautiful reflection on land and language, so was delighted to be sent a review copy of her forthcoming book by Penguin Random House. It’s called Twelve Words for Moss and it’s about – yes – moss. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn ... Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains its own irrepressible light. In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett celebrates the unsung hero of the plant world with a unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir. Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to County Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy and luminous beauty of these overlooked places. She also takes strength from them as she recovers from her grief at her father's death. As she meditates on and renames her favourite species of moss, she finds a healing power in language, and draws inspiration from the resilience and tenacity of her plant – and human – friends.

Because my own nonfiction writing crosses – and sometimes subverts – genres, I’m particularly fond of books which mix memoir, nature writing, poetry and more in new and original ways. Burnett is a poet, and the rhythms and imagery of poetry inevitably seeps into her prose. Let’s take the opening paragraph:

The air forgets its melody. Cloud moves fast over moon – wind-whipped, starless, un-tuned. I curl up in the mosses as wind bashes into bark, grass, heart – gusts around the parts that we forget to fill. And it is so convincing, this battering, that we forget that there was ever anything else. We forget that there are stars. We forget luminosity. We forget that a body could be for more than weathering.

A masterclass in the art of prose writing, and my favourite nonfiction book in a very long time. Do read it.

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This month’s poem

Back in the days when we were publishers, my husband and I edited a volume of ecopoetry: Entanglements. One of my favourite poems in that book is one which so perfectly expresses what I could so easily imagine to be the inner life of crows. Here it is, for fun.

STONE THE CROWS
Dilys Rose

We really should be more nocturnal. Roosting
at dusk – think what we’re missing: mole tartare,
spatchcocked frog, stoat hash! You name it,
somebody’s prepped it. The shops are long shut,
the coach parties toddled off. Bobble hat hikers
and twitchers are holed up in our B&Bs or the pub.
The night is ours. How’s about we break with tradition
And pick up a carryout – fresh kill, still warm?

We make a fetching Sunset in the Village shot –
Halloween hunchbacks against a blood orange sky –
but our days in the feathered niche are numbered.
Let’s face facts. Us lot won’t ever have a say
at a parish council AGM and the mud slingers,
the Johnny-come-lately white settler do-gooders
are set to pass a vote to uproot the trees,
oust us from our nests, asphalt the green.

Before we’re homeless, d’you fancy a turn
around the hotspots, tail a couple of 4x4s,
take a butcher’s at what’s come a cropper –
I can’t tempt you? Fair’s fair. No need
to be greedy. We’ve already eaten our fill.
Darlin, I love how you tuck in your wingtips
and snuggle up, but love your hoarse croak more,
your final gripe before darkness undoes us.