Strange longings

Monthly newsletter, June 2024

Read on for Wise Women event news, a summer discount, and this month’s reading recommendations. This message might be truncated by your email provider, so please think of clicking through to Substack and reading it in your browser.

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Dear friends,

I’m just back home from my fourth trip to London on book business since the beginning of the year: an all-time record. This time it was a decidedly dystopian Bank Holiday weekend, teeming with tourists and football mobs who seemed to enjoy closing down train stations. But I love the fact that London is so easily accessible to me by train now, even though I live a good way north. Not just because it’s so lovely to be able to see my publishers and my agent more often, but because I spent three years living in north London in the early 1980s when I was doing my PhD, and for the next six years, with the exception of six months at the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, I worked in Central London, near Westminster.

Whenever I go there now, I wear my feet out walking along still-too-familiar streets, visiting old haunts, curious and questioning, trying to catch a glimpse of the young woman I was then. If it seems like a lifetime ago, that’s because it was. Smart-suited and designer-handbagged as she was then (oh, the last thing she ever planned to be …) she would have given at least a right finger to be doing what I’m doing now, living where I’m living. If I could summon a fairy godmother out of an ancient glass bottle and make a wish, I would wish I could go back, just for a few minutes each time, and stand in my own shoes again just once for every decade that I’ve been alive. Memory isn’t enough. I want to know again how it felt like to be me, back then. We all imagine that there is some kind of narrative continuity in our inner lives, and in a sense of course there is. But what I can only think of as the quality of my everyday consciousness – the way I see myself, the way I interact with the world – what I think and feel as I wake up in the morning – has shifted dramatically during the past fifty years. I just can’t remember what it felt like to inhabit my old body, to live inside my own head, to see the world through that person’s eyes.

Since I turned sixty – and perhaps especially since I almost died of lymphoma three years ago – I have become strangely obsessed by the lives I’ve lived, as well as the lives I haven’t. I guess it’s because, for the first time in my life, I feel that this life is it now; I’ve used up my nine catskins. Not that that’s a problem in any way: I’m very fortunate to love everything about my life. I’m living exactly the life I always wanted, and how many people ever get to say that? But I’m haunted sometimes by the lives I didn’t live. It’s natural; at sixty-three (which I am at the end of this month) you’re frankly running out of time. That Old Lady Death will happen along sooner or later – I’m hoping, of course, for later; I have too many books left to write – and there isn’t going to be any arguing with her.

So I’m haunted by the life I didn’t have – the one I would have had if I’d taken that Green Card and stayed in America and moved to Montana or Taos. Sometimes, I’m assailed by such a vivid memory of standing outside the Top of the World store in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana and how, looking out over the layers and layers of craggy mountain in all directions, for the first time in my life, a sense of infinity overtook me – and I can feel exactly how that life would have smelled and I’m overcome with grief that I didn’t live it. Some days I long for the life I meant to have in the Midi-Pyrenées region of southern France, where I spent many happy months as a PhD student; or I wonder if I should have taken that postdoc in Saskatoon instead of choosing Paris (on balance, probably not).

I’ve loved all the lives I’ve lived, but as someone who has lived quite a few different lives in quite a few different places, something in me is beginning to rail against the vanishing options that land with age. Don’t misunderstand: I want never to leave this house, this valley, this man and these dogs (and even this very irritating little cat). But I find myself worrying that I will never, after all, visit the far North and wonder at a world of snow and ice. That Trump will get in at the November election and so I’ll never as a matter of principle go back to America or see Taos again, and that by the time it’s all over I’ll be too old and cronky to bother. I’m irritated that I never did get to Rome, and that I might never see Paris again. I’d plan a few trips if it wasn’t for the fact that travel is so horrible these days and anyway, the whole idea of a list of ‘Things I Must Do Before I Die, Whenever I Do’ seems a bit … well, morbid when I could quite easily live for another twenty years and besides, I’ve always hated being a tourist.

My old wanderlust eats away at me sometimes. But when time begins to seem short, and this revelation will hit all of us at some point along the journey to elderhood, you begin to be very careful how you use it. That’s a good thing, but it’s important not to be too parsimonious. Nevertheless, there are only so many books I can read in the years ahead, and I’m not going to waste my time reading the ones I don’t like. And I’m certainly not going to waste my time writing the books I think I should, but don’t really want to.

Which brings me to the fact that, strange longings of the elder years aside – I’m back home again, and with a light schedule until the autumn. It’s time to knuckle down and get some proper book writing going. For the past couple of months, though, I’ve found myself decidedly adrift in that context. For the first time ever, and after six completed books of fiction and nonfiction, I’ve found myself writing the wrong book. I should have known, when I found myself increasingly reluctant to open up the manuscript file, and when any tedious chore felt like a relief from something oddly dreaded. I put it down to an excess of busyness, but really it was just an inability to settle into the subject matter. I was writing about the stories of place, and coming home to the North; I think I was writing it too soon. It’s a book I’m going to need to mature into a little, and when another book idea crept into my head and wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to put it aside for a year or two until I do.

I can’t yet tell you about the book I actually am writing, though I hope to be able to do so by the end of this summer. Let’s just say, I’m not done with fairy tales yet.

In the meantime, as always, I’m wishing for you all the blessings of whichever season you’re in,

Sharon

New Mexico, 2018

Session from Audrey di Mola: Myth and Mental Health

I’m delighted to say that the very wonderful New York-based storyteller Audrey di Mola will be standing in for me at this month’s live Fairy Tale Salon for paid subscribers on Saturday June 29. If you’d like to come along, just upgrade your subscription (and then you’ll also get to participate in all our monthly live sessions on myth and fairy tales). Audrey was resident storyteller on my pre-Substack Mythic Imagination Network, and it’s lovely to have her here too. Here’s the event description:

Myth and Mental Health: Wulf Speak and Heart-Eye Vision. Multidisciplinary artist, space-holder, and oral tradition storyteller Audrey di Mola is deeply informed by her first stretch of time in the underworld: the years she spent in what is commonly referred to as 'mental health crisis' and suicidality. Audrey shares in a characteristically honest and experiential presentation how her bipolar II diagnosis became mythically re-translated as a walk with a black wolf and a white wolf – and how the rest of her incredible, life-saving journeys in Legend grew out from there. Not intended for only those who have lived experience with mental health crisis or have received diagnoses – curiosity and 'leaning in' is more than welcome. These learnings from the profound generativity of Audrey's descents and re-emergences can be applied, in general, to engaging life in a more intentional, spacious, integrated, deep listening and imaginally interwoven way.

Autumn Wise Women events

I’m excited to tell you that booking requests for UK events around my next book, Wise Women (published by Virago on October 3) are already starting to come in. So if you’re interested, do mark your diaries.

On the evening of October 16, I’ll be doing an in-conversation event organised by 5x15 in Bristol (event details still to come – keep an eye out in this newsletter), which will be the first time I’ve done an event in the city, so I’m really looking forward to it. On Monday October 21 I’ll be at Topping & Co, Edinburgh – book your tickets here ASAP, as this event is expected to sell out quickly – and on Tuesday October 22, at Topping & Co, St Andrews (keep an eye out on this page for booking info which will be there within a couple of days). Mark your calendars too for a full-day workshop on the second half of life at Alternatives, London on Saturday November 23. I’ll be reminding you of these events, and others as they come, in future editions of this newsletter.

I’m looking forward to telling you all about the ungainly giantesses, sequin-strewn fairy godmothers, misunderstood witches, fierce grandmothers, hairy-chinned hags, craggy crones – and more – who grace the pages of this book. To discuss why we need older women more than ever in these crazy times, and to talk about why myth, fairy tales and folklore matter.

If you haven’t pre-ordered your copy of Wise Women yet, links are on this page of my website – along with a video about the book, and a short extract from my Introduction to it.

30% summer discount on self-study courses

To celebrate (something vaguely approximating) the beginning of summer here in the UK, and also to celebrate my birthday month, I’m offering a 30% discount on all the self-study courses on my website (including the popular ‘Sisters of Rock & Root’) and also the on-demand version of my yearlong Hagitude program. Please visit the pages below to browse:

https://sharonblackie.net/self-study/ – for all other courses

https://hagitude.org/the-program/ – for Hagitude

Your discount code is:

30-SUMMER-2024

This coupon will expire on June 30.

IMPORTANT! Please enter the discount code carefully and be sure that it has been applied before you make your payment – i.e. that you’re paying the discounted amount before you press pay. Because transaction fees are not refunded back to me if I give you a refund, and because it is intensely time-consuming to do so, I can't give partial or complete refunds for errors. Just underneath the box in which you enter your last name as you sign up for a course, you'll see a link in pale orange: 'Have a coupon?' You must click here to enter your coupon code before you go to the payment section. If, after you've entered the code and passed to the payment section, you refresh the page, or decide on a different payment method, the coupon code will need to be applied again. If in doubt, just check that the final amount you're paying is shown to be 30% less than the advertised price before you complete your purchase.

Reading recommendation

I’ve always had a penchant for dystopian fiction, long before it became fashionable. The curious thing is I don’t find it depressing, because so many of the books I’ve enjoyed, in the end, remind us of the power of human endurance and our limitless capacity to love. I will admit that the latest such book I read, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, completely slayed me – perhaps because its setting is so close to home, and so very plausible. It doesn’t surprise me to know that it won the Booker Prize last year. Lynch’s prose is strange, compelling, and reminds me sometimes of Cormac McCarthy. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism. 

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe. 

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times. 

Here’s another similarly dystopian novel I’ve just preordered on the basis of a couple of recent reviews, and am looking forward to: Briefly Very Beautiful, by Roz Dineen:

The world is on fire. And what will you do?

In a city rocked by global catastrophe, home-grown terrorism, shortages and wildfires, Cass is quietly raising three small children by herself. Her husband, Nathaniel, has left to serve as a medic in a war overseas. As life in the city becomes increasingly impossible, Cass knows she can no longer wait for Nathaniel's return. Packing up their lives, she and the children set off in search of a place of greater safety.
But Cass will learn that not all promises and not all sanctuaries are what they seem – and as the fires around them begin to close in, she'll discover just how far she'll go for her children in a world teetering on apocalypse.

Find out more about me and my books

Visit my website, where for each of my books you’ll find text extracts, audio extracts, videos from me about how the book came to be, and readers’ guides. For If Women Rose Rooted, there are also photographs of the places I write about in the book, and information about the women I interviewed for it. You’ll also find on the site an in-depth interview and links to recent media appearances, as well as news about upcoming events, and self-study courses.