Strange things

Monthly newsletter, February 2024

Read on for book news, information about an exciting new narrative psychology/fairy tale training program 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. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment!

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Dear friends,

Alone in the house for a day last week, with yet more rain and gales making the world outside decidedly uninviting, I did something I haven’t done for a long, long time. Punctuated only by the odd break to make a pot of tea or take the dogs out for a windswept walk by the river, I sat down and read a novel from cover to cover. I found it hard to put it down until I’d finished.

The reason why it was a strange thing for me to do is that the novel I was so caught up in was my own. It was The Long Delirious Burning Blue, which I wrote during the three years of my Creative Writing Master’s, from 2004–2006. It was published in 2008 to glowing reviews, but then, as will happen, life intervened. It was eight years before I published another book, and then three more came in reasonably rapid succession, and that first one was put to one side and mostly forgotten. Which is odd, really, because the ideas in this novel provide the foundations for every other book I’ve written. One of the key characters is a storyteller, and the transformative power of myth and fairy tale is a key theme. The story of the Cailleach and Bride is in there, and the tale of the selkie who lost her skin plays an important part. The role of place in reflecting us and grounding us is threaded throughout, so that I could write about my favourite and most transformative places – the beautiful deserts of the great American southwest, and the northwest Highlands of Scotland.

Last year, a lovely thing happened. Charlotte Cole, managing editor at September Publishing, read the novel, loved it, and asked if September might redesign and republish it. I leapt at the opportunity and a fine box of early copies, with a beautiful new cover, arrived a couple of weeks ago. I put one of them on the wooden chest at the side of the small sofa in the kitchen, where in the early mornings, when all is dark still and quiet, I sit alone and read for a while. That stormy morning, on a whim, it was my own book that I picked up. As if it were a foreign thing to me, rather than the product of a three-year-long act of profound psychological excavation – not just for me but for my mother – as well reflecting four decades of personal and family dysfunction.

Yes, it’s just like so many other first novels – it’s in good part (but not wholly) autobiographical. There are two protagonists in this novel: a sixty-year-old mother, and her forty-year-old daughter. My mother sifted through her own painful memories of growing up in the north-east of England to inform the character of Laura in my novel, and I sifted through some of mine to inform Cat, now living in Arizona. It has to be said that I am not Cat, and my mother was not Laura. But there’s enough of us there that to pick the book up again and read it after so many years was a slightly shattering experience. Not in a negative way: really in quite a positive one. But shattered is shattered, nevertheless.

In The Long Delirious Burning Blue, Cat’s story is a story of learning to face death in order to be able to face life. A story of learning to fly in order to be able to let go. A story of trying to let go of old history, old trauma, of the influence of a damaged mother who does not want to let you go, not at all. The circumstances of Cat’s life are different in many ways, but that story was certainly mine.

Fiction, as everyone who reads ‘The Art of Enchantment’ will know all too well, has the ability to transport us. Reading that novel again for the first time in so many years, I was transported all the way back to that character who was so petrified during her first flying lesson that she had to be helped out of the plane at the end of it. But whose first words when finally she touched the ground were, ‘When can I have another lesson?’ – because that story was mine, and those words were mine. That was the thirty-eight-year-old woman I was, trembling and shaken to the core as I stood dazed on that burning Kentucky tarmac – but knowing that this was it, finally: this was the answer, after so many years of trying and failing. That was the time when, out of desperation at my inability to break out of a stifling life, I decided to risk that life once and for all.

It's a strange thing to be jolted back so effectively to a former self – to be so transported by the words in a book that for a moment you reinhabit your thirty-eight-year-old body, twenty-four years on. The selves we once were are never really lost. I think we have a tendency to forget them – or I certainly do. I become so tangled up in the detail of the everyday that I forget all those old moments of grace. I might remember them intellectually, but I don’t really feel them. But all the old selves are still there, even if they’re buried under too many layers of distraction and preoccupation. And on that long, emotional day I reinhabited quite a few of my old selves. The three-year-old child who took hold of her father by the knees and pushed him out of the house to stop him hitting her mother. The teenager who shrivelled under her mother’s alcoholism. The young adult who had never felt safe in her life, and so settled for security for far too long. And finally (for that novel, at least) the woman on her third midlife crisis who broke the cycle of generations, and took flight.

The Long Delirious Burning Blue (which some of you might recall my husband calls ‘the long delirious burning title’ …) is published by September on April 13. It’s available worldwide and along with preorder links, you can find out more here.

As ever, I wish you all the blessings of whichever season you find yourself in,

Sharon

FINAL CALL: The Rooted Woman, February 10^th Bone Cave gathering

A reminder that on February 10^th, from 15.00 – 19.00 UK time, I’ll be offering a Bone Cave session on working with The Rooted Woman Oracle, in which we’ll also be discussing the ideas which underlay If Women Rose Rooted – especially the Eco-Heroine’s Journey. This will be the only Bone Cave gathering I offer this year, so I can concentrate on some teaching at Pacifica Graduate Institute (see below) and on completing a new book, so it would be lovely to see you there. Please register here.

The Rooted Woman Oracle was published on January 31, and it really is a thing of beauty. Thank you so much to everyone who has left such heartfelt, positive feedback on FB and Instagram. If you loved the deck and are able to leave a review on one of the key bookseller sites such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble, that would be very much appreciated. It makes such a difference, not only to rankings, but the ease with which people can find it when they’re searching for books and decks.

I hope that those of you’ve loved If Women Rose Rooted will especially enjoy this card deck; what I loved about this project is that it allowed me to expand the ideas in the book; it also allowed me to think more deeply about the Heroine’s Journey, its stages, and the different kinds of journeys on which we might embark. For more info, please do head over to this page on my website, where you’ll find order information – I’m pleased to say this deck is available worldwide.

NEW: You can now listen to an audio journey I’ve created for the deck, ‘A Woman’s Journey to Rootedness’, which is available exclusively on the Hay House app Empower You. Here is the link.

Sneak preview: new online fairy tale psychology training program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, May – December 2024

I’m delighted to be teaching again as online faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, the world’s preeminent academic institute for psychological and mythological studies within in the framework of depth psychology. I’ve been invited to teach an Advanced Training Certificate program which we’re calling ‘A narrative psychological approach to finding ourselves in fairy tales’.

This program will be based on the unique practice I founded two decades ago, when I was teaching clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals how to work with techniques from myths and fairy tales – creative imagination work, personal mythmaking and much more – in a therapeutic setting. It’ll be brought up to date with all my work on myth, folklore and archetypes in the intervening years. It will be suitable for anyone who would like to bring narrative techniques into their therapy practice (for adults and children) and I’m anticipating it will offer Continuing Education Credits. But it will also be open to and useful for anyone who would like to work with these techniques for personal development. Those of you who loved my self-study ‘Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales’ program will find this offers a new, deeper dive into some of the areas we worked through, along with much more that’s quite new.

I’m very excited about this; the program will begin in May and there’ll be one Module per month through December. Please mark your calendars if you’re interested, and watch out for full information and the registration link in next month’s newsletter.

Mother Hylde – The Hedgewalker’s Path

Those of you who’ve participated in my online programs over the past several years will be familiar with the lovely Ruthie Kølle, who was my assistant for longer than anyone else would have found reasonable. Ruthie also wrote the ‘medicine’ part of my ‘myth and medicine’ online self-study course, Sisters of Rock & Root.

I’m delighted to say that Ruthie is now offering her own unique, interactive online herbal apprenticeship course. It begins on April 1, and discounted early-bird pricing is available until March 1. Here's a link to the signup page:

https://the-hedgewalker-s-path.mn.co/

It’s hosted on Mighty Networks, so there’ll be plenty of opportunity for community engagement, as well as Ruthie’s monthly live sessions. You can also contact Ruthie via her website for more info.

Reading recommendations

The poet and now the novelist Em Strang is an old friend from my publishing days in Scotland, but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend her novel if I didn’t like it. Quinn, though, is an astonishing piece of work. If you’re looking for comfort and ease, this isn’t a novel for you. I’m not entirely sure it’s quite a novel at all; it’s in good part prose poetry, written with great care for language and brimming with imagery. But if you want to plumb the depths of memory, forgiveness and the masculine propensity for violence in all its complexities – give it a go. It’s unsettling, but we need sometimes to be unsettled. It's also informed by Em’s years spent teaching writing in men’s prisons. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Quinn is serving a life sentence for a crime he's convinced he hasn't committed. Surely the authorities have got it wrong, and when they find his childhood sweetheart, Andrea, his name will be cleared. His parole date is drawing near when he receives an unexpected letter from Andrea's mother, who invites Quinn to share her home. It soon becomes clear that what appears to be a genuine act of forgiveness is influenced by more complex motivations. As the duo navigate the thorny terrain of guilt, justice and mutual need that underpins their relationship, the story of Quinn's past is gradually revealed, setting in motion a final reckoning. 

Em Strang's first novel is a hypnotic rendering of an unravelling mind and a visceral story about the very limits of forgiveness.

For a quite different but also very satisfying set of reads, I’d like to introduce you to Australian speculative fiction writer, Angela Slatter. Her brilliant gothic fantasy, All the Murmuring Bones, both delighted me and kept me going in 2021 during the fifth round of my pretty brutal chemotherapy. I also gobbled up The Path of Thorns when it came out the next year. She was kind enough to send me an early copy of her forthcoming book, The Briar Book of the Dead, which is out on February 13 and which is also highly recommended. If I’m honest, I’ve come to believe that the prose style of many writers of speculative fiction doesn’t live up to the promise even of often-flimsy plots, and I’ve almost given up on the genre. Angela’s a proper exception: she has a rich and beautiful prose style and her plots and characters are always entirely believable.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Set in the same universe as the acclaimed All the Murmuring Bones and The Path of Thorns (one of Oprah Daily's Top 25 Fantasy Novels of 2022), this beautifully told Gothic fairy tale of ghosts, witches, deadly secrets and past sins, will be perfect for fans of Hannah Whitten and Ava Reid.

Ellie Briar is the first non-witch to be born into her family for generations. The Briar family of witches run the town of Silverton, caring for its inhabitants with their skills and magic. In the usual scheme of things, they would be burnt for their sorcery, but the church has given them dispensation in return for their protection of the borders of the Darklands, where the much-feared Leech Lords hold sway. Ellie is being trained as a steward, administering for the town, and warding off the insistent interest of the church. When her grandmother dies suddenly, Ellie’s cousin Audra rises to the position of Briar Witch, propelling Ellie into her new role. As she navigates fresh challenges, an unexpected new ability to see and speak to the dead leads her to uncover sinister family secrets, stories of burnings, lost grimoires and evil spells. Reeling from one revelation to the next, she seeks answers from the long dead and is forced to decide who to trust, as a devastating plot threatens to destroy everything the Briar witches have sacrificed so much to build. Told in the award-winning author's trademark gorgeous, addictive prose, this is an intricately woven tale of a family of witches struggling against the bonds of past sins and persecution.