The light to come

Monthly newsletter, January 2024

Read on for my news, news of my husband’s new Substack, and for this month’s reading recommendations and poem. 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,

There’s always light to come, no matter how dark the world might seem: there’s always, always a glimmer, no matter how faint. Perhaps it’s a consequence of my two-week-long cocooning time over the holidays that I’m able to feel this way about an ever-more-challenged world. We locked the door and lit the fire and rested and regrouped. Amid the solitude and the silence, which is my preferred way to spend the darkest days of the year (even the sun takes a wee pause at Solstice), I was able to spend most early mornings writing my way into what I think will be my next book. And I painted a few cupboards, while David created the footings for a new hen house which will arrive in January, and the hens hopefully not too long afterwards. And read a little. And stalked barn owls again in the early morning, and watched the rain-soaked river rise and fall. And did a lot of dog-cuddling. So now I’m (mostly) raring to go again.

Slowly returning to email and other channels, I’ve found myself inundated by posts and articles that are focused on the beginning of the New Year. All that it might herald; all that it might expect of us, including resolutions. All the things we might plan for it; all the promises that must, or must not, be made. So, delightful as some of those pieces were, I found myself a little weary, and promised myself that I wouldn’t add to the cacophony this time around. Instead, I’d just keep this first newsletter of the year short, and write a very few words about the light to come. Because today is the feast day of Epiphany, and if that’s not about seeing the light, I don’t know what is. I don’t follow the Christian calendar, but I’m very happy to steal its best moments; after all, back in the day it stole a good few of ours.

Epiphany took its name from the Greek word epipháneia, which refers to a god’s physical manifestation or revelation to mortals. It’s associated with another Greek word, theophany (theophaneia), which refers to an encounter with a deity in which it reveals itself in a tangible form. In non-religious usage, epiphanies are powerful internal changes caused by sudden revelation. At Epiphany, then, I’m consciously walking through the world looking for revelation, and for the light in which that revelation might show itself.

On another Epiphany-related note: in my research for Wise Women (which will be out from Virago on October 3; I hope to be able to reveal the cover soon) I came across a wonderful Italian character called La Befana, and the discovery made me VERY happy. For those of you who don’t know her, she’s an old woman who delivers gifts to children on Epiphany Eve, just as Father Christmas does on Christmas Eve in other parts of Europe. She’s usually depicted as a hag riding a broomstick; like Father Christmas, our glorious Grandmother Epiphany is covered in soot, because she slips down the chimney of a house to enter it and leave her presents. Some folklore describes her sweeping the floors with her broom before she leaves the house, and in so doing she sweeps away the troubles of the past year. In other traditions, it’s said that she sweeps away the troubles of the past year for the entire country, as she flies through the air on her broomstick. Now that’s an old woman I’d like to believe in.

The Christian story of her origins which links her with Epiphany tells us that La Befana was sweeping her floor when she noticed a bright star in the night sky. Soon afterwards the Three Kings paid her a visit; they were lost and asked her for directions. They told her that they were following the star to bring gifts honouring a baby who would be found in Bethlehem. La Befana didn’t go with them on their journey, because she felt that she couldn’t leave her work unfinished (and don’t we all know that feeling ...). But after they’d left, she was sorry and changed her mind. She ran after them with her broom and a basket of gifts for the holy baby, but she couldn’t catch up with them. It’s said that La Befana is still looking for that baby today.

Apparently La Befana is celebrated in several festivals throughout Italy at Epiphany, and I just love the prominence of an old woman at such an important time.

Meanwhile, here at ‘The Art of Enchantment’ in the year to come, I’m delighted to be offering, from January onwards, live Zoom sessions as the focus for my monthly Fairy Tale Salons. I’m really looking forward to deeper conversations about my favourite subject. And as promised, there’ll be two or three extra sessions, with some special guests, for members of The Hearth.

As always, I wish you the blessings of the season, wherever you might be spending it.

Sharon

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My husband David Knowles’ new Substack: ‘Elvers by Moonlight’

I mentioned in a recent post for paid subscribers that my husband, David Knowles, had finally been inspired to create a Substack of his own after the visit of an old friend who I hadn’t seen for a while. (Thanks, Helen!) Those of you who’ve been following along with me for a few years might remember that David is a very fine poet. His first (and only) collection, Meeting the Jet Man, was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award in 2009 and a poem from it was Highly Commended and included in the Forward Prize anthology that year. He was recently commissioned by an Irish publisher to translate, from Irish into English, a collection of award-winning poems by a poet friend who only writes in the Irish language. The translations are stunning. When I’d founded and was editor of EarthLines Magazine from 2012 to around 2017, David wrote some beautiful pieces for it and for a while, when we moved to Donegal in 2014, contributed to a joint blog with his reflections on place, language and belonging. Whenever I just can’t find the words for describing a place we both know, I’ll ask him how he would do it, and he’ll come out with pure poetry every time. He sees the world in unique ways, and when he puts words to that, it’s beautiful.

But David has found it hard, as he expresses it, to see the point of writing for a very long time now. He has kept on telling me that he ‘has nothing to say’, and I have argued that of course he has, and we’ve been going round in circles on that now for several years as I’ve cajoled, entreated, insulted, raged against the dying of his particular and unique light ...

Anyway. Here he is, and to ensure that he doesn’t decide he has nothing to say after all, please do head over there, and read, and comment to encourage him to keep going. There are three gorgeous pieces already up and more in the works; all posts are free for everyone to read. Find out more at Elvers by Moonlight. The ‘About’ page tells you more about him and about the publication.

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The Rooted Woman Oracle, and my February 10^th Bone Cave gathering

A reminder that The Rooted Woman Oracle is out on January 31, and it really is a thing of beauty. I hope that those of you’ve loved If Women Rose Rooted will enjoy this card deck, too; what I loved about this project is that it allowed me to expand the places and the Otherworldly women I wrote about 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 also find order information – and I’m pleased to say this deck is available worldwide.

On February 10^th, from 15.00 – 19.00 UK time, I’ll be offering a Bone Cave session on working with this oracle deck, and its genesis in If Women Rose Rooted. This is likely to be the only Bone Cave/ teaching I do in the first half of the year, so I can concentrate on completing that new book, so it would be lovely to see you there. Please register here.

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Reading recommendations

Just in time to find its way to the top of my holiday fiction pile, the lovely Bonnie Jo Campbell kindly sent me a copy of her new book, The Waters, which is published on January 9. It’s a remarkable novel, narrated in a remarkable voice, and it’s highly recommended. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp – an area known as ‘The Waters’ to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan – herbalist and eccentric Hermine ‘Herself’ Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest – the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn – has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy ‘Donkey’ Zook, to grow up wild.

Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.

With a ‘ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world’ (Jane Smiley, New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.

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This month’s poem

To the New Year

by W. S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

From Present Company, Copper Canyon Press, 2005

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