'Rising high up on the heather-covered moorlands, seeping through our bogs, flowing down our streams and into our rivers and out onto the sandy strands of the rock-strewn Atlantic seaboard, are the old Celtic myths and stories … waiting to be reclaimed and re-visioned for the modern world.' Aged 30, Sharon Blackie found herself weeping in the car park of the multinational corporation where she worked, wondering if this was what a nervous breakdown felt like. Somewhere along the line, she realised, she had lost herself - and so began her long journey back to authenticity, rootedness in place and belonging. In this extraordinary book of myth, memoir and modern-day mentors (from fashion designers to lawyers), Blackie faces the wasteland of Western culture, the repression of women, and the devastation of our planet. She boldly names the challenge: to reimagine women's place in the world, and to rise up, firmly rooted in our own native landscapes and the powerful Celtic stories and wisdom which sprang from them. A haunting heroine's journey for every woman who finds inspiration and solace in the natural world.
Author
I was born in the north-east of England, a Celt through and through: my family and ancestry is both Scottish and Irish, and I was raised on an imaginatively rich diet of Irish myth, poetry, music and history. After studying psychology, I spent several years as an academic neuroscientist/ psychologist specialising in the field of anxiety and panic, and working at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris and the Institute of Neurology in London. After a few twists and turns, including some unwise years advising a tobacco company on smoking and health and safer cigarettes, and the acquisition of a master’s degree in Creative Writing, I moved to a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. There I returned to my roots, in practice as a therapist specialising in narrative psychology, myth- and storytelling, as well as in other creative imagination techniques and clinical hypnotherapy. My passion during those years was, and still is, creating transformation in individuals and groups. My husband David Knowles and I founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press (now under new ownership) in 2006, and in 2012 launched EarthLines Magazine, a full-colour print publication for writing about nature, place and the environment. My first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue was described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story’ and by The Scotsman as ‘… powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ 'If Women Rose Rooted', a nonfiction book about women, Celtic myth, place and belonging was published in 2016, 'The Enchanted Life' in 2018, and 'Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stories of shapeshifting women' in September 2019.. I run online courses and residential retreats working with myth and storytelling to help people along their individual paths of transformation. All of my work springs from an intense connection to the land, which is rooted as much in the mything and storying of place as it is in the physical environment. For many years I was a crofter, both in the far north-west Highlands of Scotland and in the Outer Hebrides, sandwiched between mountains and sea in one of the wildest and most remote places in the country. (On a clear day, we could see St Kilda from our kitchen window.) We produced a large proportion of our own food, keeping sheep, cows, pigs and a miscellany of poultry; a large thriving polytunnel, and a herb garden. That long, hard work, which required us to be outside in all weathers, as well as a continuing daily need for long walks to explore rocky shoreline, bog and mountain, has given me a deep and nourishing sense of connectedness to place that I feel drawn to share with others. In 2014 we completed a further migration westwards, returning to Ireland where I lived (in Connemara) in the 1990s. These days we own just a small patch of land, and so I am focused more narrowly on the keeping of bees and hens, and the growing of vegetables and herbs.
