A Privilege And A Joy

The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with author and psychologist Dr. Sharon Blackie

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Dr Sharon Blackie

is an award-winning author and psychologist with a background in mythology and folklore. Her work is focused on reimagining women’s stories, and on the relevance of myths, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, cultural and environmental problems we face today. As well as writing six books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted and her latest, Hagitude, her writing has appeared in several international media outlets and she has often been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise. Sharon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and has taught and lectured at several academic institutions, Jungian organisations, retreat centres and cultural festivals around the world. Her publication

The Art of Enchantment, with Dr Sharon Blackie

is in the top ten global literature Substacks.

1. What are you reading now?

I always have a to-be-read pile so high that I don’t know where to begin with it. But right now, I’m working my way through the novels of an English writer who’s also on Substack, Melissa Harrison. I’d read her first before but somehow hadn’t got around to the other two. She writes so beautifully about place and our relationship with the land, and in a world that seems so focused on technology and computer screens, her novels give me hope – as well as delighting me with her very precise use of language.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

My mother was pretty open-minded and always encouraged me to read, and widely, so I didn’t ever feel the need to hide books. When I was 16, she read and then handed down to me The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, the book which first opened my eyes to the fact that women were not exactly revered in this world – still. When I was also 16, at the same time, in my English Literature class at school we read D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and in my French Literature class we read Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. Both were great antidotes to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. They blew my mind and transformed the way I saw the world. In my earlier years, I loved fairy tales and anything and everything with a fantastical element: I devoured Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, for example. I also had a particular penchant for Arthurian tales.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time? 

I have a half shelf full of books which constitute my go-to medicine in times of trouble. I reread all of them while I was undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma, during the first half of 2021. They’re all mythic fiction – but that isn’t because I want escapism. They fire up my imagination and remind me of all the magic in the world; they also reel me in so I can lose myself in someone else’s story, and sometimes it’s a very good thing to get out of the confines of our own head and our particular circumstances. It can be very dull just to be yourself all the time and so I like to read books that are not about people like me.

So those books include The Lord of the Rings, which I can never get enough of, and a remarkable set of books by American author Julian May: the ‘Saga of the Exiles’ followed by ‘the Galactic Milieu’ – eight books in all, so plenty to keep you going. And then, Terry Pratchett’s novels with witches as the key protagonists: Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad ... There’s a glorious, grumpy old granite witch called Granny Weatherwax, on whom I plan to model my own old age. She says things like, ‘Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all –’ Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, ‘– jommetry. ’ … ‘It’s the wrong kind of magic for women, is wizard magic … Witches is a different thing altogether … It’s magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get the hang of it.’ How can you argue with that?

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

A long, black, sloppy, soft sweater. I have a whole collection of them. I love the freedom of clothes that don’t impinge on you too much, that don’t pinch and bite and confine.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

I’ve been re-reading the collected works of James Hillman, a post-Jungian depth psychologist whose work has profoundly informed my own. On a day when I was feeling especially downhearted about all the things I loved when I was young that are slipping away from us now, a line in his book Animal Presences leapt out at me: ‘All is not lost. Much is recoverable – if only at moments, suddenly.’ Simple enough, but we tend to forget that, when we grieve for lost things.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I wouldn’t know how to live without dogs, and especially Border collies. They keep me sane, joyful, and ground me in my physical body. The dog-love of my life – and really, I loved her as much as I’ve ever loved another human – was a working sheepdog called Nell. She died at thirteen a couple of years ago, and it felt as if all the light had gone out of the world – though every now and again she comes and visits me in my dreams. She was special for so many reasons, but we had a strong bond because we shared an illness. In 2017, Nell was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin large diffuse B-cell lymphoma. We found it because she had a big lump on the left side of her neck. She had chemotherapy and although we were told that even after that, she would only likely have a year left, she survived for five more lively years. In 2021, I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin large diffuse B-cell lymphoma. I too had a big lump on the left side of my neck, and ended up having the human version of the chemotherapy regime Nell had had. I don’t know what to make of that, but it feels important. When she had her chemotherapy she lost her undercoat, and I bought her a rather louche leopardskin fleece coat to keep her warm. That coat still lives under my pillow today. Dogs are our angels and our saviours; I will always believe that.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I took a long while getting started with writing; my first book, a novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, wasn’t published till I was 47. So my expectations of ever making a living out of it were low. When If Women Rose Rooted was published in 2016, eight years later, I fully expected it to flop, because at the time this insertion of mythology and folklore into a book about place with a heavy streak of memoir and psychology, was underheard of. Literally, no one knew where to put it on the bookstore shelves. It got no main media reviews because it didn’t fit into any genre and nobody really knew what to make of it. But it struck a chord with women and it’s sold well over 100,000 copies by word-of-mouth, and keeps on selling, and I’ve been a fulltime writer ever since.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I love to dance, but preferably alone. And probably not in the kitchen – that would be an accident waiting to happen! I like to dance with trees down by the River Eden, which runs alongside our land. I’m quite fond of playing Baba Yaga and dancing, all spiky-elbowed and jerky limbs, as I imagine she would.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

Always, right up until the end, to be a catalyst for transformation. Always to love and protect the place where my feet are planted, which gives me life. And always to love more than I think I can, and more than is wise.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

When I was diagnosed with lymphoma, it was quite an aggressive form; the treatment was going to be pretty brutal and I would need to lay low for a while. So I was going to have to tell everyone. After I took the difficult decision to go public with the news, the outpouring of kindness I received in return was overwhelming. Hundreds of supportive emails; thousands of warm comments on my social media posts. There was more than just ‘niceness’ behind the heartfelt generosity of these offerings; much of what was shared reflected me back to myself in a way I hadn’t much experienced before. I felt valued, and loved. And it’s hard to express, in the face of possible death, how much that mattered.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

A sense of calling. That I have ‘promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep’. I never thought this life was a free ride; I have always, since I was a small child, had a very strong sense that I was here for a reason. As I’ve grown older and followed my path more truly, that has felt less like a perplexing, exhausting duty and more like a privilege and a joy.

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