RADICALLY REIMAGINE THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

There can be a certain perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.
-- from the book

For any woman over fifty who has ever asked What now? Who do I want to be? comes a life-changing book showing how your next phase of life may be your most dynamic yet. As mythologist and psychologist Sharon Blackie describes it, midlife is the threshold to decades of opportunity and profound transformation, a time to learn, flourish, and claim the desires and identities that are often limited during earlier life stages. This is a time for gaining new perspectives, challenging and evolving belief systems, exploring callings, uncovering meaning, and ultimately finding healing for accumulated wounds.

Western folklore and mythology are rife with brilliantly creative, fulfilled, feisty, and furious role models for aging women, despite our culture's focus on youthfulness. Blackie explores these archetypes in Hagitude, presenting them in a way sure to appeal to contemporary women. Drawing inspiration from these examples as well as modern mentors, you can reclaim midlife as a liberating, alchemical moment rich with possibility and your elder years as a path to feminine power.

A life-changing journey from the wasteland of modern society to a place of nourishment and connection. Fifth anniversary edition, with new afterword for 2021.

'Mind-blowing. An anthem for all we could be . . . I sincerely hope every woman who can read has the time and space to read it.' Manda Scott, author of Boudica and A Treachery of Spies

'This is the core of our task: to respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognised once again as holding the life-giving power of the earth itself.'

If Women Rose Rooted has been described as both transformative and essential. Sharon Blackie leads the reader on a quest to find their place in the world, drawing inspiration from the wise and powerful women in native mythology, and guidance from contemporary role models who have re-rooted themselves in land and community and taken responsibility for shaping the future.

Beautifully written, honest and moving, If Women Rose Rooted is a passionate song to a different kind of femininity, a rallying, feminist cry for the rewilding of womanhood; reclaiming our role as guardians of the land.

'Powerful and inspiring.' Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley

Unparalleled inspiration from fierce grandmothers, misunderstood witches, glamorous fairy godmothers, and hairy-chinned hags

From early childhood, we learn about the world and its possibilities through myths and fairy tales. The heroines, though, tend to be young princesses or fair maidens, and the evildoers older women: wicked witches or unforgiving matriarchs. Yet a wealth of lesser-known European stories feature mature wise women with personality and power. Compiling many years of research, Sharon Blackie has reclaimed these tales, presenting them in evocative prose that will resonate with women of all ages.

This dazzling array of not-to-be-messed-with older characters provides compelling role models for today's readers, who seek to redefine their relationship with aging. These women outwit monsters, test and mentor younger heroines, embody the cycles of the Earth, weave the world into being -- and almost always have the last laugh. Each story is accompanied by background commentary that highlights important themes and reveals its insights into how we might live meaningfully and authentically in the second half of life.

Taking as her starting point the inspiration and wisdom that can be derived from myth, fairy tales, and folk culture, Dr. Sharon Blackie offers a set of practical and grounded tools for enchanting our lives and the places we live, so leading to a greater sense of meaning and of belonging to the world.

Enchantment. By Dr. Blackie's definition, a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world, a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. Enchantment is a natural, spontaneous human tendency -- one we possess as children, but lose, through social and cultural pressures, as we grow older. It is an attitude of mind which can be cultivated: the enchanted life is possible for anyone. It is intuitive, embraces wonder, and fully engages the mythic imagination -- but it is also deeply embodied in ecology, grounded in place and community.

To live this way is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary.

Beautiful, rich short stories, drawing on myth and folklore to bring to life women's remarkable ability to transform themselves in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances.

'A book for all the wild women ... Foxfire, Wolfskin is simply the most perfect thing. I love each and every placement of each word. Love the wildness, the shapeshifting, the fearsomeness of it.' Jackie Morris, co-author of The Lost Words

'She lived fully, my fox, and I envied her with all my heart. I wanted to dance with her, sister or lover, across the snow-clad vastness of this land. Together, we'd create the Northern Lights. For that is what foxes do - racing over the fells, whipping up the snow with their tails, the friction of it sending up sparks into the midnight sky. This is what makes the aurora's glow. Revontulet, we call it: foxfire.'

Charged with drama and beauty, this memorable collection by a master storyteller weaves a magical world of possibility and power from female myths of physical renewal, creation and change. It is an extraordinary immersion into the bodies and voices, mindscapes and landscapes, of the shapeshifting women of our native folklore.

Drawing on myth and fairy tales found across Europe from Croatia to Sweden, Ireland to Russia, these stories are about coming to terms with our animal natures, exploring the ways in which we might renegotiate our fractured relationship with the natural world, and uncovering the wildness and wilderness within.

Beautifully illustrated by Helen Nicholson, Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women is Blackie's first collection of short stories.

'Sharon Blackie has wrought a new-old magic for our times: glorious, beautiful, passionate myths. They show who we could have been, and they give us a glimpse of a world-that-could-be.' Manda Scott, author of A Treachery of Spies and Boudica

'A deeply evocative and haunting collection... Part rally cry, part warning, part manifesto and all parts enchanting, Sharon Blackie's Foxfire, Wolfskin is a deeply evocative and haunting collection. I want to press this powerful book into the hands of everyone I know and say listen.' Holly Ringland, author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

THE FIRST NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR
OF WORD-OF-MOUTH BESTSELLER IF
WOMEN ROSE ROOTED

'You and me against the
world, you used to sing. In the days before it became you and me against
each other.'

Cat Munro - who has never taken
a day off in her working life - quits her corporate job and starts flying
lessons in a small plane over the Arizona desert, confronting her fear not only
of death, but of life. Her mother, Laura, moves back to the Scottish village
where she spent the first years of her marriage to Cat's abusive father. Though
they are apart, the past connects mother and daughter, haunts them, binds them.

From the excoriating heat of
the Arizona desert to the misty flow of a Highland sea-loch, Sharon Blackie's
soaring first novel presents us with the transformative power of landscape, and
of storytelling, in women's lives.

Above all, The Long
Delirious Burning Blue is a story of courage, endurance and redemption.

'It is
that rarity, a first novel that smacks of not merely confidence, but authority
... The ending is powerful,
filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but
rarely reach.' The Scotsman

Beautiful, rich short stories, drawing on myth and folklore to bring to life women's remarkable ability to transform themselves in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances.

'A book for all the wild women ... Foxfire, Wolfskin is simply the most perfect thing. I love each and every placement of each word. Love the wildness, the shapeshifting, the fearsomeness of it.' Jackie Morris, co-author of The Lost Words

'She lived fully, my fox, and I envied her with all my heart. I wanted to dance with her, sister or lover, across the snow-clad vastness of this land. Together, we'd create the Northern Lights. For that is what foxes do - racing over the fells, whipping up the snow with their tails, the friction of it sending up sparks into the midnight sky. This is what makes the aurora's glow. Revontulet, we call it: foxfire.'

Charged with drama and beauty, this memorable collection by a master storyteller weaves a magical world of possibility and power from female myths of physical renewal, creation and change. It is an extraordinary immersion into the bodies and voices, mindscapes and landscapes, of the shapeshifting women of our native folklore.

Drawing on myth and fairy tales found across Europe from Croatia to Sweden, Ireland to Russia, these stories are about coming to terms with our animal natures, exploring the ways in which we might renegotiate our fractured relationship with the natural world, and uncovering the wildness and wilderness within.

Beautifully illustrated by Helen Nicholson, Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women is Blackie's first collection of short stories.

'Sharon Blackie has wrought a new-old magic for our times: glorious, beautiful, passionate myths. They show who we could have been, and they give us a glimpse of a world-that-could-be.' Manda Scott, author of A Treachery of Spies and Boudica

'A deeply evocative and haunting collection... Part rally cry, part warning, part manifesto and all parts enchanting, Sharon Blackie's Foxfire, Wolfskin is a deeply evocative and haunting collection. I want to press this powerful book into the hands of everyone I know and say listen.' Holly Ringland, author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart