ABOUT SHARON

WRITING, TEACHING, STORYTELLING

WRITING

THE JOURNEY

I was born in 1961, in County Durham in the far north-east of England, to a Scottish father and a mother with Northern English and Irish roots. A small portion of my ancestry is Irish, then, but most is rooted in the Scottish Highlands and Yr Hen Ogledd, the ‘Old North’: Northumberland and Cumbria. They were miners and master mariners, farmers, industrial labourers and gamekeepers, and to my great delight there was also an 18th-century book publisher and printer.

I was raised from an early age on an imaginatively rich diet of Irish and Scottish myth, poetry, music and history, and on fairy tales of all kinds, in a profoundly poor working-class household mostly free of television but with a great respect for books. And so my fascination with the mythology of these islands started young; at the age of ten I was making copious lists comparing the names of the Knights of the Round Table in Sir Thomas Mallory’s work to their ‘equivalents’ in the wider British, French and German Arthurian literature. Although I’ve studied and researched mythological systems from all around the world over the years, it’s my native British, Irish and other Northern European traditions that have always drawn me more, and on which I now exclusively focus.

Although I had originally wanted to study literature, my first degree was in psychology, and I then spent several years as an academic neuroscientist/ psychologist specialising in the field of anxiety and panic, with research fellowships at l’Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, and the Institute of Neurology at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London.

After a few twists and turns, including some unwise years advising a tobacco company on smoking and health and safer cigarettes, and a six-year-long profoundly transformative dislocation to America, at the age of 42 I moved to a coastal croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. There I returned to my early intentions for life and practiced as a psychologist and teacher of narrative psychology, working extensively with fairy tales and the creative imagination. Today, after two decades living there and in the Outer Hebrides, Ireland and Wales, I have returned to my Northern English roots and live in an old stone house by the River Eden, in the beautiful Westmorland Dales of the Pennines.

I now make my living as a fulltime writer; this, along with lecturing and teaching, is rooted in depth (post-Jungian/ archetypal) psychology. Over the years, I’ve deepened my lifelong work with myth and folklore by completing a Master’s degree in Celtic Studies at the University of Wales, and courses in Greek Mythology and Old English Literature at the University of Oxford.

A MISCELLANY OF ASSORTED FACTS

We share our lives with three rescue border collie dogs, and The Cat Formerly Known as The Kitten of the Apocalypse; we also tend a handful of ageing pedigree sheep and a tribe of hens, and bow daily to a newly arrived swarm of house bees.

In the heart of the COVID pandemic, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. Thanks to the haematology team at Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth, I’m now several years in remission. The experience helped me to understand the necessity (and the deep joy) of befriending Death.

Once upon a time in the deserts of New Mexico, in the throes of my third midlife crisis, I learned to fly to overcome a fear of flying – and probably of life – and obtained my pilot’s license.

I speak French and some Spanish, back in the day also learned German and Latin, and have a very small smattering of Scottish Gaelic and Irish (favouring the Donegal dialect) and an even tinier smattering of Welsh. I could sing you anything from a vast repertoire of the old Irish rebel songs on which I was raised. I’m a national of both Britain and Ireland.

When I was 16 I was taught to play darts by a crowd of homeless people and ageing alcoholics at an organisation I volunteered with. Although I subsequently beat them all and pretty much everyone I ever played with, an arthritic right forefinger tragically put paid to my ambitions of world domination.

I adore the Pre-Raphaelites. I have a deep love of all things canine. I have a fern phobia (as apparently did Sigmund Freud). I am a super-early riser, usually awake and writing around 4am.

My favourite fictional character is Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax, an old granite mountain witch in whose image I plan to model my old age. When in doubt, I ask myself, ‘What would Granny do?’

Favourite writers of fiction: so very many, but those that stand out include Janette Turner Hospital, Alice Thomas Ellis, Doris Lessing, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy. Nonfiction: harder to choose; probably Gretel Ehrlich, Rebecca Solnit, and several writers of diaries and memoir. Poetry: W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Basil Bunting, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robin Robertson, John Burnside and many, many more.

Major inspirations and influences – an unlikely and eclectic list. At various times of my life, and for various reasons, they’ve included D.H. Lawrence, C.G. Jung, Emily Brontë, Leonard Cohen, W.B. Yeats, Hildegard of Bingen, Rumi, James Hillman and Ursula Le Guin. But mostly, for ever and always, Granny Weatherwax.