Please scroll down for a free PDF of stories about Old Crane Woman, advance dates for a new women’s retreat in 2027, and a selection of other dates for your diary.

Dear friends,

It’s October, and the jacks are back in town. The jackdaws, that is, who own this valley (and especially our bit of the river, and the castle ruins) and who always head upstream for their summer holidays. The jackdaws also own a piece of my story in this place. The layby where I left my car, on the snow-ridden, blue-skied January morning when I first came to see this old house we now live in a few years ago, was the parking area for the castle in question. The road was super-icy, and the narrow, rising-and-falling, winding lane to the house wasn’t navigable by anything with wheels. I half-fell out of the car, exhausted by a five-hour drive through snow and all kinds of decidedly inclement weather, and as soon as I set foot on the slippery ground a great black cloud of jackdaws exploded out of the castle walls, screeching for all they were worth. Even before I went inside the house, and even before I stared down into the light-filled flow of the river, my decision had been made. The jackdaws had it. The jackdaws always have it.

It’s never dull with the jacks around. That first spring, outraged to find a great hulking human haunting their riverbanks, they took to dropping twigs on my head out of the old alders where they were roosting, as I tried to sit quietly on the smooth river-stones down among the wild garlic in the early morning. As soon as we put food out for the birds this winter, we’ll have a hard time of it to keep them from hogging it all – but life just wouldn’t be the same without them. They are, after all, our closest neighbours. And my closest confidants. There are always one or two who’ll follow me up the hill when I’m walking, circling around my head and throwing out a carefully curated set of insults along the way.

It’s not just the jacks who are back, though: we’re inundated with female tawny owls, as is also usual at this time of year. Although I’m a really light sleeper and can’t rest with any human-made noise going on around me, there’s something soothing and magical about leaving the window open to catch them all calling to each other from time to time in the middle of the night. So very many reasons to love the return of the dark.

But perhaps the most magical thing of all, amidst all this teeming autumn birdlife, is the fact that a very young heron began roosting in the giant conifer outside my bedroom window in the summer of 2025 – and she’s still here. Except that this summer, she seems to have acquired a mate. And I suspect he’s the one who gets incredibly grumpy at the incorrigibly discursive tawnies and lets out a ‘shut the f... up’ shriek around four in the morning just as I’m thinking about getting up.

The presence of our own fledgling heronry means that I’ve managed to collect what’s beginning to feel like an entire heron’s-worth of beautiful, grey-blue discarded feathers from under the tree. Here’s one tiny jugful of pure magic. And those of you who’ve been following my work for a few years will remember how much herons mean to me, and how Old Crane Woman came into my life during the discombobulating months when I first moved from the Isle of Lewis to Donegal, back in 2014. If you haven’t heard that story before, and to celebrate the fact that the old bird-woman hasn’t given up on me yet, I’ve made this post free to read. If you download the PDF in the post, you can read the first instalment of my stories about Old Crane Woman from 2015.

I’m rather obsessed with all these birds who surround me at the moment, not least because I’ve been giving an autumn round of talks about my last book, Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now. In the book I write extensively about the ways in which fairy-tale heroines succeed in transforming a decidedly inauspicious initial story into a tale of possibility. One of the ways they do that is through relationship – and especially relationship with the natural world around them. In these stories, the natural world always rises up to meet her – because fairy tales show us a world which consists of a web of oneness, of connection, with the implicit recognition that this whole Earth and everything in it and on it is animate, alive and imbued with soul. And the necessity of nurturing those relationships with our other-than-human kin is demonstrated in a good few stories, for example, in which the chances are – if you ask them nicely – that all the birds of the world will flock to your call and tell you where you’ll find your heart’s hidden desire. Because birds, in myths and fairy tales, generally know very much more about the world than humans do. They have a wisdom that’s different from ours, and a wisdom that sometimes we might end up needing very badly to draw on.

Me, I’m ever-hopeful that all those owl and heron voices in the middle of the night might seep into my dreams and leave a little sprinkling of bird-wisdom behind. The jacks, in the meantime, seem to feel that they own my days.

Wishing you all a few drops of avian enchantment, in whichever season of the world you find yourself inside right now.

Sharon

As part of the ongoing program of events that I’m building in collaboration with the beautiful Broughton Sanctuary in North Yorkshire, I’m delighted to announce a new women’s retreat next autumn. Full details and booking links will be available in a few weeks, but if you’re interested, do mark your calendars now, and think about planning your trip. The retreat will take place from October 8 – 13 2027, and the theme will be how we might grow into the matriarchs that we and the world need right now. I’m very excited about this one, as it’ll build on all my work on reclaiming women’s stories over the past decade, from If Women Rose Rooted onwards – but will also take it up to a new level. More very soon!

If you can’t wait another year, and find yourself longing for a beautiful, bracing dose of late autumn in North Yorkshire, you can still book one of the last remaining places on this year’s retreat, which is coming up soon. Nostos: a spiritual homecoming will take place from November 15 – 20. This one is open to all, and Mark Vernon will be our philosopher-in-residence for this one. You can catch a glimpse of some of what we’ll be up to by scrolling down to the bottom of this email and reading the archived post I’ve linked to, ‘Divine Patterns: or how a talk on sacred geometry blew my mind’. Oh, and there’ll be labyrinth work, too. You’ll find all the details and booking info here.

October 19, 6.45pm: There are still a few tickets left for my event with the very wonderful Marina Warner, at the Redgrave Theatre in Bristol. Tickets and information here.

October 10, 1.15pm: I’m at the Ilkley Book Festival. Tickets and information here.

And that’ll be it for 2026. None of these scheduled events for the first half of 2027 are available for booking just yet, but I’m listing them in case you’d like to mark your diaries! There will for sure be more as the year progresses.

Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, SEED Talk, Newcastle, Thursday 11 February, pm

Ripening talk, Durham Clayton Library, Saturday 13 March, 10.30am

Words by the Water Festival, Keswick, Sunday 14 March, 1pm

Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, SEED Talk, Glasgow, Wednesday 28 April, pm

A full-day workshop on women and fairy tales through Alternatives, London, Saturday May 8, 10am–4pm

‘… The archetypical journey to our Otherworld differs profoundly from the archetypical journey to the Underworld, too. The journey to the Underworld is a katabasis, a descent, a fall; we’re pulled down there through factors beyond our control. But the journey to the Otherworld is an invitation, and we can decide whether to accept it – or not. We can stay safe at home, if we choose. But for all its ambiguity, for all its infinite possibilities and momentous outcomes that never can entirely be guaranteed, it’s a journey filled with beauty more than terror. It’s designed to expand our vision, not to end it. There is no inevitability about what or who you’ll meet there; the story shapes itself around you and you shape it in turn as you go. The Otherworld nourishes and animates the land, and the Otherworld will nourish us too – if we are brave enough to step across the invisible threshold, stumble down to the deep, calm river, fade into the flickering wall of mist.’

‘… In this year’s Myth Summer School we celebrated women in the Arthurian tradition, and as a follow up, for the next six months I’m going to be focusing in on the Grail stories that provide the foundations of our rich native mythology. We’ll be looking at what the stories tell us about the the archetypal masculine (the Grail Hero and the Grail King/ Fisher King), and we’ll be talking about what these tales might tell us about the archetypal feminine (with the gloriously feisty Grail messengers, Grail bearers and beyond). We’ll also be exploring what the Grail symbolises, and the nature of the Grail quest and what it might represent for us today.’

We’ll be working with elements of archetypal cosmology and sacred geometry at the Nostos retreat in November. Do join us if you can. The article below offers some thoughts on an experience I had with sacred geometry a year ago.