SHARON BLACKIE
About Sharon Blackie
Sharon Blackie’s roots are in the north-east of England and in Edinburgh, though she has travelled all over the world and lived in France, Ireland and America. She now lives on a coastal croft in the Outer Hebrides with her husband, dogs and a growing collection of livestock. Originally trained as a neuroscientist, she has worked in a variety of corporate consultancy roles, practiced as a psychologist, after completing an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, she set up Two Ravens Press with her husband, David Knowles, in 2006. In 2008 she was selected as a 'woman of achievement' to attend the prestigious Woman of the Year lunch in London. She has also been a member of the board for HI-Arts, the arts and cultural development agency for the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
Once upon a time in the great American south-west Sharon struggled to obtain a pilot’s licence to overcome a fear of flying – an experience which led to the conception of her first novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue. She was the recipient of a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary to work on her second novel, The Bee Dancer.
Sharon has had work published in magazines as diverse as Waterlog and Country Smallholding. She is co-editor of Riptide: New Writing from the Highlands and Islands (Two Ravens Press, 2007) and editor of Cleave: New Writing by Women in Scotland (Two Ravens Press, 2008). She is translator from the French of renowned Franco-American author Raymond Federman's memoir of and tribute to his friend, Samuel Beckett: The Sam Book (Two Ravens Press, 2008).
Sharon also is an experienced storyteller, offering new and old myths, fairy tales and other stories in a Jungian/psychotherapeutic vein.
See the author's website at http://sharonblackie.wordpress.com
Praise for Sharon Blackie:
‘It is that rarity, a first novel that smacks of not merely confidence, but authority, a sense that the story is true and clearly envisioned, with the technique to make it seem seamless, dynamic and written with verve and a care for the English language … The ending is powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ Tom Adair, The Scotsman
'Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story.' The Independent on Sunday
'[A] cleverly woven presentation of how violence and lies within a family work down the generations, cultivating abuse, addictions, and careers that are essentially displacement activities.' Scottish Review of Books
‘Sharon Blackie writes with a real sense of truth and emotional depth about relationships between individuals, and between individuals and their environment. Her characters are figures in a landscape brought vividly, vibrantly to life.’ Nicholas Royle
‘An inspirational literary début; empathetic and mature. Sharon Blackie vividly conveys the protagonist’s struggle to overcome her fear of flight to crack open the limitations imposed on her, not just by others but by the memory of others.’ Margaret Graham
An interview with Sharon Blackie
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I read books from as early as I can remember, and ended up with ‘A’ levels in French and English literature, but it took me years to figure out that people ‘like me’ could write! It also took till I was 40 before I was really convinced I had anything interesting or especially different to say. To me, writing is something that you do once you have a real need to, and not before: it’s not about ‘wanting to be a writer,’ it’s about needing to write, and needing to write a specific thing that tugs at you and haunts your dreams and won't let you go until you do something with it. So then I decided I should have a bit of craftsmanship to go with the need, and registered for an online MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Inspiration – so many! Camus was the first author who really made an impression on me, when we read L'Etranger during ‘A’ level French literature. We studied DH Lawrence in English lit at the same time (The Rainbow) and both were a real revelation after the arid years of Jane Austen and Milton. Now I look for literature that surprises me – that does something different, that isn’t too tied to conventional structure or conventional language or conventional style. But always, it’s been about ideas and language in literature. I love language that’s poetic, full of imagery, laden with myths. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is, to me, one of the most beautiful novels ever written. And Nikki Gemmell’s stunning Lovesong, Shiver and Cleave. I adore Doris Lessing, and Cormac McCarthy. Who writes with more honesty than is comfortable about issues and subjects that most writers would shrink from.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Long Delirious Burning Blue? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?
I lived in America for five years, around the turn of the Millennium. It was a restless period: I’d just gone through a divorce, and was seriously disillusioned with a corporate job I was holding at the time and the whole lifestyle thing that went with it. In many ways it was a classic mid-life crisis. And in classic mid-life-crisis style, I needed to do something drastic to work my way out of it. I decided to learn to fly. Sounds like a great idea – unless, like me, you have a fear of flying ... Well, let’s just say, eventually, that it worked. It worked so well that I left my job, left America, came back to Scotland, took an MA in Creative Writing, wrote a novel, and decided to set up a publishing company!
But there’s more to Blue than just flying. It deals predominantly with the difficult relationship between a mother and a daughter – a breach that stems from the mother’s alcoholism when the daughter was a child. What caused the mother’s alcoholism? Domestic violence. And so, although this is a novel that ultimately, I hope, is uplifting – a story of courage, of learning to fly – it focuses on a number of issues that touch so many women today. One of the key things I was trying to do in the novel was make the point that each of us has the ability to reassess and retell the story of our life – maybe, ultimately, even to transform it entirely. You can interpret the same facts in a bunch of different ways. You can decide that your story is one of fear and failure and misery – or, at any point in your life, you can say – I don’t like this story. The next chapter will be different. And then what previously was a negative backstory becomes instead a story of growth, of learning to overcome obstacles.
I drew on my own training as a therapist, and my specialisation in storytelling and ‘narrative therapy’ – the use of stories and creative writing in health and therapy settings. Story and myth are very important parts of the novel, as they’re very important to me and to my own life. That, and the landscapes where I’ve spent lots of time – landscapes that have affected me deeply; landscapes that are themselves filled with myth and story. Landscapes where the novel is set: the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert and, in contrast, the misty sea-lochs of the north-west Highland coast where I lived from 2003 to 2010.
How and when do you write?
I find it near impossible to write if I don’t have a whole whack of time ahead of me. I’m very bad at squeezing it in when my head is full of other things. When I’m writing properly it normally comes early in the morning. Early mornings are when I take the dogs for a long walk along the remote rocky coast where we live now, right at the end of the last road west on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I’m not always consciously ‘writing’ inside my head when I’m there, but something is happening – as evidenced by the number of times I’ve gone down there with a plot or structural problem and by the time I come back up and sit down again at the computer, it’s solved!
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
Right now it’s hard to find time to read because I spend so much time editing other people’s manuscripts! But one of my favourite authors is Janette Turner Hospital, and every so often I re-read her novels, which I first discovered in Australia about twenty years ago. Read Oyster. Other long-time favourites apart from the authors I already mentioned above? Margaret Atwood (especially Cat's Eye), Thomas Hardy, Alice Thomas Ellis ... So many. It's probably easier to talk about specific books than specific authors. I recently read Witch Light (also called Corrag) by Susan Fletcher and thought it was the most perfect picture of how to be in the world that I'd come across for a long time. Lots of poetry - I'm a big fan of John Burnside. Michael Ondaatje's poetry – in fact, anything Ondaatje has ever written! I find myself so often getting so bored by contemporary British novels – what I want to read is anything that still has the power to surprise and the courage to make interesting use of language rather than that flat pared-down style that seems so beloved of the critics these days. And so often it seems that people write for the critics or the market, rather than for the sake of the writing.
