Riverwitch

A collaboration with Sharon Blackie

To those of you who have been kind enough to subscribe to Elvers by Moonlight - sorry to be dropping into your busy inboxes again after just a week. But I wanted to let you know that the writing here will be taking a somewhat different form, just for the next couple of months. I hope you’ll maybe take a look and see if the new path is of interest.  

Many of you will know that I am, gratefully and proudly, ‘the husband of’ the writer Sharon Blackie. Together, we’re going to be doing a series of interrelated posts on alternate Wednesdays under the title ‘Riverwitch’ – the first will be next week on Sharon’s Substack The Art of Enchantment, the second a week later here, and so on.

The original Riverwitch sequence was a sort of prose duet that Sharon and I wrote to each other back in 2014. ‘Call and response,’ she has called it. Originally, it had two purposes. Firstly to help us grieve for the loss of a dream, a place which we loved but in which we could not stay. And secondly to help us learn the ways and lore of the place to which we moved, and in which we hoped to be accepted as apprentices to the land. The first handful of posts will be about inhabiting and then leaving our croft on the far south-west coast of the Hebridean island of Lewis. Later in the sequence we will wash ashore amongst the Derryveagh Mountains of Donegal and try to find our feet in that deeply mythical landscape.      

This reincarnation of the 2014 Riverwitch series is not simply a reprint of some old nature and place writing. The 2024 version is, in a way, a story about a story. It will locate the original Riverwitch sequence within a framing narrative, a broader context which we hope will be relevant and useful, like a sturdy spade or a good garden fork. It is not, for sure, some reflexive postmodern experiment. Nor is it an attempt at self-mythologising. It is simply that we have lived another decade since the events and episodes we wrote about back then, raw and exposed and ill-prepared. As those ten years have passed we have often sat and reflected on those times. We have grown older. So, hopefully, we have learnt a few things, come to understand some of the forces which buffeted and blew us across the narrow sea from the Outer Hebrides to the coast of north-west Donegal.   

Sharon and I went through the same parting and rebirth, saw the same things  - but differently. Our writing to one another reflected those different perspectives and, over the years, have given each of us a chance to see things through the other’s eyes.

Sharon wrote about the events leading up to the Riverwitch time of our lives in her book ‘If Women Rose Rooted’. If you are curious about that back-story you’ll find it on her introductory Riverwitch post out today at ‘Riverwitch – stories of time and place’ if you scroll half way down to the header ‘Extract from -  If Women Rose Rooted’.

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