Books are like magic: years of life and thought, colours, light, landscapes, voices, all pressed into a block of paper and ink small enough to slide into a bag or a pocket, which calls at you for company. When we read, we spend more dedicated time with a book than we would do with a partner. When else are we immersed, without distraction, in someone else’s voice and life for hours, days at a time? To be a writer, then, is an immense privilege. To be a writer is to weave magic. To be a writer sending her book into the world is to float a house on the sea. 

Before there is a book there is writing - the long and shapeshifting verb. Sometimes it involves sitting at a desk; oftentimes not. In writing, a kind of magic also occurs. Over time, certain themes or objects call for your attention, quietly insistent. 'Coincidences' happen. Thought threads twine in ways that could not have been planned. Once, just once, I was gifted an entire chapter by holding two quartz pebbles from a special beach in Iceland - one in each hand. I had wanted to write about that thin place, where the improbable had happened, and the quartz gave me the way in. That chapter remained unedited and became part of a memoir, my debut - The Raven’s Nest: An Icelandic Journey Through Light and Darkness.

Next, the journey to publication and beyond involves navigating the opaque world of publishing with no map. Once, I might have naively assumed that there is ‘a way that it works’. Two years in, I can say that doesn’t seem to be the case. If there is a way, it is hard to find anyone who will tell you. It is a nebulous business with no direct link between cause and effect. That said, authors are under unprecedented pressure to do much of their own publicity - to be the mother and the midwife - but with little guidance. I have always thought of the magic I speak of above, as emerging from a dance between labour and grace. But if the labour feels relentless, or you are unsure what kind of labour you are supposed to be doing, I wonder sometimes whether it is more challenging for grace to visit.

This quandary has led me into conversations with other women memoirists about their experiences. Sadly for many, the process has been challenging at best and painful at worst. The clamour for a greater diversity of voices making their way to the page is slowly being answered by publishers. But the workings of the machine that brings them into the world are much slower to change: often not supple enough to accommodate what that diversity really means, or sensitive enough to the metabolism of struggle in the author's life that has had to occur for that book to exist.

Long before I found an agent, one writer's kind guidance - that the process of a book coming into being and finding its readers is definitively non-linear - has been a lodestar. So what has that looked like for me? What about the moss that grows in the shaded elbows of the machine, the light that slips past and over its whirring cogs? 

My search for a literary agent coincided with the lockdowns of 2020. Everything, including the future of the publishing industry, was uncertain. It was frustrating to write proposal after proposal for a book I had already written, to hear nothing back and not know whether that was a 'no', or a 'not yet'. We were all having to be exceptionally patient with one another. At the same time, I was aware that really, there was only one thing I needed to be doing. 

In late 2019, honouring the orality of my text and the Icelandic culture that had inspired it, and conscious that, for better or worse, eventually the book would become a 'product', I had made a commitment to read The Raven's Nest aloud to an audience from start to finish, so that it could exist first as breath on the wind, spoken. Inspired by the Icelandic tradition of kvöldvaka ('the evening wake'), where someone would read to the household while they spun, knitted and darned wool, by March 2020 I was mid-way through a series of candlelit readings, in a gallery in SW Scotland where I was artist-in-residence. I read aloud weekly to a roomful of people busy with their hands, or with their eyes closed, each being transported to another time and place. 

All of a sudden, the pandemic was upon us and these gatherings were banned. I couldn't imagine creating that atmosphere, that togetherness, on Zoom. But as the months rolled on I knew I had to try. Together, we each lit a candle whose light filled those small squares on a screen. We could see one another's needles and thread – in, out, in, out. Somehow, the magic still worked. 

The day after I finished reading it, I had a call from an agent; my agent. Three weeks later The Raven's Nest went to auction. The winning offer came in at the very moment I sailed into the harbour of the village in Iceland where the titular raven's nest lives. What strange convergence of life threads placed me there at precisely that moment? I don't know. But I do know that as writers, for all the labour, we must leave space for grace, for magic. To remain receptive to it and act in service of it. To let it play with our words in the world, carrying them to other realms of meaning.

In Iceland a year later, newly published book in hand, I made my way along a dusty track to a remote turf-roofed farmhouse to give a reading. Through bizarre coincidence, the audience that night was to be a group of Affect Theorists from across the world. I get a feeling for which chapter I will read when I am near or in the place I will read it. My instinct told me to read a chapter called 'The Whale' in which I dream of being in the sea with a humpback whale, and the dream is interpreted by a farmer. As I arrived at the farmhouse, a pod of humpbacks breached in the the fjord below, the evening light dazzling its surface. With their participation, the reading took on a new resonance. 

I want to remain open to those moments, to the things we cannot plan. 

As the last rays of sun retreated from the wild moors, the twisted shadows of Bone Woman disappeared and I began to sing a soft lullaby to serenade the fading light and welcome the darkness of night. Barefoot, I stood and circled this dying Hawthorn tree whom I had come to love deeply.

She who has weathered the winds of change and called to me from afar, as I prayed for a wise grandmother to guide me across this threshold of initiation. She who stands rooted as Bone Woman, a midwife of death and rebirth, an elder of this land of rock, peat and bog.

Walking three times around her - bowing, clapping and singing as I praised her life and blessed her dying - I arrived at the shrine of bones I had gathered and formed into an offering upon her roots. I lay down the shawl from my shoulders and tenderly placed each bone upon it, before bundling them together as my voice and breath invoked their spirit to life.

With the bundle of bones held against my chest I stepped outside this Death Lodge and walked the short way to the babbling Snowdon Brook, alive with ancient voices as the waters tumbled over moss and rocks. Unwrapping the bones, my voice deepened as the grief stirred in my belly and the lullaby shifted into a soulful lament. I bathed each bone in the crystal-clear waters as the light faded and my heart filled with tears, softening my edges as I dissolved into the waters, becoming the hollow bones I washed, and the song of the stream claimed me. 

For four days and nights I tended these bones, blessing them in the waters at dusk and dawn, and dreamt with them under the shifting sky, shimmering with silver stars. This vigil became a prayer to re-member, honour and praise the elders of this wild land of Dartmoor, Dumnonia, as I courted the Sacred and danced with my eros in devotion to Life. 

The night before this quest I was preparing to sleep nearby in a beech grove when I saw the luminous moon rising, and felt the longing of my wild heart. It was Beltane Eve – the night when the Horned God gallops across the fertile earth, hunting for the Goddess to proclaim him Sovereign and Protector of the land as they commune in flesh and Spirit, restoring balance and fecundity to the earth.

On this night I felt the pull of the moon, the lunar-licked moors, and the feral call of the Stag King as I meandered through gorse and hawthorn, stalking him as he stalked me. I stopped and faced the pregnant moon as I listened for the sound of his hooves. As my heart quickened, I raised my drum and began to beat its skin, calling to my Beloved to rise up to meet me. My voice bellowed with ecstatic roars as I felt the fire in my heart stoked by his presence. I heard his hooves and felt his breath, warm and panting upon my cheeks. We made love again that night - his horns like swords, emanating from his crown, penetrating the night sky as I enveloped him and his seed was sown within me. I was enthroned as Wild Queen, guardian of our Sacred lands.

To celebrate this union and commitment to the land, on the final day of my vigil I opened the way for ceremony - rising to greet the dawn and tend the bones, before covering my naked skin in dark, thick, fertile peat from the blackest bog I could find and cleansing myself in the gushing waters. I bowed before Bone Woman as I unveiled myself and painted red ochre onto my limbs and face. Adorned in my finest robe, and crowned with a garland of ferns, ivy and hawthorn I prepared to marry my beloved Dartmoor.

As I walked up high above the sun-kissed boulders and singing stream, I gathered grasses, gorse branches, fluffy cotton stems and a crow feather to fashion into a wild bouquet as a skylark sang its sweet song overhead.

Arriving at a solitary hawthorn, presiding over these moors like a priestess, I knelt before her and wept as my heart cracked open with devotion to this place where I feel most at home, whole and holy. Under the white blossom, I wrote my vows and proclaimed them to the winds and winged-ones above: To love and protect these wild lands, to restore the Sacred and activate the ancient memory within.

With joy in my feet, I weaved my way back across the moors, stopping for a first dance with my Beloved, a congregation of sheep looking on, before returning to Bone Woman. I felt the quivering in her branches, like a twinkle in her eyes, as she blessed this union with her silent gaze. Her old bones a reminder of how to be forged in the furnace of your longing.

I don’t know when I lost my voice. Loud and brash in my twenties I would stand my own with all comers, words dancing on my tongue full of futures and potential and bright sunny days. 

Was it a life running after kids that quietened me? Certainly, four kept me busy. Then my mother-in-law died and, leaving two adopted kids with profound multiple disabilities, her two joined ours to make six. Six kids by the time I was 30, two requiring full 24-hour nursing care, is enough to silence anyone. But the words lingered, whispering in my ear, stories, half-formed, shimmering in the air.

Was it bereavement that stole my song? Or getting sick myself? Maybe it was the shame of not getting better? Was it the shifting of hormones or husband’s redundancy or the raising of teens, or the endless struggle with my weight? Or was it just being wrong? A loud woman in a world that wanted quiet. People like me don’t write. 

I became quiet. I swallowed my words. 

I see so many women reaching 50, realising that they have become quiet, have lived the last few years of their life with the sound turned down. 

‘I used to be fearless,’ I hear them say. 

‘I used to be brave,’ they whisper.

 ‘I used to sing.’

But the words would not remain silent, no matter how hard I tried to swallow them down. I wrote in secret, not sure why I had to hide. I told stories to my children and created worlds for their imaginations to roam, but that wasn’t real writing. Because people like me don’t write.

But the words persist. 

In the early days, I called my words my musings, my mumblings, a bit of fluff, just messing about. Minimising my words and my voice like many of the women around me.

‘It’s just me,’ they say.

 ‘Going on,’ they mutter.

 ‘Take no notice'. 

Why is this? 

What happens to us?

Where do we go?

Now I call my words my conjuring’s, my magic, my powers. With the power to turn shapes on the page into stories, I find I have come back to myself. 

We do come back, from wherever we have been. Finding our voices, practising croakily, we say our names, naming ourselves again in a new light. 

No longer girls we are now the women of tall tales. 

No longer girls, we clear our throats and if not roar – not yet at least – we can sing our name with pride. 

There is a strength in this coming back to ourselves. Finding ourselves, our words, rediscovered amongst the debris of our lives. 

I was brought up to be largely silent:

Speak when you are spoken to.

Stop being so giddy.

No laughing at the table.

Don’t interrupt!

Little pigs have big ears.

Children should be seen and not heard.

Stop mithering.

Hush!

Questions were not encouraged, and secrets never shared. 

To be silent in these circumstances is to be ashamed. You do not have the words to explain or explore anything so feelings and experiences fester. There is no space for honest and open communication.

I was called ‘shy’ and I believed it.

‘Has the Cat got your tongue?’

When I was in my thirties I went to tap dancing lessons. We took part in the annual show which included sequins, silver-topped canes, gold waistcoats and whooping. I was quite happy about the sequins, the canes and the waistcoats but incapable of whooping. No sound would come out of my mouth. As I ‘step, ball, changed’ I was literally voice-less.

I mimed. 

I later confessed to my fellow dancers that I had mimed my whoop, and they have never let me forget it.

So, the fact that this tongue-tied, ‘shy’ ‘cat got your tongue’ whoop-less woman became a memoirist, is a surprise. 

I started writing as a journalist, telling the stories of others for first-person pieces in Woman’s Own and other magazines about broken hearts, broken marriages, broken bones, broken homes, miracle babies, miracle cures and miracle weight-loss. It was fascinating to interview people and write their stories without giving away anything about myself.

When I wrote my first novel, Truestory, I was forty-four and it was inspired by raising my autistic daughter, Nina. I would not have dreamed of writing about this issue in a memoir because it would have been too exposing – for me and for Nina. Nina was fourteen then, so I turned the autistic character into a boy to create some distance. 

This only worked to an extent. My other daughter, Lara, said: It may be a novel, but Nina is on every page of that book.

But writing a story as ‘fiction’ gives you deniability. 

Of course it is not based on truth…of course that never actually happened…

It is surprising though, how many people do not grasp the meaning of ‘fiction’ and assume that if something is in a book, it is ‘real’. 

Them: What does your husband think of the way you have written about him?

Me: That is not my husband that is a made-up character.

Them: Yes, but what does he think?

With memoir there is no such deniability.

The contract with the reader is that if you call it memoir then what you write is true (or at least it is your truth).

My first memoir, When I Had a Little Sister, was about the death by suicide of my sister, Tricia. I knew I was writing about other people besides myself – my father, my mother, my sisters. It was uncomfortable. I did not want to offend or upset anyone. I read somewhere that having a writer in the family is as bad as having a murderer in the family. No secret unrevealed, no stone unturned, no privacy remaining after all that dirty linen has been washed in public. 

While writing the memoir I asked myself: Is it true, is it fair, is it important to the story. If it was all three, it went in.

However, with my second memoir One Body – about growing up and growing older in a woman’s body and my experience with breast cancer – the writing felt freer. This was my story, about me, I could say what I wanted, and that feeling of freedom was heady.

There were taboo subjects to include in One Body – sexual assault, abortion – and I asked my husband and daughters how they felt about me writing about these subjects. They did not say: ‘Hush!’ They said: ‘It’s your story, you tell it,’ which was generous. 

As a group of British South Asian women, we have come together as part of the educatinggeeta writing group. We have spun our writing webs around the theme of ‘Wild Brown Women’. Reflecting on the concept of ‘wild’, we’ve engaged with life experiences that have made us the women we are.

This is our collective thread.

Women Who Run With Wolves 

In the seminal text “Women Who Run With Wolves”, Clarisa Pinkola Estes states “No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively”. I remember reading these words, the sentence buzzing around my body. Flashes of images ran through my mind: dancing until daylight in Ibiza; the dum-dumming of the dhol aligning with my racing heart at my best friend’s wedding reception; and that time I did something for me, where time stood still. 

In the middle of the pandemic, my newly separated and broken heart got into a car and drove to a place where there were no other souls to keep me company. I escaped my cage and fell headfirst into sweet freedom. I revelled in my audacity, turning away from the voices in my old cage, calling me back to the safety of the Known. You see, Brown women don’t just drive off alone to a random location without rhyme or reason. I stood on a cliffside, looking out on a lake, wind howling. I had not dressed appropriately and despite walking for hours, I was cold. My hair whipped around me, lashing around my face. I had never felt so alive, yet so very alone. I leaned into this solitude, my heart feeling giddy in its freedom from society’s expectations of a woman - my soul dancing in its newfound Wild.

Written by Aman

Wild. Brown. Woman 

Wild.

A word drowning with negative connotations. As though we are uncivilized, feral creatures unable to obey the demands of society. 

Wild, to be associated with rebellion, breaking glass ceilings, untamed yet powerful. 

Brown.

The colour of my skin. A colonizer’s dream. The exemplification of my race; a race which gives permission to society to oppress me. A shade which tells people I am their inferior, that my words do not matter. 

Brown, to be associated with vibrancy and culture, language and food. A little bit of spice in this otherwise bland world. 

Woman.

Second class citizen. Emotional and irrational creatures-God forbid we should be given the power to rule countries one day. Baby making machines. 

Woman, to be associated with equality, success, multifaceted, boss babe. To show the world that my sex does not determine my worth. 

For I am a woman. A Wild. Brown. Woman. 

Written by Harleen 

Wild and Sikh 

I am becoming a Wild, Sikh, Brown Woman

I am finally ripping away the Poisonous messages of the Patriarchy 

I am extracting the deeply, ingrained toxicity of colonisation

That had nurtured my sacred essence and forced me unconsciously to embody a Tame, Sikh, Brown Woman for far too long.

I accepted what I was told, never questioned, or raised my voice

I suppressed my true emotions and silenced my intuition

I stepped into the comfort of the shadows, hiding away my spiritual power

I had become a Tame, Sikh, Brown woman; compliant and complicit to all I saw that was unjust for far too long

I then encountered Motherhood  

A spark of desire was ignited that everything needed to change

I began to understand my Sikh Spiritual and Ancestral roots

I connected with the stories of Sikh Warrior Women of my lineage

I started to walk on the pathway towards my Azadi*

I am healing and releasing intergenerational traumas

I am discharging the weight of unprocessed emotions and strengthening my intuition

I am stepping out of the shadows and declaring my spiritual power

I am wearing my Kara** and Kirpan*** to remind me of the immense Power I possess  

As I am revealing my potential and capacity to be a Wild, Sikh, Brown Woman 

Azadi- from Persian meaning Freedom/liberty 

Kara- A Sikh article of faith, reminds me of the infinite nature of this world. 

Kirpan- A Sikh Article of faith, a symbol to remind me to fight against injustice and oppression 

Written by Sati

To be Wild  

Maybe to be wild is to be free, 

From the unforgiving expectations 

Of an overcritical society, 

When only the opinion of others matters, 

Limiting your existence. 

Maybe to be wild is to find your voice,

Against injustice and restriction, 

Finding power in the very femininity,

Which chained your potential. 

Maybe to be wild is to dream, 

Beyond glass ceilings, 

Of what is possible and achievable, 

Without checking your reflection,

And beginning to unsee what others see,

Knowing you are more than: 

Brown skin, diverse culture and ethnic clothing. 

Maybe to be wild is having knowledge, 

Gained through the wisdom of living and being, 

Releasing traumas and burdens, 

To heal and release, 

Leaving and letting go. 

Maybe being wild is an acceptance, 

That survival takes all modes, 

And happiness is a journey and not a destination. 

Sometimes an elusive goal. 

Maybe being wild is growth, 

Through and beyond discomfort, 

Heading lessons from life and people, 

Discovering that there is always time to bloom 

In the right environment. 

Maybe being wild is finding peace, 

In the laws of nature, 

Away from imperfect rules of a world 

Which should evolve faster for the modern brown woman, 

Empowered in the truth that only you hold your power. 

Written by Mehwish

A Wild Brown Woman. 

They call me a wild brown woman for my hair is too long, too dark, too silky. 

They call me a wild brown woman for my skin is the colour of the Assam tea they add milk to at afternoon tea.

They call me a wild brown woman for my clothes are vibrant, embellished and nothing like they’ve seen before. 

They call me a wild brown woman for my eyes are deep and dark like the untamed woods that contrast the tranquil blues of theirs. 

They call me a wild brown woman for their mouth cannot comprehend my name - it is a tongue alien to theirs.

And you…

You call me a wild brown woman for my daily menu is not dhaal and roti. 

You call me a wild brown woman for my masala is a shade darker than yours. 

You call me a wild brown woman for I converse with those whose ancestors once oppressed mine. 

You call me a wild brown woman for feeding my child from my brown breast while sipping on tea at a tearoom. 

You call me a wild brown woman for not being a submissive, silent wife.

You call me a wild brown woman for not walking paces behind my husband. 

You call me a wild brown woman for powerfully keeping my name after marriage. 

You call me a wild brown woman for speaking. For being honest. For having a voice, an opinion, a breath. 

You call me a wild brown woman because my skin is like yours yet I am no mirror of you nor who you want me to be.

You call me a wild brown woman for being ferocious like a lioness protecting her cub. 

But you’ll think again and when you call me a 

Wild

Brown 

Woman. 

For soon my daughter will grow 

And 

You will call her…

A 

Fearless Brown Woman.

Written by Simran 

Like stars, mists and candle flames

Mirages, dewdrops and water bubbles

Like dreams, lightning and clouds

In that way will I view all phenomena

Prayer of the 12th Tai Situpa

I live between saltwater and fresh. My home lies beside a wide freshwater loch that rests in a shallow bowl of low green hills. The burn that flows out of it skirts the edge of the garden. A mile from here it meets the sea that encircles this island. Most days, I walk from loch to sea and home again. Wind on my left cheek, wind on my right. 

I watch the water. I’m trying to draw it. But here’s the catch; when you draw water you make it into something that bears no resemblance to water. You strip it of its restless, liquid reality. A drawing takes time and holds it still. 

But you can’t hold water still. 

I’ll keep trying.

This morning I’m sat here at my desk writing. I’m feeling for the right words as if with my fingers, the hesitant stumble and rush of them over the keyboard, the words that come so ploddingly, hopelessly trying to hold onto time, to pin it to the page. I don’t even know why I’m doing it. 

I do know why I’m doing it. To try to hold still those dewdrops and water-bubbles, those dreams, lightning and clouds. To see if art can hold a single instant still, slow it down enough to see it properly, watch it slowly thicken with meaning. To see if I can know fully one moment, even an instant. 

A drawing is a net for catching time. A sentence is a path attention follows. 

So, I go on setting down words on the page. I go on drawing my tiny lines and circles. Millions of them. I bring my attention back each time it wanders, frets, worries, goes racing after distraction. I watch the water as it goes on circling and cycling, always going, always coming, always here, always already elsewhere. I watch my thoughts go spinning on and wait for them to settle. I try to learn patience. 

And from that, I hope, will come a certain steadiness. Calm. 

My fingers twitch in the air above the keyboard as if reaching for something. Time is too quick for me. Catch catch catch, always in arrears. 

Acknowledge the impossibility of the task.

And keep going. 

Stay. Just listen. On the shed roof there’s a starling chirring and whistling and buzzing through his whole repertoire, and further off a curlew’s long, weeping call. Further still someone is hammering in a fencepost. Chipchipchipchirrup go the busy sparrows. The clouds are gleaming today as if lit from inside. The bright beauty of this big sky, this towering cumulonimbus, will never come again just in this shape. This light, this moment, will never repeat itself. And yet it does also repeat itself. The daily cycle, the seasonal round, the regular chores. Make the coffee. Feed the hens. Answer emails. Mark another batch of student essays. Make a to-do list. Tick tick tick. Stir the soup. Butter bread and eat it. Wash and stack the dishes. Draw more circles, more lines. Write more words. And under the slow tumble of sky there is always the quickening shimmer of the loch in wind and sun. The sound of the sea coming from beyond the fields, a big swell still washing in after yesterday’s gale. Water, always, a dancing thing, a lightness. A strangeness.

I go out to check the hens, and stand a few moments by the lochside, holding a just-laid egg still warm in my hands, turning it over and over against my palms. This moment, resting so tenderly in itself. How full it is. The light pouring its freshness over everything. Greylag geese drift and preen. Gulls fly up off the water with clapping wings and shake themselves dry like wet dogs, midair. Along the shingle at the water’s edge oystercatchers lift and settle, lift and settle, piping loudly all the while. 

Hold the moment like the egg. Cup it gently, feel its fragile shell and the warmth lingering inside it. How can I observe the inside of this moment without dropping or breaking it? I catch at the scraps, glimpse the edge of something, a trick of the light, the brief flash of a trout turning in the shallows and gone, the glint of a gnat’s wing. Life’s flow washes over and through us and yet somehow leaves us beached, gasping and flapping on a bare shore: Ralph Waldo Emerson puzzled over this: I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects which lets them slip through our fingers even when we clutch the hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. 

Where is it, this moment? It melts under the heat of my attention. It’s gone in the very instant of its becoming. If life is made up of successive present moments, each one ungraspable, how will I know I have lived?