I met the novelist Mary Sharratt in the Bay Area in 2000, if I recall right; we were in a small writing group together which had become more of a “women’s group,” for better or worse. Skilled at adapting to wherever she lives, Mary has had quite an odyssey over the years, as this personal essay on the Feminism and Religion blog describes. I never imagined she and her husband would leave England because of Brexit—but it makes total sense. As she writes, a lesson that’s been personally hard for me: “A special grace comes from knowing when things have reached their end—some things *must* end so something new can be born.”
Ms. Boo, aka Queen Boudicca, in the heart of Pendle Witch Country.
Though I was born and raised in Minnesota, I have wandered the world as an expat writer nearly my entire adult life, living in Belgium, Austria, and Germany, before moving to Pendle Witch country in northern England in 2002. I fell in love with the beautiful, rugged moorland, haunted by its history of the Pendle Witches, who cast their everlasting spell on the land. This was the landscape that inspired my 2010 novel,Daughters of the Witching Hill, which casts the Pendle Witches in their historical context as cunning women and healers. Indeed I was inspired enough to write seven out of my eight published novels in Lancashire. The mythic name for that part of Northern England is Brigantia–simultaneously the name of the Celtic Goddess of the land, the tribe of people who made their home there…
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Gabriella West 