Sally Walker

Sally Walker has lived in Cornwall for 35 years. Born in Staines, outside London, she later escaped westwards to a wilder county ringed on three sides by coastal footpath.

Sally's working life spans teaching, nursing and working in a refuge for women fleeing domestic abuse, while her leisure time is spent a little less conventionally, pursuing female spirituality and belonging to a long-running coven of witches. Her love of Cornish moor and seascape – so evocative of myth and folklore, where ancestral voices speak compellingly – inspires her writing.

On a global level, the growth of paganism and witchcraft in contemporary culture is reinstating the Feminine into our concept of Divinity. On a personal level, Sally writes light heartedly from her own experience as a Cornish witch with tongue-in-cheek humour.

Her passion to research and re-consider the witch hysteria of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which swept Europe and then the Americas, has led to her debut novel A Westerly Wind brings Witches.

sallywalkerauthor (website)

A WESTERLY WIND BRINGS WITCHES:

WINNER of Kindred Spirit magazine's WRITER OF 2024 AWARD (mind, body, spirit)

A dud family gene pool handout won’t stop a common-or-garden lass from trying out life at both ends of the fair/foul continuum, each with its crazy curve balls. Whether in an era of mass hysteria sweeping Europe, perpetrating brutal crimes against women, a rat and Black Death infested mediaeval London, or today’s world of glamour and pretty privilege, an indomitable Mogs and her coven cronies, find there is more to life than time and place, and we’re greater than our face value. This quirky novel explores the age-old questions Who am I? And who am I not – despite how much we’d like to be! What can I do? What can’t I? - however much They keep on insisting we must…

Perhaps, with a magical multi-dimensional slight of hand, and a few mystical ingredients stirred into the same-old, same-old cauldron, we might just discover we’re actually something completely different and altogether bigger than we thought! Put down and put upon, but underfoot is where to find the soul.

website: sallywalkerauthor

Twisted Beech

– why we write

What is that particular niggle, infuriatingly nibbling away at our peace, wearing us down until we just have to meet it in the shadowlands where it’s long set up camp, and write about it? For some writers it’s a love of the mystical, a compulsion to shout against injustice, a delight in the absurd, a fascination with lives so different from anything we can imagine, the fiery pull of the spirit – or maybe a little of all of these. For me, it started with a wound. Well two to be exact, one collective, one personal.

The witch trials. In a long inhuman history of atrocities, why that one? Why does this crime against mainly women (many old and in poverty) eat away at us, infesting the collective unconscious with an unresolved unease?

It might be in part personal to me, linked to childhood family clashes over religious beliefs, or maybe even a past life. I’ve never forgotten a life-changing dream of a sixteenth century teenage girl, confused and terrified, imprisoned for her healing abilities, who had inadvertently got caught up in community politics and the mass hysteria of the era. A girl who I recognised (not by appearance) as myself.

Or is it because it was the most defenceless members of a gender already devalued and controlled who were so vulnerable to being demonised with the word ‘witch’? Gaslighting has a long history it seems.

And then, embarrassingly, there’re my own little sore spots at play. Most women, at least on a bad hair day, and especially in today’s selfie-posting, self-promoting culture celebrating celebrity and glamour, secretly worry that they don’t quite measure up. For many of us, with time, the romantic dreams we once drank like nectar at the fairytale feast, seep away beneath illusory moonshine, leaving empty cups with little cracks. Sooner or later, we all have to face brothers Grimm reality.

Never getting to be the Disney Princess seems pretty trivial in the scheme of things, but even petty slights and mere twinges when persistent enough may bore into your peace of mind, eating away at our sense of self. Being mega average myself, I’m easily overlooked. Additionally, as the Cosmos dearly likes a joke, I always end up with beautiful friends – who stand tall and simply shine in public, as opposed to my tongue-tied virtual squat…

So there I am, in my thirties, back home after some unsatisfactory party or other, sitting despondently on the carpet in the small hours of the night, wailing that same old childish complaint common to all of us from five years up, “But it’s not fair!”

No surprise then, that my (anti-) heroine is passed over, put upon and poorly endowered in personal attributes. Of course, limitations come in assorted flavours – economic, geographic, demographic to name a few. And you can bet your bottom dollar that whichever society you’re born into is going to have a lot to say concerning your gender, race, sexual preferences, beliefs and whether you were schooled at Roedean or the comp down my road. (I got the comp with bottle green gym knickers.)

“It’s not fair!” gets answered by “Well, life isn’t” – not this one at any rate, or at least not from our limited roadside viewing spot. Gaining a bit of maturity, Moira gives away The Dress to someone who looks less daft in it, and I too eventually cottoned on that the real life-task (of real life) is to find happiness within (or despite for the feisty) our limits.

Because we’re shaped by these, they slowly twist our growth over the years. And once we get that this is only part of who we really are, we can then start smoothing out our ruffled feathers and tightly coiled trunk. Writing a whole life storybook of someone whose struggles you can resonate with is a great way to unravel both core collective brutal wounds and piddly but painful personal pinpricks alike.