More About Us
Sharon
We’ve been lucky enough for the past few years to live in a 6 1/2-acre croft on the shores of the sea-loch, Loch Broom, on the north-west coast of Scotland not too far away from Ullapool. I bought the croft in around 2002. At the time the house was just a wee bit delapidated – see photo – and required Total Renovation. Back-down-to-the-four-stone-walls kind of Total Renovation.
I came to this croft to live full-time in June 2003, after six years in America, planning a whole new life. And got a bit more than I bargained for… Working initially from home as a psychologist specialising in hypnotherapy, I also did an online MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Over that 3-year period I wrote my first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue. That was based loosely on an experience I had while living in America, when I learned to fly – and got my pilot’s license – partly in order to overcome a fear of flying.
At the end of the MA I decided it would be "fun" to set up a publishing company. Little did I know… So Two Ravens Press was born, in November 2006, while David was still flying Tornados in the RAF for a living. (We met in early 2006, by the way, and got married in summer 2007.)
I started off the menagerie here at the croft in late 2003 with a trio of Partridge Wynadottes – two hens and a cockerel called Clarence – kindly donated by my friend and neighbour, Mary Goold. Poultry-keeping is a pretty virulent kind of bug and the population soon expanded – we now have a number of rare-breed hens and breed both Exchequer Leghorns and Lavender Araucanas, as well as keeping a few hybrids for egg-laying. Two female Roman Geese followed, hatched in my incubator from eggs donated by another friend, Ruth Leslie from Achiltibuie, who also found us a gander to keep them company. And then it seemed only reasonable to acquire some ducks - beautiful glossy green-black Cayugas. The sheep (ten Hebridean ewes) are actually a later addition, and much as I love them they’re really David’s babies – he has them literally eating out of his hand. Ten lambs from ten sheep in our first year and then, in May 2009, we finally managed to fulfill a long-held ambition of mine and acquired a hive of bees. Actually, I rather suspect they have acquired us.
Days are always filled (to the brim) with writing (a second novel, entitled The Bee Dancer, is to be published in October 2011, thanks to a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary), running Two Ravens Press, and keeping the croft going – including a rapidly expanding vegetable patch and associated greenhouse.
And yet, and yet ... beautiful as it is here, we're looking for wilder and more remote. And so in June 2010 we'll be packing up for another adventure: moving to a seaside croft in the beautiful region of Uig on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Another renovation project - though thankfully not quite so extreme!
David
I always wanted to be a philosopher. They were my heroes. Leibniz and Spinoza, Schopenhauer – but most of all Nietzsche. I was handed a grubby under-the-counter copy of Beyond Good and Evil when I was 14. Scarred me for life. And I went to a poetry reading by Ted Hughes at about the same time. Coincidences and arbitrariness, events that alter the trajectory.
The I joined the RAF as a pilot and went on a long, meandering digression for 26 years. A wonderful, expanding digression that I wouldn’t swap a minute of for anything in the world. Nights up with the northern lights struggling with turbulence to get fuel off a bucking-bronco of a tanker hose. All that stuff and more.
Now I’m following the poetry path again. And the philosophers who came along for the ride – the ones who weren’t afraid of a few flashes and bangs – have taken me back to the classroom at last.
Plus there are the ten little black sheep who really aren’t half as daft as they make out … and a Border Collie puppy, Nell, who is the (other) love of my life.
