WRITINGS
ARTICLES & OTHER BOOKS
“Considered as a figure in our waking dream, (Trump) could be seen as the psyche’s attempt to call attention to the shamelessness of a culture whose dominant cultural complexes sanctify money, power, violence, and individual advancement over the grounding awareness that the survival of our species rides on our soulful interconnection with each other and our shared biosphere. As an Iraqui-born Lyft driver put it to me during a recent ride: ‘Paradise without others is not paradise.’”
"The Body Blow of Trump’s Election"
“Those who love children know how important it is to bend down from adult height to look directly into their eyes from their closer-to-the-earth perspective…It is here, in that embodied state, that the world makes full impact; where senses and intuitions are keen, and the soul stand undefended against feeling terror and rage, sorrow and hunger and awe. The feeling-toned aspect of life is rich and universal, representing a significant healing dynamism for our troubled species.”
"The Child Within/The Child Without"
"…(and) what started as a kind of ‘Marco Polo’ in the social media swimming pool turned into a deep-sea-dive into more provocative, moving, and ultimately saltier and life-giving waters.”
"A Jungian Alice in Social Media Land"
“The cancer hit like a bolt out of the blue, discovered by a disbelieving radiologist in a routine mammogram. I met for the first time with my new oncologist to discuss treatment options on my fifty-third birthday. I found myself making a personal commitment to combat any internal voices that wished me dead. I’d worked for years on my harsh inner critic. Now I found myself visualizing my inner attacker as a bully coming up a set of school steps to beat me up. I vowed to kick him back down the stairs each time he came after me. I was sobered to discover that I was having to kick him down thousands of times a day, but what was ultimately born of those repetitive efforts were the first glimmers of a more deeply rooted self-love.”
"The Church of Her Body"
“…you might simply be curious, though in folklore and mythology curiosity is rarely depicted as a simple affair, but one that spurs both danger and development. While curiosity may literally kill the cat, avid curiosity tends to accompany intellectual giftedness in children. Freud had it that the child’s first curiosity concerns what takes place in the secrecy of the marital bed, much like our Judeo-Christian myth of Eve’s curiosity, whose first fruit is the dawning awareness of sexuality and nakedness and brings death into the world. The link between secrecy and curiosity, sex and wisdom, love and death is the through line, not just for gossip and Woody Allen films, but for the whole of human experience, giving it its piquancy and punch.”
"Gossip, Envy, Secrecy, and Belonging"
“…geneticists tell us that we all descend matrilineally from an African woman they dub the Mitochondrial Eve. Can we even begin to imagine how much beauty, how much suffering, how many dreams deferred in the face of implacable reality were undergone by that Eve and all those who came after her? And how much we ourselves matter in the continued stream of life—our charge to create, through our own willingness to suffer and to dream, an ongoing future that will honor and redeem our ancestors?”
"Honoring the Mantis Between Our Toes"
“Some ancient nut-brown Turkish ancestress accompanied me as I burst forth from the womb of my pale-skinned mother, casting me into an otherness from my personal family and the small community of Hermosa Beach where I spent my first years. Living by the sea meant playing on the sand, and in the summers my skin would tan to a rich umber—which might have been fine, had Hermosa Beach not then been primarily populated by Dust Bowl refugees…Bible-thumping Baptists (with) blue-eyed, tow-headed, alabaster-skinned children…”
"Tangled Up in Brown"
BLOG
Songs of Root and Sky
May 21, 2017
I'm a city girl. For most of my life, I've lived in SoCal, with a brief stint in Berkeley as a young teen. My family moved around a lot, but the closest we got to anything resembling raw nature was in my earliest years, when we lived just a few blocks from the Pacific...
Fleur’s Back- in Tizita, Book Two of the Fleur Trilogy!
May 5, 2017
Fleur Robins burst into my life like a firecracker, excitedly skipping ahead of me, tugging me into realms I barely knew existed and stretching my mind as impossibly as childbirth once stretched my body. Writers are often encouraged to write about what we know, but my...
Stand up Like a Mountain
Nov 27, 2016
I can’t believe it’s been two whole years since I last posted here in Cyber Land. During that time, a new grandchild burst into my life like a wild wind, toppling old routines and riveting my attention. I’ve become the archetypal grandma, yakking away to everyone I...
BOOKS
BOOK REVIEWS
Sharon Heath has, through her fiction and through Fleur, produced a record of the challenges of our times that is unparalleled among modern fiction writers, making these four books...an utterly essential read.
Joey Madia
New Mystics Review, “'Messages from the Void': A Review of Sharon Heath’s The Mysterious Composition of Tears, The Further Adventures of Fleur, Book 1"
Among Heath’s great strengths as a novelist is her ability to interweave science, science fiction, whimsy, and the complexity of human relationships, with all their messy history and glorious failings, into a cohesive and moving narrative. This latest Fleur story takes us even deeper, into an exploration of communication with animal and plant life on Earth, and a wildly imaginative rendering of Fleur’s “home away from home,” where Einstein, Pauli and other brilliant scientists morph into fantastic shapes and colors as they ponder Fleur’s dilemma, and ultimately, how to save the world. THE MYSTERIOUS COMPOSITION OF TEARS is a feast for the heart and mind, and a call to action.
Wendy Anderson Epstein, Screenwriter
If you're anything like me, Sharon Heath's luminous The History of My Body will have you on the horns of a delicious dilemma immediately. You'll want to rush through the story to see what happens next, even as you'll want to linger on each page for the sheer glory of its language. Sharon Heath is an exceptional writer and The History of My Body is an extraordinary novel. Our heroine, Fleur, has moved into my pantheon of favorite fictional characters. She is, by turns, beguiling, funny, brave, exasperating and heartbreaking. The supporting cast is equally delightful—these are definitely people you'll want to spend time with. As Fleur comes of age, lurching from crisis to acclaim and back again, she captured my heart, as I'm certain she'll snag yours. I left her world with the greatest reluctance, but I have two consolations: The Fleur Trilogy Volumes Two and Three await. Highly recommended.
Burt J. Kempner
Mild Wild Media
I read The Mysterious Composition of Tears in 48 hours, resonating with the colors, the trees, music, the strangeness of the human heart and the infallibility of the Universe's heart. (This is) a playful, a joyous book in the midst of all the crises. Joanna Macy said that we needed new sacred texts. There are places where (Sharon Heath's) descriptions of the tragedies, the beauty, the ineffable, rise to that level. Sacred words.
Carolyn Raffensperger
The Science and Environmental Health Network
Heath…has created an amazement of a novel which keeps singing in my heart with its feminist assertion and its feminine depths, its scientific muscle and its mythic invocations, its agony for the earth and its joy in life and love, its girlfriend intimations and its far flung vision, its wisdom that ‘dark matter…is the glue of the universe’ and its celebration of the ‘mysterious inter-relations of all things (which) people liked to call God.’
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Psychological Perspectives
Tizita, like the first novel before it in The Fleur Trilogy, The History of my Body, is as utterly original as its chief protagonist Fleur Robins, and in some of the same brilliant, moving, and laugh-out-loud hilarious ways.
Frances Hatfield
Psychological Perspectives
Heath’s books, however, engage us further into the world’s troubles, as she ups the stakes on a macro level while pulling us in with her characters on the micro level. If literature has real value for the soul, this is it.
Joey Madia
Literary Aficionado
In her wise, superbly crafted debut novel, author Sharon Heath connects a series of highly improbable events into a tightly knit story about a self-taught young girl who believes her coming of age is a wonderful example of the butterfly effect: or, as Fleur came to understand nonlinear systems, a personal development with a sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Malcolm R. Campbell
Malcolm's Roundtable
Heath (The History of My Body) continues the story of fictional young Nobel laureate Fleur Robins as she pursues matters of the heart as well as her cutting-edge physics research, while facing challenging social interactions Heath’s adroit writing makes Fleur’s remarkable life consistently captivating.
Publishers Weekly
…if your interests…include Jungian thought, David Austin roses, the problem with pornography, and a lovely romantic tale—oh and did I leave out Ethiopian culture? And parenting? I have rarely read an author with Heath’s breadth and facility with storytelling. Read it and become engrossed—and enlightened.
Leah Shelleda, author
After the Jug Was Broken
Tizita asks the tough questions, calling upon the series’ engaging cast of support characters to serve as the moral 'chorus' for Fleur’s philosophical navigation as well as doing some of the heavy lifting on their own.
Joey Madia
New Mystics Reviews
Sharon Heath's tragicomic novel is a laboratory to observe a homely caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly flapping her wings and changing the world. In the chrysalis of Heath's story, the butterfly effect transforms physics and biological facts into juicy, universal myth. Oh the joys and sorrows of inhabiting a young girl's body in the swish and swirl of sex, food, death, politics. Live them all here in their riotous complexity with Fleur, our historian of the body and the body politic.
Carolyn Raffensperger
The Science and Environmental Health Network
Sharon Heath’s sense of irony is both savory and sweet, transporting us into a world where the improbable is at once real and mysterious, and where the sparkly presence of a memorable girl named Fleur will remind you that true wisdom is born of innocence.
Jeremiah Abrams, author
Reclaiming the Inner Child and Meeting the Shadow
Fleur is a narrator we really do need right now. She is such a collection of Compromise, Complexity, Community, Communication, and Communion that she is the perfect spokesperson for the 21st century.
Joey Madia
Literary Aficionado
If you've ever wondered what it's like to be inside the mind of a quirky young girl that some people consider autistic and others a genius, you must meet Fleur Robins, Heath's enchanting protagonist of The History of my Body.
Molly Jordan
Psychological Perspectives