Though I trained as an actor and have stood before thousands on stage, storytelling is a different beast entirely.  Theatre is a craft of precision - lines learned, movements rehearsed, moments shaped to fit the arc of a script.  

But storytelling? 

Storytelling is wilder. 

It is breath and bone, wind and fire, shaped in the telling, shifting with the listener.  It is an old magic, older than theatre, older than the written word itself.

My path into this ancient art began in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic, when I felt the call - not just to nature, but to kinship, to the old ways of gathering, to something deeper than the modern world allows.  In parallel with my MSt in Writing for Performance at The University of Cambridge, I stepped onto another path: Stalking the Rebel Soul, a course led by world renowed storyteller and mythologist Dr. Martin Shaw at the West Country School of Myth.  Over several weekends in a large house on the wild fringes of Dartmoor, we sat with stories that had crossed oceans and centuries - some no longer than a breath, others unfolding over entire days and nights.

For me, the course culminated in being accepted to do a Wilderness Vigil, Wolf Milk - a profound and solitary experience of fasting and storytelling, where I held vigil for four days and nights in the liminal space between the ruins of a Bronze Age fort on the edge of the ancient moor and the chthonic depths beyond.

That experience kindled something in me.  It reminded me that storytelling is not just entertainment - it is a way of seeing, of remembering, of weaving ourselves back into the great, roaring current of human experience. It is a fire that has burned for thousands of years, and if we let it, it can still warm us today.

I am still a fledgling storyteller, walking this path with curiosity and care.  But I know this: stories are spells, and in the telling, something stirs.

'Stories are magic and narrative is alchemy that turns everyday lead into gold!'