‘Stories are koans that life sends us.
They contain hints of multiple realities.’
Ben Okri
I had been living in Ireland for 12 years when a friend asked me one day to tell a story to a group of Boy Scouts. I thought of all the stories I had read and listened to and I realised that I knew a great store of tales , myths and legends. I felt suddenly a great thirst to share them and began to tell them in schools , hospitals, libraries, theatres, festivals and private gatherings. When I moved back to England, I spent a wonderful 3 months at the International School of Storytelling in Sussex. At my home in Dorset we have storytelling gatherings and a great joy for me was to be invited to tell stories by WB Yeats at the Yeats festival in Sligo. Yeats wrote that ‘imagination was the first emanation of divinity’ and that stories, like all beautiful things have ‘lain burningly on the Divine hand’.
Stories I love to tell:
Stories of Red Hanrahan by WB Yeats
Stories from Yeats’ Mythologies
Gawain and the Green Knight
Tales of Finn McCool
Russian Fairy Tales
Stories by Flaubert, Balzac and Pushkin
Tales from the Brothers Grimm
Oriental Tales
Tales of Saints and their Animal Friends
English Tales