In the thick of the heat, Sarah sits with Donkey Skin — the dancing, the impossible dresses, the prince as the first green shoot pushing through — and finds a way to move difficult feelings like toffee instead of chewing them over. From there: treasure held underground, the last auk’s disappearance, a garden as mirror for self-care, and a folk song recorded to defend Felton Common from Bristol Airport. Ends with a grounding meditation to root you in the earth and let the sun in.

Music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque. “The Goose and the Common” by the Common Land Choir.

Sarah will be telling stories at Priddy Folk Festival (four sessions in the children’s tent, half eleven and three) and at Tolpuddle Festival the following weekend.

This autumn she’s running two courses in Glastonbury: Women Who Run With The Wolves (Tuesdays, 7 weeks) and a Greek myth wintering course (Wednesdays, biweekly). She’s also playing a gig with Ted Waters on 30th October at St Ben’s, Glastonbury.

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Opening music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque

Sarah records this episode in the aftermath of an accidental encounter with cactus acid and two visits hospital having her eyes rinsed out with saline — which turns out to be the perfect portal into a meditation on salt, flavour, and what we’re worth.

Moving through Cap o’ Rushes, Donkey Skin, a North American corn myth, and the story of the giant turnip, this episode asks: what are we hiding under the donkey skin, and can we begin to dance in our own radiance again? Sarah weaves personal reckoning — the places where we make ourselves small, the six-year-old still reaching for something she never got — with fairy tale as inner map.

A Summer Solstice episode in the truest sense: everything revealed, shadows and all. Closes with a live guitar fragment of the Detectorists theme tune.

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Opening music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque

Sarah records from a closed curtain, a lit fire, and the aftermath of two hours of singing on an empty stomach — and discovers that drooping under the weight of your own blooming is a perfectly good reason to stay in. This episode wanders through the names of old roses (Rosa Damascena, Deep Secret, Hidden Harmony), stumbles into Edward Young’s 244-page night poem and ends up with Edgar Allan Poe, Christina Rossetti, a new collaboration with the Synthphonic Orchestra, and the news that the Latin root of semen means hope. The tangents are the point.

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Sarah recreates a medieval landscape for the Arthurian myth of Lanval — the knight overlooked at Arthur's Pentecost feast who wanders to the river's edge and is called into the mist by a Lady of the Fae. With atmospheric heavy lifting from the Avalonian Free State Choir singing Gaudette and Dragonfly performing La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Intro music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque.

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Opening music by Queen Space Baroque

Sarah returns from a day storytelling and running a poetry workshop inside a men's prison — an experience that cracked her open.

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But first, a story she didn’t get to tell in her Women Who Run With the Wolves group last week.

From there, Sarah moves into the myth she and theatre director Joanna Proctor have chosen as the heart of a new immersive mythic experience they’re co-creating: Echo and Narcissus. Stripped of her words by Hera, able only to repeat what she hears. Him, raised without mirrors, learning to see himself only through the reactions of others — and never quite satisfied. Sarah tells the story with stillness and depth, then unpacks why it speaks so urgently to now: the loneliness of needing external reflection to feel real; the inner voice that cannot find its way out.

Sarah shares brainstorming notes from her day with Joanna, including the question that really got her: What do we reject when we remember we are worthless? And she reads aloud her own visioning of the evening — origami birds, torn pages, the line from Clarissa Pinkola Estés: “If you don’t go into the woods, your life will never begin.”

Also mentioned: A new Women who Run Wih the Wolves group in Glastonbury Story Wintering group coming soon, in person and online.

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Recording on the Spring Equinox — She shares a week that began with a surprisingly complex Florence Nightingale school session, honouring the many women who served alongside her in the Crimea, before falling headlong into Greek mythology at one in the morning after her Alice in Wonderland finale in Glastonbury. The nine Muses — daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory — become an invocation, a book orgy unfolds, and a new chapter of work begins.

Sarah also announces fortnightly episodes from here till September, with free online Story Magic workshops for Patreon supporters.

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Waking in the Flower: Madness, Medicine & Marmalade

Opening music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque

A wandering, intimate episode threaded through with grief, wonder, and the week’s many mythic currents. Sarah reflects on the first in-person Women Who Run With The Wolves circle — a gathering she describes as “nectar” — and a deep resonance with the story of Bluebeard: the girl who ignores her instincts to fit in, and a childhood memory of Jimmy Savile’s Jim’ll Fix It that illuminates how a whole culture can be complicit in the humiliation of the vulnerable.

A visit to Glastonbury Abbey brings sadness — the beloved herb garden is to be removed — and a rattle of the cage around what gets quietly erased and why.

Sarah reads aloud from Hafiz (Coleman Barks’ translation) — luminous fragments gathered on the back of a choir song sheet — before the episode closes with a tender guided visualisation: waking, slowly, inside a blooming flower, after a thousand winters of sleep.

Support the pod via Patreon — and thank you to the Patreons whose gift of a new microphone made this episode possible.

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Alice, Archetypes & The Garden of Innocence

I am recording from a hotel room in Bradford during World Book Week, fresh from telling Alice in Wonderland stories to schoolchildren 27 times across three days. Come down the rabbit hole with me.

The concept of lysis (story resolution) from Clarissa Pinkola Estés — and why a nightmare is simply a story without an ending

Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor for growing up: too big, too small, never quite fitting

Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse and the concept of “good mad vs. bad mad” (featuring Violet Gibson, the woman who shot Mussolini)

Plans for an adult Alice in Wonderland evening show at the Goddess House, Glastonbury (19th)

Women Who Run With The Wolves group — now full, September waiting list open

Intro music by Queen Space Baroque. Ritual Door Number one

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Opening music by Queen Space Baroque Ritual door No1

Sarah recaps a Valentine storytelling evening with musicians Rossi and Imogen, and a Rose Cabaret in Glastonbury where she compared alongside Jenny Bliss, Tom Widdicombe, and storyteller Beth Webb.

At the cabaret, she performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet — a meditation on young love and naming that opens into a wider reflection on what we pass down to future generations: not just love, but everything that is not love.

Elsewhere: a love letter workshop for the Mental Health Network, writing to past and future selves, tracing your hand and celebrating it — and a great-aunt’s funeral at 100, with the beautiful image of women embroidering encouraging messages inside soldiers’ uniforms.

The episode closes in the fossil room at the Clark Shoe Museum, where storytelling to children sparked wonder at the revelation that whales and dolphins were once land mammals — their fins still bearing the five-knuckled memory of hands.

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