Brief update

It has been a while since I last posted properly. Life has been busy, in a good way - with an amazing new job, a lovely new partner (who is introducing me to Sicilian folklore), a short holiday away at Grey Mare Camp, and various chapters for anthologies.

Grey Mare is a very relaxing pagan camp, and a good chance to tell some stories - one or two of which I may record and upload here. Alongside my own contributions, several other people told stories - it is intriguing to not only hear new stories (some of which I am "acquiring" for my own repertoire) but to also see different styles of telling.

Story acquisition can be a slow process at times. Books are excellent, and there are many collections on my shelves of stories from all different parts of the world. The Net also has some excellent story resources, though also a great many badly organised ones. However, one of the best ways remains listening to other tellers and gaining not only the bare bones of the tales, but also some inspiration as to how they can be told.
Pace, intonation, imagery, poetry, song, body language, use of musical instruments (well, not so much in my case because I cannot currently play any), props etc. There are all sorts of ways of finding one's Voice. More accurately, finding different voices because - as a polypsychological entity (how frigging pretentious is that?) - there's no reason to be restricted to one Voice. There are many Voices that we can each speak in, each with their own way of viewing the world. This is something I hope to come back to in future posts, when life calms down a little and I can find the mental capacity to write more.
Grey Mare, as the name suggests, is a camp strongly guided by the Spirit of Horse (especially Epona), and tales and songs of horse were plentiful. I shall be adding a few more horse stories to my memory store.