$20 - General Admission
$25 - Preferred Seating

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Author and wilderness rites-of-passage guide Martin Shaw has been described by Robert Bly as “a true master” and as “one of the very greatest storytellers we have.” Based in Devon in the UK, Shaw is Director of the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, leading a year-long program and wilderness retreats, and lecturing. He is also a visiting lecturer in the Desmond Tutu leadership program at Oxford University.

It is not enough, says Shaw, to simply tell or listen to transformative mythological tales, or even to know these stories, or to have experienced them. We must all become carriers of those stories, have them living within us, and hear them speaking to every moment of our lives. Martin Shaw is a great carrier of story, and it is this that he hopes will also happen to us. His work has been described as “visceral and imaginative”...finding “wildness in both language and landscape, using myth, philosophy and poetic leaps as a crossroads between the two.”

Central to Shaw’s work is a period of four years he spent living in a tent on the Welsh border studying initiation, myth, and the simple challenges of living outdoors. As a wilderness guide, he has fifteen years of experience facilitating fasts in a wild location. As a storyteller and teacher, he is internationally regarded as one of the most exciting new proponents of the mythic imagination. He has recently returned from Norway, where he collaborated with poet and Rumi translator Coleman Barks on the relationship between poetry, myth and the ecstatic. He has also just led a five-day telling of an ancient Russian fairy tale, accompanied on percussion by John Densmore, former drummer for The Doors.

Shaw’s new book, A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness (White Cloud Press), presents seven initiatory myths: Siberian, Irish, Romanian, Gypsy, and more. These are all what Shaw describes as “prophetic stories,” stories that speak deeply to the challenges we face today, in the world and in our personal lives. Interwoven is a commentary on his years in the wild, and his belief that the words “culture” and “wild” have been artificially divided. Now, more than ever, is the time to reunite them, and Shaw presents several images of what that might look like. The book has been highly acclaimed internationally.

Don’t miss this exciting and transformative experience! You, too, can become a carrier of stories!