Look up!

There’s a star that’s started to appear.

It’s been seen before, you may remember.

If we dare to put down our screens and walk out into the night, we will find that it’s leading us somewhere. Past tired ideas and weary polemics. The star is leading us to something we may have completely forgotten about. To the one some First Nations people call Creator-Sets-Free.

The star is leading us to a cave where a strange one is being perpetually born, surrounded by the warmth of animals and adored by magicians. A baby that is already a fugitive, and in only a few short decades will be taken to Skull Hill and slaughtered for the troubling, beautiful things that he says. The fundamental poetic event of our time. A storyteller and a healer who then has the audacity to return from the Underworld with a message of love so extraordinary it has caused half the world to swoon.

Here’s the thing.

The star is back.

It’s appearing to many of us, making our life far more inconvenient and infinitely more exciting.

I have wondered at this star for several years now, and its light means the land around me now appears entirely different. For 30 years I have described the earth around me as best I can – through myth and poetry – but this is new and startling.

Bringing, I hope, the very best of what I’ve learnt over the years, I’m going to be teaching from the place I find myself in now. That’s a vulnerable but vital thing to do. Anything else is cowardice and dereliction of duty. Please note – there’ll be many myths, fairy tales and ideas I have loved for decades alongside the developing landscape this star is helping me behold. It’s a happy jostle where everyone is making friends with everyone else.

It’s the wildest, most wonderful place I’ve ever been.

So I start all over again, from September.

After two decades at the helm of the Westcountry School of Myth, this is the trail we are setting out on. Most of my team aren’t Christians, so don’t worry, you won’t get swamped in some kind of endless altar-call.

Maybe no one will come, I can’t be worrying about that. Some things we just have to do.

We will begin in September at an old manor house on the edge of Dartmoor. It’s comfortable, the food is great and wild weather often looms. There’s more detail on the course below. Much more will become clear in the doing of the thing. Everyone is most welcome, from whatever background or persuasion. Please note this is a 5-weekend course and it’s not possible to book individual weekends.

The Five Weekend Programme
with Dr Martin Shaw
& special guests

No experience of storytelling is needed, and there is no ‘performance’ aspect to this course. If fully booked there will be 60 participants in the 2024 cohort which will run between September and March 2025.

FEES (including VAT)

Budget shared room: a bunk bed in a standard shared room:£2460 

Standard shared room: sharing with up to 6 others (single sex): £2580 

Twin/triple: sharing a room with one (or two) others: £2760

Double: there are a few rooms for couples, sharing a double bed: £2760

Dr Martin Shaw is a writer, storyteller and mythologist. An Eastern Orthodox Christian, he has spent many years as a wilderness rites of passage guide. Author of seventeen books, his latest, Bardskull, was book of the day in the Guardian and described as “rich and transgressive” by Erica Wagner in the Sunday Times.

The Skin-Boat & The Star is a homage to the early Christians, especially the Celts who would have travelled in such boats with this dangerous and wonderful story tucked under the breastbone of their hearts.