This is a story about family.
This is a story about history.
This is a story about relationships, people, patterns.
This is a story about stories…
This… is a story.
The Selkie: A Song of Many Waters, was my first solo show, combining poetry, traditional storytelling, drama, and music. I commissioned artwork from the brilliantly talented Sa’adiah Khan, which appears in the book of the show, and in every piece of publicity, but the rest of it was entirely mine (well, okay, I may have borrowed some tropes here and there to create what I used to pitch on the streets of Edinburgh as “a modern life mythologised” during the festival.
It tells the tale of a selkie (a shapeshifting seal/ human) whose skin was either stolen or went missing when she was very young, because I found myself wondering: how does it feel to be a magical creature whose powers have been suppressed through her family’s fears of sticking out from the crowd.
Listen on BandCamp
(Yes, it’s a metaphor; of course it is – it’s an hour-long metaphor; sometimes there are metaphors within the metaphor, but you can also just listen to it as a story about a magical sea-creature travelling across the land trying to find her proper home, and coming up against all sorts of interesting beings along the way.)
There are still a few copies of the book available, and I will be making it into an ebook soon. You can also listen to it online, and download it if you like. Every single attempt to record a live version was doomed to failure – either technical or otherwise – so we’ll all have to content ourselves with the studio version.
