Sarah Mooney
@mooneystories

I’ve been an award-winning storyteller for 25 years. I started walking this

path as an actress with Northern Stage Ensemble. It was fertile ground to

train with practitioners who have spent a life time pondering presence and

humanity on stage. I trained with The Peter Brook Company, Maly Theatre,

Frantic Assembly, Augusto Boal and eventually ran away to Cornwall with

Kneehigh Theatre Company. From there my own story took me to

residencies at the National Portrait Gallery, the National Centre of

Childrens books, and onto to the Roald Dahl foundation, where I got to sit

in his chair and look through his notepads and first drafts.

“Your storytelling holds me in a mesmerising dance between dark and

light. You are skilful, brave, bold, direct and vulnerable. You ask us to

meet you there.”

—Ziggy Slingsby, aerialist

The itch to join the circus needed to be scratched so next was narrative

director for the Whispering Wood Folk, myth and circus deep in the wood. I

learnt to listen to the forest floor, sing the son fog the trees and late nature

channel through me. group, as well as creating my own work and

recording many stories.

By now I had a son, strapped to my back as I told or snoozing in a

wheelbarrow by my side. Motherhood deepened the storyteller in me as I

remade me stories to nurture and keep intact his kaledoscpoic soul.

In 2015 an invitation landed at my door like a fishermans catch, silver

rainbowed and very much alive. I was invited aboard a boat called the

Seadragon as it sailed across the Atlantic. The sailors and scientists

onboard where concerned about the plastic in the ocean and wanted a

storyteller to take their dry statistics and weave them into stories that

people would listen too. I sailed with them for a month and wrote the play

Plop! In the Ocean which is still out there touring Scottish primary schools

with Hopscotch theatre company. I had help from the gods with this,

Demeter and Persephone were the main characters and I started to open

up to writing myths and remembering stories differently. Sometimes stories

get damp with the oppression of time and need a good shaking out. Like a

wet dog or dusty carpet.

Another initiation followed, In 2016, I was appointed Bard of Glastonbury –

a yearly competition for poets, storytellers and songwriters who live within

walking distance of Glastonbury Tor. Before then, with the exception of

Plop! I had only really been an oral storyteller but a car accident that left my

speech jumbled for a while caused me to take up my pen. I am still

wrestling with it.

In recent years I went to Colorado to learn from Clarissa Pinkola Estes,

hugely affirming and inspiring. She told me to get organised and get out

there! I now run journeys through her magnificent book, Women Who Run

with The Wolves, because everyone should have those stories in their back

pocket.

My passion is blowing the dust from old stories, unwinding them so

that the original wisdom can flow through. I believe that stories have

all the answers, they soften us open us and connect us to what is

important. Storytelling and guiding people through story is my life’s

work, my soul’s purpose and my greatest honour.