Marcus Fagon
@storytellermythswithmarcus
Facilitated 5 events
| Website | |
| Gender |
Man
|
| Sexuality |
Straight
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| Location |
Bristol
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| Last active |
3 days ago
|
A short bio is that my work is rooted in a love of stories, big questions, and connecting with people.
The long Bio. Is a story, a story of my genealogy. I am a dual heritage storyteller. My maternal line is British doctors stretching back three generations. My paternal line is Jamaican subsistence farmers stretching back three generations. Yet this telling, like any other, is only part of the picture. As I follow my maternal line back, three hundred years, to my oldest known ancestors. A woman named Kathy McCarthy, born in St. Kitts and described as Irish-Ghanaian and a man named Malone, born in Ireland and who emigrated to St Kitts. My personal story of migration and heritage. That I have been telling for years - My mother is from England, my father is from Jamaica, I was born in America and I moved to Bristol when I was about four is reflected back to me. One chapter in a three hundred year old ancestral story of heritage. These stories of ancestry orientated me, not toward certainty, but toward questions of culture, inheritance, and belonging. Who am I? Where do I come from? And How should I live?
It was these questions that led me in search of big answers. Part of this search has been a fifteen year career, and still ongoing, working with young people. It was through this work that I encountered the power of myth. I volunteered on a residential weekend for young people, which used mythology as a core part of its intervention and was shocked by the transformational power of story. From there I continued my study of mythology and storytelling and found it the most profound way to talk about and understand my own experiences. I felt incredibly lucky to be given the tools and the permission to make sense of my life through these stories from Millennia ago. I found shockingly similar motifs across vastly different cultures. I then dabbled with telling stories to the young people and was shocked by how they were able to take deep meanings from the story so quickly. This reiterated to me how universal and fundamental storytelling was to humanity - the only thing older is probably fire. What I realised is that myths do not give us answers to the big questions. What they give is something less but also something profoundly more. They give us the responses of our ancestors to the big questions stretching back thousands of years. This is something shockingly beautiful to be treasured and shared.
Find out more about me here;
Linkedin - linkedin.com/in/marcusfagon