Episode 4 Transcript

Helen (00:01.582)

As we continue on this journey from understanding our deep past to where it forms in our DNA and our biology and all of those sorts of things, the true understanding of why stories are so important to us is emerging. And in this episode of Stories in our DNA, I'm speaking to John the storyteller, who is a folklorist and a historian.

with a love for tales and linking the past and present to place. He's doing a PhD in storytelling and sense making and is understanding this role that modern myths can play in our environment. And that's what this episode is about. It's about folklore and landscape. It's about where stories originated in terms of where we actually live. And because I live in Sussex, I really wanted John to come on and talk about

myths and legends from this particular place, but it can also be applied to absolutely anywhere in terms of where you live or the landscape that you operate in and how that can connect to story. And this conversation is so fascinating because it really does help us understand in much more complexity why us humans tell stories, the purpose of why we tell those stories and how that is connected in with our culture and where we live.

So this was a really, really fascinating one. And if you are enjoying this series, please do like, subscribe, please do share because it really means the world to me to be getting this message out into the world of how we can all harness the power of our words and stories to change lives for the better. So if you are ready, let's begin.

Helen (00:01.473)

So John, from your perspective, with your esteemed experience and viewpoint, why do you feel humans began telling stories, what they were for and how they evolved as they have done?

Jon (he/him) (00:18.21)

Well, I find it to be, it's such a fundamental part of our evolution that I've been fascinated looking back at the work that the experts have done on that evolutionary side of things and the way that it's storytelling is understood as being a means of understanding what's going on around us and then being able to share that understanding with our group because

We are social animals, that's how humans evolved. We are one of a great line of species that found that a trick to get by was to work together. so, yeah, from what I understand it, it's suggested that storytelling became common and popular.

so to speak, because if you were able to notice the interesting novel bits of relevant information about what's going on around us and relay that in a charismatic and effective way, then that was a useful skill to have. But I particularly like theories that go beyond that and say that it's not just about individually making sense of what's happening, it's about the collective effort.

to make sense of things. That we discuss the story, we tell the story together and then through picking through it and saying, yes, but what about that, whatever, we come to a collective understanding, which I think is particularly important in terms of bonding the group. I love Robin Dunbar's theories that storytelling is one of a set of behaviors that humans evolved to replicate the

the grooming that other primates do. The verbal grooming, exactly, yeah. And that it has the same sort of set in terms of the hormones that it releases and things. It evokes the same sort of sense of being bonded. Yeah. But also that it enables the group to cope with particularly uncertainty, really. We don't know what's going on here. So let's come up with an explanation for which you can read a story.

Helen (02:07.712)

Yeah, verbal grooming.

Helen (02:19.182)

Exactly.

Jon (he/him) (02:33.354)

which we feel comfortable with and therefore we've addressed that. And I think Terry Pratchett puts that incredibly well, the late great Terry Pratchett. Not only was he the one who suggested that we shouldn't call our species homo sapiens, we should be called pan narrans, the story-making chimpanzee. Yes, yes, it's wonderful, isn't it? But he has some amazing terms of phrase about it.

Helen (02:53.885)

I didn't know this!

Yes!

Jon (he/him) (03:02.792)

the idea that making maps and the whole here be dragons thing, because if you don't know what's there, then that's really troubling. So at least if you call it a dragon, then you can you feel like you've got some sort of control over it. At least you can tell yourself you've got control over it. And as he says, that's almost as good, really. So ultimately, here be dragons is better than nothing, better dragons than the void.

Helen (03:31.818)

Yes!

Jon (he/him) (03:32.298)

And so that way of like, just managing uncertainty by at least giving it a shape and a name and the story tells you what to do about it. Yeah. Yes.

Helen (03:44.171)

Filling in the gaps that we don't understand in order to feel safe by labelling and making meaning of something that we don't know.

Jon (he/him) (03:55.567)

Yeah, exactly that. Yes. Yeah.

Helen (03:57.552)

God, I just love this topic so much. And I agree, you know, and in all my studies of doing this and, you know, really understanding why we have this still as such an intrinsic skill that is so firmly in our DNA is to understand why we originally did tell these stories in a harsh landscape where we didn't understand scientifically what was happening.

Jon (he/him) (04:01.23)

Yeah, me too.

Helen (04:26.989)

with the sun and the moons and the weather patterns and all of those sorts of things. And so to fill in the gaps of what we don't know and to bond us with our social glue and our verbal grooming, we told stories in order to make that meaning and that sense of belonging. But why I'm really fascinated to talk to you, John, is where we take this to a different place in this season of Stories in Our DNA. And that is where folklore.

and myth and legend sort of comes into the stories we told. And of course, all over the world, that takes different forms in different ways through different cultures. But what I'd love to talk to you about specifically is the land that we live on and where you, you you share stories and how place and story intertwine. And I'd love

your kind of thoughts on that given, you know, what you do.

Jon (he/him) (05:29.849)

and I love talking about this. It's such a joy to be brought on because that's always been a big part of my work as a professional storyteller without even deliberately meaning it to be. But I realized very early on when I first started getting into storytelling from a hobby basis, just for fun, in the early 2010s, that this was where I was drawn to.

I think that the easiest way to sort of explain it is probably to talk a bit about why I was drawn to it really to start with, which is that I grew up and I am checking my privilege here. I'm not complaining about this and I'm very lucky to have grown up middle-class and comfortable in the suburbs of England.

and you know, I'm white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant as well, I have been very much part of the dominant culture all my life. But growing up sort of in the late 20th century in the suburbs in England, then I know that I always felt a bit of a sort of a rootlessness really, a sense of not really having a place, not really having a culture.

And it's very easy to say, well, of course, fish don't know that they live in water. Sometimes people say because it's just there all around them. And actually, that was the dominant culture that I was in. But I've seen exactly that same sense of ruthlessness in a lot of my peers, especially when I first went to university in the late 90s in Wales, because that's another big part of my background is having family in Wales and that being somewhere that we would visit lots.

And I met a lot of other white middle-class English kids like me who were clearly looking for roots in the same way that I was and finding it in popular presentations of myth and folklore and just as I was and in studying the history that goes with them. so that's very much what brought me to it. But I've spent

Jon (he/him) (07:43.519)

all my adult life mulling on these things and realising, actually no, I do automatically have a culture. It's just not labelled as such unless you get into the more flag and empire kind of things, which politically, it's just where I am. And through thinking about when I got more and more into social history,

cultural history and looking at stuff from a grassroots level, then I realized that actually everywhere has its stories, everywhere has its past. And it was people just like you and me whose hopes and dreams and lives and efforts made the world that we live in. And so it sort of felt like this was a big misunderstanding that I and my peers and the people who had told us our place in the world.

had made without even realising it is that actually these places that seemed mundane and without stories, actually that's not true. The stories don't necessarily look like what we're looking for, but they are there. And so as I became a storyteller, then one of the big things that I've always been motivated to do is to give every audience where I can a sense that the day-to-day places that they live in, walk through, move through,

that they might take for granted, that they might think are boring and mundane are actually far from it. There is magic everywhere and I want to imbue that sense of special excitement and meaningfulness to the landscape all around us really. Go on, sorry.

Helen (09:28.439)

In terms of, I don't know, you might not be able to answer this question, of what places in history these stories have come from, is that an important part of the storytelling, the time in which these stories have come from, or is it more the story in itself, no matter when it originated and what that means in that particular place?

Jon (he/him) (09:53.514)

This is going to sound like the biggest cop-out answer in the world, but it's true for me and the answer is it's both. It's both of those things at the same time. I think I'll take the second one first really, because we've talked about how instinctively humans make sense of stuff by turning it into a story.

Helen (09:59.64)

Okay.

Jon (he/him) (10:17.008)

even when we don't realise we're doing this. If you're telling somebody about something strange that happened at work, then you will arrange it as, well, they're this and then this, and then you'll put in the dramatic twist, and then you'll say, and then I turn round and said, and it takes on this recognisable, familiar structure. So people will always have been doing that about the landscape around them. so a lot of stories that arise, I think, are

attempts by people in generations past and right up to present day to address that uncertainty that we were talking about, where it can be found in the land around them. So Alan Garner, one of my favourite authors, puts this really well when he says that humans are merchtstappen, which is from Old English. It's a word that's used to describe Grendel in Beowulf and it means a boundary walker.

because we are intellectually curious, problem solving beings trying to understand stuff, then we are probing the boundaries and that we encounter physical boundaries in real life, which aren't just like a fence that says this is my land or whatever it is. That forest where we don't control the space anymore. We've made this space here ours by turning it into farmland.

Helen (11:34.318)

and

Jon (he/him) (11:43.289)

We feel that we know we're on top of the challenges here and we can cope with it, but that there, that's different. And there are wolves and bears and who knows what else? And then just like we were saying with naming the uncertainties, then the who knows what else? Well, we can't, we don't like that. So then we give it a name. We say that it's fairies or witches or whatever.

And, you know, if you look back at early modern records of popular stories, then fairies and witches are also the ones that are often held responsible for strange illnesses and high infant mortality and unexpected deaths of young adults and all this sort of stuff. so it's that way of the challenges and the unknown get given a name. And so Alan Garner again puts it really well when he says that in terms of storytelling, it's about

Helen (12:20.141)

Right.

Jon (he/him) (12:36.283)

addressing the mystery. And 300 years ago, the mystery was in the Greenwood. 100 years ago, it was in the nearest grave. Now it's in the nearest galaxy. Yeah, I know. I know it's such an incredible way putting it.

Helen (12:38.573)

Yes.

Helen (12:47.988)

Helen (12:53.475)

That has blown my mind. You're so right. You're so right. thinking on this and I'm thinking about the stories within land of my past, I grew up up the road. in Shoreham now. I grew up near Copthorne. I've always been in Sussex. And I remember the first school trip down to the Long Mountain of Wilmington. And I remember that was the first memory I have of

Jon (he/him) (13:02.746)

You

Jon (he/him) (13:17.945)

Huh.

Helen (13:21.761)

of story being told about the history of a place. The clergy house, how they built the clergy house, the wattle and daub in the walls, the stories around how people lived in that time, what the Long Man of Wilmington was, the stories around the Long Man of Wilmington. And that's, I remember it as clearly as, you know, and I was what, or however old I was. And then now,

how I'm filling in the gaps at the moment is within the galaxies, within this comic called Three-Eye Atlas that's currently behind the sun and people don't know, you know, it's composition and there's so much speculation online as to what it's made of and what it's here for and people are telling stories and filling in the gaps and so, you know, what you said just then really struck me in that we do this all the time now and, you know,

where we're placing back within the land that we were in, it was the unknown that we filled in those gaps with magic and mystery, addressing that mystery and filling in the gaps with a fairy or a witch or a dragon or whatever it might have been to make us feel safe and understanding and belong within that piece of land. I absolutely love that. What I'd love...

Jon (he/him) (14:41.644)

Yeah.

Jon (he/him) (14:47.177)

Uh-huh.

Helen (14:50.679)

to do now is invite you to share a little bit of an example of that because you do these, you share these types of things, you do shows and performances and I would love the audience just to hear an example to put us in one of these stories that might be relevant to the local landscape and invite you to do that now if that's okay.

Jon (he/him) (15:19.766)

Absolutely, I'd be very happy to. Thank you very much. So this is a story from right here in Sussex where we are, each sitting while we record. This is a story from a little village called Limmonster, which is just by Arundel. And in Limmonster, there is still, you can go and see it, there is a pool. There is a pool of water. And in times past, not that long ago, 1930s still, people were saying...

that this pool was different. This pool was strange. This pool had special qualities, but not necessarily comfortable ones. This pool would be cold even in the height of summer. But in winter, then it was warmer than the frosted land around it, and mist could be seen rising from it. This pool, people said, was bottomless. And this pool...

was known as a knucker hole. And a knucker was a monster, was a dragon. And there were said to be knucker holes all along the Sausage Coast in Worthing, Salting, Lansing, lots of different places. This particular knucker, this monstrous serpentine dragon-like beast,

that lived in this pool in Limitster, that it was a terror. It used to crawl out of the water and it used to rampage across the countryside and any kind of livestock or people that it could catch, would seize in its big yellow jaws and draw them back into the depths to feast upon them. And so something needed to be done about it. And so the story says that the mayor of Arendal, the mayor of all Arendal, sent out news that there would be a reward.

for some great hero who could come and rid the people of this nocker. And so some versions of the story say that a knight came on horseback from far away with shining blade and slew the great beast but died from its fiery or poisonous breath. And so in Limits to Churchyard there is a gravestone which has a sort of

Jon (he/him) (17:34.329)

herringbone pattern with a cross upon it that people will say is the sword of the knight lying upon the ribs of the dragon and that grave marks the night's final resting place. But the people of Liminster, at least in the 1930s, they knew, they knew that this wasn't really what happened because they knew that it was a local lad who'd come

to everybody's rescue. Some say it was a boy called Jim Polk, some say it was a farmhand called Jim Puttock. Either way, Jim came from out of the local people and said, I've got a plan. And he told the mayor of Arundel his plan and the mayor said, give everybody, give Jim what he needs to make this plan happen.

And Jim was given flour from the miller and wood to make a fire and a huge, huge, huge iron pot. And in that pot, he made the biggest Sussex pudding that you've ever seen. Filled it with apples and currants and all sorts of spices, all sorts of amazing things that you might want to put in a pudding, but also laced it with poison. No.

only to himself. And this pudding was so big that it had to be put on a cart drawn by oxen and he drove the oxen down the road to the pool, the knuckle hole where the knuckle waited. And the knuckle saw him with the cart and said, you've not come to slay me, have you? And he said, no, no, no, no, just got a pudding for you. And the knuckle said, me? And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the knuckle came and he sniffed it.

Licked it and had a chew. And then he threw himself upon it and gobbled down the whole thing and he was eating so, so lustily that he even gobbled down the cart and the oxen as well. and that pudding tasted good. then, there was something wrong. there were the worst feelings going on in the, the knucker's tummy. They were squirting and squeezing and bottling and billowing. And then, he said to Jim, said,

Jon (he/him) (19:51.239)

the worst collie wobbles what have you done and Jim said well I've got a good trick to getting rid of collie wobbles and the knocker said tell me tell me what is it and Jim said it's this and he pulled an axe from behind his back and while the knucker was laid prostrate and dismal rolling in the dust he swung the axe cut off the knuckers everybody was overjoyed clapped him on the back marched him up to the Six Bells pub to give him a big celebratory drink under

A foaming pint of ale was put down on the bar in front of him and he reached and grabbed it, downed it in one, wiped the foam off the back of his hand, but he hadn't washed his hands since he made the pudding. And so there was still poison there in the dirt upon his working man's hands and suddenly his chest went tight.

and his stomach started squirting and squeezing and he had the worst collar wobbles and they say that Jim fell dead right there in the bar room.

defeated and so everybody remembered his story.

Helen (21:06.543)

yay! I was completely transfixed there with that story. And as you're talking, I'm thinking these stories, whenever they were created, always had a message.

Jon (he/him) (21:08.684)

Thank you very much.

Jon (he/him) (21:22.604)

Mm-hmm.

Jon (he/him) (21:28.095)

In a sense, think, yes, some of them very definitely do have a moral, so to speak, a point that you're expected to take from them. I think it's fair to say as well that a lot of the time, and there's a big overlap here as well, they were simply for entertainment. But entertainment in the deepest, richest sense as well, that it's not just about switching off at the end of the day, it's also about feeling.

Helen (21:34.159)

I'm moral.

Helen (21:44.533)

Yes.

Jon (he/him) (21:52.789)

you know, emotionally enriched and stimulated and allowing your imagination to go to interesting places. And that's one of the things that I have been looking at in my PhD and I love it about stories is the way that that process of imagining is a process of learning in itself. that is, again, you could call it an evolutionary trait.

Helen (22:12.53)

Yeah.

Jon (he/him) (22:16.593)

imagination is a mode of knowledge, it is a learning practice and even if we never actually have to face a knucker ourselves by seeing how somebody else maybe did then we learn something on an emotional level that maybe can't even be put into words but about exactly that's exactly what Keith Oatley called it in a study about fiction being good for social interaction. think it goes much broader just like you say it is

Helen (22:23.534)

Yeah.

Helen (22:32.025)

flight simulations for the brain, right?

Jon (he/him) (22:44.795)

simulations of dealing with just human experience. And so in that sense, there's a message there as well. But there's also the stories, the stories that get told tend to resonate with the times that they're in one way or another. So this is kind of like the second part of the question you did ask previously, maybe in some ways that I think, like JRR Tolkien put it really, really well in his lecture on fairy stories when he said that

Helen (22:59.181)

right.

Jon (he/him) (23:14.251)

any story that's handed down generation to generation, it's like a matrix of parts and those parts can be popped out and replaced with the greatest of these. And so the stuff that remains there is the stuff that, as he puts it, people instinctively feel has a literary value. Now, I would argue that in any generation, literary value

incorporates a sense of what is meaningful, what gives me that sense of being emotionally enriched by it. And a large part of that is always going to be that I can relate this to my experience and this tells me something which I think is worth hearing in my own time and place. And so by that token, as the story is handed down and the matrix shifts and changes,

Helen (23:50.883)

right.

Helen (23:54.627)

Yes.

Jon (he/him) (24:04.095)

then what you get at the moment that it is told, and therefore the moment that it is recorded at any point, is a snapshot of what matters in that time and place. So with the example that I just told, then that's from the 1930s. And what we can see in that is that in the 1930s, there were people living in this corner of rural Sussex who enjoyed telling tales of...

there being something special and magical in their landscape, but there are also dangers that you have to face. they're making... Wash your... Exactly! Yeah, exactly! Yeah, I was going with the dragon, but that's the basic... Yeah. And, you know, the allegedly bottomless pool that's a bit weird, so we don't really know where we're standing next to that. So we'll say there's a dragon in there, keep away from it. And... Yeah.

Helen (24:34.497)

Yeah. Wash your hands. Sanitise. COVID!

Helen (24:55.055)

Don't go to the dark places. Yeah.

Jon (he/him) (24:58.47)

Exactly. And even there you could say there's simple lesson about, know, hey kids, stay away from deep water. So, folklorist called Sophia Kingshill put this really well about Kelpies, water horses in Scottish mythology that are predatory things, where

Simple advice to stay away from the edge of the water would have been forgotten. A horrible tale about disembowelment by the water horse was much more likely to stick in the mind. But we can also see the fact that in that story, it's a local person who does it. And you get this in English folklore, British folklore more widely all the time is that the plucky working person.

Helen (25:27.971)

gets remembered.

Jon (he/him) (25:45.523)

can fix the problem. And they don't do it with a big shining sword because they don't have big shining swords. They're not lucky enough to have that, but they do have their wits, their own innate cunning and mischief about them. And that is how they can fix the problem. And I think it's interesting that clearly at some point during that story's evolution, there was a story about a knight and people...

came up with that story, or at least applied that story to this particular gravestone, which you can't read whose stone it is anymore because it's all worn away. So again, there's sense making there. We don't know what this is about. Maybe it's to do with the story. But then as time went on, actually, we don't care about the night anymore. What we care about is ordinary rural Sussex folk like us fixing our own problems with our wits. Yeah.

Helen (26:39.011)

I'm doing some research on a documentary at the moment called The Biology of Story. so not only obviously on a biological level, we're wired for story in terms of the dopamine and the serotonin and the reward that we get from hearing and connecting, but also it's story as a living thing. So story is an actual living organism outside of ourselves that

grows and adapts and changes with the meaning that we need to create from it at the time in which it's being told, which is exactly what you're saying here. It's that adaptation as it's passed down through time and through people within the landscape that it is set within that means it can change and we can fill in different gaps dependent on

the purpose and the message that we want to share. So if we were telling that story today, it would probably look a bit different, but it might be linked with COVID or something.

Jon (he/him) (27:43.908)

Yeah, no, that's a very good point. When I tell the story, usually I actually change the main character to a girl, just because you don't get many stories. You don't get as many stories with female protagonists getting to say goodbye in the same way. So why not? And I did sort of think to begin with, I'm going against the recorded version of it. But then that recorded version of it would have been different from one that had been recorded 100 years before that, 100 years because of people making exactly the same decisions. So yeah.

Helen (27:56.079)

No.

Helen (28:12.055)

And I think what my listeners, just from talking to my clients and I work a lot in the corporate world where we all have this ability within us and I really firmly it's proven we do, we all have the ability to tell stories. We've just kind of lost it maybe a little bit along the way is how can we apply this magic of

wisdom and myth and law. Like my daughter, my daughter and one my friends always talk about law. They want the law in everything. She's 13. They talk, they, she says that word at least once a day. What's the law on that? And I love that.

Jon (he/him) (28:44.71)

Hehehehehe

Jon (he/him) (28:50.976)

I love it. It feels like one of those many ways in which we think, yes, nerds won! This language from fantasy fiction is now out there in the mainstream. Brilliant.

Helen (28:59.823)

But how can we capture that magic? Because, you know, I train, I coach a lot of people and I help them to tap back into that. But I think what we're talking about here is really, you know, this wisdom, the sense of magic. can't quite put your finger on, but when you hear it, like I was absolutely enraptured when you told that story. How can we tap back into that?

Jon (he/him) (29:27.353)

Yeah, yeah, it's a really interesting one. I think part of the effort that a lot of storytellers have always put themselves into since back in the 1980s when the storytelling revival really sort of kicked off in the UK as it's put, a lot of that is about the idea that, we should make sure that these stories are remembered.

Helen (29:28.975)

today.

Jon (he/him) (29:56.196)

that they are still current in daily culture, really. That we don't just allow them to drift off into the past, we keep telling them. But because we are telling them in our own time and context, and we are inevitably changing them, and that's part of keeping them alive, really. So, yeah, that's part of it, because then you still get those lessons being heard by kids.

and by grown-ups. let's not forget, one of the most common opportunities that we get to tell these stories is in schools or festivals where entertaining children, but actually storytelling is for all ages. And I think part of the way we can promote the lessons in these stories is by giving grown-ups a chance to hear them. And more often than not, I find, even if they didn't think they liked this sort of thing, they get into it.

Helen (30:50.127)

you

Jon (he/him) (30:52.28)

But I think it's also important to remember that while clearly the role or at least the status of stories as cultural forms has changed, like you say, in popular culture, it isn't gone. It's, you know, because it is wired into us. So of course we're ultimately doing it. And so like there's wonderful things we're talking about landscape by.

anthropologists and cultural geographers, like a guy called Dennis Cosgrove, who was particularly prominent in this, pointing out that spaces have meaning still, and we acquire the stories that explain what those places are, like a Victorian park in an English town. As you grow up, then you absorb the knowledge of

what that space means, how we're supposed to use it, how we shouldn't be using it, all that sort of thing. And Kent Rydin, who's an American anthropologist, came up with a wonderful phrase about the invisible landscape being the storied sense of the spaces we move through that all of us have privately, but based on what we've

understood about what these spaces are and our own personal experiences in them. That was where I fell off my skateboard. That was where I had my first kiss or whatever. Don't go down that early way. The kids there beat you up. That sort of thing. And also stories from the media. And that's the key thing, I think, is that we need to recognise that, yes, most of us get our stories of entertainment these days from screen-based media.

but we still use those stories as part of the process of making sense of where we are and who we are. And so it's not so much for me at least a question of promoting one specific set of material as a source of messages. It's more about promoting the idea that stories are a really important and valid

Jon (he/him) (33:06.034)

means of learning and understanding. so, hey, people know that. I was going to say EastEnders, but then I realized, actually, the powers that be, they do know this stuff. Because people use programs like EastEnders and Casualty. Government departments, I gather, will contact them and say, we've got this public health issue going on. We need to do something about it. Can you write a storyline about that?

Helen (33:08.687)

Hmm.

Helen (33:29.005)

Yeah. Yeah.

Helen (33:35.193)

That's why everything that's ever happened has happened in Albert Square.

Jon (he/him) (33:39.24)

Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. So there is that recognition. I think, you know, the powers that be are just people like you and me trying to do their best in a paradigm which says that grownups do things by facts and reporting and only kids do stuff by stories. And so I think the real thing to do is to promote imagination as one of our many tools for understanding our lives.

Helen (34:06.991)

I completely agree, know, you know, particularly thinking about the education system, you know, and our children and how my children have and do struggle with learning in those environments and how if we use story more in the learning environment, then, you know, what could happen? So I think you're right. It's not just a set of kind of tools for storytelling. is how we're using it as a...

how we did use it as a tool for learning and how we can.

Jon (he/him) (34:37.836)

Exactly, And giving it that... Affording it that status as a, yeah, no, this is really good. This is meaningful. This isn't just entertainment.

Helen (34:47.435)

It's not because that we just lump it into that category. Whereas it's actually incredibly versatile. You know, it's so versatile and so many purposes on so many different levels of our human experience. And, know, just thinking, you know, how can I get my corporate leader, client, senior leader to bring his people with him by telling a story is just one tiny snippet of

Jon (he/him) (34:55.711)

Yeah.

Helen (35:13.771)

of the human experience and how we can do that. So just before we close, John, I'd love to hear how you're using storytelling currently and for people that might want to find out more about you or what's happening with you, where they can find you. Yeah.

Jon (he/him) (35:15.816)

Yeah.

Jon (he/him) (35:19.092)

Yeah.

Jon (he/him) (35:25.374)

Right.

Jon (he/him) (35:30.601)

Sure. Thank you. Yeah. Well, so a lot of what I've been doing for a few years has been sort of connected to my PhD in many ways, but also my PhD grew out of the storytelling work I was already doing, which was leading local walks and sharing stories and history about the places that we were walking through.

Helen (35:56.473)

So cool.

Jon (he/him) (35:57.694)

Thank you. Just lots of people do that sort of story walk type work. But for me, it just seemed like an obvious way of trying to very directly address that sense of nothing ever happened here. No, really, it did. It really did. Or let's imagine that it did because people have done.

But also I'm sort of trying to spread myself into other areas really. So for the last couple of years I've been doing an awful lot of work on a show called Promised Land the Myths of Rock and Roll which is retelling the tales of famous rock icons as if they were figures from famous world myths. So Bob Dylan is clearly low key. Janet Joplin is Icarus because she

flew too high she fell. Springsteen is the grail knight as well for keeping the belief in the myth going. yeah so that was immensely good fun. I had a rock band on stage with me, some amazingly talented friends. So we'll be looking to do more of that. I've been doing, working on a performance of Beowulf with my friends Amelia Armand and Joshua Crisp from Reptical Storytellers which we

performed last night, and we're looking to do that again as well. Which again, for me, it feels important to find ways into those very old stories, which are part of, again, our cultural heritage in this particular accidental bit of geography and politics where we are, and find meanings in them that are relevant to the present day, really.

looking to do lots more of that. There is a huge big cycle of Germanic myth around the figure of Theodric, the emperor of the Goths in late Roman early medieval times, who became just the hero of, it seems like it was like one of the biggest things in the Germanic speaking world.

Jon (he/him) (38:09.039)

hundreds and hundreds of years in medieval times and these stories are kind of, who cares, nobody knows about them anymore, but there are a couple of translations of various texts of these so I want to read those and see if there's something in there that I would like to tell them.

Helen (38:21.569)

Hmm.

God, that all sounds so exciting. So, so up my street. John, thank you so much for sharing this with me and actually really opening up my perspective on this topic, on this journey that I'm on with season two of Words That Change Lives, Stories in Our DNA. So thank you so much for sharing your story and your viewpoint and experience with me. And I know that the listeners will really, really love this episode.

Jon (he/him) (38:26.397)

Thank you.

Jon (he/him) (38:54.724)

It's a pleasure. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for having me on.

Helen (38:58.447)

Thank you.