THE PROGRAMME
THE PROGRAMME
Now in its 21st year, this five-weekend programme entails the telling of myth(s) or fairy tale(s) by Dr. Martin Shaw, and then study and response to it. Over the gatherings a braided knot of relationship is formed between the story of your own life and the great ocean of these epic tales. The atmosphere is studious and lively in appropriate measure. It’s a migratory voyage through the grandeur of language, mythos and place.
The Skin-Boat & The Star
A Christian Mythopoetics
September 2025 — March 2026
The Skin-Boat & The Star is a homage to the early Christians, especially the Celts who would have travelled in such boats with a dangerous and wonderful story tucked under the breastbone of their hearts. The tale of the storyteller and healer born as a fugitive in a cave, and in only a few short decades, taken to Skull Hill and slaughtered for the troubling, beautiful things that he says, 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.
This programme sees Martin teaching from the place he now finds himself in. There’ll be many myths, fairy tales and ideas he has loved for decades alongside the developing Christian landscape he is beholding.
Each weekend will take place at an old manor house on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, UK. As well as stories and teaching from Martin, there will be in-person guests, along with archived and live zoom sessions with guests between each weekend.
Please note this course is in-person attendance only.
The Skin-Boat & The Star
A Christian Mythopoetics
September 2025 – March 2026
The Skin-Boat & The Star is a homage to the early Christians, especially the Celts who would have travelled in such boats with a dangerous and wonderful story tucked under the breastbone of their hearts. The tale of the storyteller and healer born as a fugitive in a cave, and in only a few short decades, taken to Skull Hill and slaughtered for the troubling, beautiful things that he says, 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.
This programme sees Martin teaching from the place he now finds himself in. There’ll be many myths, fairy tales and ideas he has loved for decades alongside the developing Christian landscape he is beholding.
Each weekend will take place at an old manor house on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, UK. As well as stories and teaching from Martin, there will be in-person guests, along with archived and live zoom sessions with guests between each weekend.
Please note this course is in-person attendance only.
Life Aboard The Skin-Boat
Lo! I have the fairest dream to tell you, it came from dark midnight when all were
asleep. —Cynewulf
This last year has been the most rewarding of my teaching life – specifically the 5-weekend course called The Skin-Boat & The Star. Within it I took three decades of study of fairytale and storytelling and applied it to the mythologies of Christianity. Many of my own mentors had studiously avoided this, but I’d come to realise it was leaving a distinct hole in my learning to keep swerving for more exotic ground.
Tales of creation, Cain & Abel, the Flood, Babel, saint stories, the extraordinary and sometimes uncomfortable teachings of the Galilee druid, I’d not often seen these stories approached with a storyteller’s imagination or a mythologist’s awareness of cultural layers. Lots of theological erudition certainly, but not quite that. I’d seen such tales politicised, weaponised even, which was what kept me away. But what if we let the stories be the stories again? What if we allowed them to live on the tongue again, do their work in the air not just on the page?
Skin-Boat is not church, it’s a learning community. There will be no altar call or emotional coercion of your spiritual life. But it’s of the come-find-out variety. It’s an adventure. It treats the stories lovingly and with respect but doesn’t wallop them over the head with endless doctrine. It allows them to stand in all their vitality unblinking in front of us. We walk with the tales, brood on the tales, laugh and weep with them on occasion. They do their work on us. In its first year we attracted a great variety of folk from all sorts of backgrounds: from confirmed atheists to pagans to clerics. What bound us all together was love of the power of story. Curiosity, kindness and patience were consistent demarcations of character as we sailed our little boat out into profoundly deep waters.
It’s also important to note that Skin-Boat maintains the exploration of folk, fairy tales and wider mythologies. From Irish myth to Russian tales, getting to grips with the technologies of how such stories erupt into our consciousness is vital. We grew to see how essential themes move between biblical tales and the folk story, how these narratives engender courage, sacrifice, and compassion. There was also the opportunity to actually learn a few stories yourself to bring back to your own family, friends and community. So the fundament of the School of Myth’s attention to wider myth remains a cornerstone in the Skin-Boat exploration. Stories are a large part of how we grow into a human being, and we draw on many resources to support what that actually looks like. My decades long work in wilderness-rites-of-passage is also a factor.
The gatherings were quite the reward. Seeing gleeful faces huddled by the fire as a winter storm lashed our backs and Malcolm Guite bellowed his Arthurian tales into the freezing rain. Astonished, over and over, by the poems and insights that rose up from the participants, many of whom have become close friends with each other. It was a tremendous act of spiritual rehydration. It turns out that something like Skin-Boat is starting to light up the souls of people all over the place. From Australia, Skin-Boaters came, and from Japan, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Europe and America.
And we set sail again in September. We will patch up the holes, learn some new songs, fill up the hip flask and follow that star that keeps calling us. It’s that same star that has led so many of us down the centuries.
I will be blessed by some splendid guest teachers: Dr Rowan Williams, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Mark Vernon, Natasha Kozaily and Heather Pollington. This intrepid group open areas of the wider arts, poetics and philosophy while still circling around the central engagement with the Christian mythos. This may be the very last place you would have ever considered gathering for dynamic story, but life, mercifully, is still full of the most extraordinary surprises. I understand. Five years ago I would have bet the farm on never going anywhere near any of this, and yet here we are. I have a habit of inviting amazing teachers at the last minute, so you never quite know what may happen.
If you have a love of myth, storytelling, culture, poetry and truly wild information, then this could be for you.
Life Aboard The Skin-Boat
Lo! I have the fairest dream to tell you, it came from dark midnight when all were
asleep. —Cynewulf
This last year has been the most rewarding of my teaching life – specifically the 5-weekend course called The Skin-Boat & The Star. Within it I took three decades of study of fairytale and storytelling and applied it to the mythologies of Christianity. Many of my own mentors had studiously avoided this, but I’d come to realise it was leaving a distinct hole in my learning to keep swerving for more exotic ground.
Tales of creation, Cain & Abel, the Flood, Babel, saint stories, the extraordinary and sometimes uncomfortable teachings of the Galilee druid, I’d not often seen these stories approached with a storyteller’s imagination or a mythologist’s awareness of cultural layers. Lots of theological erudition certainly, but not quite that. I’d seen such tales politicised, weaponised even, which was what kept me away. But what if we let the stories be the stories again? What if we allowed them to live on the tongue again, do their work in the air not just on the page?
Skin-Boat is not church, it’s a learning community. There will be no altar call or emotional coercion of your spiritual life. But it’s of the come-find-out variety. It’s an adventure. It treats the stories lovingly and with respect but doesn’t wallop them over the head with endless doctrine. It allows them to stand in all their vitality unblinking in front of us. We walk with the tales, brood on the tales, laugh and weep with them on occasion. They do their work on us. In its first year we attracted a great variety of folk from all sorts of backgrounds: from confirmed atheists to pagans to clerics. What bound us all together was love of the power of story. Curiosity, kindness and patience were consistent demarcations of character as we sailed our little boat out into profoundly deep waters.
It’s also important to note that Skin-Boat maintains the exploration of folk, fairy tales and wider mythologies. From Irish myth to Russian tales, getting to grips with the technologies of how such stories erupt into our consciousness is vital. We grew to see how essential themes move between biblical tales and the folk story, how these narratives engender courage, sacrifice, and compassion. There was also the opportunity to actually learn a few stories yourself to bring back to your own family, friends and community. So the fundament of the School of Myth’s attention to wider myth remains a cornerstone in the Skin-Boat exploration. Stories are a large part of how we grow into a human being, and we draw on many resources to support what that actually looks like. My decades long work in wilderness-rites-of-passage is also a factor.
The gatherings were quite the reward. Seeing gleeful faces huddled by the fire as a winter storm lashed our backs and Malcolm Guite bellowed his Arthurian tales into the freezing rain. Astonished, over and over, by the poems and insights that rose up from the participants, many of whom have become close friends with each other. It was a tremendous act of spiritual rehydration. It turns out that something like Skin-Boat is starting to light up the souls of people all over the place. From Australia, Skin-Boaters came, and from Japan, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Europe and America.
And we set sail again in September. We will patch up the holes, learn some new songs, fill up the hip flask and follow that star that keeps calling us. It’s that same star that has led so many of us down the centuries.
I will be blessed by some splendid guest teachers: Dr Rowan Williams, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Mark Vernon, Natasha Kozaily and Heather Pollington. This intrepid group open areas of the wider arts, poetics and philosophy while still circling around the central engagement with the Christian mythos. This may be the very last place you would have ever considered gathering for dynamic story, but life, mercifully, is still full of the most extraordinary surprises. I understand. Five years ago I would have bet the farm on never going anywhere near any of this, and yet here we are. I have a habit of inviting amazing teachers at the last minute, so you never quite know what may happen.
If you have a love of myth, storytelling, culture, poetry and truly wild information, then this could be for you.