Wolferland
For 101 days a man walked into a Dartmoor forest and called to it, then listened for a response. Combed through the landscape, combed through his mind. No agenda, no spin, no manifesto. As messy or poetic as need be. No sense of how it would unfold.
This is a very ancient way of approaching an emergency.
The world is on fire and the fear is real. In response to this reality, Martin Shaw underwent an ancient ceremony, in fact reversed it.
There is a whisper that says if you are bitten by a wolf, 101 days in domestic confinement could wash you of its lupine infection. 101 days to become more civilised, more soporific, more sedentary. Clean yourself better.
But what if we are living in times that need more fur, more teeth, more howl?
So Shaw reverses this encounter. For 101 days he takes himself back and forth to a forest to see what the wolf has got to say to him. He goes to take its bite, not rid himself of it.
To do this in England is to have a conversation with a ghost.
The back and forth is what he describes as ‘calling songs’. That the oldest way we can talk to a place is through story.
Shaw enters a haunted landscape at a haunted time of year. Up in the forest he will encounter ancestors, animal powers, visions and finally be left with just nine words from a midnight vigil in an ancient hill fort. He will track the perimeters of dream, loss, vision and surrender. He will record what comes, not what he hopes will come.
Wolferland is a spiritual Morse code, an invoker, it is a lifting of the lantern to many unseen things.
Praise for Wolferland
“Shaw is a sorcerer, a shapeshifter, a High Priest in the cult of Wild Kindness, and the sort of ragamuffin you see laughing gently at you as you drive to work listening to and believing the news. He is, in other words, a human being of the sort that we might be if we had the nerve. In his hands language works as it is supposed to do and almost never does. His words seep straight out of the hill and are kraaked direct from the raven’s throat while being splendidly his own. Sell everything you have and buy Wolferland.” —Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast.
Wolferland
For 101 days a man walked into a Dartmoor forest and called to it, then listened for a response. Combed through the landscape, combed through his mind. No agenda, no spin, no manifesto. As messy or poetic as need be. No sense of how it would unfold.
This is a very ancient way of approaching an emergency.
The world is on fire and the fear is real. In response to this reality, Martin Shaw underwent an ancient ceremony, in fact reversed it.
There is a whisper that says if you are bitten by a wolf, 101 days in domestic confinement could wash you of its lupine infection. 101 days to become more civilised, more soporific, more sedentary. Clean yourself better.
But what if we are living in times that need more fur, more teeth, more howl?
So Shaw reverses this encounter. For 101 days he takes himself back and forth to a forest to see what the wolf has got to say to him. He goes to take its bite, not rid himself of it.
To do this in England is to have a conversation with a ghost.
The back and forth is what he describes as ‘calling songs’. That the oldest way we can talk to a place is through story.
Shaw enters a haunted landscape at a haunted time of year. Up in the forest he will encounter ancestors, animal powers, visions and finally be left with just nine words from a midnight vigil in an ancient hill fort. He will track the perimeters of dream, loss, vision and surrender. He will record what comes, not what he hopes will come.
Wolferland is a spiritual Morse code, an invoker, it is a lifting of the lantern to many unseen things.
Praise for Wolferland
“Shaw is a sorcerer, a shapeshifter, a High Priest in the cult of Wild Kindness, and the sort of ragamuffin you see laughing gently at you as you drive to work listening to and believing the news. He is, in other words, a human being of the sort that we might be if we had the nerve. In his hands language works as it is supposed to do and almost never does. His words seep straight out of the hill and are kraaked direct from the raven’s throat while being splendidly his own. Sell everything you have and buy Wolferland.” —Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast.