Off the Beaten Path

Spent last weekend in Derby (pronounced DAR-by) otherwise known as the middle of fucking nowhere. The city really had nothing to offer except things like this:

So instead I spend my time doing things like this:

Nonetheless, I ended up having a great weekend at the Amber Valley Storytelling Festival, even with the 30-minute walk to the bus station, the 30-minute ride to Shipley, and the 30-minute walk to the park that it took me to get there and back every day. Tack on me getting lost for an hour on Saturday, and me missing the bus back to Derby on Sunday and having to wait 2 hours reading Haunted and eating fish and chips in the yard of an abandoned hospital, and all in all I spent 8-9 hours simply going to and fro. But oh my, was the festival wonderful. It was a small storytelling festival for children with some very big names attached, so I it was a great opportunity to mingle with established performers in an intimate setting. I spent Saturday introducing myself and going to nearly all the performances, while Sunday I sat down and interviewed Sophie Snell, Debbie Guneratne, and Pete Chand. Pete just so happens to organize Festival at the Edge, the UK's largest storytelling festival, and promised me an introduction to any performer I wanted there, which is is such a lucky connection. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to speak with Bharit Patel, a fantastic mask performer who wins my favorite telling of the weekend, but hopefully I will be meeting up with her in Birmingham before I leave. In the end, a great weekend of storytelling with lots of wonderful connections made.

After Derby it was onto the Isle of Man, a tiny little place located right in the middle of Ireland and Scotland's oceanic border. In fact, on a clear day, you can climb the Isle's tallest - and only - mountain to see Ireland and Scotland at the same time. More on that later...

My dear friend Will Halicks is in the UK studying the legend of the black dog, and the Isle of Man is known for being the point of origin for one of the world's most famous black dog stories. Knowing this, I meet a storyteller named Kit in Birmingham who is from the Isle of Man, hear a couple of tales in the native "Manx" tradition, and you get me and Will meeting up for 3 days of Manx Mayhem. I shipped out on Monday by ferry from Liverpool, only to have Will miss his ferry from Dublin and get delayed a day. I took the surprise alone day to curl up in my bed and breakfast, start work on a story about a man who sells balloons, and enjoying splendid views of the ocean:

After a gigantic English breakfast at the B&B I headed to the Manx National Library and Archives for some joint research with Will. I spent a few hours there by myself before Will arrived working through a number of Manx storytelling collections, which draw heavily on tales about deceptive ferries, or "Them Ones," as the locals like to say. The whole island's history is rich in the storytelling tradition, and Man's founder is even thought to be a 3-legged wizard who shrouded the island in a blue mist so it could never be found. He could also throw defending ships into the ocean whenever he wished, and whether you believe any of this or not, it's true that the Isle of Man was never conquered by the Romans even when all of its neighbors were, and you still have a 3-legged man on the country's flag. Upon Will's arrival we started digging into black dog tales for a few more hours, explored the coast for some magical footage for his documentary, and spent all night in a pub catching up about the study abroad experiences that made this the first time in 8 months we'd seen one another.

The next day Will and I made it an early day so we could conquer Snaefell Mountain, the point where you can see Scotland and Ireland, and England and Wales, and heaven and Earth (according to local tourism ads), all at the same time. We took an hour-long train ride to the top, leaving the bottom with clear skies and the best of hopes. We ended our journey in a haze of fog that wouldn't let us see more than 10 feet in front of our face. The conductor said it was maybe the third "bad view" day that had all year. So much for luck. Instead we ate delicious cake and drank tea in the mountain's coffee shop to warm our bodies and souls and then headed back down to make it to Peal Castle by bus. We roamed the town for some more doc footage and then hiked a mountain where we could see Ireland. Take that, fog. After a delicious Chinese dinner we took a ghost tour of the town with plenty of black dog lore and then had a pint with the tour guides afterwards, adding a totally new perspective on what realms storytelling encompasses.

Now I'm in Edinburgh to visit the Scottish Storytelling Centre and get my fill of haggis. I have already seen many a man in the traditional kilt and hope such sights continue.