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About Us
We are a community interest company of storytellers and artists who support and create community via story.
We hold storytelling spaces for all ages which explore the wilderness of story and offer an imaginative forum to respond to contemporary issues around climate, community, identity and relatedness.
As a Commons space, we are an inclusive network dedicated to community participation and co-creation. As explorers of story multiplicity, we are interested in how stories allow us to step outside of single, simplistic narratives, and invite us to exist with complexity in a complex world.
We are dedicated to speaking, writing and enacting stories that reinvigorate our relationship to the real world.
Directors
Joanna Gilar is a Sussex based storyteller and writer with a PhD in fairy tales and ecology from the University of Chichester. She has been telling stories for ten years, and currently works as a community storyteller, building projects for families and young people that strengthen communities via stories.
She is passionate about inspiring young – and old – to discover the infinite wonder of the ordinary world. She is the editor of The World Treasury of Fairy Tales and Folklore (Wellfleet Press, 2016) and the founder of the StoryCommons.
Gauri Raje is a storyteller and anthropologist based in Scotland and India. She works with different genres: folk tales, fairy tales, epics and myths, mainly from non-European regions, and autobiographical storytelling. She is fascinated by myths and their power to hold community memories, and has been increasingly working with the ways in which stories allow migrants to create a relationship with the land they settle in.
Sophie Gibson is a singer, storyteller, writer and facilitator. She was raised in a family where books and stories were her life blood. Her career spans theatre making for empowerment; transforming violence and leading trauma responsive services. She is fascinated by contemporary resonances in traditional tales
Sam Chittenden is a writer, theatre maker and lyricist with a strong track record in female centric fringe productions. An experienced facilitator, coach and consultant, actor and director, who uses creative and emotion based approaches to deliver lasting impact.
She is a published academic, poet and author of Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of Leadership (available on http://differentdevelopment.bigcartel.com).
Fleur Shorthouse Hemmings has been teaching philosophy and working with story for 30yrs. She completed her MA in Applied Storytelling, under the tutelage of tradition bearer Shonaleigh Cumbers. She is a student of Lithuanian Pirtis sauna tradition with Bath Master, BirutÄ— MasiliauskienÄ—. Fleur has brought sauna master practice and traditional oral storytelling together to create the unique art form of sauna storytelling. She is artist-in-residence at Wowo Wild Spa, Sussex.