The House of Beasts & Vines – Substack launch
A brand new subscription newsletter has just been launched by Dr Martin Shaw - The House of Beasts & Vines. There will be regular free tasters, but for just $7 per month (around £5), subscribers will get exclusive access to new material and everything in the vault as it builds up. The newsletter will be published on the platform Substack, with fortnightly offerings from Martin, including fresh essays and audio recordings. It promises to be part care package, part spiritual provocation. Says Martin: "Imagine we’re sitting in my
A Glimpse of the Library: Martin Shaw’s 2021 Reads
Martin was recently asked to share a handful of the books he was reading in 2021. For any of us book lovers contemplating what to delve in to for the coming year, here's a glimpse of the reading pile... "The Norton Anthology crackles and bangs with word-magic, devastating on occasion. Submission by Houllebecq is a prophetic tale for middle-aged professorial types getting lost in the passions of the world. She Who Is lovingly and dynamically places Sophia back in her rightful place within Christianity. The Interior Castle is
Tristan & Isolde, launching February 2022
Cista Mystica is delighted to announce the release of a new series of books, starting February 2022 with Martin Shaw’s version of Tristan and Isolde. This is the first volume from a major body of work Shaw has been working on over the past few years. From the primordial caves of antiquity and up through the pagan imagination and Christian mysticism, Shaw wanders centuries, stories and ideas that reconsecrate our relationship to a living earth. Based within the Celtic fringe of Britain, Tristan and Isolde is a standalone
The Hidden Country
New Year message from Dr Martin Shaw: Joe Strummer once told me not to lose a sense of the heroic. Not in some overbearing, strutting, macho manner, but in a quieter, more vocational register. That certain beautiful things needed defending, and that itself was an organising principle in the scattergun chaos of these times. That you figured out what you stood for. You set free a little morality but held back on the judgement. I’m not someone that peddles in despair or stirs up disorder and claims it
Smoke Hole Sessions – Martin Shaw podcasts
Author and master storyteller Martin Shaw brings us the Smoke Hole Sessions – a series of vital conversations with inspirational people, in the hope that in the crackle of the thinking, the fire of the language, the visioning and the wildness of the exchanges, we may find breadcrumbs that lead us out of the forest again, and into a deeper life. Inspired by his new book Smoke Hole, Martin speaks to some of today’s most admired writers, musicians, comedians, activists and more about their own work and
BARDSKULL: A second glimpse, plus new Wolf Milk merchandise just in
Bardskull: a second glimpse Dr Martin Shaw has released a tantalising second glimpse of his latest book Bardskull, sharing a reading of an 11-minute section of the book as it unfolds. The wild words just recorded are a taster of this powerful fusion of memoir and myth, scheduled for publication in 2022 by Unbound Books, which has launched a funding project to get it completed and to press. Bardskull is the record of three journeys made in the year before Martin turned fifty - for each, he walks