GREEN CANTERBURY TALES

  On Friday October 5th 2012 members of the Glamorgan Seed Group met up to beach walk round Swansea Bay, telling and inventing stories, and later planning our route for next year's walk to Canterbury, part of a pilgrimage across Britain weaving new green tales for a sustainable world. Below is some background from the first meeting at Cae Mabon representing ten groups across Wales. Ours is a women's group of writers, poets, artists, and storytellers.

The pilgrimage is open to all.If you are interested in forming your own Seed Group look on www.greencanterburytales.org.uk for more information.


        "Each group will be unique depending on the individuals involved and the nature of the journey given their geography. It may be possible to build on pre-existing projects, organisations and contacts. This could lead to potential sources of funding. Some Seed Groups will want to attract young people who can be mentored as storytellers and pilgrims. Such groups will probably need to be aligned to pre-existing groups and to tick boxes regarding health and safety etc. Other groups may simply consist of a handful of self-responsible adults. If groups become larger walkers may need to be asked to sign disclaimers.

•Initially the Seed Group will need to cultivate their repertoire of stories, agree on a starting date and an itinerary. They may organise a public performance in this first stage. We’d like each seed group to give a minimum of 6 days or 3 weekends over the 5 months for their journeys, not including the 2 or 3 days in Canterbury. This does not mean every individual does the full six days, just that the group as a whole does so. We expect many story pilgrims will spend longer on their journeys. Some may want to walk or cycle the whole way.

•The Seed Groups will begin their story-journeys in a place of sacred, historic, ecological or political significance. En route they'll exchange with each other and with people they meet stories, songs and poems on a broadly green or land-based theme. Later they may meet up and walk with neighbouring seed groups. So participants will fine tune stories; perform to audiences encountered or organised on the way; listen to and gather stories from other seed-groups or from people met en route; and tell the tales of their journeys.

•The third phase of the journeys will be the approach to Canterbury. One group will come from Southwark following the route of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The final weekend in Canterbury will be a mixture of festival and conference (Confest) where we explore the importance of storytelling on green themes, tell the stories of the journeys, re-tell some of the original Canterbury Tales with contemporary twists, tell some of the old and new stories gathered en route, and enjoy poetry and song."