Are You Storyshaped?

Hey hey! Listen up.

At the end of July, I co-founded a podcast. It’s called Storyshaped, and it’s so much fun.

Art by Paul Coomey

My co-host is the brilliant Susan Cahill, whose debut children’s novel is being published next year. Susan’s book is called The World Between the Rain and as soon as it’s available, I urge you to go and grab a copy. (I’ve had an early peek. It’s brilliant). Every week, we get together to have a natter about books, and stories, and how important they are, and we welcome a new special guest each Thursday to talk about these things with us. Susan and I both firmly believe that the stories we read (or experience) as children have a powerful effect in shaping our lives, and these stories can shape not only our future careers, life-choices, and dreams, but also the work (creative or non-creative) that we go on to do.

I wrote an article about how we decided to put the podcast together, which you’re very welcome to read. Basically, I explain how Susan and I – who’ve been friends for many years now, but who’d never somehow managed to talk about books before – reconnected over our shared love of the same children’s books, which we’d read and loved in childhood. We realised our philosophies about the power of stories were very similar, and from there it was a simple leap of logic to kick off our podcast. It’s been an extremely steep learning curve, but it’s been so rewarding.

If you haven’t checked us out yet, I really recommend you do. The podcast is aimed at everyone, primarily adults who enjoy children’s books, but if you’re a person who’s interested in hearing from writers and other creatives about their work, their process, and the stories that they credit with inspiring and shaping and encouraging them during the course of their life, then Storyshaped is for you. So far, Susan and I have done some ‘deep-dive’ episodes into some of the books we found particularly captivating as children, and our guests have discussed things as varied as throwing the hammer (as a sport, not just flinging tools about), the Challenger disaster, libraries built into the walls of a castle, parents who had tabs in their local bookshop, and so much more. We have loads of wonderful guests lined up, with some fantastic episodes already recorded (we’ll be going hunting for a Sweet Tree! And potholing! And so much more!) and there have been so many people eager to come to speak to us that Susan and I feel we’re only getting started. Get on board, and join in!

Our podcast website is here – Storyshaped Podcast – but we’re available on all the major podcast streaming services, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

So please come and listen in! Search ‘Storyshaped’ on your podcast streaming service of choice, and don’t forget to Like, Subscribe, Share the episodes, and (importantly) Rate and Review the podcast, to help the algorithms to find new listeners who might be interested in what we’re doing. We hope you’ll enjoy STORYSHAPED!