...stories trade in a kind of — it’s a word, it’s a beautiful word I use sometimes: chthonic — they work in chthonic dimensions. In other words, if a story lands immediately in your logic, if it immediately is neatly trimmed and makes perfect sense, it’s not really doing its work. Stories, old myths, do a kind of open-heart surgery on you.

And at the time — usually when I’m hearing a story of tremendous power, I know something is happening, but I don’t quite know what it is. It’s as if some vast presence is just passing me in the dark. And over the weeks that follow, to use an old Irish expression, I brood. I brood on the images that really touched me during the story. And it is then that whatever is trying to surface in me, to express itself from the story — I begin to get some comprehension about it.

Martin Shaw, 2018