A Spell in the Forest

Trees occupy a place of enormous significance, not only in our planet’s web of life but also in our psyche. A Spell in the Forest - Tongues in Trees is part love-song, part poetic guidebook, and part exploration of thirteen native sacred British tree species. Tongues in Trees is a multi-layered contribution to the current awareness of the importance and significance of trees and the resurgence of interest in their place on our planet and in our hearts.

Roselle Angwin
Cornish poet, author, internationally-known workshop facilitator, Cetlic mythopsychologist and hedge druid Roselle Angwin leads the popular holistic 'Fire in the Head' creative and reflective writing programme, and a programme for the ecological imagination, 'The Wild Ways – ecosoul'. Roselle is renowned for inspiring creativity and transformation in her workshop participants. Increasingly, all her work focuses on a psychospiritual approach that can help people re-experience themselves as part of a web of interconnectedness with the other-than-human.

She’s passionate about the creative process, the environment and the whole of the natural world, and the psychology of myth as living practice; and especially in how creativity can help us reconnect with and revision our relationships with each other, the land and other species, as well as with the hidden aspects of ourselves. She leads many workshops throughout Europe in settings ranging from universities to islands, and has contributed to or tutored for many publications and organizations.

Roselle was brought up in the rural Westcountry of the UK where a hands-on knowledge of flora and fauna was an integral part of her life. She uses plant medicine, makes incenses and forages, as well as tending a healthy veg-plot and a woodland garden, and writes on myth, poetry, spirituality, psychology, creativity, veganism and sustainable living. From very early on, she’s had a sense of a land-based spirituality, only naming it as shamanic and druidic or bardic in her late twenties. As a student, she learned the practice of Zen meditation, and these two strands inform all of her life.

Roselle studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at Cambridge University focusing on The Mabinogion (in Middle Welsh), and her passion for Celtic mythology has continued through her work as, initially, a self-employed shoemaker turned writer, counsellor and workshop facilitator. A decade after leaving Cambridge, she trained in transpersonal psychology as a counsellor, and started leading workshops, focusing particularly on the archetypal symbolism of the Grail legends, which she named ‘Myth as Metaphor’. From these workshops, her first non-fiction book 'Riding the Dragon – myth and the inner journey' was commissioned by MBS publishers Element Books in 1993.

She has been described as ‘a poet of the bright moment... whose own sources of creative inspiration are her native Westcountry, the Scottish islands, and a highly individual blend of Celtic myth and metaphysics, psychology, shamanic and Zen thinking’.

She was the keynote speaker on 'The Wild' for the LAPIDUS conference in 2007. Recently, her retreats on the Isle of Iona were listed by The Telegraph as being among the world's ten best creative writing holidays, and The Guardian has featured her courses.

As a writer, especially in relation to her poetry, she has undertaken many residencies, and has been the recipient of Arts Council England awards. For several years she was the director of an indoor and outdoor literary festival on Dartmoor.

Her poetry and prose is widely published and has won several awards and prizes. Roselle frequently collaborates with artists, musicians, dancers and sculptors, often on the land. Her poetry has been displayed on buses and cathedral websites, has appeared in numerous anthologies, been etched into glass, hung from trees, printed on T-shirts, carved into or painted onto stone, metal and wood, become pennants behind bicycles, painted, sung, composed to, choreographed, recorded, broadcast, danced, performed and eaten by sheep.

Professional membership: Society of Authors; National Association of Writers in Education; LAPIDUS – the words for wellbeing association; Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids.