I am an East Anglian! Sense of place is really important to me. Many of the people who have talked to Spiked in these pages have moved into Norfolk from some other part of the country, where are you from? It was a good ten years before I began to tell stories myself though I had been teaching and writing and singing traditional ballads and all that eventually converged into storytelling as a career. Everything I enjoyed reading led me to the belief that all nature is supernatural, and that theres something unseen that charges the visible world. Then in my teens I discovered Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes, and by the time I was 17 or 18 the Border Ballads introduced me to the place where myth met music, language and place, which was absolutely inspirational to me. Later I came to John Masefields Midnight Folk with its very English magic. I had a real love/hate relationship with the book. I was terrified by the story of Prince Ivan and the Witch Baby, but kept going back to it and its horrifying refrain ∞aten father, eaten mother, nows the time for little brother. There was something dark and beautiful about those stories, they seemed remote from my world but true to it at the same time. As a small child I was particularly drawn to his Old Peters Russian Tales. My family were very given to anecdotal storytelling, but my only claim to a literary background is through my grandmothers brother Arthur Ransome. How did the young Hugh Lupton become a storyteller?
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