Gooday, welcome to Last Call. I am Matt Frad. Thank you for being here. We've got a real treat for you.

Martin Shaw, who I've interviewed recently, is going to sit down with me and he is going to tell me a fairy tale.

I love your retelling of stories. It is called the birth of Oshin. Finn immediately recognizes

that he is in the presence of something extremely unusual.

He is just about to close his eyes and there's a knock.

Martin, thank you for coming.

We just spent some time speaking about fairy tales and myth and storytelling and attending to what is small so that our world can become larger.

I'm going to stick with it.

There's something in it, you know.

And congratulations on your book being a New York Times bestseller.

Thank you.

It's called Litages of the Wild, the myths that make us.

And when you started writing this, if someone had us said, this might be a New York Times per cellar. You would have laughed, maybe. I would have had no sense in my, I wouldn't have even able to be absorbed the idea. Yeah. Right up until the moment, I found out that it had happened. Never would have occurred to me. I was very pleased with the way things were going already, but this is a whole other thing. It reminds me of Lars Ulrich. You're familiar to... I'm afraid I'll be very familiar with Lars Ulrich. So he said something about like if he, if he had been told that they were going to become as big as they were. Yeah. He said, I would have asked you what drugs you were on and would you mind sharing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so I love your retelling of stories. Yeah. And I said, well, let's have you in here just to tell me a story. I will. Which is a little weird, maybe. You see, I'm going to fall asleep. I've got a pillow here. No, no. Yeah, there were, if you fall asleep, I will take that as high praise.

And when I ask you, you just say, I was doing dream work, Martin, for goodness sake, you're so

unsophisticated. So what I was thinking about, you and I were talking earlier, and you mentioned

that you'd actually lived in Donagall, in Ireland for a period of time. So I want to tell a story

in praise of your Irish years.

So forgive me, you're making, you're just making something up?

No, no, no, no, no.

This would be a Bronze Age Irish story.

Okay.

That sort of came into polite society probably a few hundred years ago,

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