Healing Spells: An Evening with Martin Shaw and Jane Hirshfield

Stories have always been medicinal. Some are potions, some poisons. The best of them become guiding narratives that we somehow sense are good for our health. Poetry too, a guiding star in tough times. Ancient myths often tell us that wholeness begins to be realised not by perfect health but by deeper understandings of the soul. In our incompleteness begins our authenticity.

Tickets are free and space is limited. Tickets will be available here at 12pm PST on Wednesday, January 28th, 2026.

Martin Shaw is a writer and mythographer. Author of many books, he is currently in residence at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, and is a fellow of the Temenos Academy. He is also the director of the Westcountry School of Myth. His latest book, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us is just out. His previous works include Scatterlings, Stag Cult, Courting the Wild Twin and Smoke Hole. His first book, A Branch From The Lightning Tree, won the Nautilus Book Award.

Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023); Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past.

Co-sponsored by the Stanford Storytelling Project and the Medicine and the Muse.

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