APOLOGIES TO YOTO SPACE USERS. We were unaware that deactivating these MYO playlists would affect people that have already downloaded them. We're seeking advice on this. Please bear with us while we figure it out.
I now have proper Yoto Cards of these stories for sale though, which you can buy through this link. By buying these cards you're supporting the future of The Book of Arralan.
https://yotoplay.com/creators/morwenna-rose
Ever since I was a child, I've always had wild stories racing around my head. Nature has always been my inspiration; wild landscapes make the perfect canvas for wild characters to form and dwell. Despite a love for stories and storytelling, I never considered doing anything with this interest due to my dyslexia. Had I not struggled so much with grammar, punctuation, and spelling, I might have dared to dream of becoming an author. Instead, I took a path in special needs education and also harp teaching.
Decades passed, and then came lockdown. Yes, like many people, lockdown was the spark. I have two young, lively boys whom I home educate. I run a home education collective with a few other families, and when everyone was forced into isolation, I wanted to find a way to keep the children connected and shield them a bit from what was going on.
So one day, I picked up my phone and started talking into it. I began a story. I had no idea where it was going or how it would develop. I wrote nothing down; it was completely freeform, just building on whatever came from the previous episode. I sent one out a day for 66 days until the story came to a natural conclusion. Each one of these children had an alias in the story, which helped them feel like, instead of being stuck at home, they were off on wild adventures in a mysterious land. I remember the day my parents asked my eldest son, "Are you missing your friends?" and he said, "No, of course not because I see them in Arralan every day!" That took some fun explaining, but it was a special moment for me to realize my experiment had worked. They didn't feel the isolation.
I also sent out letters and activity packs from Arralan to the children so they had crafts that went with the episodes to keep the stories alive in their minds. There was something special about having to wait until the next day for the next episode instead of binging it. It hadn't been created yet, so they had to wait, and this resulted in them playing out and reimagining each episode for the whole day.
The parents, who are all attempting low screen households, were all very appreciative, saying it was a sanity saver, and time and time again, I got the message, "You should do something with it; it's really good." Not much of a businesswoman, I didn't really know what to do with it, but I liked the idea of offering screen-free slithers of sanity to tired parents, and I was excited by the idea that in an overly edited, ever-flashy digital time, that good old unscripted storytelling still had a place in children's hearts. So, in August 2022, I decided to release it as a podcast.
Not knowing the first thing about the podcasting world, I just posted it on a few Facebook pages, and people started tuning in. It wasn't long before people from all over the world were sending me heartfelt messages of appreciation and the constant hope that I might create more.
Of course, my children and their friends asked me for more and more, and so I continued. There have been some bumps along the way; I lost half a season due to corrupted files and had to rerecord the first 33 episodes as they were just spoken into WhatsApp and were appalling quality, but it's been a learning curve.
Each season is a bit of a journey for myself as much as the characters in it. I never really know where the story is going to go, although I have a vague outline of elements I'd like to include. I feel this is an important part of why it's so engaging. It's fresh from the imagination, the words I'm speaking are describing exactly what my mind's eye is imagining, and I think (based on the feedback I've had) that there is something unique and authentic about it that children connect with.
The bottom line is I just never lost my childish imagination, and children resonate with that.