Book Rosie Mapplebeck
Rosie is deeply rooted in the Earth. She uses story to teach about the environment, to reflect on personal or emotional experience and to dramatise historical research. Her repertoire includes tales learned from Scottish travellers, tales from the Celtic lands and stories she has created herself, inspired by animals, birds and the people she has met.
Rosie tells to all ages, believing we can all relate to a story and hear all too few. She especially likes to work with family groups, letting story bond us across the generations. Rosie works in a wide variety of settings, from woodlands to jail cells, classrooms to cliff tops. She facilitates conversation with dementia clients using story, chosen items, poetry and song, and is happy to run workshops on story making and telling. Rosie strongly believes in story as medicine by expression; they create a safe place where issues can be examined from different perspectives. And they are so much fun!
Rosie was born in Middlesex, England and grew up in the industrial North-East in Middlesbrough. As a child, she cut her teeth on stories of myth and legend in the local library, where she also studied nature from the earliest of ages. At age 4 she drew her mum a picture of a whale – complete with a set of wheels, as the whales she had seen in museums didn’t have any legs… After a degree in Botany (having given up on whales) Rosie worked in a bookshop, as a Special Constable and then as a Veterinary Nurse. She set up her own cattery and behaviour therapy business in rural Ayrshire, where she still works as healing facilitator, surrounded by animals, birds and bees.
Rosie runs ghostly historical story walks for adults about Ayrshire and family story walks at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum where she also guides. She runs an Open Stage night in Ayr for beginner tellers, poets and songwriters. She is part of the Living Voices project for people with dementia and their carers.
Storytelling became the natural complement to her parenting, singing and writing skills. In 2005 she became an accredited teller with the Scottish Storytelling Centre. In 2013 after long training (and after finding she probably had a fair degree of ASD), she officially became Forest School leader and learned to be herself.
