Telling Their Tales - What's it all about?
Start here to read everything you need to know about this community of readers and writers
Hi there, I’m Holly. Welcome!
I’m currently a full-time stay-at-home-mum, having welcomed our little one in May 2023, and I pursue my love for reading and writing history in the edges of motherhood (read: during nap times). Motherhood has changed me entirely in more ways than I have words to describe here, but one of the best is that I’ve been able to spend more time reading and writing than I could when I worked full time.
I studied History at Oxford (BA) and Cambridge (MSt), but had a career in primary school teaching for nearly a decade. I was passionate about developing a love of reading, including supporting our earliest learners with their first forays into the world of stories. I guess this transfers over to this space in that I would love you to find as much joy in reading my words as I have in reading those of others.
From September 2024, I’ll be starting a PhD (Archaeology) at Oxford (part-time, because mum-life!) researching the role of women in the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England and Merovingian Francia. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this!
What’s the vibe here? THIS👇🏻
You step over the threshold, moving from the ice-cold, frozen realm of the cobbled street to the warm, cosy interior of the coffee shop, the location of this rendez-vous for fellow creatives and story-lovers.
Your cheeks are pink and your fingers sting as they begin to revive; you find yourself quickly having to remove woollen layers, hats and scarves and gloves coming off one by one and being stuffed into your linen shopper bag.
You look up to see green plants trail from the high shelves adorned with candles and artfully-arranged piles of books. Your shoes tap as you walk across the terracotta tiled floor towards the piles of pastries and cakes, so mouthwateringly beautiful that you could eat every one of them.
You order your favourite coffee (hazelnut skinny latte for me) and just one pastry (a cinnamon swirl this time, but the lemon drizzle cake was equally as enticing).
You spot your friends gathered around a small, heavily worn wooden table, cradling their coffee cups, their words tumbling over each other as they rush to share the worlds they’d experienced through their most recent reads: the places they’d travelled to, the people they’d met. You join them, talking for what seems like hours, before you all brave the cold once more and go your separate ways. You aren’t sad, however, because you know that you will see them again next week and speak to them many times in the intervening days.
You are kindred spirits, like minds, story-sharers.
My mission here on Substack
I long to give a voice back to those who have gone before us, recognising that they had loves and losses, joys and hurts, just like you and me. They had real, textured lives: they too grumbled that their kids didn’t leave the house on time; that their husbands burnt the dinner to the pan (sorry husbands: mine is great but he does tend to do this!); that they find their baby’s spit up on all their clothes. They had crushes and felt their cheeks warm when they walked by. They were disappointed when a work opportunity didn’t materialise.
Above all, these were individuals, people, whose lives had dignity, value, and worth.
Yet the vast majority have been forgotten, with not even their names passed down through the generations. When scant details do survive, these rarely flesh out the colour of these lives, recording only bare facts (birth, death, marriage, for example) or fleeting moments when they crossed paths with someone or something more important.
I find myself pulled towards the ordinary details, the day-to-day moments, in the lives of the men and women who lived long before us - particularly the ones whose stories have been lost. I daydream about what their lives might have been like, weaving narratives (in my head and on the page) around the bare framework of the fleeting words that alone testify their existence.
What can you expect from me?
I hope to create simple, beautiful, and joyful writing that gives a voice back to the men and women of the past.
For published posts, I will stay in this lane: history writing is my wheelhouse and while my short stories and serialised novel will stray into creative writing, they too are ultimately historical in nature, using real lives as their starting point. My great passion is early medieval Europe so most of my writing will be set in this time and place.
On Notes I have given myself permission to be a little freer… I find so much value in connecting with other mother writers in particular, so will restack, comment, and like their posts alongside more strictly historical ones. This fills my cup, so that I am able to give creatively to others. I won’t, however, be writing on motherhood. Many of the characters I write about were parents in some form, but I will only write about this within the context of historical lives.
At the moment, I’m able to share three published posts each week:
Two shorter (500-ish words) midweek posts, often a short story and a poetry excerpt
One longer (900-1200ish words) weekend post, cycling between: a book review, a biography, and two instalments of my serialised novel
This may change as I go through different seasons of life, but it’s realistic at the moment.
Check out my About page for more detail on the different subscription levels here at Telling Their Tales.
What not to expect
Anything live: webinars, workshops, livestreams, events… I just don’t have the capacity for this at the moment, as I need to be able to work without time constraints. I need to be able to work during naptimes and feeds, whilst also dropping everything if my little one is ill or particularly clingy.
I also just don’t feel like this is what I have been gifted for or called to do. It fills me with horror!
You should unsubscribe if…
You only want one post per week. I like to write on a range of topics and find that three posts per week enables me to do this.
You are uncomfortable with me sharing the impact that motherhood has on my writing. I keep this to Notes, but it’s integral to who I am and how I write.
You want a facts-based historical approach. This is just not me: I am an academic at heart (currently pursuing doctorate work) so I get formal writing, I really do. It’s just not what I want to do here: this is all about stories, tales, narratives … the textures and fabrics of real lives … bringing out lived experiences and our connections with past people.
Some top posts by category
Bertha’s Tale: The queen who converted a kingdom (a serialised novel)
Short Stories
Book Reviews
Biographies
Poetry
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This is wonderful ❤️