Preface

By Dr. Elowen Carne

 

We are, all of us, built from stories. The ones we are told, the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones we inherit without ever knowing - the quiet, persistent tales whispered by the grain in the wood of our floors and the stone beneath our feet.

I began my work as a collector of other people’s stories, armed with a recorder and the clean, sharp tools of academic scepticism. I believed then that truth was a thing to be extracted, like a fossil from clay - identified, dated, and placed safely behind glass. The idea that the land itself could be a narrator was, to my professional self, a romantic illness. A diagnosis I was eager to make.                              

The cases contained within this volume are the record of my cure. They trace a path from a sceptical PhD candidate trying to taxidermy a local curiosity, to the woman I am now - a listener. This transformation was not a single moment of revelation, but a series of corrections, like a ship’s captain adjusting their course through a stubborn fog. Each story presented a new facet of the same profound truth: that the world is not silent. It is, and has always been, in a state of constant, eloquent testimony. Our failure was one of attention.

           I have chosen to present these cases not as polished, standalone fictions, but with their original context; the professional rejections, the private doubts, the fragments of theory scribbled in field journals. I have done this not for confession, but for clarity. To understand the listening, one must first understand the noise it cuts through: the clamour of institutional disbelief, the seductive simplicity of cynicism, and the profound loneliness of hearing a truth that no one else can verify.

This resistance, I now see, was part of the training. It taught me that a story heard is a responsibility accepted. To listen is to be changed. And to be changed is to become an agent of change in turn.

The final case in this collection, The Listener’s Testament, represents the culmination of that learning. It is the point at which listening becomes not only an act of perception but of resistance - the refusal to let noise, anger, and inherited hatred dictate the shape of the world we share. It taught me that every echo carries a choice: to repeat the harm that made it, or to transform it into something truer. This last case is, therefore, both a record and a plea - that we attend more carefully to the frequencies of compassion that still rise, even from broken ground.

This volume, then, is more than a casebook. It is an argument for a different way of belonging to a place. It is an invitation to listen for the memories in your own stone, your own river, your own street corner. You may not hear a name or a date. But you might feel the shape of a promise, or the memory of a laugh, or the resilient, humming note of a community that decided, against all odds, to endure.

The land is speaking. It has never stopped.

I offer this work in the hope that it helps you to hear it. 

And when the work is done, I may have to follow the echo to its source.

 

Dr. Elowen Carne

Zennor, Cornwall

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* An extract from The Listener: The Authorised Casebook of Dr. Elowen Carne

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