Welcome to the
Story Apothecary
Medicine & Wisdom of Old Stories for New Uncertain Times
Let Story be your Medicine
Find the thread that was lost. Remember what your ancestors knew, and let the old stories carry you home.
In an age of individualism and consumerism, we have lost sight of our traditions, our ancestors and our belonging. We might experience grief, feel emptiness, sense rootlessness, and know restlessness.
Perhaps you don't know your grandmother's songs. Perhaps you have forgotten your family's stories. Perhaps you don't hear the land call your name. You feel it as an absence you can't quite name - not homesickness, exactly, but a kind of 'unbelonging'.
Many of us are carrying a kind of inherited silence. So much was lost, forgotten, or abandoned in the process of survival. The last generations chose silence to give their loved ones a voice. They traded knowledge for peace. They left behind memory to embrace hope. This is the result of immigration, political regimes, war, oppression.
And yet something in us yearns to re-member. Something in our bellies knows there's a thread, even if we can't yet see where it leads.
Story is one of the oldest ways back.
Photo courtesy of In Feathers
Story is the way to find the thread that was lost.
A myth can't bring back lost time, but it can show you the shapes of your life, allowing you to reconnect you to lineage, to land and to the living world
My work is about helping you find your way back to that thread - through myth, through folklore and tradition, through the old tales.
Myths carry symbols old enough that they sit in the undercurrent of a culture, beneath language, in parts of our marrows that remembers before we were taught to forget.
A story doesn't ask you to prove your belonging. It doesn't require you to state your worthiness to listen. It simply shows you a map of possibility - a bear who transforms into a woman, a spirit who guards a forest, a daughter who descends nine worlds and returns. Something in you recognises it, even if you've never heard it before. Your bones remember. Your heart remembers.
Listening to traditional stories is one of the most radical things we can do in our time.
"Beauty on every level and every sense! I was completely mesmerised and so inspired. It seemed to shift something in me that was beyond words or intellect."
Hi, I'm Nana, and I believe that stories aren’t just entertainment — they’re one of the oldest forms of healing we have. Long before therapy rooms and clinical language, people sat by fires and worked through grief, fear, and change by telling and hearing stories. This belief sits at the heart of everything I do as The Story Apothecary.
Stories are not empty words strung together. They are spells and medicine. Stories shape our world. We are told that Eve ate the apple, and the telling of that one story has affected women's place in culture, society, relationships, in power. The danger of a single story.
Stories speak of descending to the underworld, of shedding your skin to reveal a true form, of having your hands cut off and growing new ones. They offer hope, courage, wisdom and medicine. That's what they have offered me. That's what they offer to all who have the ears to listen, and the heart to let them in.
Photo courtesy of Ollie Denney
Bulgarian Folk Tales
Released 04/06/2026
Bulgarian-born oral storyteller Nana Tomova carries in her bones old tales of golden maidens and winged serpents, of wise women and wild nature stretching back to ancient Thracian times, when the Great Goddess was revered. Spirits of forest and water cure and curse, the Three Fates determine destinies, a girl lets down her hair for a wolf to climb up, whilst Vampires roam the dark nights. Through this freshly translated collection of traditional stories and Rima Staines’ otherworldly illustrations, you will be enchanted in a world of imagination.
'Told, retold, and interpreted with wisdom and joy, elegantly structured to reflect the Earth’s seasons, this collection of folk stories is magical in every sense. Nana Tomova has dug deep to create a compendium of the folk imagination as passed down the millennia by our ancestors. In doing so, she makes an important contribution to the canon of oral story-telling for the 21st century. Reading these stories is like sipping fine aged wine at candle light inside a dragon’s cave. It transported me to the creative dawn of Thrace, the Balkans and Bulgaria - and to my own psyche. I will be giving this book to folk aged between nine and ninety.' - Kapka Kassabova
