The Story of ‘Making Worlds – The Creation Myth Puppets’
Like so many ventures, the whole enterprise started in earnest before we could suspect anything was starting. At least, in terms of my brief sojourn on the planet it was long ago and our children were still young. The oldest of our three inadvertently, through his homework task, gave me the idea of gathering the unusually high numbers of puppeteers in town and making a show – making a world if you like – in a day. We would attempt to set a world record for the biggest puppet show on earth and we’d do it as a huge workshop. More than 200 people made a spectacular puppet show in a day and another 250 plus came to watch called. The show was called the ‘Guests of Chance’ because we simply didn’t know what would happen. The flame was lit.
In the thirty-five years since the Guests of Chance, I have ended up, with a band of brilliant artists, making hundreds of shows – some of the shows three times the size of that first one. School audiences were amazed watching their young children raise the roof with high quality performances made in a week from nothing. The joy in hall after hall was manifest. Expectations were exceeded time after time. They remembered and we learnt. It was a slow dawn but it eventually it dawned on me that, if I was put on the planet to do one thing, this was probably it – guiding, directing, orchestrating and creating big shows with large groups of children in a short amount of time.


“With puppets anything is possible”
As time went by and we found more and more tales to animate, our range of puppets grew. Necessity being just what they say it is and us making creation myths from North and South America, the Arctic Circle, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe as well as getting the children to write their own tales. So, naturally, we had to make kangaroos, swans, mandrills, frogs, mice, sheep, giraffes, wolves, lions, vultures, dolphins, robins….and many, many, many more creatures. There were also the deities who made the creatures such as the Rainbow Serpent or Quetzalcoatl or Ra or Nyame. It seemed a waste to keep all these models of making just for ourselves and the hundred thousand children who made their own puppets and brought them to life.



From time to time, I mooted the idea of creating a manual and whoever the crew of freelance artists work together at the time would make vaguely positive noises. This went on at intermittent intervals over the years until I forgot about it. But then something else began.
I was working as a sole trader under the company name Far & Wide Puppets and in 2012 my wife worked with me to make a show with a school in South West London. As I write this a coincidence occurs to me. The first ever creation myth we made with a school in 1996 was an African tale which featured a sky god who loved nothing more than to create – in 2012 we made that very same tale. Coincidences abound in my line of work. Some are quite extraordinary. Anyway, this show with my wife was in a well-heeled private school and my wife asked me how much I’d charged them. On hearing how much her response was, “that’s not enough.” Although, given the hours and levels of physical, emotional and mental energy that go into making this sort of work, she was right – the deal was sealed. And I told her saying that there was nothing I could do about it. She agreed but said that she would do something about it.
Long story short. The result was a charity was founded in 2014 – Creation Myth Puppets. It’s a good story so I’ll write about that elsewhere. Creation Myth Puppets took the extensive work that had been done as Far & Wide to another level. We had a regular team of artists and got Arts Council Funding leading to expanding our work into new areas of story creation with children and the making of more and more puppet models with more and more children. We even drew up our manifesto.

Creation Myth Puppets Manifesto


By this time, I had forgotten all about creating a manual of our puppets until one day a few years back, a talented artist who is part of the core artist team of Creation Myth Puppets, said, “we should make a book of all these puppets.” That artist was Charlie Narweski Scullion. Charlie is a generous and highly talented man. His commitment and wonderful illustrations have made possible Making Worlds the book. Pre- Lockdown, we had enough work as a company to begin to fund Charlie’s work. Post-Lockdown, like so many in the arts, life has not been so healthy and we have had to manage our thinner resources very carefully but we have survived.
Charlie put together a Crowdfunder and the response exceeded our expectations and now Making Worlds – the Creation Myth Handbook lives and will be published by the end of 2023.
A guide to making your own worlds come to life.