Floating Stories Lab presents…
Fire pit talks
with Angie Richard
Imagine you have just sailed across an ocean and now floating in the calm of your new anchorage, huddled by the fire pit on the center deck of your Poylnesian-inspired voyaging double canoe talking story with fellow voyagers and locals from the community. Such is the set and setting for Fire Pit Talks, a celebration of long-form conversations taking place around the digital fire pit, shared as both video and audio formats. Subscribe to Substack for first access to all episodes, ad free.
Episode One: Sailing Solo on a Simple Wooden Catamaran | Interview with Kiana Weltzien
It’s 7am and the sun is already warming the bay off the coast of Paraty, Brazil, where Kiana Weltzien lives anchored aboard her 50-year-old Wharram wooden catamaran, ‘Mara Noka’. For years now, Kiana has voyaged - almost exclusively solo - aboard her weathered wooden friend, the two learning to live together in a form of symbiosis grounded in hard knocks, deep trust, and mutual respect.
Episode Two: Art, Sailing, Surf & Life Between Worlds | Laerke Heilman of Women & the Wind
There is a moment in Women & the Wind where Laerke Heilmann reflects on growing up with childhood stories about a Danish sailing family’s voyages at sea. These stories left a mark on her imagination, but they were not isolated tales—her own family had their own open-ocean adventures. She was merely a baby when she first set sail, beginning a lifelong relationship with the sea before she could walk or talk.
Episode Three: Art as Awakening | Interview with Alizé Jireh of Women & the Wind
At one point during my conversation with the phenomenal lens-woman Alizé Jireh, it struck me—she’s part of a generation (25 years young) that has never known life without the Internet. It’s what enabled her to complete high school online and graduate years ahead of her peers, creating space for artistic exploration and a creative coming-of-age during puberty. But it also means she’s never experienced the disconnection that once defined travel: running through unfamiliar cities in search of an internet café, waiting to send or receive news from home. She’s lived her life consistently connected.
Episode Four: Between Wind and Will | Interview with Maya from Sailing Magic Carpet
In my most recent recorded conversation, we meet Maya — musician, filmmaker, sailor, and boat builder, perhaps known to some of you as one half of the phenomenal YouTube channel Sailing Magic Carpet. I have followed Maya and Aladino’s salty stories for several years, so it was an absolute pleasure to finally speak across oceans — me in Brighton, she on the west coast of Canada. I think Maya’s journey has become one of the most honest chronicles of a creative life at sea, from the $1 boat that first ignited her curiosity at 18-years-old, to the more recent five-year gruel of rebuilding a Cape George Cutter (and, at one point, having two refits on the go at once, uff!).
Episode Five: Sutton Hoo, Ghost Boats & Ocean Care
In this episode of Fire Pit Talks, I sit down with anthropologist, experience designer and storyteller Lisa M. Rose, MPA for a conversation that travels from the Great Lakes to Sutton Hoo’s Anglo-Saxon longship reconstruction to the Isle of Wight and today’s global crisis of abandoned “ghost boats” and marine pollution.
Lisa shares her work with the Sutton Hoo Ships Company in Suffolk, where a 7th-century clinker-built ship is being reconstructed using traditional methods. Together, we explore what reconstructive archaeology, craft heritage, and traditional ecological knowledge can teach us about modern boatbuilding, materials, and responsibility.