Burn

A Story of Fire, Woods and Healing

By: Ben Short

Narrated by: Ben Short

A frank and inspiring memoir about letting go of what we're told to want, risking everything to find happiness and the brutal salve of nature.

Ben Short has a successful career in advertising, a flat in a trendy part of London, a flashy motorbike. But after years of suffering with anxiety, he's a wreck. A drastic change is needed.

For a time, he finds solace working with a forester, then as an apprentice to a Gypsy woodman, setting up home in a dilapidated wagon with just a rescue dog for company. However, it is not until he feels the call of the furnace, a glowing charcoal kiln in the Dorset woods, that he can truly re-forge his thoughts, put the years of suffering behind him, and start afresh by immersing himself in the old ways of woods and fire.

Exquisitely written and deeply honest, Burn is a hopeful story of transformation, a celebration of manual work and craft, and a love letter to the English countryside.

©2022 Ben Short (P)2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Awesome book

It’s not really about charcoal, it’s about how a guy who found healing and purpose leaving his corporate job and working in the woods. He is a poetic writer, that weaves a good story. And really speaks to the heart.

Written by the fire

I finished this book while walking through the barn, and I’m stopped for a moment to offer a reflection.

Ben shares a story of stories. To me it shows up like the “visiting” I remember from my simple upbringing among the fields. Visiting happened with good people on fireside, around the table, leaning on shovels along fence rows and ditch banks, Sundays, the only days you’d seem to catch a farmer in an arm chair. Maybe more, the visitations, the “conversations” I had with wind, hay, branches, sage, willow, and the dark inky night. I can’t get enough of this kind of authentic story telling, in a place and a space created by the author where things actually still happen worth telling.

I appreciate that the writing hints at but refrains from nostalgia, doesn’t get preachy, is properly improper at times, and honest about the conflict of life and death in nature. Ben, thank you for sitting down with Pig and writing out the feelings. Thank you for not being to busy in love with land or in healing to break the trance of the transcendental and do the work to form it up in your own unique way. Thank you to all the characters human and otherwise out there and for honoring them all by writing their messages in your book. It’s not common to read a book that draws from the natural source, most books today are rehashed from human mind - laced with data, an incestual re-creation of the human mind.

This book to me a message from the quiet of nature, a quiet that under Ben’s craft, is revealed as it is, a source of unimaginable beauty and intelligence older than human thought, a cacophony of connection and magic. Thank you for carrying on the natural art, you’re a modern alchemist and a shaman. Please write more.