Sarah Acton is a writer and explorer weaving oral history research, myth, story and expanded realities of soul and cosmos connected to place and landscapes. As part of her research practice Sarah delivers immersive collaborations, performances and writing commissions based on site response, with an established track record of working with natural and post-industrial landscapes with people and organisations across arts, heritage, education and health sectors.
what is black ven?
A huge mudslide. Mass of cliff. Blue lias clay layers. The dark place where ammonites wake after millions of years…transformed to stone…snakestone once known as…shifting moving landflow between Charmouth and Lyme…graves of pyrite…underwater realms intertidal and very slippery.
what is black ven writer?
Writer, author, performer, creative project designer and facilitator known for the last twelve years as Black Ven. With a proven track record of experience delivering commissions from small to large scale immersed in landscape, memory and communities. Always place-connected and political because playful creativity through attention and intention become empowering tools through freedom to remember, speak, think, question, roam, explore, make and action. It used to be all about the work but now this includes a responsibility to be part of a global urgent awakening against forces that move against our civil liberties, plunder our pockets and challenge our movements and freedoms. I’m interested in open-minded enquiry, language, soul and process towards generative change and personal and communal growth for individuals and the health of wider community, and all things relating to deepening connection to the land for change-making, joy and wide-awake passion to be present in this moment. The only difference is that now I am part of the fight, making a creative contribution (which I used to think enough) is only part of this effort. It is connected to a quest into ancient stories and patterns and underground spaces and dark secret corners.
Projects (creative facilitator)
The work is immersive and it’s getting intense this year. Disrupting creative blockages, and building confidence in creative writing for myself and others is about being curious, dreamy and outside in nature, to shift energy, break the chains that bind potential, and transforms expectations, in magic, healing and creative vitality.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
A soul wanderer over many miles. My writing explores the journey of the heart in its quest to find a way home; always tracking the sundial shadow of love, venturing a course towards true north.
Meanwhile as I study (artists, thinkers, storytellers and poets) to remember what it is to be human in a more than human world, to honour dead languages and sleeping warriors, lost species and old names. Silence and listening. Listening that carves beauty from chaos in its reverberation, and combs the mundane from the everyday profound in trembling dawns of realm-crossing. Certainly I find solitude in caves and underground, read and attend the teachings of live and dead poets, stories and myth, sit at the feet of trees, navigate by the sky-dictionary of clouds and winds, attend to night notes and dreaming in the forest.
This is what I believe: I am for writing and activism that serves with humility and beauty, crafted for the purpose of transformation, sharing, healing, teaching and tendering fierce boundless kindness and love to the earth, community and self. I am for freedom of expression and movement, creative process as an essential means of communication, magic and expression in the deep “heart-work” (Rilke*) that connects us to what really matters. But now more overtly political, it always was.
Love is not consolation, it is light (Simone Weil)
A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William Stafford
“And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”
Sarah Acton, 2026
*“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” (
