The Monthly Talks to Michelle Wooderson/Starlyng about her book and album

June 2025

The Monthly talks to musician, Michelle Wooderson (Starlyng), about her book and album “A Little Herbal Hymnal”

Are there any early memories of being drawn to music?
I was immersed in the folk tradition from when I was a child. My mum loved musicians like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. My dad listened to classical music, so that was the type of music that was played at home. From that beginning, and all through school, music was the thing I was best at, and it was a big part of what made life meaningful to me.
I started learning the piano around the age of 7, and then, weirdly, I dreamt one night that I would become a flute player. (I don’t think I’d even seen or heard a flute before then). My mum and dad took this dream seriously enough to save up to buy me a flute. They turned up a few months later with one for me – it was third or fourth hand, and all the metal plating was peeling off it, but honestly, it was the most precious thing I owned and I was so proud of it. My piano was a really old honky-tonk too but I loved it. It was the seventies and no one had any money for fancy things. None of that mattered.

Did you get support at home?
Neither of my parents played an instrument. They both grew up in poor families, post-war. Things were tight and there would never have been any money for them to have had music lessons. I often wonder if they might have been good musicians given the chance to learn, but they were different times.
When I was growing up, we didn’t have much money, but my mum and dad went above and beyond to encourage me. I feel really fortunate and grateful that my parents sacrificed so much so I could have music lessons.

What about school?
I went to a pretty rough comprehensive school in a poor mining community in the Midlands. I was a quiet, creative, sensitive kid who stuck out like a sore thumb. I was bullied all through my secondary school years because I was a bit different. I think this is why I threw myself into music. It became a bit of a sanctuary for me.
There wasn’t much value placed on the arts at my school, and we didn’t have visiting peripatetics coming in to teach music, so I had my music lessons with a teacher outside of school – Brian Carter. He was a phenomenal flautist and I was so lucky we found such a wonderful teacher. He spotted my gift early on and really inspired and nurtured it. With his encouragement I eventually went on to play joint principal flute in Staffordshire Youth Orchestra.

You went on to do music at university?
Yes. I did a Bachelor of Music and within that I chose to specialise in performance. I would have liked to do composition but I was strongly discouraged at the time. For some reason, they didn’t encourage women to do composition. I’ve no idea why! It was the early nineties and I’m sure that wouldn’t happen now. I wanted to do my dissertation on Irish Folk Music and that was discouraged as well. These were the days before the internet so the argument was that there wasn’t enough source material to get access to. I still did a dissertation on folk music, just not Irish Folk Music. I also did a performance recital as part of the specialism I selected.

What happened once you graduated?
I moved to Northern Ireland in 1993, and started working as a youth worker in North Belfast. This was quite a culture shock! While I was doing that, music started to find its way into my work. I was based at a community centre in an interface area, and I discovered that music was a lovely way to connect with young people.
I bought my first little house in Beechmount, just off the Springfield Road. I think I might have been one of the few English women in that neighbourhood at that time, but I loved living there. Even though there was still a lot of trouble in the city in the early nineties, I had a great bunch of friends and it was a really happy time. I set up a little project while I was there, teaching some of the kids in the streets around me. I had instruments donated – guitars and keyboards mainly – so any child that wanted to learn, could access music lessons and get an instrument of their own to play. I also organised little concerts for them up at Whiterock Leisure Centre, where their families and friends could come and hear them play.

You also did lots of other things?
All through the 1990’s I taught music part time with the Education and Library Board, and was a peripatetic woodwind tutor with Belfast School of Music. I was also touring as musician around this time with Irish Gospel singer songwriter, Robin Mark, who was really well known in the United States and Canada. I got to travel all over the world with him between 1995-2010. It was a lot of fun and through it I gained lots of experience playing on TV and radio, studio session work, performing in theatres, stadiums, churches, festivals, and I also got to play with other international artists in Nashville, as well as Belfast artists such as Duke Special and Brian Houston. I even had one of my own songs featured on a number one album in the US gospel charts.
When I wasn’t touring, my day job was music therapy. I did a postgraduate training at the Welsh College of Music and Drama in 2000-2001, and this led me to specialise in using music therapy in areas of mental health, palliative care and bereavement. As well as being immensely meaningful work it provided me with a stable income and the flexibility to travel and tour when I needed to.
Running alongside my love of music, has always been this fascination with plants and love of the natural world. Over the past few decades this curiosity has led me down many rabbit holes and I went on to qualify in aromatherapy, forest school facilitation, therapeutic horticulture and community herbalism. I was just really interested in healing and nature.
So, my two key interests were music and plants and I have followed those interests over many years.

How did Starlyng come about?
I met John Fitzpatrick in 2018, when we were both booked to play a gig. We ended up on stage beside each other and afterwards we got chatting about writing music and I got to listen to some of his compositions. I thought they were phenomenal. They moved me to tears, such was his gift.
John was an incredible violinist, studio musician and string arranger. He’d worked with some of the finest musicians in Ireland and beyond, and was held in the highest regard in the music industry. Regardless of this, there was no ego with John. He was very humble and understated, funny and self-deprecating. You couldn’t meet him and not warm to him. I adored him instantly.
Around that time, I had been asked to write the theme music for a TV show which was being made and would be aired on RTE. I thought it would be great to collaborate with John, so we started to meet every few weeks down at St. Christopher’s Church on Mersey Street. There was a dusty old piano there, a lovely big wood burning stove and great natural acoustics in the room. We’d light the fire and improvise for a bit, and we’d write and record some ideas together. Then Lockdown happened and everything stopped. The TV show was cancelled and so was the music. I lost touch with John until much later on in 2020.

What happens then?
John and I reconnected about 9 months into the Pandemic. By that stage, he had lost everything, all his work, just like so many other professional musicians. So he wasn’t doing very well at that point. I was still working as a music therapist in NI Hospice and managing to keep my head above water, but he was really struggling mentally.
I suggested that we should just keep writing, just for fun really, we could work on his material and my material. That started a weekly thing where we’d go to our friend Rick Bleakley’s studio in east Belfast and chat, play and work on each other’s compositions. It was such a creative, fun time and definitely got us through the pandemic. We decided to call ourselves ‘Starlying’ and we put out our first track in 2023 around summer solstice. Tragically, just three weeks after this, John died very unexpectedly.

How did you deal with that situation?
It was very difficult, because our lives were so interconnected. John had become the person I loved most in the world. We were pretty inseparable. And because music was such a huge part of our relationship, in the shock of losing him I just couldn’t face playing or hearing music for a while. I had to pack in a lot of my work because I was in such a state. I went underground and completely immersed myself in nature and plants and everything that comes with that wildness. It really helped me find a way through the difficult period after his death.

How do you move forward?
John and I had made a plan that we would release one track every quarter turn of the year, basically mapping the seasons, Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice.
Once the initial shock of losing him began to lift a number of months later, I started to think that I needed to honour that plan. By that stage I had begun writing again, and that helped the grieving process.
I didn’t start out thinking I was going to write a book. I was just thinking I would put individual tracks out. But because I was studying Community Herbalism and writing about plants as I was writing music, it all seemed to fit together. The plants were helping me rebuild a sense of a world without John and I ended up writing about that. It was all connected and cathartic.

How long does the project take to come together?
I didn’t start writing the book until 4 or 5 months after John (Fitzpatrick) died. I was spending a lot of time working with plants, spending a lot of time outdoors. It was winter and I was studying as well, so I didn’t know that what I was doing at the time was producing a book.
Once that became clear, I started work on the project in January 2024 and it took 12 months to complete. I financed it all through savings, and my family helped me. I have sold enough now to recover the costs and do a second print run but I am thinking that I might look at sending it to a publisher. The book has been really warmly received and I only have a few copies left of the initial printing.

It is an impressive package which is nicely put together
Thank you! I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like – a cross between an old hymn book and an old herbal, a small hardback book, beautiful enough to sit on a coffee table or carry around in your bag. The artwork was mostly done by a very talented friend of mine – Pauline O’Flynn, and my mum who’s also a gifted artist, added some botanical illustrations too. It is a book of plant wisdom, poetry, wild food and foraging, medicine-making recipes, deep nature connection, an exploration of what plants teach us about life and death, love and loss. At the end of each chapter is a QR code taking the reader to a song that deepens the whole experience. John’s beautiful strings can be heard throughout. It’s very poignant and beautiful. All the tracks were produced by the wonderful Rick Bleakley at Blackdog Studios in east Belfast.

What are the aims of the project?
Two things.
One is that I want people to connect more deeply with the natural world, to know that there is sentience and magic in every living being. We as humans have forgotten who we are. We’ve got very lost and disconnected. I think that’s why we cause so much destruction. I wanted the book to reignite wonder and love for the natural world. When you love something or someone, it’s unthinkable to cause harm.
And the second thing was a question of looking at grief. I think we’re all experiencing a collective grief over the things that are happening in the world at the moment: the genocide in Palestine, climate change, loss of biodiversity and habitat, to mention just a few.
Grief can be really isolating and our culture doesn’t talk about death or dying or loss. We’re scared of it. That makes the isolation so much greater for those experiencing bereavement. I say this not only from my own experience, but from working as a grief therapist for the past twenty years and hearing this loneliness spoken of so many times. In my job in palliative care I work with grieving families all the time and so I wanted to give a voice to this and open the conversation. I’ve found that a lot of people who have bought the book have have written to me and expressed that it has helped them deal with their own losses. Actually, some people have said that the book and songs touched them so much they have bought multiple copies for friends who are recently bereaved. But although the threads of love and loss run throughout, it’s not a sad book by any means. It’s a book full of joy, wonder, magic and beauty. One of my taglines for it is
‘Plants. Songs. Remedies.
Wonder. Curiosity. Love’.
That sums it up really.

Was there anything else which emerged through the project?
One of the other jobs I do is working part time at The Larder community food hub as the community gardener and community herbalist. The Larder is based in the heart of one of the poorest sections of Belfast society. It started off as a Food Bank but it doesn’t follow that model anymore. We’re looking to create a much more dignified system where everyone, regardless of income, can access really good quality food.
We’re establishing a little medicine garden, growing plants that help us with things like sleep, anxiety, menopause, digestion, respiratory issues, mood etc. Some of these incredible plants might be considered weeds by many people, but they have so many gifts for us if we take time to notice. So, part of what I am doing with the book is posing a question about the things that we, as a society, throw to the side, things we consider of little value, that actually have a lot to offer.
I think there are parallels with some of those I am working with at The Larder who feel like they have been thrown to the side, as do a lot of people on the margins of our society. The gaps are widening. And it is just the same with the plants and weeds around us that have so much to offer and yet we don’t see their value.
I launched ‘A Little Herbal Hymnal’, with a sold-out immersive gig on March 1st, in tribute to John Fitzpatrick. It felt beautifully fitting to perform it at St Christopher’s Church (home to The larder), in the place where he and I first began. We were able to get Lottery Community Funding to host it, which was fantastic. I’d never have been able to cover the costs otherwise, and it meant the income from tickets could all go back into supporting the work of The Larder.
The event included foraged wild foods and drinks, songs performed from the book, stories, a video installation, a tea ceremony, a gratitude ritual and an audience choir. It was incredibly rich and beautiful and John would have absolutely loved it.
There have been lots of requests to repeat the event, so I’m planning to do another one later this year at the Oh Yeah Centre in Belfast. I’m also continuing to write music, so perhaps down the line there may be ‘A Little Herbal Hymnal Vol 2’, who knows!