On this Red Tent Storyteller episode, we sit down with willow-weaver, grief-walker, and audio alchemist Hazel Moon Audio to trace the winding path from London suburbs to wild Hebridean shores — and from women’s refuge work to bringing other women’s stories to life in her own voice. Hazel shares how a girl who “didn’t fit” in a sporty family grew into a woman who chose books, music, radical feminism, and eventually a law conversion course and Women’s Aid work… only to walk away from the city and start again on a remote island where she had to learn to cut peat, build stone walls, grow food, and talk to neighbours instead of avoiding eye contact on the street.

From there, we follow her into the craft: the moment a friend dragged her to a basketry course, the older woman with arthritis who handed her the torch and said, “Of course you’re good enough to teach,” and the years of planting willow, making baskets, and slowly becoming the village basketmaker. Hazel speaks honestly about the years of caregiving for her partner Carly, and the way grief stripped all the colour out of the world — even the beauty of the island — and how reading aloud to Carly at night became the quiet, unseen apprenticeship for what would come next.

That “next” was Hazel Moon Audio: an unexpected nudge in a Dyke Voices Twitter space, months of learning ACX, microphones, mastering, and the sheer stamina of narrating whole lives into a microphone. Hazel walks us through the practical and emotional labour of audiobook narration — from auditioning for projects like Ray, The Well of Loneliness, The Candlemaker’s Woman, and feminist titles like Girls Matter and The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism — to setting boundaries around what she will and won’t read, mentoring other women who want to try it, and refusing to let AI erase the human warmth and history in a woman’s voice. This is an episode about craft, courage, and starting a new life chapter when the world has already taken more than its share.Hazel Moon is not just “a nice voice.” She’s a woman who has lived several lives and stitches them all into the way she tells a story.

Hazel’s authority doesn’t come from industry hype — it comes from lived experience, craftsmanship, political clarity, and a voice that has literally read women to sleep and back into life.If you want more conversations like this — women telling the whole truth about their lives, work, grief, and craft — follow us on X and join Ember for free, The Red Tent Collective’s flame of ongoing broadcasts.Follow Hazel Moon Audio on X