iServalan

I am a musician and filmmaker currently working on the Book of Immersion. This is my personal diary podcast sharing my internal and external dramas. Sarnia de la Mare FRSA Artist. Storyteller. Explorer of the strange and beautiful. Host of the Personal Diaries Podcast – a life in fragments. Sarnia de la Mare is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and musician who uses creativity as both a compass and a survival tool. Her work dances between sci-fi, autobiography, sound experiments, and handmade art, often blurring the lines between the imagined and the lived. Through her Personal Diaries Podcast, Sarnia shares candid reflections from a life lived intensely — as a mother, outsider, thinker, neurodivergent creator, and relentless documenter. With warmth and honesty, she invites listeners into her studio, her thoughts, and her ever-expanding world of ideas. From cello practice to experimental soundscapes, from unfinished paintings to old diary entries, the podcast is a patchwork of insight, imperfection, and invention. Currently awaiting formal assessments for autism and ADHD, Sarnia speaks openly about her late-discovered neurodivergence and how it has shaped — and clarified — her life’s work. These themes of identity, sensory overload, and nonlinear thinking find their way into everything she creates, consciously or not. Her long-running project The Book of Immersion began during the COVID lockdown as a kind of inner escape — a musical, a novel, a film, and a personal odyssey rolled into one. It’s now a published book, an interactive audio-visual experience, and a film in production. But the heartbeat behind it is human: an ongoing search for connection, meaning, and voice. Sarnia is also currently directing In Search of Splendour, a documentary that explores disability and creativity through an experimental, poetic lens — continuing her drive to tell stories that matter, even when they’re messy, complicated, or unfinished. Find her work: 🎧 Podcast: iServalan (available on all major platforms) 📖 Book: The Book of Immersion (Kindle + PDF) 🎬 Films: The Book of Immersion (in production) and In Search of Splendour (2025) 🎵 Music: Tale Teller Club – electro-orchestral sci-fi and experimental soundscapes 🖥 Website: www.taletellerclub.com Sarnia lives and works in the UK, accompanied by her cello, bass, viola and her cat, a mountain of notebooks, and an imagination that rarely sleeps. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/iservalan--5940628/support.