KnotWork Storytelling Marisa Goudy

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Calling All Writers & Creative: Reweave Your Own Myths
Join us on August 1 for HARVEST: An Online Lughnasa Retreat for Writers and Creatives: marisagoudy.com/lughnasa-writers-retreat
OUR STORY
Rather than a single story, Aisling Fraser brings us a series of poems rooted into the land, people, and mythology of Ireland. All of her work is an invocation of wild diversity that invites us to tune into nature’s voice and be carried back to the deepest part of the soul.
OUR GUEST
Aisling Fraser is the founder of Danu Wellness, a healing space designed to reconnect you with the truest version of yourself. She is a mother, therapist and imbas poet who works as a medium for an ancient Celtic Healing Process which is deeply rooted in the Heritage and History of Ireland.
Find Aisling at: www.danuwellnesscork.com, Instagram @DanuWellnessCork, and Substack @WordsFromAcrosstheVeil
OUR CONVERSATION
Imbas forosnai: the Irish druidic practice which means something like “inspiration that illuminates.” Seers or poets would enter into the darkest caves into sensory deprivation and return with the words that would support the community.The Irish bardic tradition - putting that which is beyond words into words. Poetry is a way to communicate with the land. Words can be crafted in service to the entire community, not just for the individual.A new way to understand Sovereignty: it can only be established through connection with everything. It's a connection to my land, not in a sense of ownership, but in knowing we are of the earth and environment. The paradox of story: though there are so many reasons to celebrate it, when we cling to story as part of cultural and personal identity, story can become a limiting force.Recognizing the way humans transformed Ireland, from a great forested landscape to what is essentially a desert of green fields full of sheep. We can honor the importance of farming today, but also remember what was.Mary Reynolds, author of We Are the ARK: Returning Our Gardens to Their True Nature Through Acts of Restorative Kindness Honor the plantcestors - wisdom in the plants and nature that wants to present itself to us if we’re willing to stay long enough to listenThe story of the Nordic people, the Vikings, is important to Aisling’s work and to the origins of the Irish people. She also feels a calling to the Blackwater River, sourced near the Paps of Anu at Sliabh Luachra, a sacred, ancient city of Shrone where the Tuath Dé Dannan were said to live.The shared lost ancestors: The Irish lost on the voyage to North America, are lost to Ireland and the diaspora.  
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With...

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack
Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together. Find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons.
Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.
Reweave Your Own Myths
Join us on August 1 for HARVEST: An Online Lughnasa Retreat for Writers and Creatives: marisagoudy.com/lughnasa-writers-retreat
OUR STORY
This tale of druidic magic and epic battle tells of how the Sons of Mil, the first of the Gaels, came to Ireland and divided the land with the race of the gods, the Tuatha Dé Dannan. At the geographical centers of Ireland’s spirit and power, Uisneach and Tara, you’ll meet the great poet Amergin, the three goddesses who gave Ireland its name, and the Good God Dagda.
OUR GUEST
Brian Walsh is a professional storyteller who specializes in Celtic Mythology and folk tales. He is also a clinician and educator in a hospital setting, where story listening is at the heart of his work.
Brian’s has told at diverse venues including the Toronto International Storytelling Festival, the Parliament of World Religions, Pubs, University settings, and around the campfire under the stars.
He lives and works in Toronto, Canada, on territory covered by the treaty 13 and the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant — an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy, the Ojibwe, and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.
Find Brian’s upcoming gigs at brianwalsh.ca and on instagram @brianwalsh.ca.
OUR CONVERSATION
What it means to tell stories of Ireland here as members of the Irish diaspora on Turtle Island: If gods only had resonance on one island, they would not be gods, they would be genus loci (protective spirits of a place). There is time and place for specific stories, and then there is telling according to what the moment requires. This is a Bealtaine story: according to the Irish Annals the Sons of Mil arrive in Ireland on the eve of festival:  Thursday, April 30 1699 BCEElements of fairy lore come from this story - the balance and reciprocity required for co-existing with the Good People.Role of memorized poetry of Amergin in Brian’s telling of the story. The rosc pattern in poetry is a sort of circular sacred repetition.Stories can be used to raise people up or to weaponize. This story could be heard as a tale about the right of conquest, or as a caution about the power of keeping the balance between peoples, between the human and the divine, between the people of the earth.Asking audiences to sit with you in the ambiguities of these stories. We can’t make the gods into moral figures by contemporary standards.The trope of the worthy opponent enables both sides to ask when the work of a battle has been done and when it is time for reconciliation.Brian’s personal story of coming to this tale and to Irish mythology: a search for roots beginning as a young teen that led to a sense of home. How the Canadian wilderness of northern Alberta the landscape of ancient Ireland in a way that the current Irish flora and fauna do not.
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: a...

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack
Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together. Find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons.
Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Meet Achtan, a druid’s daughter and mother of a future king, Cormac, son of Airt. This is a story of sovereignty, of spellwork, and of our deepest entanglement with nature. Bees, wolves, and horses also play a magical role in this tale.
Our Guest
Karina Tynan is a psychotherapist and the author of two collections of Retellings from Irish Mythology: TÁIN : The Women’s Stories offers a new lens on great Irish epic, Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and SÍDH : Stories from the Women in Irish Mythology, which  are linked through the presence of the goddess in her many manifestations. 
Karina's interest in Irish mythology began almost 30 years ago through the Bard Summer School which commences each July on Clare Island, Co Mayo, Ireland. Each year the summer school explores an Irish myth for its contemporary relevance. 
You can purchase Karina’s books at bookshops across Ireland. International readers can buy them directly from the author: https://karinatynan.com/
Find Karina on Instagram @irishmythsretold
Both books are illustrated by Karina’s daughter, artist Kathy Tynan, kathytynan.net & @kathy.tynan. The books are designs by Karina’s niece, Ruby Henderson  Insta: @ruby.hndrsn
Our Conversation
Our need for magic, and the way we know that magic when we meet it: magic wakes you up.Ultimately, this is a powerful conversation both about growing and about parenting - both in the ancient times we imagine and in this difficult contemporary moment. Sacrifice (whose roots mean “to make sacred”) particularly, when it comes to parenthoodThe five spells of druidic protection are inspired by the original sources and Karina's imaginationIrish myth’s tradition of the geis (pl. geasa): a cross between a curse and a taboo. Modern examples of geasa: the ethics of psychotherapy; the way humans - or, the richest humans - are transgressing the limits of our planet’s ability to support life with the addiction to fossil fuelsOur fear of our own children’s fragility, including fears of giving our kids an eating disorder or pushing them to suicideThe importance of fathering - both for partner and childThe role of rhythmic stories, fairy tale, adventure, and romances in the development of childrenThe role of ritual, particularly coming of age rituals which get people to wake up and be alive to what happens in life.
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa....

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack
Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together. Find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons.
Subscribe to our on our Substack newsletter Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Did Saint Patrick have a wife? Irish folklore of the 18th and 19th centuries declared he did. Sheelah was celebrated on March 18, the day after Saint Paddy's Day.
KnotWork host Marisa Goudy imagines a one-sided bedtime conversation between the couple. The story also weaves in two other women of the Celtic Otherworld - Cailleach and Sheela Na Gig.
Our Guest
Martha Wright is the perfect combination of maternal and bad-ass, she devotes herself to helping people embrace their inner divinity. She is a vessel and facilitator of divine energy - whether that is a healing session,  her own writing, or leading a class or retreat. As you’ll hear in our conversation following the story, Martha has apprenticed as bean chaointe,  the Irish tradition of keening and as a shaman.
Find her at marthawrightshaman.com or on instagram @Marthawrightshaman 
Our Conversation
Sheela Na Gig: a figure of a woman with a skeletal head holding her vulva open wide that was carved into medieval churches and castles, a representation of death and rebirthApproaching a story of Ireland’s patron saint with a kind of holy ambivalence - responding to the call to the ancient, often hidden divine feminine, and also the beauty and the scholarship of early Irish Christianity, but acknowledging that Catholicism became such a punishing, diminishing force in Irish culture. Reclaiming the tradition of divine coupleship as the full humanity of the people in the story. They are both spiritual beings and as sexual beingsThis story was inspired by the famous “Pillow Talk” scene from Ireland’s greatest mythological epic, The Táin. Intimacy, at the emotional and at the physical level. Marisa borrowed from Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, particularly its refrain “I bind unto myself this day”The tradition of celebrating Sheelah’s Day seemed to emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the Irish diaspora, as a way to extend the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations one more day (and to avoid the Lenten abstention for one more day)Martha as bean feasa (wise woman) and bean chaointe (keening woman), as shaman, as emerging author who has uncovered so many layers of her own identity in the process of telling the story that is truly hers to tell“Wildness” and what that really means in our modern world.
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more ata...

Write With Us in 2024
Do you want to write your own memoir or simply make more space for self-expression in the new year? Join Marisa in the Writers' Knot, our online writing community.
Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack
Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together. Find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons.
Subscribe to our  on our Substack newsletter Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Perdita Finn shares an excerpt from Take Back the Magic. This chapter, "The Land of the Dead," describes her first encounter with the place that she and I both call home, the Hudson Valley, the land once peopled by the Lenape and Esopus tribes.
“We wouldn't fight wars if we knew that everyone on the other side had once been our child. We wouldn't kill children if we knew every child had once been our child, had once been our mother. There would be no sides.”
Our Guest
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.  Find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” at wayoftherose.org
Perdita’s book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls.
Find more at her work at takebackthemagic.com
Our Conversation
“Paperfold places”: real places that are dream places, places you feel you’ve seen before.Who are our ancestors? Everyone. This disrupts our ideas of ancestry and lineage and feels like a radical idea when we consider colonialism and we’re cautious about cultural appropriation. Civilization as a long story of genocide and colonialism that is based on stories of good guys and bad guysCyclical living, and the sense we have all been here before. Cairns on the side of Woodstock’s Overlook mountain were placed about the same time as Newgrange in Ireland. Glenn Kreisberg and Dave Holden’s research about stone monuments created by indigenous people of the northeastern US.  The heart, a sense of belonging to land, the ancestors, and the dead. So different from the fear and fascism that are so present today.Our interrelationship with the more-than-human world reflected in the destruction of the American chestnut trees.How to nourish the seeds of the heart; a practice for the new year at the Solstice.
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
Join the Writers' Knot online writing community - the new program begins mid-January!1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to...

Write With Us in 2024
Do you want to write your own memoir or simply make more space for self-expression in the new year? Join Marisa in the Writers' Knot, our online writing community.
Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack
Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Elizabeth Cunningham reads to us from her new memoir, My Life as a Prayer. For Elizabeth, "A prayer is one who prays." This excerpt brings us to the start of her journey as a writer because, for this author, writing and prayer are always interwoven.
Our Guest
Elizabeth Cunningham is a novelist, poet, musician, and counselor based in New York’s Hudson Valley.  She’ll be reading to us from her multifaith memoir, My Life as a Prayer. She is the author and illustrator of The Book of Madge, a graphic novel, and the source of her best known work, the four books in The Maeve Chronicles. Her earlier novels include The Wild Mother, The Return of the Goddess, and How to Spin Gold, all of which have been recently reprinted by Monkfish Book Publishing. 
Our Conversation
This excerpt from My Life as a Prayer is a request for help, and a prayer of gratitudeElizabeth chose to write through the lens of prayer because it enabled her to write a memoir without writing about certain things at the core of her life - love affairs, children, her marriageScripture as sacred storytellingThe pressure from Elizabeth’s father to be a social worker, not to be a writer; this tension is alive for many writers who fear they should be more devoted to activismElizabeth’s “best imaginary friend forever” BIFF, Maeve, the unrepentant Celtic Magdalene, heroine of The Passion of Mary Magdalene and three other booksThe need for an incarnate goddess, and a desire for a relationship with JesusThe invitation to all people be in a uniquely passionate love affair with “God” (or whatever you call the great spirit) Prayer and the troublesome idea that “only god can help” when we think of suffering mothers and children in GazaFite fuaite, the Irish phrase for interwoven; the idea that something can be woven, then torn, then mended, as the Hebrew word tikkun“A way out of no way, way will open”
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
Join the Writers' Knot online writing community - the new program begins mid-January!1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at writingcoachmarisa.comFind more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of her book, The Sovereignty Knot: a href="https://www.knotworkstorytelling.com/episode/www.marisagoudy.com" rel="noopener noreferrer"...