Explore your own mythic landscape…

Join us for our summertime writers’ retreat on June 25th! 

During a three hour online retreat, we’ll explore a series of imaginal landscapes that help to illuminate and reframe your own relationship to your creativity and to your voice. You can expect a guided journey, a lot of time to write, and chances to dive into conversation with other myth-minded participants.

This event is open to all paid Myth Is Medicine subscribers. To subscribe, or to upgrade your subscription, please visit: https://mythismedicine.substack.com/ 

IN THIS EPISODE

Marisa revisits the story of Cessair, the first person to set foot on Irish soil. This time, the story is told from the perspective of the ocean that carries Cessair from her homeland in the ancient Sudanese city of Meroë, all the way to Ireland.

• Find the full story of Cessair in When Tides Rise, Build Your Own Boat, S5 Ep19
• The latest Bard Mythologies program, an exploration of creation myths tracing the route that Cessair might have taken across the ancient world.  
• The original story is told in the Leabhar Gabhála Éireann, the Book of Invasions
• Marisa’s new project explore the concept of erosion, both in terms of culture and the earth.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

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.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

OUR STORY

This tale from the Outer Hebrides weaves together an unjust king, a sovereign maiden, and the Cailleach. It originates in a certain place on Isle of Harris, but spans many landscapes from Lochlann (Norway) to Éire (Ireland).

Tracy Chipman received this story of the Cailleach Squire in the late 1990s from an islander from the village of Leverburgh named Norman MacLeod. It has never been published, and was given to Tracy in hopes that she’d preserve and share it as part of the Hebridean Folklore Project.

OUR GUEST

Tracy Chipman is a somatic healing artist, oral storyteller, creative writer, and a certified TRE® provider who weaves together ancient and new experiences designed to invite us into deeper connections with ourselves and the animate world. She resides in Washburn, Wisconsin, on the traditional territories of the Ojibwe peoples. In March 2023 Tracy published her first book, Borealis Mundi - Resting in Place, Loss & Grace. 

Learn more about her work. www.tracychipman.net, IG @all.here.dwell.free, Substack: allheredwellfree.substack.com, and Patreon: www.patreon.com/c/tchipman_storyteller

OUR CONVERSATION

• Meeting the elemental powers of the land in an “un-storied” way rather imposing our expected stories upon them.
• The language and the access to the imaginal that has been lost in modernity
• The power of orality. We reference a recent article by Sophie Strand (a guest S2 Ep 3 and S4 Ep3) called Against Self Capture.
• The understanding of sovereignty and virginity as being related to being complete unto oneself
• The experience of telling stories in certain atmospheres and how different elements emerge.
• The sweetest sound in the world, according to Finn MacCool: “the music of what happens”
• What it’s like to tell Scottish stories on Turtle Island, being aware of appropriation and learning how to stay centered in yourself when called out. The messiness and difficult encounters when doing cultural work

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

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.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

OUR STORY

It’s Gemini Season. And Marisa, your host, is a quintessential Gemini. She tells the story of Castor and Pollux, the twins who are associated with the constellation. 

IN THIS EPISODE

• WTF is Blindboy? He’s an Irish podcaster and author whose show explores everything from mythology to mental health to modern culture. Highly recommended!
• Chani Nicholas is a Canadian astrologer and writer, and the woman behind the CHANI app as well as several podcasts related to astrology, culture, and activism. 
• Eleanora Amendolara is Marisa’s longtime teacher, and the founder of the Sacred Center School for the Healing Arts. She appears in S4 Ep9.  

The passage from the end of the episode is from Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity & Soul.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

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.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

OUR STORY

A magical tree grows apples that assure the fertility of the community, but suddenly the fruit stops appearing each morning. The story, which comes from the Nart Sagas of the Ossetia region in the Caucasus Mountains, includes an initiatory journey, a marriage, and is ultimately about the union of the land and the sea. 

OUR GUEST

Stephanie MacKay is the founder of Mythology Club and is co-founder and Director of Fianna Wilderness School. She specializes in ancestral knowledge, earth-based skills, ceremony and myth. Stephanie has a degree in literature, which has been enriched by over 15 years of transformative practice and study. She has delved deep into the realms of myth and initiation through trainings with Animas Valley Institute, Haven Institute, Wilderness Awareness School, and over a decade of study with Martín Prechtel. Her work is deeply informed by the time she spent in Alberta collaborating with Blackfoot and Métis elders as a part of the Rediscovery Initiative. She has held the role of senior guide and director at nature-based organizations across Western Canada. 

Stephanie is dedicated to uncovering the vestiges of intact cultural origins within the body of old European mythologies. Drawing from the wellspring of these old mythologies, she seeks to uncover the hidden pathways that lead us to our cultural origins—reviving traditions long forgotten and holding space for the rehydration of ancestral wisdom.

Find her at www.stephaniemackay.ca and facebook.com/MythologyCultureRemembered

OUR CONVERSATION

• First questions to savor when you first receive a story: Where do you place yourself in this story? What image stands out for you? Can we meet the story from a place of soul?
• This story is connected to a Celtic story from the Isle of Skye, “The Cup of Healing.” The Narts are connected to the Celtic peoples through Indo-European migration.
• The contrast of working with myth for the purpose of psychological insight, compared to the more ancient, animist, land-based understandings of the stories
• The power of romance in the creation of the world. In this story, she is water goddess, he is a warrior of the land.
• John Colarusso, translator of the Nart Sagas
• Stephanie’s work with First Nations elders of the Haida, Blackfoot, Métis. Her need to look to her own ancestral origins to feed her own land based work on on the land of the Sneneymuxw, Gabriola Island.
• The discomfort and aliveness that comes with reckoning with the stories of the lands you live upon as a descendant of settlers
• We might read this story as the old “hero selects a woman” narrative, but it’s ultimately a story about the marriage of the land and the sea and the creation of the Nart people.
• This story is an initiation story for all, not just a singular hero’s tale. Everyone has a magnificence and a royalty of the soul (Martín Prechtel)/
• How to become receptive to story rather than a consumer or a decoder of story.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution (via Substack) helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

OUR STORY

Think you know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?Think again. Katrice Horsley offers a wholly original take on this classic tale. It’s a coming of age narrative that invites us all to come into relationship with the wildest parts of ourselves.

OUR GUEST

Katrice grew up in the slums of Birmingham. Whilst her family were poor in the pocket, they were rich in the mouth and this laid the foundation for her love of words and stories. In her early years she struggled to be understood due to a speech problem and this resulted in her becoming a selective mute - in fact she did not speak in school until she was about 8 years old and her teachers judged her to be 'educationally sub-normal.' She went on to become the UK's National Storytelling Laureate and an internationally known narrative consultant and performer. Katrice believes that this was not, 'in spite' of her childhood but because of it. She is passionate about the power of story in enabling people to know that their voice deserves to be heard and their story deserves to be told.

Website - www.narrative4change.com

Substack The Wildling's Path https://katrice.substack.com/

• This story was crafted as an homage to the late British writer Angela Carter
• Katrice’s key themes: duty, desire, and death. 
• Inhabiting the liminal space between the feral and the acceptable, she questions what is allowed by the dominant narrative and explores what within the individual nature that needs an outlet.
• The myth of separation, at cultural and personal level
• The desire to make menstruation and what it means into something beautiful 
• Biomimicry: “a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by living organisms to solve challenges comparable to the ones we face as individuals and societies.” Katrice recommends this interview with Janine Benyus on biomimicry. 
• On Katrice’s TBR list: To Have Or to Hold by Sophie Pavelle
• Katrice’s newest project “Mythcilium” explores how myths work as the mycorrhizal networks that connect humanity
• Oral storytelling is action driven while written storytelling is character driven.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution (via Substack) helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

OUR STORY

As part of our Myth Workers and Culture Makers series, the artist Rónán Ó Raghallaigh takes us on a tour of the landscape and storyscape of his native County Kildare and neighboring County Wicklow. This area was home to Fionn mac Cumhaill (AKA Finn McCool) and his legendary band of warriors, the Fianna.

OUR GUEST

Rónán Ó Raghallaigh is an artist and researcher who received an MFA from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2021. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland and internationally.

Working through painting and performance, Rónán’s practice engages with pre-Christian Ireland as a means for contemporary postcolonial action. He visits sacred sites and researches their archaeology, history and folklore, providing a spring for new work. Paintings are made in the studio, while performances on site are filmed or live. He is re-learning the Irish language, and uses it during performances, for work-titles and in written texts interwoven with English and his vernacular dialect.

Rónán’s work is a constant act of remembering and cultivating alternative ways of being in response to colonialism, Christianity and industry. Storytelling and ritual become a practice for befriending our environment, considering identity and encouraging healing.

Find Rónán on Instagram: @ronan.o.raghallaigh and at ronanoraghallaigh.com

OUR CONVERSATION

• Rónán’s approaching to creative visionary art work includes accessing the consciousness through channeling and trance work. It’s a form of DIY spirituality and decolonization work.
• Logainmneacha: Irish placenames
• The power of well-visited sacred sites where others are also engaging with spiritual work, and also being with folks who are simply out enjoying a beautiful day
• The research and revival of imbas forosnai and other druidic practices to access inspiration
• The power of naming. In 1972 Brian O'Doherty staged a performance called Name Change, in which he changed his name to “Patrick Ireland” in protest of Bloody Sunday in Derry.
• The role of ritual, and Rónán’s performance art piece: Bealtaine Baptism
• Amergin’s Song with its proclamations of “I am” as a form of pre-Christian prayer.
• A recent performance art piece An Tobar agus an Chloch 

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution (via Substack) helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

Our Story

What if the first day of summer arrived with the icy grip of the Ice Age? Join one man on his quest for truth as he seeks answers from Ireland’s animist wisdom keepers—encountering Eagle, Otter, and Salmon along the way.

Inspired by an account shared in Gearóid Ó Crualaoich’s The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer, this story reimagines the tale of The Cailleach Bhéarrathach and the cold of May-Day Monday. 

Our Guest

As KnotWork’s 2025 resident storyteller, Erica O’Reilly is devoted to facilitating experiences where souls feel seen, held, and heard. She believes deeply in wisdom of the human body and spirit; as well as the powerful medicine of storytelling.

Over the years, in coming home to the bones of her Irish ancestry, Erica has discovered that her dán [soul work] is interlaced within the sacred embrace of the Irish Mná Feasa (the Wise Women), the Mná Leighas (the Medicine Women), the Mná Chaointe (the Keening Women), and the Áes Dána (People of the Arts).

As the Creative Visionary of Into the Circle Theatre, Erica is dedicated to reverently honoring the tradition of the seanchaí in a modern context. Through the weaving of Irish culture, history, folklore, and mythology, Into the Circle Theatre shares the hallowed tales of women remembering and reclaiming the wisdom of their bodies and the magic of their spirits.

As an Irish-Canadian, Erica remains profoundly grateful to the traditional spirits and keepers of the land—past, present, and future—of the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation, where she was born and currently resides. Míle buíochas for the opportunity to live, create, share stories, and walk alongside you.

Find Erica: Weavings of the Wise & Embodied [Substack], Instagram or her website.

Subscribe now and mark your calendars for the Sunday after Bealtaine.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution (via Substack) helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next members only Myth Workers' Salon on May 4 at 11 AM ET (via Zoom).

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.

OUR STORY

On the eve of the festival of Bealtaine (Beltane), three sovereignty goddesses watch a fleet approach Ireland’s eastern shore. The new arrivals were the Sons of Mil, the first of the Gaels. Their coming would unseat the race of gods known as the Tuatha Dé Danann and change… everything. The goddesses knew this, and welcomed them in anyway.

This truly is a Bealtaine tale: according to the Irish Annals the Sons of Mil arrive in Ireland on the eve of the festival:  Thursday, April 30 1699 BCE.

This story is inspired by the final wave of migration described in Ireland’s Book of Invasions. Brian Walsh told his version, The Coming of the Sons of Mil, on the podcast last year (S5 Ep3). Marisa’s retelling gives us the story from the women’s perspective.

This truly is a Bealtaine tale: according to the Irish Annals the Sons of Mil arrive in Ireland on the eve of the festival:  Thursday, April 30 1699 BCE.

Want to dive deeper into this story? Join us for the next Myth Workers’ Salon via Zoom on May 4 at 11 AM ET. 

This open conversation is for folks who support the podcast through paid subscriptions to the Myth is Medicine newsletter over on Substack. 

Subscribe now and mark your calendars for the Sunday after Bealtaine.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution (via Substack) helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next members only Myth Workers' Salon on May 4 at 11 AM ET (via Zoom).

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.

OUR STORY

The tale of Etain and Midir is one of the great love stories of Irish mythology, and our guest Amanda Verdery brings it to the podcast just in time for Bealtaine, the springtime festival that celebrates new life  and fertility.

OUR GUEST

Amanda Verdery is a writer, certified shamanic practitioner, and initiated medicine woman in her Celtic ancestral traditions. A second-generation Scottish American with Irish, English and French ancestry, most of her learning hails from the Scottish & Irish mythic and mystical paths. She is devoted to helping women in particular remember and embody their dán— their soul's gift and calling.

In 2022, she founded the Wild Becoming Sanctuary, a modern mystery school guiding deep & holy women of all kinds into communion with their power and capacity for self-healing. Join her in the Wild Becoming Sanctuary.

She also offers 1:1 guidance to those undergoing a holy rite of passage in their lives, in her Wild Becoming Immersion. All of her work is led by the Path of the Goddess and the circle-wisdom of the Wheel of the Year. 

Find Amanda at www.wild-becoming.com, on Instagram @wild_becoming , and on her Substack newsletter Wild Becoming:

OUR CONVERSATION

• The power of initiation and choice, particularly in women’s lives right now
• The way we look to myth for psychological insights, but also seek to understand our connection to the more-than-human world.
• Seeking your soul’s true name, your dán
• The Claddagh ring, the hands, crown, and heart - friendship, loyalty, and love.
• At one point, Etain is turned into a puddle of water. What does this teach us about our romance with water and our own essence? Water as the ultimate model for shapeshifting.
• True love is a great threat to the patriarchy. 

Want to keep exploring ideas like these? Join us for the next Myth Workers’ Salon via Zoom on May 4 at 11 AM ET. 

This open conversation is for folks who support the podcast through paid subscriptions to the Myth is Medicine newsletter over on Substack. 

Subscribe now and mark your calendars for the Sunday after Bealtaine.

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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Please Support Our Show: Join us on Substack

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution (via Substack) helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.

With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next members only Myth Workers' Salon happening on Zoom on May 4 at 11 AM ET.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.

OUR STORY

This is the story of Macha, a goddess, a fairy woman, a woman of the Sidhe, who took a human lover for a year. This story, and Macha's race against the king's horses, sets the stage for the greatest epic in Irish mythology, the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Marisa returns to this story which she originally shared in 2022 and looks at it through the lens of a “post Roe world,” in which the right to abortion and reproductive freedom is no longer part of life for all Americans.

She explores the many ways in which we also live in a post-privacy world, and how this influences everything from romantic to parent-child relationships.

Want to keep exploring ideas like these? Join us for the next Myth Workers’ Salon via Zoom on May 4 at 11 AM ET. 

This open conversation is for folks who support the podcast through paid subscriptions to the Myth is Medicine newsletter over on Substack. 

Subscribe now and mark your calendars for the Sunday after Bealtaine.

https://mythismedicine.substack.com/

 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 at www.marisagoudy.com
• Learn about our global writing communities, the Authors’ Knot and the Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.