KnotWork Myth & Storytelling

The days of the great Fianna warriors have ended. Unexpectedly, Oisín is invited to live out his retirement in the Otherworld and become husband to Niamh on Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth. How long is too long in paradise? Despite his love for his new wife and children, Oisín is destined to end his days at home in Ireland.

Dian Killian is the author of The Gaelic Effect, a popular publication on Substack, where she explores linguistic archaeology, human experience and potential, through the lens of Irish language, place and culture. Her writing is informed by a background in applied linguistics, Irish cultural studies, conflict resolution, and work as a professional coach. In addition to The Gaelic Effect, she is the author of two books (Connecting across Differences and Urban Empathy: True Life Adventures of Compassion on the Streets of New York), and is also an artist and musician. She lives in Dublin and frequently travels around Ireland, including to the Gaeltacht.

The Gaelic Effect: https://diankillian.substack.com

• Like mythical characters who live between this world and the Otherworld, we know what it means to be liminal creatures living in liminal times.
• Coming to Irish as an adult: beginner’s mind, humility, and meeting the language with love
• The Irish words for wife and husband, bean chéile and fear chéile, emphasize how it’s a language built on relationship rather than ownership
• Irish employs many of the principles of Nonviolent Communication
• How the modern Irish language embodies the aisling (“vision poem”) and the spéirbhean (“sky woman”)
• Also in this episode: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Spenser, Joyce and Beckett, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta, and Manchán Magan
• Marisa’s story of Tír na nÓg at the start of the show is based on Marie Heaney’s telling in Over Nine Waves.

Love the show? Subscribe to Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and join our community. www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa at www.marisagoudy.com

Join our global writing community, the Authors’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

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Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

Deep in the forest in the Scottish Borders, there’s a hidden cottage that’s home to a shapeshifting witch. In this ghost story, a handsome, duplicitous laird falls in love with the woman who can turn into a hare, and his entire world is turned upside down.

Katy Swift is a storyteller, maker, mother, and lifelong gatherer of the stories, skills, and ways of living that root us back into the more-than-human world. A Northumbrian lass with Highland and island heritage on her father’s side, she has made her home in Scotland for nearly twenty years and carries that lineage forward through her love of the Gàidhlig language and the old tales. Today she lives in the Scottish Borders with her partner and their two wee boys, in a landscape thick with ballads, hawthorns, and haunted towers.

These threads come together in The Wildcraft Way, her online course and community for families who want to walk the Celtic Wheel of the Year together through foraging, herbal remedies, seasonal recipes, Waldorf-inspired songs, traditional skills, and the stories that have always marked the turning of the year.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mama.moon.storytelling

The Wildcraft Way:

https://www.epiphany-learning.com/program/wildcraft-way-samhain-and-introduction

• This story takes place at Littledean Tower, a lesser-known Borders ruin where visitors still report a feeling of unease
• From the Flames We Rise, a 2023 gathering at Traquair honoring the folk burned as witches in Peebles, and the new memorial on Tweed Green
• Stories as living, evolving things, retold and embellished around the cèilidh fire all winter long
• Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn and her 1662 confessions of hare shape-shifting, flight, and the King and Queen of the Fairies
• Listening from both places: skepticism, belief, and a Gaelic otherworld that waits at crossroads, woodland edges, and beneath the hawthorn
• Guising, turnip lanterns, and what American Halloween has kept and lost of Samhain
• Laying a place at the table for the year’s dead
• How to Kill a Witch by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi of the Witches of Scotland podcast

Love the show? Subscribe to Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and join our community. www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa at www.marisagoudy.com

Join our global writing community, the Authors’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

We return to the archives for a story of the Fens of East Anglia, retold by Mitlé Southey.

The moon becomes trapped in a marsh pool. Without her light, the bogles and beasts of the darkness take over the Fens. Through a combination of community care and the wisdom of the old woman at the edge of the bog, the local people finally find and liberate the moon.

Mitlé is a Circle Holder walking the ancient path whilst contributing to a modern movement. The founder of Circle School, she teaches internationally and has facilitated circles, retreats and courses since 2016. She believes in the power of connection, community and circle to provide a path of integrity back to ourselves, and authentic relationship with the more than human world. As a woman of British heritage, Mitle’s circles and courses are deeply rooted in the old Western wisdom traditions and British native mythology. As a former lawyer now learning the old ways, she is seeking ways to fracture the current systems that uphold oppression and is committed to increasing her capacity to hold diverse, inclusive and safer spaces for those marginalised by those systems. When not in Circle, she can usually be found out walking or in a cosy corner with a book and a cup of tea.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gatherwithmitle

Substack: https://mitle.substack.com/

• We can see ourselves in every character and every element of the more-than-human-world in this story. This is a story of community and connection and of Sister Moon who is so caught up in overgiving that she loses track of her own needs.
• The power of the unknown and finding answers when people come together as a community.
• The mark of the heroine: the “do it together” ethic as an alternative to the hero’s journey.
• Mitlé’s experience of holding circles, both in person and online, and how we are called to continue to adapt
• How the “architecture of circle” can help us today. What is being included or suppressed in a circle? What is said or unsaid? The power of silences and words? Conversations about power and biases, and what perspectives are welcomed into a space.
• Western culture’s limits of time and how it contrasts with indigenous cultures where circles last as long as they need to go.
• What we can learn from indigenous traditions that gathered in circle. Questions of cultural appropriation and Inclusion.
• Mitlé’s source: from the folklore collected by Mrs. M.C. Balfour from the 1890s.

Love the show? Subscribe to Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and join our community. www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa at www.marisagoudy.com

Join our global writing community, the Authors’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

Mis staggers away from a gruesome battle on Kerry’s Dingle coast and finds a home in the mountains. Over 200 years, she becomes at one with the wild, covered in feathers and living completely apart from the human world. Eventually, the harper Dubh Ruis finds a gentle way to bring her home.

This preview episode is part of our Turas series.

Upgrade your membership to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and unlock your access to Turas, the subscriber-only podcast series, plus monthly invitations to gather live with the Myth Workers' Hearth community.

Subscribe: www.mythworkers.com

• Why "apocalypse" doesn't mean the end of the world, at its ancient Greek root, but an uncovering or unveiling
• Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's new book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, and the "politics of Hereness" inspired by the Jewish Labor Bund
• The Battle of Ventry, instigated by the invading Dáire Donn (the self-styled King of the World)
• How the story reads differently at different points in a life, from a young feminist grad student to now
• Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's essay, ‘Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation in Irish Writers and Religion
• Sources for the story: The Druid's Cauldron retelling — https://thedruidscauldron.org/2022/10/17/mis-and-dubh-ruis/, and Brian Ó Cuív's edition via Corpas na Gaeilge — https://corpas.ria.ie/index.php?fsg_function=3&fsg_id=492

Love the show? Subscribe to Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and join our community. www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa at www.marisagoudy.com

Join our global writing community, the Authors’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

“Driftwood Man” is a timeless tale of longing and belonging, existential homesickness and ultimately coming home that’s at once deeply Irish and unmistakably global. This original story emerged as artist-performer-activist Dee Mulrooney emigrated from Dublin to Berlin and speaks of the longing for home, land, and belonging.

Based in Berlin, Dee Mulrooney weaves a rich tapestry of experiences, emotions, and insights into her creative practice. Rooted in the complexities of inhabiting a female body, her work emerges from the profound influences of her upbringing as a working-class Irish woman in the patriarchal, misogynistic landscape of 1970s Catholic Ireland. Her background profoundly shapes her identity and informs her artistic journey, where she fluidly navigates drawing, painting, writing, performing, filmmaking, and music.

Through her alter ego, Growler—a vibrant, full-body vulva costume—she channels the voices of women past, transforming pain into powerful storytelling and performance. This character is a nod to her ancestors. Growler embodies the spirit of resilience, connecting generations and facilitating healing.

With over two decades of experience as an educator, Dee champions community and empowerment, drawing inspiration from celebrated artists and the potent power of women's narratives.

Find Dee at deirdre-mulrooney.com, on Instagram, Tiktok, and FB

Love the show? Subscribe to Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and join our community. www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa at www.marisagoudy.com

Join our global writing community, the Authors’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

Nobody believes Phaeton's claim to divine heritage: Helios, the sun god, is his father. The boy sets out on a quest to find his dad, and when they're finally united, Helios promises to fulfill one wish. Phaeton asks to drive the chariot of the sun for a day. It all ends in fire, ruin, and a geomyth.

• Matthew opens with Z.R. Ghani's poem "The Reddest Red." Full text of poem.
• Ovid's telling of Helios and Phaeton as a geomyth, a story that may preserve the memory of a real meteor that streaked over Greece centuries before it was ever written down
• How myth takes time: a "mythically literate" people needed centuries to turn a single terrifying event into a story that could be held and retold
• A detour into Manchán Magan's theory that Cú Chulainn's warp spasm may encode a meteor sighting, too
• Travel, the personal spiritual quest, and the "forward-leading wake" that changes a place as more people go there to experience it
• Matthew's course, Committed to Heart, Committed to Memory, and his "conviviums," communal practices of memorizing and reciting poetry together online

Matthew Stillman is a life-long New Yorker, a lover of language, culture, and a practitioner of bigger questions, wondering aloud, and sitting in mystery. He has spent a lifetime studying and practicing with aspects of Eastern and Western spiritual discipline, alongside years of deep engagement with long-form improvisational comedy.

He is the author of Genesis Deflowered, a book of biblical erotica written in Elizabethan English that looks at how we might heal the fracture between sex and spirit in our culture. Matthew is also the conceiver and producer of The End of Poverty?, a feature-length documentary about the origins of poverty and why it persists in a world with so much wealth. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Directors' Choice commendation, and Matthew has spoken at the UN four times about it.

He started a skin care company, Primal Derma, where he works to reclaim older, forgotten threads connecting the health of place, animals, and humans.

At the end of the episode, you'll hear about Matthew's current project, in which he teaches the dusty and deeply beautiful skill of poetry memorization and recitation through his online course, Committed to Heart, Committed to Memory. Classes are starting now.

Learn more at stillmansays.substack.com

Find Matthew at: @stillmansays (IG) / Committed To Heart, Committed To Memory (FB)

Love the show? Subscribe to Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and join our community. www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa at www.marisagoudy.com

Join our global writing community, the Authors’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

OUR STORY

According to traditional Irish myth, Tailtiu, the foster mother of Lugh of the Tuatha Dé Danann, uproots a vast forest with an axe and her own two hands. The plains she clears become the site of the great festival of Lughnasadh and once the people begin planting crops on these vast fields, agriculture comes to Ireland. She wasn't there to see it. She died from exhaustion, having done all the work alone.

One source says that Tailtiu was in bondage to the men of Ireland, but what does that actually mean? In this retelling, Tailtiu is a queen and a goddess who belongs to several worlds. The question Marisa asks in this story: was Tailtiu ordered to clear those fields, or did she merely believe she had no choice?

And then what happens after Tailtiu dies? In this reimagining of what comes after the traditional story ends, Tailtiu arrives in Tír na mBan, the Land of Women, where she comes to understand her worth is rooted in so much more than her capacity to work.

Past KnotWork episodes featuring Tailtiu:

• A Mother’s Love, A Mother’s Sacrifice: Tailtiu and Lugh | S5 Ep9
• The Eagle Remembers: A Bardic Vision for Lughnasadh with Jonathon Huet | S7 Ep13

HEAR THE WHOLE STORY

This preview episode is part of our Turas series.

Upgrade your membership to support KnotWork Myth & Storytelling and unlock your access to Turas, the subscriber-only podcast series, plus monthly invitations to gather live with the Myth Workers' Hearth community.

Subscribe: www.mythworkers.com

WORK WITH MARISA

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at www.marisagoudy.com

Learn about our global writing community, the Authors' Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

Join Us at the Retreat!

Meaning-Making: Claiming & Interpreting Signs

November 6-8, 2026, near Philadelphia

Kara will lead us over a weekend of asking for, recognizing, and trusting in the signs that the universe is constantly sending your way. Marisa joins as a guest facilitator teaching about Myth Working for Meaning Makers.

Space is limited. Learn more and register now: www.joyfulresonance.com/retreat

OUR STORY

A raven, a spider, a river. Kara Simons shares the story of a visionary journey that helped her navigate a health crisis and then rebuild trust in her own body and her own creativity.

OUR GUEST

Kara Simons, founder of Joyful Resonance, is an author, attorney, and oracle deck creator. Her original decks, Prairie Majesty Oracle and Song of the Grandmothers Oracle, have sold thousands of copies worldwide. Through inspired wordweaving, Kara anchors portals in her workshops and retreats for experiencing magic as real. Feeling leads to believing leads to trusting—and taking action.

Her latest book, You Belong Here, has just been released.

Find Kara at www.joyfulresonance.com

OUR CONVERSATION

• A thyroid diagnosis became a message about how Kara had tried to earn love through productivity. This is the story of what it took to actually listen to her body and her own needs.
• Grandmother Spider's role as Kara's creative guide
• Reframing grandmother energy as something ageless and genderless, not confined to a kitchen or a bloodline
• “Make believe" and "real" are a false binary when it comes to imagination and spirit
• The quest for signs, symbols, and nudges from the universe
• Kara's new book, You Belong Here, and its exploration of identity, safety, and purpose.

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at www.marisagoudy.com

Learn about our global writing community, the Authors' Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

Perdita Finn returns to KnotWork for the third time to talk about the grandmothers, the mothers behind the mothers. She shares a story told in her latest book, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors: discovering a hilltop church built by 19th century Irish immigrants and dedicated to St. Anne, the mother of Mary who holds the magic of being mother to us all.

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. They are currently at work on their next book together, Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy. To find out more about her devotion to "ecology not theology," visit wayoftherose.org.

In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead, empowering participants to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World traces her recovery of these lost ways. Her newest book, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors, is a map back to the maternal wisdom that has always been ours. She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.

Find Perdita at: https://takebackthemagic.com/

• St. Anne as folk memory of a goddess of Ireland and the Indo-European tradition: Anu or Danu. They contain "every story and no story.”
• Legends beneath the chapel: buried bones, caves, a mirrored room, and miracle healings that drew pilgrims for decades
• Perdita’s grandmother’s mason jar of saved chicken wishbones. What it means to hold a wish in reserve for real crisis rather than spend it casually
• What gets transmitted between grandmother and grandchild without ever being spoken, including the Calabrian grandmother's sacred "No"
• We’re invited to understand we are being mothered by the dead and by the land, since "the dead and the land are one"

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

As a paid Myth Workers' Hearth subscriber, you'll have access to Turas and be invited to our monthly Myth Workers' Hearth Gatherings.

Subscribe to Myth Workers' Hearth (via Substack): www.mythworkers.com

1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, memoir, or visionary creative nonfiction, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at www.marisagoudy.com

Learn about our global writing community, the Authors' Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

OUR STORY

“Lugh was a new type of hero, a hero that was needed then, a hero that is needed now. A hero who listens to everyone and anyone, and never strikes unless it's a just cause and never from anger or from revenge, but for the benefit of the whole.”

In celebration of the festival of Lughnasadh, we receive a story of the god of the Tuatha Dé Danann, Lugh. Our storyteller, Jonathon Huet, steps into the role of Tuan mac Cairill, the seanchaí of old to unfold this tale.

OUR GUEST

Jonathon Huet is a woodsman, shamanic practitioner, naturalist, and bushcraft instructor. He is a creative, professional storyteller and speaker trained in bushcraft, woodcraft, and expedition leadership. Over the last thirty years he has researched and studied the folklore of the natural world of the British Isles, running workshops that explore the deep spiritual practices rooted in the sister islands of Britain and Ireland. His practice is grounded in full inclusivity, working with trauma, mental health, and wellbeing.

For the past ten years he has trained with Caitlín Matthews and other teachers on the Walkers Between Worlds Shamanic Training Programme, which has deepened his connection further to nature and his ancestral lands.

Substack: https://woodlandbard.substack.com/ Website: https://www.walkwithtrees.com

OUR CONVERSATION

• The bittersweet nature of Lughnasadh, which is both a harvest festival and moment of sacrifice and grief. The first Lughnasah marked the goddess Tailtiu's death after she exhausted herself in the clearing of the fields. Both Yeats and Blake had unique language for joy and sorrow woven together
• The question of a man’s relationship with the goddess and the unique guilt that emerges when examining the connection to the earth. The reclamation of wild masculine figures like Cernunnos and Herne the Hunter
• Jonathon's work with young people in care: holding space without judgment and offering experiences with the land and with nature.
• References to the work of John Moriarty: refusing to be "blackmailed into being a modern man" and understanding Ireland through Fódla consciousness rather than Éiru consciousness.
• Additional resources in this episode: William Sharp (writing as Fiona Macleod); RJ Steward; Caitlín Matthew’s book Sophia; Shonaleigh a drut’syla, a storyteller in a Jewish tradition: https://shonaleigh.uk/about/; Jennifer Murphy of the Celtic Creatives

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir, or are a wellness professional or 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: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups
• Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SHOW

Love KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together. As a paid Myth Workers' Hearth subscriber, you'll have access to Turas and be invited to our monthly Myth Workers' Hearth Gatherings.

Subscribe to Myth Workers' Hearth: www.mythworkers.com