Write Your Book With Us In 2026

The Authors’ Knot Program, February - November 2026

Registration is open now for our intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, novelists. and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”

In this episode, we welcome back Elizabeth Cunningham, a beloved guest who joins us for the third time. Elizabeth shares the wild Elemental Grannies who appear in her latest novel Over the Edge of the World. 

OUR GUEST

Widely known for The Maeve Chronicles, Elizabeth Cunningham is the author of six other novels, four collections of poems, and a memoir. She lives in the Valley of the Mahicantuck on land that was home to the Esopus Tribe of the Lenape.

Elizabeth’s latest novel is Over the Edge of the World and her new poetry collection is called  Holding Our Brokenness. Find all of her books at https://elizabethcunninghamwrites.com/

IN THIS EPISODE

• Meet the Grannies–Sweep, Spark, Dirt, and Brine
•  The power of fairytales to help us grapple with the biggest issues of modern life, particularly issues of power and environmental destruction
• Archetypal old women characters that have appeared across Elizabeth’s work especially in The Wild Mother and The Maeve Chronicles
• Elizabeth’s process of naming and conceiving of her characters 
• A reading of “November Trees”  a poem from her new collection, Holding Our Brokenness

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 writingcoachmarisa.com
• Learn about group writing opportunities: www.marisagoudy.com/writing-groups
• Find more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of her book, The Sovereignty Knot: www.marisagoudy.com

Follow the show on Substack, Instagram, and Facebook.

When Rima Bonario invited me to be part of her Sovereignty Rising Summit, I was honored. 

You’re invited to the Sovereignty Rising Summit, too! Join us Nov. 21-23. Register for this free online event now: https://www.thesevenqueendoms.net/sovereignty-rising-summit

Rima’s work has given me an opportunity to come back into renewed relationship with ideas that are always at the roots of everything I do at KnotWork.

OUR GUEST

Dr. Rima Bonario is an Author, Dream Weaver, and Soul-Coach with over 30 years of experience in spiritual and mystic exploration. She helps women reclaim their inner power, divine wisdom, and radiant presence through archetypal embodiment, ritual, and transformational programs.

As the author of The Seven Queendoms: A Soul-Map for Embodying Sacred Feminine Sovereignty, and the Founder of Bloom Temple Mystery School, Rima guides women into self-trust, soul-sourced prosperity, and embodied leadership. 

Holding a doctorate in Transformational Psychology, Rima blends trauma-informed practices, energy work, and the Temple Art of Anointing to offer profound spiritual transformation. 

Meet Rima, and more than three dozen other powerful advocates for the power of sovereignty at the Sovereignty Rising Summit: https://www.thesevenqueendoms.net/sovereignty-rising-summit

IN THIS EPISODE

• Marisa revisits the experience of writing and publishing The Sovereignty Knot, nearly six years later, including the shifts in our cultural interpretation of “sovereignty” due to the pandemic
• The Cailleach, a shapeshifting being older than the time and land itself, is likely the first of the Irish Sovereignty Goddesses
• The roots of Rima’s passion for sovereignty, including a childhood need to “up regulate” the adults in her life, which she sees a skill and an obligation of young women and the princess archetype
• Sovereignty counters both hyper-individualism and selfless service
• Reflections on sovereignty as individuals, and on the national level, particularly on colonized land in North America
• The concept of Rima’s seven sovereign queens, and their shadow aspects

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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine. Words Are Magic

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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine. Words Are Magic

S6 Ep 33

We continue to celebrate Samhain season on the podcast with a story of an Irish goddess and queen who was eventually known as a banshee and a witch. 

Though we tend to celebrate the festival on the same day as Halloween, October 31, the ancestors would have celebrated this final harvest on the day that falls between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice. In 2025, that’s November 7.

In a year full of No Kings protests and with the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor, it’s the perfect time to embrace the women and the rabble who operate outside the halls of established power.

“Then, on the eve of Samhain precisely, Mongfind dies. So this is The Death of Mongfind the Banshee. Hence Samhain is called by the rabble, “Mongfind's Feast,”  for she was a witch and had magical power while she was in flesh; wherefore women and the rabble make petitions to her on Samhain.” From "The Death of Crimthan Etc." in the Silva Gadelica, a collection of medieval Irish tales, translated by Standish O’Grady, 1892. 

Mongfind, a sovereignty goddess and high queen of Tara, inspired Marisa to start KnotWork Storytelling, and her stories  appeared in several past episodes:

• Ireland’s Forgotten Goddess-Queen-Witch (S4 Ep7)
• The Last Sovereignty Goddess (S4 Ep 8)
• Niall of the Nine Hostages, A Story by Mari Kennedy (S3 Ep14)

This story is really an invitation to imagine and do your own myth working. Who were “the women and the rabble” who would have remembered Mongfind after her death? Where would they have gathered? Who would have led the ceremony? What would their petitions have been?

Share your myth work reflections in the comments section of the latest post at Myth Is Medicine.

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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine. Words Are Magic

Samhain: the Celtic festival when the veil between the worlds is thin.

It's the last harvest of the old year, the start of the new, and a time of turning inward both to reckon with the shadow and to engage in deep, restorative rest.

We're marking the start of Samhain season with a conversation with Robert Mulhall as part of our Myth Workers and Culture Makers series.

May this episode offer you an invitation to have your own conversation with the Otherworld and engage with mythology, the land, and the power of ritual and ceremony.

OUR GUEST

Robert Mulhall has spent the last two decades in such diverse industries as public health, leadership development, education, finance, organizational consulting, and executive coaching. He is now the CEO of Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires. 

Originally from County Wicklow, Robert holds a bachelor’s degree in commerce, accounting, and business management from the University College of Dublin. He is a certified public accountant in Ireland, and certified in mediation, executive coaching, the Enneagram, Reiki, and Celtic Irish Shamanism. 

 IN THIS EPISODE:

• Living mythology in modern times through relationship with the land and daily spiritual practice
• The power of uncertainty and mystery in Irish spiritual traditions
• The importance of humility in walking with spirit and indigenous wisdom
• Finding wholeness through reconnecting with ancestral roots and practices
• Navigating cultural identity and spiritual authenticity with an awareness of colonization and what it has stolen from both indigenous and white-identifying peoples
• The symbol and power of the triple spiral, the triskele
• “Don’t rush your winter.” How can you allow your own wintering, quietude, and need for rest and renewal - even if that instinct doesn’t match the current weather or your long to do list.

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.

Last Call! Write with Us this September

The Writers’ Knot is welcoming new members! This is the global creative community where where the mythic imagination meets creative expression.

Registration is now open and due to the intimate nature of this community, space is extremely limited: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine. Words Are Magic

IN THIS EPISODE

What takes us even deeper than mythology? The direct relationship with the earth itself. 

In this episode, I share a 20th century poem rather than an ancient story: Seamus Heaney’s "Digging."

• Finding the mythic, magical moments in the everyday, and in art that seems to describe “the mundane”
• The evolution of the name of my Substack newsletter to  Myth is Medicine. Words are Magic. 
• Reflections on sharing poetry with my daughter at the start of our first day of homeschooling
• The nature of work, whether that’s farm labor or sitting at the writing desk
• Listen to Mr. Heaney recite "Digging"

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.

Write with Us this September

The Writers’ Knot is welcoming new members! This is the global creative community where where the mythic imagination meets creative expression.

Registration is now open and due to the intimate nature of this community, space is extremely limited: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

OUR STORY

King Bran leaves the feasting hall and is wrapped in the haunting song of a magical silver branch. This is the beginning of his immram, an oversea journey to the Otherworld. Along the way, he meets Manannán Mac Lir, the god of the sea, and they eventually reach Tir na mBan, the Island of Women.

IN THIS EPISODE

• This story of Bran throws the typical hero’s journey on its head as he cannot return home with the elixir because time works so differently in the otherworld
• Silver Branch Perception, a way of seeing the world described by the Irish mystic-philosopher-scholar John Moriarty (author of Dreamtime and Invoking Ireland)
• My experiences with the Bard Mythologies Summer School, which carries Moriarty’s work forward today
• Reflections on traveling to the ancestral homeland of Ireland, including the art of arriving there fully, the pain of leaving, and the unique challenges of returning home again
• What it means to be “fully in yourself” as you travel and as you move through your everyday life 
• How my own life is changing on the other side of my own homecoming: homeschooling my younger daughter

Write with Us this September

The Writers’ Knot is welcoming new members! This is the global creative community where where the mythic imagination meets creative expression.

Registration is now open and due to the intimate nature of this community, space is extremely limited: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

This week, a ‘best of the podcast episode’: Achtan: A Brave Mother’s Tale.

Our guest Karina Tynan, psychotherapist and Irish mythology author, tells a story of sovereignty, or spellwork, and of our deepest entanglement with nature. Bees, wolves, and horses play a magical role in the tale of Achtan and the lengths she went to protect her infant son, the future king, Cormac, son of Airt.

In the conversation that follows we explore:

✨Mothering and parenting - both in the ancient times we imagine and in this difficult contemporary moment

✨Our need for magic, and the way we know that magic when we meet it

✨The way Karina blends her imagination and personal experience into all her mythological retellings

✨Sacrifice (whose roots mean “to make sacred”) particularly, when it comes to parenthood

✨Achtan is a druid’s daughter, and Karina imagines the details of the five spells of protection are woven around Cormac Mac Airt in the literature

✨Our fear of our own children’s fragility, including fears of giving our kids an eating disorder or pushing them to suicide

✨The importance of coming of age rituals in indigenous cultures and the lost value of adventure.

✨The role of rhythmic stories, fairy tale, adventure, and romances in the development of children

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.

Write with Us this September

The Writers’ Knot is welcoming new members! This is the global creative community where where the mythic imagination meets creative expression.

Registration is now open and due to the intimate nature of this community, space is extremely limited: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

Our Story

The sea has its own way of speaking - not in words, but tides, dreams, and memory. Not all who feel lost are meant to be found; some of us are simply remembering where we came from. 

Erica O'Reilly's The Call of the Sea and a Lost Sealskin emerged when she returned to Ottawa, after two weeks at an artists' residency on the coast of Kerry. In this piece, she explores the layered, cascading grief of returning to a land that doesn’t feel of “home.” 

This piece was first as part of her Substack series The Creative Process of De thír mo Mháithreacha: Of the Land of My Mothers. Be sure to subscribe to her amazing newsletter, Weavings of the Wise & Embodied.

Our Guest

As KnotWork’s 2025 resident storyteller, Erica’s heart-centered work is devoted to facilitating experiences where souls feel seen, held, and heard. 

Through her Into the Circle Theatre project, Erica weaves together Irish culture, history, folklore, and mythology.

As an Irish-Canadian, Erica is 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. 

In this episode:

• Diasporic grief and what it is to feel at home in two worlds
• The selkie myth, that classic tale from Irish mythology of the seal woman who is torn between land and sea
• Creative residencies: making plans vs. letting go of expectations
• Storytelling is medicine and sharing stories out loud matters
• What it means to live between worlds and living the question: do you have to choose? 
• Planting seeds in the water, hoping for future adventures and new stories together

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.

Write with Us this September

The Writers’ Knot is welcoming new members! This is the global creative community where where the mythic imagination meets creative expression.

Registration is now open and due to the intimate nature of this community, space is extremely limited: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

You can also dive deeper into the stories behind the stories in this episode with the latest post about the immram tradition and what makes a good story.

In This Episode

In this solo episode, Marisa Goudy explores the art of truly “arriving” through the lens of her recent journey to Ireland, blending personal storytelling with Irish mythic tradition.

Inspired by the ancient immram tales—sea journeys to the otherworld—Marisa reflects on how travel, memory, and landscape shape our sense of self and belonging. Rather than a simple travelogue, the episode weaves together 17 moments of arrival at the Bard Mythologies Summer School on Clare Island, each representing a different facet of presence, transformation, and connection.

Along the way, Marisa draws parallels between her experiences and Irish mythology (including the story of the voyage of Máel Dúin), considers the role of motherhood, grief, and friendship, and invites listeners to reflect on their own journeys and moments of arrival.

Also in this episode:

• Fiona Doris who gave us “Bid, the Unbiddable” S6 Ep4
• Tracy Chipman who joined us in S6 Ep19, had me on her show, “A Year and a Day” in an episode called The Poetry of Mothering
• Erica O’Reilly, our storyteller in residence who will join us next week with her own story of visiting Ireland this July
• Connecting with past KnotWork guests at the Bard Mythologies Summer School including: Treacy O’Connor, Mari Kennedy, Karina Tynan, and the founderes of the Bard, Ellen O’Malley Dunlop, and Sandy Dunlop.

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.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine

Write with Us this September

The Writers’ Knot is welcoming new members! This is the global creative community where where the mythic imagination meets creative expression.

Registration is now open and due to the intimate nature of this community, space is extremely limited: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community

OUR STORY

As the traditional Irish myth goes, Tailtiu, the foster mother of Lugh of the Tuatha Dé Danann, clears vast fields so the people can plant their first crops. And then, she dies from exhaustion. The great festival of Lughnasa (on or around August 1) is held in her honor.

REFLECTIONS

• The power of retelling stories, both to honor the cyclical nature of time and to give ourselves the chance to see it with new eyes
• How we tend to flatten the stories and experiences of groups of "others" in preference for singular hero's tales
• What does this story say about work and overwork, and the way that we can get so caught up in what we convince ourselves must be done, regardless of the cost?
• Deep gratitude to the work of Bard Mythologies. Find the passage about the Fir Bolg, and more, at bardmythologies.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.