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Join the Authors’ Knot Program

Marisa is leading an intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”

There are just two seats left! Registration closes February 10, 2025.

OUR JOURNEY

The season opens with an episode from our Myth Workers & Culture Makers series. Rather than telling a story of Brigid, Treacy O’Connor takes us on a meditative journey to feel the presence of Ireland’s mother goddess and matron saint.

OUR GUEST

Treacy O’Connor  is an ordained OneSpirit Interfaith Minister, guardian of Ireland's ancient ancestral wisdom, Mindfulness and Meditation teacher & Co-Founder and CEO of Creating Wellness. Her mission is to inspire and empower a return to right relationship with the self, others, the planet and the cosmos – connecting the dots through the passage of the heart. 

Treacy initiated a campaign to honour Brigid with a public holiday in Ireland which was inaugurated in 2023 and she was honoured by her local town with a Balbriggan Town Award, for illuminating the hearts and minds of the 24,000 residents with a Brigid Procession of Light in 2024.

Brigid continues to inspire and surprise Treacy with invitations to be an expression for connection with her qualities, in many different ways. One of those invitations is taking the form of a 6 day retreat.  Restoring the Heart of Brigid, a magical  pilgrimage and retreat to be held in Ireland  May 31st to June 6th 2025, will be guided by Treacy O’Connor in collaboration with Carmela Fleury and LeeYen Anderson:  https://www.leeyenanderson.com/heart-of-brigid

Follow Treacy on Substack, Instagram, or Facebook.

 OUR CONVERSATION

• The emergence of Brigid into the popular consciousness over the last several years, and what it means to introduce her as not only an historical figure, but as a spiritual presence.
• Brigid’s Day, now a national holiday in Ireland, started with a petition in 2019 and was made a reality in 2023.
• Treacy’s story of being called to the very diverse town of Balbriggan, or Baile Brigín - the “Village Little Brigid” and what it was like to create a festival, including an intimate fire procession at Imbolc
• Brigid’s connection to both fire and water. These elements temper and bring one another into balance
• How Brigid’s energy emerges in everyone. A story of how Maud Gonne, Irish actor and revolutionary, exemplified Brigid energy.

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.

Join One of Our Group Writing Programs in 2025!

The Authors’ Knot Program, February - November 2025

An intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”

The Writers’ Knot Community, January - June 2025

A creativity incubator for writers seeking camaraderie and connection. Mythic imagination meets creative expression in this long-running global writing community.

Our Story

The goddess Brigid is known to be a daughter of Dagda, “the Good God.” But who was her mother?

Laura Murphy tells her own story of Brigid’s birth at Newgrange. The child comes from the milky way, the way of her mother, the goddess Bóinn. (Laura offered us Bóinn’s story in Season 2, Episode 7.)

Our Guest

Laura is a poet, activist, and healer. She is a passionate campaigner for Ireland’s Mother and Baby home survivors and other issues surrounding equality, environmental and social healing including the recent successful campaign to make Brigid’s Day a national public holiday in Ireland (February 3, 2025!)

Watch the “Is Mise” Lightshow, Brigid’s Day in Kildare 2022.

Follow Laura on Instagram.

Our Conversation

• The first time Brigid is recognized with a national holiday February 1, 2023, a green comet crossed the skies
• Artists who are with us in the conversation, Caitlin Matthews and Dee Mulrooney. See the images on Myth Is Medicine.
• Power of the sacred twelve and thirteen, and yet Brigid’s sacred number is 19 (the sisters who held the sacred flame in Kildare).
• The significance of the cygnus constellation in this story and in Laura and Marisa’s stories
• Dagda: sacred masculine as midwife. Echoes of a KnotWork episode with Perdita Finn, who describes Joseph as midwife to Mary. 
• Brigid and Mary in Celtic Christianity, which was close to the Essene tradition. Kate Chadbourne in Season 1, Episode 1, the story of Brigid as best friend to Mary, creating a diversion with the flaming harrow on the day that Mary was nervous about being “churched” after childbirth.
• Imbas forosnai, the energy of creation, as well as “the inspiration that illuminates” and the power of prophecy and speaking things into creation.

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.

Join One of Our Group Writing Programs in 2025!

The Authors’ Knot Program, February - November 2025

An intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”

The Writers’ Knot Community, January - June 2025

A creativity incubator for writers seeking camaraderie and connection. Mythic imagination meets creative expression in this long-running global writing community.

Our Story

Ireland doesn’t have a creation story, but it does have Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions. The first "invasion" was led by Cessair, a granddaughter of Noah who took her own boat to Ireland to avoid that great Biblical flood.

Our Guest

Carmen Schreffler is a marketing consultant who works with purpose-driven entrepreneurs. She gives entrepreneurs the tools to cultivate rich and diverse ecosystems where they can thrive. She believes in connecting with your natural gifts—intuition, curiosity, and discernment—to guide the creation of a sustainable business that meets your needs and goals. 

Join Carmen on Substack for inspiration on weaving the threads of your life and business into a thriving ecosystem: https://wildpreneur.substack.com/

Instagram @carmenschreffler 

Our Conversation

• This conversation was recorded in March, 2023.
• What stories get told and passed on. What makes a myth “real”? Who are the “winners of culture”? Which parts of civilization, culture are we meant to rewrite and rewild? Rather than tearing down the master’s house, what if we are meant to build a new boat? Is technology, including artificial intelligence “the next flood”?
• What’s the source of this story? Scholars say it was conceived to further Ireland’s desire to establish Christianity and a Biblical pedigree, but the myth may have been rooted into something much older: an older goddess or memory of the floods that would have come with the end of the last ice age. 
• The power of sharing your unique story and art and bringing it through your unique lens in this age of ChatGPT and AI, as entrepreneurs and creatives.
• The work of Mary Reynolds, a “recovering landscape designer,” and author of We Are the Ark. Her work of Acts of Restorative Kindness in order to live in relationship with the earth.
• Article in the New Yorker, The End of the English Major: liberal arts as a way into so many different ways of knowing.
• Carmen’s guiding principle, a quote from Yogi Amrit Desai: “We exist in perpetual creative response.” We remain open minded and open to the moment without judgment and move forward from that place.
• Marisa’s inventions: the reason Cessair and family were not included on the Ark and her meeting with the trinity of goddesses who gave Ireland its name: Éiru, Banba and Fódla.

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.

Join One of Our Group Writing Programs in 2025!

The Authors’ Knot Program, February - November 2025

An intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”

The Writers’ Knot Community, January - June 2025

A creativity incubator for writers seeking camaraderie and connection. Mythic imagination meets creative expression in this long-running global writing community.

Our Story

Iona. This island in the Scottish Hebrides is only three miles long, but it's home to untold spiritual, cultural, and natural magic.

In this excerpt from the spiritual memoir, The Geography of the Soul, author Royce Fitts invites us to meet the wild divine feminine energies that are embodied on this sacred land.

Our Guest

Royce Fitts is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified dream worker, with a doctorate in ministry.

His book The Geography of the Soul: Dreams, Reality and the Journey of a Lifetime blends memoir, political and social consciousness, and spiritual wisdom and takes you to a hidden gem in the midst of the English countryside: the Ridgeway National Trail.

Royce is a long-time writing coaching client. I have had the immense pleasure and privilege of walking alongside him throughout the writing process.

Order Geography of the Soul from your favorite bookseller. 

The audiobook edition is now available. Download it now.

Our Conversation

• This book grew out of Royce’s 2016 journey: a “conscious hike” on the Ridgeway National Trail, the oldest road in England and Europe.
• The role of dreams in our lives and the strange, evolutionary instinct to dream. 
• Royce describes his relationship to the Crone of Iona and what he learned about his own masculinity while held by the sacred feminine.  
• What is it like to embody masculine “god” energy in a healthy way? Royce invites us to have an intimate conversation with the feminine and masculine divinity within us.
• Royce’s lived paradox: he is a mystic, wizard, shaman in this world, but his work takes him to the heart of the US military where he is a military and family life counselor
• An invocation of vitality, and why it is so important to dream and to value our dreams.

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.

Our Story

Marisa invites you to explore the lore of the Cailleach, the winter solstice at Newgrange, and the work of the Irish mystic philosopher John Moriarty. Plus: a new oracular practice to welcome 2025, the Twelve Rays of Solstice.

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. Get the stories behind each episode and stay connected between seasons.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.

A special invitation for writers & creatives: Join one of Marisa’s writing groups!

• The Authors’ Knot Program, February - November 2025

An intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”

• The Writers’ Knot Community, January - June 2025

A creativity incubator for writers seeking camaraderie and connection.  Mythic imagination meets creative expression in this long-running global writing community.

In this episode:

• Visiting Loughcrew or Slieve na Calliagh in the midst of Storm Ashley
• Newgrange, and how the sun penetrates the inner chamber of the 5000 year old passage tomb
• Gearóid Ó Crualaoich’s Book of the Cailleach: He associates the Cailleach with “Conflict with and displacement by Christianity”
• John Moriarty’s Invoking Ireland
• Marisa’s new practice for the year, Twelve Rays of Solstice, is a twist on the more familiar Omen Days tradition. In the twelve days stretching from December 21 to January 1, you seek out a sign each day that foretells of the year to come. Dec. 21 corresponds to January, Dec 22 to Feb. all the way to Jan 1’s offering of what December of 2025 will bring
• Let's share this practice together. I'll be sharing my 12 Rays over on Instagram and in my Substack Notes

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 our global creative community, The Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community
• 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.

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. Get the stories behind each episode and stay connected between seasons.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.

OUR STORY

Rab Fulton brings us “a healing story” with its roots in 19th century Ireland. A stranger comes to northern Galway, and he doesn’t know how to be with the land or honor the stories and traditions of this new land. Thanks to a foolish choice, and a bit of magic, the man eventually becomes an integral part of the community.

OUR GUEST

Rab Fulton is a Galway-based Scottish/Irish storyteller, author, and educator. Along with with Kerry Graham, Rab is the host of The Celtic Tales Chronicles podcast. 

His books include West of Ireland Folk Tales for Children and Galway Bay Folk Tales.

You can find Rab telling stories upstairs in the Crane Bar in Galway’s West End  every Thursday evening. Get your tickets in advance - they often sell out!

Follow Rab on instagram @celtictalesgalway for details on upcoming events, including the storytelling project 'Growing With Stories' with Amelia Perez. 

Find more about Rab on LinkedIn and at www.celtictalesgalway.com

OUR CONVERSATION

• Rab tells a 200 year old story that speaks to our 21st century questions: How we deal with our anger? What’s possible when we commit to resolving our conflicts? How do we welcome the stranger and how do we honor traditions when we come to new places?
• What the new immigrants to Ireland bring to this land and how we weave new people into the Irish narrative.
• The burdens of single definitions of what nationalities are - we contain multitudes. Neither Scottish nor Irish society have ever been homogeneous.  Galway, a port city that was essentially an English city, was a very diverse city, and that diversity still carries on today.
• Rab’s many years of storytelling at the Crane Bar and some insight into being a working storyteller.
• Growing up in Glasgow in a working class family with a duality of language speaking Scots, a cousin of English sometimes called “bad English.” The only Scottish history Rab was told was about the land clearances, an act of ethnic cleansing, and it was framed as a good economic practice.  
• Why do we tell stories? Never underestimate the power of sheer pleasure!
•  It’s as important to be a story listener as it is to be a storyteller.
• Check out the KWS episode featuring another Scottish storyteller Katy Swift: Bride and the Cailleach, S3 Ep 10 

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 our global creative community, The Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community
• 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.

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. Get the stories behind each episode and stay connected between seasons.

Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is Medicine.

IN THIS EPISODE

In this episode, Irish songcarrier Sionnáin offers an ode to the Cailleach called “The Wise One.”

This is the second installment in our Myth Workers & Culture Makers series and includes a deep, powerful conversation about ancient tradition and living lore.

OUR GUEST

Sionnáin is a singer, songwriter & musician from the West of Ireland. Her path has guided her into gathering both traditional and channeled songs from the landscape of Éire.

She lives and breathes the sounds of the land, offering them up as prayers, woven with raw edges, soundscapes and the great depths of the ancient places that shape her journey.

Find her on IG at shannonsoulsounds. There, you'll find another gorgeous version of "The Wise One," including beautiful visusals.

Learn about Sionnáin’s upcoming program: The Descent:Dreaming with the Cailleach & Rising with Brigid

Contact her at [email protected] 

OUR CONVERSATION

• The song, “The Wise One,” was born beside the fire at the Paps of Anu in County Kerry. 
• The Cailleach is the wise old woman, the sacred hag, grandmother essence, and according to some traditions in Éire and Alba (Scotland), the goddess who created the land itself. Cailleach is rooted in contrast - she is strong and fierce, but also soft and nurturing.
• Caoineadh - the ancient Irish lament tradition (Anglicized as “keen”). The mná chaointe, keening women who would perform the ritual of grief at the wake. For more: visit Mary McLaughlin, a scholar and keeper of the wisdom of the tradition.
• The legacy of grief related to An tOcras Mór or An Gorta Mor, the famine or the Great Hunger.
• The conscious choice to open and receive the ancestors, the songs, the magic
• Tuam: the Galway town and site of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home from 1925-1961, where the remains of 796 babies were found in a disused septic tank. 
• Ireland’s Samhain community traditions that were about sharing and visiting, rather than the commercialized version we have today.

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 our global creative community, The Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community
• 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.

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 CONVERSATION

We express ourselves through mythic concepts and symbols, all the time, even when we don’t engage in traditional storytelling. This new series called Myth Workers & Culture Makers takes us into conversation with artists, leaders, and creatives of all kind who shape their work - and our world - through myth.

OUR GUEST

Aodh Ó Riagáin is an Irish creator of illustration, hand-drawn animation, comics and beyond, working with a foundation of traditional tools. Creatively known by the moniker Oreganillo., Aodh is working in the bardic and the druidic tradition of storytelling and myth-making. 

Connect with Aodh: https://oreganillo.org/ and on Instagram @oreganilloartworks

In this episode:

• Aodh considers taking up the bardic tradition to be a lifelong quest 
• Irish words that helped Aodh tap into the Irish mythic tradition (and receive the Silver Branch of Manannán): ceantar, which means place or locality, and alltar, which is its opposite - the otherworld.
• Aodh’s fascination with Queen Medb (Maeve), the subject of his graphic novel in progress. Goddesses like Medb and Mongfind can help us work with contemporary issues of power.  
• Aodh’s short film, Candlebaths - a meditation on fire.
• Ursula K LeGuin’s essay Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
• How shamans, druids, and witches would have been neurodivergent people who have a complex and vibrant internal world but are “maybe not so good in the material world.”
• Aodh’s five year plan: make a feature film that deals with Irish mythology

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 our global creative community, The Writers’ Knot: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community
• 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.

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

Marisa returns to the story of the Irish sovereignty goddess Mongfind, who has featured in several episodes. After some reflections on what it means to keep working this myth in a contemporary context, this episode includes a replay of Marisa’s 2023 story, The Last Sovereignty Goddess.

In this episode:

• For a more complete Mongfind story that sticks to the original source material, listen to S1 Ep2, Ireland's Forgotten Goddess-Queen-Witch
• The idea for KnotWork Storytelling emerged from a “conversation” with the goddess over an autumn equinox fire in 2021. Mongfind’s original message included the declaration: I am interrupted feminine power. 
• Marisa reflects on power, and how not all females in power represent feminine power. 
• Riane Eisler, systems scientist, futurist, and author of The Chalice and the Blade makes the distinction not between masculine and feminine approaches, but between domination and partnership systems. 
• Kamala Harris’s promise to build the “most lethal fighting force in the world” is an example of the perpetuation of the domination system. 
• As Eisler says in Advaya’s Reimagining Women and Power Course: “The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy; it’s partnership.”
• And, Marisa remembers a childhood classmate who died this week. Matthew Nelson engaged in self-immolation, the most profound act of civil disobedience to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He set himself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Boston on September 11.

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 at writingcoachmarisa.com
• The Writers’ Knot opens to new members through September 9. Learn more and join the interest list: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community
• 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.

Calling All Writers & Creatives: Join our global writing community!

Enrollment in the Writers’ Knot is now open: marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community

Want to talk about whether the group is a good match? Let's set up a quick call.

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

This week, our story isn’t a retelling of an ancient myth or offering a new spin on an old bit of folklore. Instead, it’s a long, open ended response to this question:

Is it possible I'm hiding behind stories? 

Host Marisa Goudy reflects on how stories have shaped her work and wrestles with this question.

Inspired by a powerful conversation with friend and colleague Carmen Schreffler, this episode explores the delicate balance between storytelling and the deeper meaning-making process.

Here's a writing prompt from a recent Writers’ Knot session that will help you explore what it means to “get unstoried’:

Most prompts in the Writers’ Knot include the phrase “tell the story of…” 

Stories are necessary. Stories make us human. And, we may set limitations on our understanding of the more-than-human world when we impose story on everything we encounter.

Be with an unstoried place, creature, or experience. Dare to strip away the story and be with what is. Allow this to be both possible and impossible. Allow yourself to resort to metaphor and even tell the story of how you tried to write without imagining the story of it all. 

Join the Writers’ Knot: The Writers’ Knot community is open to new members until September 9, 2024. If you’re a writer or creative looking for a supportive global community and these ideas resonate, this is the writing group for you. Learn more at www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community

About Carmen Schreffler: Carmen is a previous podcast guest and member of the Writers’ Knot. Learn more about her approach to work and life on her Substack, Way of WildPreneur. 

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 at writingcoachmarisa.com
• The Writers’ Knot opens to new members through September 9. Learn more and join the interest list: www.marisagoudy.com/writers-knot-community
• 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.