The Hagitude Sessions

Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster. Her most recent book, Enchantment, became an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Her internationally bestselling hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times was adapted as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and was shortlisted for the Porchlight and Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, was adapted as an audio drama by Audible. Other titles include novels such as The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club, and The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood which she edited. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer and Aeon.

Peggy Orenstein is the author of the New York Times best-sellers Boys & Sex, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy as well as Don’t Call Me Princess, Flux, and the classic SchoolGirls. Her latest book is a memoir, Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.

A frequent contributor to The New York Times and a contributing writer for AFAR, Peggy has also written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, New York, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered and The PBS News Hour. She has been featured on, among other programs, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Morning Joe, and NPR’s Fresh Air. Her TED Talk, “What Young Women Believe About Their Own Sexual Pleasure,” has been viewed over 5.8 million times.

Carolyn Hillyer is a renowned musician and artist who lives and works on a thousand-year-old farm in the ancient belly of Dartmoor, a mist-veiled landscape of wild hills, peat bogs and heather moors in the south-west of England. The inspiration for all her work is drawn from the raw beauty, untamed spirit and primordial memory of this ancestral land. Her creative output includes albums of powerful songs and chants, concerts, books and workshops, paintings and art installations, and traditional drum-making.

In this episode, I talk with Carolyn about her Book of Hag, wrapped around travels into old age and towards ancientness, and the grandmothers from her Weaver’s Oracle, created from thirty years of paintings, mythic tales and work with women’s archetypal mysteries.

Roz is an author, speaker, and the first (and so far only) woman to row solo across the world’s “Big Three” oceans: Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. She was inspired to brave the oceans when she realised two things: 1) we are all capable of much more than we tend to believe we are, and 2) we need to make big changes if we’re going to live fulfilling lives on a thriving planet. She holds four Guinness World Records, is a Member of the Order of the British Empire, and was National Geographic Adventurer of the Year in 2010. Roz is passionate about each of us living to purpose as an ongoing exercise and bringing the best of ourselves into the world in service to our own evolution – individually, collectively as humanity and as part of the greater web of life. 

Stella Duffy is completing a doctorate training in Existential Psychotherapy and her research is in the embodied experience of postmenopause. As well as her private psychotherapy practice, Stella has worked in NHS cancer psychological support, hospice bereavement support, and is currently working with a low-cost community mental health service. Alongside her therapy work, Stella is an award-winning writer of seventeen novels, over seventy short stories and fifteen plays and worked in theatre for over thirty-five years as an actor, director, facilitator and improvisor. She was awarded the OBE for services to the Arts in 2016 and has been active in equalities and inclusion work in arts and LGBTQ+ communities for many decades. She is also a yoga teacher, leading regular workshops in yoga for writing.

Stella has been postmenopausal since chemotherapy for her first cancer in her mid-30s, and has an especial interest in life after menopause – a conversation sadly lacking in the prevalent current discourse.

Hannah MacDonald (b.1971) grew up in Oxford and began working in publishing after studying English and American Literature at Manchester University. After twenty years of publishing at Andre Deutsch, Random House and HarperCollins, Hannah founded September Publishing. She is also the author of two well-received novels, The Sun Road and Julianna Kiss, and a winner of a Betty Trask Award for first novels. Starting an independent publisher was a natural extension of a life-long, escapist pleasure in buying, reading and – above all – sharing good books. She lives with her family in Kent. @septemberbooks

Kate is the author of Second Spring: the self-care guide to menopause. Published by Harper Collins, it offers a psychological map for menopause. Kate mentors people in perimenopause and beyond, 1-2-1 online, runs groups, nature-based Yoga Nidra sessions, hosts the Life - An Inside Job podcast, and creates multi-level art textile projects. When she’s not doing these things you’ll find her playing in her compost heaps.