OUR STORY

In the Potawatomi origin story, the pregnant Sky Woman, Giizhgokwe, falls from Sky World. She is caught by a flock of geese and lowered onto mshiké, Turtle, whose back becomes this continent we know as Turtle Island (known in Potawatomi as Mshike Minis).

Our guest, Kaitlin Curtice weaves her ancestral story with her own story. As a young mother, walking a trail outside Atlanta while nursing her baby, she felt the presence of her ancestors. These were the women who had walked before her, those who mothered their own children on the 1838 Trail of Death when 800 Potawatomi people were forced from Indiana to Kansas over a two-month-long trek.

OUR GUEST

Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. She writes and speaks at the intersections of indigenous spirituality, identity, and the stories that shape us. Her books include Native, Living Resistance, and her most recent, Everything Is a Story. She also writes at The Liminality Journal and is co-founder of the Aki Institute. Kaitlin lives near Philadelphia with her family.

Find her at kaitlincurtice.com

IN THIS CONVERSATION

• As the United States marks 250 years, Kaitlin reflects on indigenous grief around the Fourth of July. “Chemokmankik” which loosely means “land of the long butchering knives”

is the Potawatomi word for the US.

• Spéirbhean, the sky woman of the Irish aisling tradition, and how Kaitlin found her resonance with Giizhgokwe across ocean and culture
• Azho gami, the Potawatomi word for "across the sea," and what it means to carry that word onto an overnight flight to Ireland
• The sacred reciprocity of kinship: why we need each other to grieve, to dream, and to build toward future generations
• Start a practice of writing love notes to Segmekwé, Mother Earth, in order to begin repairing a fractured relationship with the land

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

It's the middle of the night. A wealthy woman sits alone by the fire, carding wool, when the first knock comes at the door.

Open! Open! I am the Witch of One Horn!

This is the opening of The Twelve Horned Women,” from Lady Jane Wilde's folklore collection Ancient Legends of Ireland. It’s one of several stories that Marisa weaves together in our latest full-length Turas episode, The Village Beyond the Dunes, available exclusively to paid members of Myth Workers' Hearth over on Substack.

The Twelve Horned Women come down from Sliabh na mBan, the Mountain of Women in Co. Tipperary. They take over the woman’s house and make impossible demands. These witches from the Otherworld nearly get away with murder.

But here's the question that haunts this story: were they invaders, or were they reclaiming what was always theirs?

In the full Turas episode, Marisa explores how stories like this one teach us about community: its magic, its failures, its longing, and its wounds. From Tír na mBan to Avalon to a deserted village on Achill Island, The Village Beyond the Dunes walks the terrain of everything we've lost, everything we've dreamed, and everything that might still be possible.

Join Myth Workers' Hearth to access the full episode and the complete Turas series.

www.mythworkers.com

KnotWork Myth & Storytelling is hosted by Marisa Goudy. New public episodes are released each week.

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, a memoir, or you’re seeking to weave the mythic perspective into your creative work, 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.

Our Story

The rosary has long been used to shame women and restrain sexuality, but what if it is actually the umbilical cord that connects us to The Mother?

When the rosary emerged in the 11th or 12th century, the Church offered a narrative that began with Eve’s sin and ended with apocalypse. Ordinary women were living and telling a different story. Theirs was a story that was expressed in a great circle, not in a straight line of patriarchal history.

Perdita Finna unfolds the mysteries of the rosary, reclaiming the prayers and practice as an act of power. What if, all along, the beads are a story of women’s empowerment that’s been hidden in plain sight?

Our Guest

Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors, and with her husband Clark Strand The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. She teaches popular workshops on connecting and collaborating with both the dead and the animate everything. She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.

Joining Perdita’s free class coming up on June 25 at 8:30 PM ET. Register now for Long Story of Your Soul

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, a memoir, or you’re seeking to weave the mythic perspective into your creative work, 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

This episode is a medieval Irish permission slip for every creative who has ever felt too raw, too unformed, or too messy to call themselves a writer. It’s for anyone whose inner critic has tried to kill the emerging work before it could grow.

OUR STORY

From the Book of Leinster (c. 1160): a strange, silent boy who hasn't spoken in fourteen years. A blacksmith father who knows how to protect what isn't ready yet. And the chief poet of Ireland, who recognizes genius before anyone else does — and has to decide what to do about it.

OUR GUEST

Kate Chadbourne is a storyteller, singer, harper, and poet, professor of Irish language and folklore, and founder of The Celtic Wisdom School. Her debut novel, The Poet on the Train, was published in 2025.

Find her at https://www.katechadbourne.com/. She tells stories each week over on YouTube @katechadbournebard

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The Irish proverb (or seanfhocail) Bíonn gach tosú lag. Every beginning is weak.
• You contain both poets. Amergin, the instinctual, unschooled self and Athairne, the credentialed institutional self are both necessary. The danger is when one swings an ax at the other.
• Feel for the bruise. Pick up your poem like an apple and find where the energy has gone soft — then ask every part to rise to the aliveness of the best part.
• Put a flower on your house. Blátham — I bloom, I flourish. Making beauty for its own sake, even a sticker in a journal no one will ever see, is the practice.
• Completing something changes you. Kate shares the moment midway through writing her novel when the inner Athairne told her to stop. She kept going. Finishing, by your own standards, for yourself, is its own transformation.
• Write with Amergin, revise with Athairne. Kate and Marisa's upgrade on Hemingway's "write drunk, edit sober."
• Father Dineen's Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla

The Poet on the Train by Kate Chadbourne

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, a memoir, or you’re seeking to weave the mythic perspective into your creative work, 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

OUR STORY

The shoreline is a threshold. When we stand at the place where the ocean meets the land, we know we’re standing in between the worlds.

In this preview of S7 Ep6, Marisa tells the story of King Canute, the Anglo-Danish king whose famous confrontation with the tide has been misread for centuries. His real message–about faith and hubris and our relationship to the power of the elements–turns out to be more urgent now than it ever was.

But the Canute story is just the doorway. The full Turas episode is a guided journey along the shorelines of the imagination and your own beloved countries. We explore the art of arrival and the power of liminality, and question what it means to truly inhabit a place rather than just pass through it.

The extended episode includes three writing prompts which invite you to explore your own history of arrivals, and your relationship with change and erosion.

This is the work that happens at Myth Workers' Hearth. Every Turas episode is built for the listener who wants to go deeper — into the myth, into the land, and into their own story.

Hear the teaser on KnotWork Myth & Storytelling: KnotWorkStorytelling.com

The full episode is waiting for you when you upgrade your subscription to the Myth Workers' Hearth: mythworkers.com

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, a memoir, or you’re seeking to weave the mythic perspective into your creative work, 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

OUR STORY

Cú Chullain is Ireland’s most renowned mythological hero, and his story comes what’s seen as the greatest of Irish epics, the Táin Bo Cualigne. And yet, we’ve never told his story on KnotWork.

Clearly we were waiting for the right storyteller. In this episode, Peter Wucherpfennig offers an outsider perspective on Cú Chullain’s early life told through a modern frame: a young Phil Lynnot, front man of the iconic 70s band Thin Lizzy conjures the elements of myth. You’ll also hear WB Yeats’s "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."

OUR GUEST

Peter Wucherpfennig is a German harpist and storyteller based in Darmstadt. After graduating in 1986, he completed fifteen months of compulsory service in the Bundeswehr before training as a nurse — a path that would prove unexpectedly resonant with the warrior myths he would later carry as a storyteller. He has worked in intensive care units since 1991. In the mid-nineties he picked up the harp and found himself in the company of Scottish storytellers. He gave his first public performance as a harpist and storyteller in 1996 (his word: disastrous) and has spent the years since traveling between the worlds of the hospital, the workers' council, and his own calling as a bard.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Cú Chulainn is remembered as the greatest hero of the Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and was a powerful inspiration during the 1916 Easter Rising. Peter imagines him as the outcast hero.
• The power of the mentor: just as Cú Chulainn found Scáthach, as an adult, Peter was adopted by a landlady who said "you are my third son." Such relationships open an entirely different world.
• The significance of the island apart. Whether it's Tír na nÓg or Scáthach's island fortress, this isn’t a place to stay forever, but is a place to gather new tools. What does it mean to seek out those threshold spaces in our own lives?
• The power of fellowship. Peter and Marisa remember meeting at the Bard Summer School on Clare Island in County Mayo.

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, a memoir, or you’re seeking to weave the mythic perspective into your creative work, 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

OUR STORY

The selkie story is one of the most enduring tales in the Celtic imagination. A woman caught between two worlds, a stolen skin, and the impossible choice between the sea and the shore.

But what if the story doesn't end when she slips beneath the waves? What if it lives on in her descendants, in us?

Hear the myth on KnotWork Myth & Storytelling: KnotWorkStorytelling.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. The full Turas episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers of Myth Workers’ Hearth on Substack.

When you're ready to go deeper, the full meaning of the story is waiting at Myth Workers' Hearth: mythworkers.com

WORK WITH MARISA

• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a novel, a memoir, or you’re seeking to weave the mythic perspective into your creative work, 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

OUR STORY

Jen Murphy tells us the core tales Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the great epic of Welsh mythology, beginning with King Math and his Goewin, his “virgin footholder” and concluding with the story of Arianrhod.

Jen concludes her telling with Blodeuwedd, who you met in S7 Ep 1.

OUR GUEST

Jen Murphy is an Irish mythologist, anthropologist and founder of The Celtic Creatives. A Dubliner born and bred, from the time she could talk, Jen's grandmother Frances O'Sullivan filled her ears with tales from Irish myth and folklore, fuelling a now 40-year fascination with the stories of her lineage. Jen's apprenticeship to following her soul's breadcrumbs has guided her formal studies in Medieval Irish and Celtic Studies, Anthropology, and Jungian Psychology. Jen supports people to remember that they have a shining soul, to dream Celtic spirituality into their modern lives by making the Celtic soul a living aesthetic—centring the soul in the everyday experience of life—through mythwork, dreamwork, and the body.

Find her on Instagram @celticreatives and at https://celticcreatives.substack.com, https://www.celticcreatives.com/

IN THIS EPISODE

• How stories choose their tellers - Jen had prepared a different tale entirely, and then this telling of Arianrhod insisted on being told
• Jen takes us on a beautiful tour of the moon's monthly cycle as a map of our own becoming
• Arianrhod as living initiator: Jen maps the three refusals: name, arms, marriage - onto her own creative journey toward the Sunset Journal, a ritual practice rooted in beginning the day at dusk
• Reclaiming the night: Jen gives up the 5am productivity myth and discovers that creating by moonlight, as a confirmed night-owl, born just before the winter solstice is simply becoming more of her nature
• Jen's Sunset Journal is launching by Lúnasa (harvest season). Be the first to know when it’s available: https://www.celticcreatives.com/sunset

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