KnotWork Myth & Storytelling

OUR STORY In this episode from our archives, Irish songcarrier Sionnáin offers an ode to the Cailleach called “The Wise One” - a deep, powerful conversation about ancient tradition and living lore. OUR GUEST Sionnáin is a song carrier, ceremonialist and guide from the West of Ireland. She walks a path devoted to tending the threads of lineage, landscape and language. Through her living relationshi...

OUR STORY 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. OUR GUEST Dian Killian is the author of The Gaelic Effect, a popul...

OUR STORY 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. OUR GUEST Katy Swift is a storyteller, maker, mother, and lifelong gatherer of the stories, skills, and ways of living that root us b...

OUR STORY 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. OUR GUEST Mitlé is a Circle Hol...

OUR STORY 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. HEAR THE WHOLE STORY This preview episode is part of our Turas series. Upgrade your membership to s...

OUR STORY “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. OUR GUEST Based in Berlin, Dee Mulrooney weaves a rich tapestry...

OUR STORY 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. OUR CONVERSATION Matthew opens with Z.R. Ghani's poem "The Reddest Red." Full text of poe...

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...

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....

IN THIS EPISODE 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. OUR GU...

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...

"If you want to save the planet, then start with your own patch of it." OUR GUEST Mary Reynolds is a reformed landscape designer who launched her international career by winning a gold medal for garden design at the Chelsea Flower Show in London in 2002. That story was later told in the movie, Dare to Be Wild . She is a bestselling author, activist, speaker, writer, RTÉ Guide columnist, and occasi...

"The moment she reached the shoreline, she began walking, walking, walking. She didn't need a road, not when she had a stride this purposeful and undeterred." That's Macha, goddess and woman of the Sídhe, arriving in Ireland from her home in the Otherworld. It's the start of the terrible, fascinating tale from Irish mythology about the pregnant woman forced to race against the king's horses, and i...

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 nur...

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...

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...

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...

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–turn...

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,...

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 yo...

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...

OUR STORY We’ve told the story of King Bran and the silver branch several times on KnotWork. This time, we the woman’s story, the story of the Bean Sídhe who speaks her fifty quatrains of poetry and invites us all across the sea to Tír na mBan, the Island of Women. ABOUT THE NEW SERIES: TURAS Turas, the Irish word for journey, is a paid subscriber series within KnotWork Myth & Storytelling. Ea...

OUR STORY Just in time for Bealtaine, the Irish festival of fertility and new life, we explore the erotic energy at the heart of all creation, specifically in the context of Celtic mythology. We open with a brief retelling of the story of the woman made of flowers Blodeuwedd, which appears in the fourth branch of the Welsh mythological epic, the Mabinogi. You’ll hear an excerpt of Nuala Ní Dhomhna...

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Take Marisa's Brigid class at Celtic Junction! Marisa will be teaching a three-session online class for Celtic Junction, starting January 28. Register for Brigid & Expressions of the Irish Divine Feminine Our Story As the season of Imbolc draws closer, an episode from the KnotWork archives. Kate Chadbourne offers us two tales of Brigit, Ireland's patron goddess and saint. The first describes B...