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Write With Us in 2024

Do you want to write your own memoir or simply make more space for self-expression in the new year? Join Marisa in the Writers' Knot, our online writing community.

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Our Story

Perdita Finn shares an excerpt from Take Back the Magic. This chapter, "The Land of the Dead," describes her first encounter with the place that she and I both call home, the Hudson Valley, the land once peopled by the Lenape and Esopus tribes.

“We wouldn't fight wars if we knew that everyone on the other side had once been our child. We wouldn't kill children if we knew every child had once been our child, had once been our mother. There would be no sides.”

Our Guest

Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.  Find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” at wayoftherose.org

Perdita’s book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls.

Find more at her work at takebackthemagic.com

Our Conversation

• “Paperfold places”: real places that are dream places, places you feel you’ve seen before.
• Who are our ancestors? Everyone. This disrupts our ideas of ancestry and lineage and feels like a radical idea when we consider colonialism and we’re cautious about cultural appropriation. 
• Civilization as a long story of genocide and colonialism that is based on stories of good guys and bad guys
• Cyclical living, and the sense we have all been here before. 
• Cairns on the side of Woodstock’s Overlook mountain were placed about the same time as Newgrange in Ireland. Glenn Kreisberg and Dave Holden’s research about stone monuments created by indigenous people of the northeastern US.  
• The heart, a sense of belonging to land, the ancestors, and the dead. So different from the fear and fascism that are so present today.
• Our interrelationship with the more-than-human world reflected in the destruction of the American chestnut trees.
• How to nourish the seeds of the heart; a practice for the new year at the Solstice.

Our Music

Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com

Work With Marisa

• Join the Writers' Knot online writing community - the new program begins mid-January!
• 1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to...