This is a FREE monthly newsletter of a venture founded by Kate Farrell, Woven: Telling the Heroine’s Journey.
Its goal is to explore the hidden terrain of the heroine’s unique quest found in the pre-literate, oral traditions—how the age-old, foundational fairy tales, folktales, and myths can empower us, reframe our life stories, and inspire new creative work.
This fall is an exciting time for the feminine with Vice President Kamala Harris running a competitive campaign to be the first United States woman president.
Yet women across the global are embattled in a fight for basic human rights. It’s time to regain the narrative of the heroine, her journey towards independence, and reassert the need for feminine leadership.
We can begin by learning our stories, based on the heritage of the past.
Persephone, unknown artist
We are excited to announce a new book by Kate Farrell on Substack!
The Fairytale Heroine: Live and Create Her Journey
Release Date: October 7, 2024 Online: Kate Farrell’s Substack: farrellk.substack.com/ Subscribe today for weekly posts of the book!
The Fairy Tale Heroine will publish each post as it is written! Readers will be able to influence its content by engaging in prompts with comments and ideas.
This exciting, new book, The Fairy Tale Heroine: Live and Create Her Journey,is an interactive, practical guide to the ancient foundational tales of the feminine quest with creative tools that translate their elements to our lives and times.
It will show you how to reclaim your heroine story and reinstate the archetypes, tropes, characters, and motifs of her tales in projects for all media, to tell them in modern dress. It will expand the narratives we tell ourselves and one another, while identifying with their characters who are aspects of the feminine.
The purpose of the book is two-fold: to inform and enhance the lives of modern women, and to influence and guide creative works.
We will go backwards to move forward, as far as the surviving tales and fragments can take us—to listen once again and realize with stunning clarity that her story was ours all along across millennia. Because the timeless, universal archetypes reside within us.
Become part of Kate Farrell’s new book on the heroine’s journey, serialized weekly on Substack! Join in the commentary and discover your personal journey with prompts and exercises as it is revealed. Use the tropes and motifs in your creative projects.
Going live October 7th, release date! Subscribe today.
A Creative Crone
By Kate Farrell
Kate Farrell Fall 2024
During my long life as a storyteller, I was always aware that in ancient cultures the elders were the wise and revered storytellers, particularly the crone. Never did I imagine that when I became a crone, I would be motivated to take on that very mantle to tell the age-old heroine’s fairy tales.
I might imagine myself as the elderly crone of yore around a fire—an open camp fire or a hearth fire in a thatched hut, wearing a rawhide skin or a ragged woolen shawl, eyes gleaming by the fireside. But no. My eyes gleam in the light of day, looking out to a brightly color mural in my Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, fingers poised over an open laptop to tell my tales.
“Why now?” I may ask, as I approach my 83rd birthday this October.
Never have women been so ready to hear the tales of the feminine quest after centuries of suppression. Never have her legacy stories been so needed.
Now is a perfect time to rediscover the tales’ beauty and mystery—something I can share with my emerging understanding of their shape and deeper meaning—from my armchair or at my active desk stool.
But I can’t do this work alone. As I write and post each chapter’s segment on The Fairy Tale Heroine’s Substack, I invite you to share your thoughts, stories, and experiences of the heroine’s journey. We will write this book together, bringing the tales back to life, making them relevant once again.
How it All Began—Seventy Years Ago
When I was a scrawny kid, living on the hardscrabble Southside of San Antonio back in the 1950s, I happened to wander along a dusty main road. Walking past Roosevelt Park a few blocks away, I noticed a public library up on a hill across the busy street. Curious, I took my chances running across the street and up the stairs to a huge, glass door.
Inside, the librarians at the counter smiled at me in my shorts and t-shirt. I was wearing shoes, after all, and knew enough to keep quiet. One of them showed me to a low shelf of books with spines of all different colors.
As I knelt down to look at them, she bent over and whispered, “Those are the rainbow fairy tale books. Do you like fairy tales?” I nodded, taking out my first one, the red one.
Fascinated, I borrowed all the fairy books one after the other—as I read and reread the Andrew Lang Fairy Tales, an entire new world of imagination exploded from their pages.
But of all the many, exotic tales in the volumes, one spoke to me the most: The story of the maid who had to rescue her lost husband while wearing iron shoes. I was not a girl first captivated by Cinderella and her dainty, glass slippers, or splendid gowns.
Chris Beatrice, a digital illustrator
My heroine was the maid who was cursed to wear out three pairs of iron shoes and blunt a steel staff in her search to save her husband. Her quest was fraught and difficult as she traveled across bare sandy deserts, crossed high rocky mountains, jumping from crag to crag and from peak to peak. She journeyed from the Moon to the Sun to the Wind, where the mother of the Wind told her to go by the Milky Way and to seek ‘til she reached her goal.
That long ago fall I decided to write my own fairy tale and preform it for the kids on my block. My little brother, who was about five, practiced the play with me. But when the kids came, my brother got so shy he ran to the bedroom to hide under the covers. So, I told my original fairy tale myself. I never forgot the thrill of that experience or the staying power of the ancient stories.
The feminine tales helped me to buckle up my iron shoes for what would become a challenging life ahead, one that propelled me to reach beyond my strength and push through boundaries.
Now that I’ve come to a quieter place of rich reflection, I can share what I always knew: That the heroine’s stories were within reach, a fabulous storehouse of guidance and spirit, just down the road.
I invite you to take her journey with me, week by week. Subscribe today! I can’t wait to begin.
About Woven
The idea for WOVEN grew from Kate’s memoir, as she blended motifs and archetypes of the heroine’s journey with events of her first forty-two years. Kate became aware of the power of the heroine archetype, but also realized that it was hiding in plain sight. She began teaching classes on the heroine's journey, finding a rapt audience in translating its ancient motifs to modern women and to one’s life story. Encouraged by partners and co-presenters, Kate established Woven to more effectively share the wisdom of feminine quest tales.
Women live in challenging times. Digging deep, hitting the bedrock of our shared journey through the mythic language that Joseph Campbell gave to the modern hero, we will explore our own heroic path through the suppressed and almost destroyed archetypes of the feminine quest.
Website
Visit woventales.net and be transported to another world that blends ancient and modern in a richly textured and brightly colored journey of its own. This magic was created by Kate with the help of a brilliant graphic designer, Nichola Americanos: elationbydesign.com
This is so exciting! Look at you there at your new writing desk... the heroine's journey dream!
What a FUN way to spend your 80s!