Woven: Telling the Heroine’s Journey
4th Edition Newsletter, March 2024
Celebrate Women’s History Month with Us!
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—and how the age-old, foundational fairy tales, folktales, and myths can empower us, reframe our life stories, and inspire new creative work.
Upcoming Courses: March 2024
UNIQUE MULTI-GENERATIONAL WRITING SEMINAR
Your Heroine's Journey: Ageless and Heroic
Learning the Heroine’s Journey in Her Suppressed History and Yours
A Writing Circle with Authors Kate Farrell and Mary Mackey
Saturday, March 16, 1:00 – 5:00 pm /PDT
Location: North Berkeley
This interactive workshop is geared for pairs of attendees from different generations and for single attendees who are interested in bridging the generations. We will learn from one another and write our journeys, inspired by literature of the long ago matriarchal cultures told in folklore and in re-imagined, meticulously researched historical fiction.
$95 Registration per attendee | Registration Limited
Register as individuals—come by yourself or in pairs!
Light Refreshments offered in a charming North Berkeley home not far from Solano Avenue. Parking is plentiful and free. Directions provided when your registration is confirmed. Registration on the Woven website: https://woventales.net/presentations/yourheroinesjourney/
THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY: A TEMPLATE FOR WRITERS
March 21, 2024 | Thursday
Noon – 1:00 pm /PDT Virtual Event with
WNBA – San Francisco Chapter
$10 for members, $20 for non-members
Kate Farrell will discuss the basic elements of the heroine’s journey and compare the Hero’s Journey models of Joseph Campbell and filmmaker Christopher Vogler to the Heroine’s Journey of Carl Jung, Marie-Louise Von Franz, Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Learn how to create a narrative arc in your creative writing that reflects the archetypes of the feminine quest, its plot line, characters, and major conflicts, in this interactive talk.
Register on the WNBA-SF Chapter website. https://wnba-sfchapter.org/march-21st-the-heroines-journey-a-template-for-writers/
PITCH-O-RAMA PREP WORKSHOP
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Noon – 1:00 pm / PDT Online via Zoom
Pre-Pitch Coaching Session
By popular demand, WNBA-SF will hold a Pre Pitch-O-Rama Coaching AMA [Ask Me Anything]. Registration is free for anyone already signed up for 2024 Pitch-O-Rama. If you haven’t, prices are $10 for WNBA-SF members and $25 for non-members.
On the panel, steeped in Pitch-O-Rama history, Kate Farrell will offer insight into effective pitches and the kind of good advice only an experienced author and pitch event coordinator can provide.
Register online at the WNBA- SF Chapter website:
https://wnba-sfchapter.org/march-28th-pitch-o-rama-prep-workshop-ama/
Woven Winter Retreat Feedback * February 23- 25, 2024
“A massive THANK YOU for a truly wonderful weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed everything: the deep discussions into the heroine's journey, and storytelling in general, meeting such interesting and gorgeous new women, eating yummy food, being in such a beautiful house and getting so much inspiration! I returned home full of it all!”
~Claire Hennessy, Winter Retreat, 2024
“What a wonderful retreat. I could tell you both put your hearts into planning and making Woven, Winter Writing Retreat, a delightful, meaningful experience. The women who attended were creative, smart, supportive, and talented. Every so often, I looked at their faces while stories were being shared and was amazed. The level of engagement was through the roof.”
~Winter Retreat, 2024
Women’s Empowerment at the Movies – 2024
by Kate Farrell
Is it a coincidence that two much acclimated and powerful movies are center stage in popular culture right now and that they both depict clear motifs of the heroine's journey from fairy tales, both BARBIE and POOR THINGS?
Both films are about female empowerment; both feature innocents who leave their sheltered, restricted lives, and through their interactions with the outside world experience self-actualization, the discovery of self, and become independent human beings. Though thematically similar they couldn’t be more different in style: Where BARBIE is a PG-rated, pink hued, crowd pleasing, candy land, POOR THINGS is a sexually graphic, bloody, absurdist, surreal, darkly comic fever dream.
“Fellini Barbie”
I'm calling POOR THINGS the “Fellini Barbie” movie. It was laugh out loud funny in parts, equally terrifying and grotesque. I adored Emma Stone as Bella with her wide awake stare at the bewildering world, brilliantly acted from beginning to end. Her exquisite, artisan costumes gave new meaning to Victorian leg-of-mutton sleeves, enlarged, textured, colorful, lending her a doll-like quality or that of an innocent child with fairy wings. She is lovable in her delicious dialogue, delivered in a posh, British accent that mimics her creator/ mad scientist, God. And her manners are atrocious, that of the liberated female toddler, outside the box of convention.
Reanimated from a suicide and a brain transplant from her unborn child, Bella is a Frankensteinish woman, organically fabricated. Not for the squeamish viewer. But the overdone, lush sets in fantasy gorgeous were easy on the eye, a steampunk delight.
The heroine's tale in POOR THINGS is straightforward: Bella is infantilized Victorian femininity, a grown woman pushed by over-the-top misogynistic men into living her life like a child. She finds resolution by taking control of her fate, body, and mind for herself.
Barbie, Bella, and Cinderella walk into a Bar
They find out how much they have in common and compare notes on napkins.
Like Barbie, Bella is manufactured and learns to become human through her adventuring, with advice from elder women: the bookish, wise woman on the cruise (Barbie's Ruth) and the impish madam of a Parisian brothel (Weird Barbie) while rejecting the advice of a male cynic (Mattel execs).
In the fairy tales of the heroine’s journey, the “most told story on Earth,” the maid in these coming of age story is orphaned or abandoned. She is trapped in miserable circumstances with restrictions and punishments set by her evil stepmother, the patriarchy, or her own delusional reality to conform to expectations for women. From these constraints, the heroine must escape.
Snow White flees into the woods; Cinderella seeks a magical fairy godmother; Sleeping Beauty finds a good fairy to overcome the evil one who cursed her at birth. They all triumph through hard work, escape, or magical intervention, thereby undergoing transformation to become fully recognized for their true power and beauty.
The two movies, BARBIE and POOR THINGS, blend an alchemy of fantasy and humor, mixed with the motifs of archetypal fairy tales, in an explosive brew. They excite our imagination with a heightened awareness of the collective consciousness that stirs our soul.
As in her archetypal narrative, the modern heroine is restless to break free!
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.
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
©Woven LLC