Woven: Telling the Heroine’s Journey
23nd Edition of the Woven Newsletter, October 2025
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.
October Event
Writing with the Witch Workshop
Reclaiming the Crone on the Heroine’s Journey
Tuesday, October 21 | 4:00 – 6:00 pm / PDT
Presenters: Kate Farrell and Megan E. McDonald
Online Workshop
Cost: $25
Fall is that haunting time of the year when the veil is thin between worlds, long celebrated in feasts and holidays. And it is the best season to discover our inner witch by exploring her fabled huts, hearth, magical tools, and most bewitching skills. In this imaginative, lighthearted writing workshop we will enter the hidden abode of an ancient witch through the motifs and archetypes in her folklore and create our own versions. Who else but that of the great, Slavic hag Baba Yaga?
The crone/hag/witch is a major character in the Fairy Tale Heroine’s journey—part of the feminine cycle of becoming—she plays a vital part in the heroine’s transformation. Such a pivotal role possesses the powers of discernment, confrontation, and deep insight. We’ll discover the truth behind the scorned witch through her tales and ancient tropes, making her our own.
Each of the four writing exercises will reveal our unique interpretations of this archetypal, timeless character, creating new dimensions and personal attributes for our challenging times.
We’ll go deeper into the woods, where pale birch trees stand tall, where shadows stretch in the twilight beyond and beyond, to the place where darkness and its secrets live with an old woman, a hag, a babushka, a lost part of us.
PRIZE!
The 13th person to sign up for the workshop will receive a copy of Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga by Taisia Kitaiskaia, 2020.
For lots more information and to register, click HERE!
October on Substack
Once Upon: A Storyteller’s Memoir
In August, Kate Farrell launched her memoir, Once Upon: A Storyteller’s Memoir, with feminine fairy tales braided with the true events of her first forty years. Their motifs and metaphors demonstrate what they might mean for women’s lives today.
Beginning August 11th, Kate posted the Prologue, an overview with a tight weaving of the fairy tale, “Sleeping Beauty.” The following chapters reveal the three-part narrative of the heroine’s journey: Entanglements and Jealousies; Escape and Initiation; Return and Recognition. Follow along with Kate on her personal feminine quest through her first forty years.
In October, Kate will post Chapters Four and Five, depicting her childhood years along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the French colonial town of Pass Christian during a time of strict segregation—Jim Crow of the late 1940s. With a legendary history of racial and cultural blending from the 17th century to the pirate days of the 19th century, this picturesque, bayou town held both charm and dark secrets from the past.
Kate weaves the motifs of the illusive, haunting Melinoë from Greek mythology into her childhood experiences there. Melinoë seems a fitting, underworld goddess, one who presided over offerings to the ghosts of the dead. At night she wandered the earth with her train of ghosts, striking fear into those who glimpsed her ghastly form: The body of Melinoë was black on one side and white on the other, the dark and light between death and life.
Subscribe to Kate Farrell’s Substack section featuring the heroine’s journey in her memoir: Once Upon: A Storyteller’s Memoir.
Announcing a New Book by Kate Farrell
We are thrilled to announce that Woven founder Kate Farrell’s new book The Fairy Tale Heroine: Live and Create Her Journey will be available in Winter 2027.
This exciting new work meets a cultural moment when women’s legacy in folk literature can provide confidence and impetus for our lives and creative work.
This heritage is wide and deep, full of great heroines and their courageous journeys, gathered from the oral traditions of Old Europe and beyond time!
The Fairy Tale Heroine: Live and Create Her Journey will be published from Sibylline Press as part of their new Imprint Sibyl Writing Craft.
Book Review by Kate Farrell
Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun
Written by Jane Harrington, Illustrated by Khoa Le
Fairy Tales to Resist the King
Have you ever thought of fairy tales as subversive—as an underground literary genre that expressed the repressed dreams, fantasies, and wish fulfillments of women writers? Indeed, this was a phenomenon in pre-revolutionary France, during the absolute monarchy of King Louis XIV in the 17th century, when the term, fairy tale, or conte de fée, was first conjured by these famous, female storytellers. Calling themselves conteuses, they met and published scores of original tales that became a sensation throughout Europe, yet their popular work faded in time, unacknowledged, and disregarded by male contemporaries and subsequent scholars. Until now!
In her stunning and captivating book, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun, Jane Harrington rediscovers the lives and works of seven of the most well-known conteuses, reclaiming their talent and purpose. In their stories, Harrington contends that the “fairies” are symbols of female empowerment, avatars of the conteuses themselves, who vicariously experience the adventures of their fairy characters and so, transcend the extreme constraints on their lives as women.
A recurring theme in the fairy tales is escape and rescue from forced marriages to distasteful, older, or abusive men, particularly true in the aristocracy, since many of the woman writers are aristos scrutinized by the government in their social activities. But what could be more harmless than creating fairy tales, salon literary games, to get past the royal censors? These tales slipped under the radar with charming fantasies of faraway lands, horrible ogres, magical spells, and splendidly beautiful women who fall in love with handsome, gracious men, or women, or both. Who would ever take them seriously?
It might be that these very evasions of the royal censor caused the fairy tales, the original contes de fée, to remain in the cultural shadows, unrecognized and discounted as literature in the canon of folklore. But as Harrington’s meticulous research shows, the stories were often acts of courage, with subtle satire and alternative realities, written by women who were in exile, under house arrest, or placed in convents as punishment for treason, spying, or disreputable behavior. The heavy restrictions placed on women across all classes with severe consequences is a subtext to most of these tales in which the fairy world is flipped upside down: Women find a way of escape and self-fulfillment and wield incredible power.
But their discreet creativity and subjugation made it easy for Charles Perrault, a member of the salons, to poach from the women’s popular works in his famous Contes de ma mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose), published in 1697. Erasing the conteuses’ role in coining the term, fairy tale, and in creating their distinct female genre, Perrault eventually claimed the historic title, “father of the fairy tale.” Decades later, the Brothers Grimm, as Harrington states, called the women “inferior imitators” of Charles Perrault, an absurd claim since the opposite was true.
In this book, literary history is set straight by its passionate author: Harrington reveals the dramatic life stories of the most celebrated conteuses, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie Murat, Charlotte-Rose La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, Catherine Bernard, Catherine Durand, and Louise d’Auneuil, saying their names, and retelling some of their most compelling fairy tales in her accessible, delightful storytelling style.
My favorite fairy tale is “Féline” or “The White Cat” by Marie-Catharine d’Aulnoy who is credited with starting the fairy tale phenom, and was possibly written while she was incarcerated in a convent, banished there by the king. What I appreciated most about this complex tale was the seamless way d’Aulnoy incorporated motifs and tropes from myth and folktales into her unique plot.
In fact, I detected details from the ancient Greek myth of “Psyche and Eros” in Feline’s magical palace, the bodiless hands, the luxurious care, the delicious food, and the hidden identity of the hostess. In addition, there is the trope of the three princes on a quest with the youngest one favored due to his kindness and virtue, often part of European folklore. The sublime difference in this amazing story is the dominance of the sensual white cat who once released from her curse is not only beautiful, but quite scholarly and wins the quest for her prince.
Exquisitely illustrated by Khoa Le, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance is irresistible, a paean of triumph for the conteuses who wrote in the shadow of the Sun King and defied his rule with their extraordinary fairy tales. They lifted the hopes and ideals of many women who read and shared them in past centuries, creating a legacy now celebrated through the research and storytelling of Jane Harrington. This is a book for those who love transcendent tales, dreams of possible worlds, claimed by women. So relevant to our times!
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
©Woven LLC
Kate, I love the way you're getting your work out there these days: through Substack, your book, your website, and your online classes! I admire the skillful way you weave it all together for us--you're a wonderful model! Also, thanks for the review of Harrington's book: I've just pulled a Kindle sample.