ReWild Red
Write it! Rite it!
Some stories swallow you whole. In hiding stories, they eventually come out sideways. Working with Story trauma or larger than life stories creatively and somatically is a powerful journey of transformation.
I grew up in an isolated snaggle of land in Upper Michigan near Lake Superior. My adolescence was swallowed by the Big Bad Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood’s red-neck forest - alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, an abortion at 16. Small town stories. I buried my stories deep. I was ashamed of what had happened to me and some of the choices I had made. I swore that when I left for college, I’d never return. At 17 years old, I was outta there.
At 19, I landed feet-first inside a larger than life story when I studied abroad for a year in Moscow, Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The entire society and political story was dissolving. It was shock economy and ‘snickers-economics’ (we could tell the percentage of increase in the ruble by the price of a snickers bar); there was anarchy and dissent, marches with Stalinists and black market, black mafia jeans. I was swallowed whole - inside the belly of Transition and Contradiction. Baba Yaga was my enigmatic guide, trickster- she was the ubiquitous baba of the streets, toothless, rough, ragged, begging, raw and elbowing me to get into the Metro first. I didn’t realize while it was happening to me that she was churning me into bones and butter. I was inside of the grit of mystery.
Artist: Chloe Dominque Allen
I lost my voice, my ground, my bearings. I found my street smarts. Survival. Stand in line for 30 minutes for bread. Buy a massive cabbage. Find your way during February’s Season of Slush along the Tverskaya and backstreets, winding my way back to the dormitory (former Higher Communist Party Dorm)--in combat boots and an army coat.
I was a girl becoming a woman in a society unraveling. Lost between stages, countries, stories. I dreamed of apocalypse, dead poets, stale bread and the tsiganka (gypsies) whose children attacked me as I wandered beneath the streets.
I loved Russia. I hated Russia. It was dog-eat-dog on the streets of Moscow. My accent was thick, distinct. Folks couldn’t tell I was an Americanka. It was gritty, salty, crass and awesome. I was alive inside of a revolution. I witnessed the death of a man who hung from a power line, the death of the Russian soul and the birth of McDonald’s. It was a strange story. Renegade Mafia took their guns out in a Video Bar, shooting bullets into ceilings before taking out a suspect. I kissed a Night Wolf -a Russian version of the Hell’s angels in an underground punk club.
I came home with matryoshka dolls, anxiety, Lenin Tshirts and panic attacks. I couldn’t fully digest the story. I didn’t have words. It was too big. I couldn’t think my way out. So I swallowed it. and buried it whole.
The more I kept it at bay, the more anxious I became. My professor- a brilliant Saint of a human- fluent in fourteen languages told me -- “to find your way out read the words of Pasternak, (Dr. Zhivago), Russian poets of the Revolution and Magical Realism—Master and Margarita. Especially Dr. Zhivago -it will change your life. I promise you.”
I read it. It did. In a sense.
It awakened me. To symbolism. Archetypes. Cycles. the Human Condition. And Mysteries about things too large to make sense of --revolution. Societal upheaval. Transition. Change. Shadow. Evil. Good. One age falling and another rising. Contradiction.
It was still too big a story to digest in a year and a day. For years, and lots of therapy in between I carried these unprocessed, unspoken, unwitnessed rites of passage - without a container or a map. Sometimes they emerged sideways as anxiety or insecurity. There was a lot churning and rumbling in my belly. The stories were clashing and colliding. Building pressure. Trying to turn my depression into a diamond.
In my early 30’s I decided to finally walk the Old Tale Road -to delve completely, fully, viscerally into the Belly of Story. I created a self-designed rites of passage program at Goddard College in Transformative Language Arts. I wanted to be an archeologist of Story.
I moved back to Upper Michigan - to the house that ate me as a teen- then to an isolated cabin on horse farm- off grid- not far from Lake Superior during 30-below winter. I set out to write and dance my way through my unspoken, buried, hidden stories -as they cracked open -as new stories unfurled and cracked open the next layer to be excavated.
Write. Haul wood. Dance. Chop water. Write. Listen to owls. Make art. Soak grains. Keep fire going. Write. Dance. Edit.
I dove body first -Beginning with the Season of Slush -that Miserable February in Moscow, combat boots hitting pavement, re-membering revelations about cracked and distorted truths in times of change. This led me to more stories hidden in the cracks of my storylines -forgotten stories, shamed, buried, hidden, decapitated; ancestral motherline, fatherline; religious Catholic conditioning and Grandma’s German-Lutheran rigidity; mafia stories -my outlaw dad and his renegade Jewish dad -arsonists, conmen, little boys who never fully grew up. And the mythopoetic— Story with a capital S -The Stories of Persephone, Little Red Riding Hood, and Vassalissa the Brave gave me guidance -I entered into them. They led me to more story threads.
Artist: Maria Chiara Digorgio
It became a personal odyssey, Heroine’s Journey to become more intimate with the power of story -to destroy and to transform. Stories that had stuck me like a fly in a web could be written and danced out of, reprogrammed, re-wired, re-written. I could become the author of my story -not the victim of it. I could love myself by seeing myself more clearly -not stay small in shame or trauma. I could empower myself with truth from the heart fire and liberate my creativity -not spin around in circles inside the stories writing me.
I rewilded, rewrote and re-membered myself from the inside out.
Little Red Riding Hood led me to stories about place and the archetype of a lost girl- an Ojibway story about a Lost Girl who fell in love with the Puckwudginees -the little people of the forest --who married herself and rewilded herself with nature --she became my teacher to find my inside nature’s rewilding- nature’s deeper medicine. I found my way back thru story tracking and storybody writing and moving the story thru five rhythms. Long walks along the shores of the land that rebirth me into a new version of myself. Across ice. Into ice caves. My back against stark white birch trees.
Lake Superior + Bone
I became hunter and tracker- red and wolf- tracking story through body - and embodied imagination—through sensation, image, movement. I wrote from my flesh and bones, not just mind.
Through nature, solitude, through the writing itself - the terrain of story became alive. I began to see the interconnected threads everywhere. Story was a multidimensional living being. Connecting me to the past, present and future. A web of pain, possibility and karma; beauty, fragments and tatters; power, courage and wholeness making.
I realized: I have the power to choose which stories I give power to, which stories I need to feed, which stories feed me, which stories I write eulogies to and which stories still need more re-patterning from a cellular level in my marrow.
A map was born. I hurtled out of the belly of Story - changed, rewilded, more whole.
Red. Fire. Life force. Courage. Wild. I became Red, rewilded.
And for twenty years, I’ve been guiding women through their own passages - with Mythos, memory, place, body and (w)rites of passage. Because stuck stories do help us grow when we work with them creatively. Because You are the Story of Yourself, Becoming. Because Story is a miracle, a landmine, a path and a secret treasure.
Artist: Kiki Smith
A couple years ago, a storyteller-rites of passage guide came to me feeling digested by certain stories - chronic illness since 17, migraines, physical pain that wouldn’t leave. She wrote:
“Here lies the one who thought illness was all she had...
She had forgotten she belonged, just by being her.”
Through Crack Open the Story, she entered the 13th Fairy of Briar Rose - the shadow voice she’d been swallowing, the “wicked stepmother” living in her belly spitting gall wherever she wasn’t embodying herself. She dove into Ceridwen’s Cauldron, stirring her blood, sweat, and tears for a year and a day.
She wrote her way from indigestion to transformation:
“I am the cauldron that digests it all...
Nothing is too intense or overwhelming for me.
The stirring gave oxygen to the essence of the story
so it could breathe and with the right incantation and song
her elixir was born.”
By journey’s end, she’d written:
“I came out. I just came out of that dark deep belly...
I am Red and I know I can set myself free.
My body remembers how to heal me, breathe me
So I can trust her and she can trust me.”
The migraines softened. The bitterness transformed. She found the girl in purple shoes who knew exactly who she was. She learned which stories to feed, which to write eulogies to, which to compost into medicine.
Stories that had been eating her became stories that fed her.
Artist: Julia Sarda, The Wolf’s Secret
Another woman - a painter and art therapist working with Ojibwa youth on Red Lake Nation in Northern Minnesota - came carrying decades of journals, “blank journal after journal” filled with unspoken stories. She’d been transplanted “time and time again in personas of a thousand women” but had never gathered them all home.
She wrote:
“I ache terribly for you to get out and fly, be released...
Through thousands of colors, through thousands of words...
I unzip myself exposing my earthen skin.”
Through Crack Open the Story, she entered the Lost Girl archetype and became Red Fox - the outlier who knew the way home. She dove into her Slovakian ancestry, moving between Northern Minnesota and her father’s homeland village, writing from Lake Bemidji to Lake Eva Domasa.
She confronted the “curse of silence” that had protected her for years:
“You no longer serve me. I release you from my betrothed asylum...
I unzip my mouth. I release all the gauze and bandages.”
By journey’s end, she’d gathered all her thousand women in “a grotto filled with white and pale pink roses.” She released “thousands of syllables like uncaged doves.” A fox pelt arrived on her porch “like an unexpected stork delivering a new baby girl” - the book born on her ancestors’ soil.
“The spell has been broken. I am with you. You are with me. Evermore.”
These women’s voices - along with eleven others who journeyed through Crack Open the Story two years ago - are now gathered in our anthology: Waking Red: There Blooms Their Blooms.
An amazing testimony of their rewilded transformation through words.
If you want to witness the raw, unpolished, holy work that emerges when women write from inside the fairy tales, you can read their words here: [link to anthology]
The stories that had been hiding in her duša, her soul, finally flew free.
And now -it’s your turn. To explore the wild and transformative power of story. To reclaim, rewrite, rewild your story. Your way. Creatively. Somatically.
This February, I’m opening Rewild Red: Write it! Rite it!
a 13-week StoryBody writing circle for women in transition.
If you’re navigating change - relationship shifts, midlife becoming, creative reawakening, loss, emergence - and you want to write and rite your way through…
If you’re drawn to fairy tales as living maps, embodied creative practice, and brave witness community…
If you’re ready to change your relationship with your stories and discover which ones deserve your power…
This is for you. I’d LOVE to weave with you. To see your stories unfurl, bloom and glow.
You do not have to be a seasoned writer. The myths and fairytales themselves work through your creative process in mysterious ways -stitching the words through you -unexpected, wild, beautiful, raw, fierce, soft, vulnerable. Your inner artist-writer will be substantially fed.
13 Fridays, Imbolc through Beltane. Oral storytelling. Wild writing. Somatic practice. Embodied voice. Witnessed sharing. Limited to only 13 women.
We begin February 14. Learn more: Rewild Red
Or write me at movingthestory@gmail.com to share your intention to join us. This is a potent, creative circle of women.
Artist: Unknown