On April 10 in Portland OR, we offer “Can the Blessed Virgin hold the hearts of goddess women?” Led by Michael McDermott and friends, the special event includes readings from the late Patricia Monaghan’s Mary: A Life in Verse and first-person accounts of Mary’s influence on women’s lives. Michael says, “If anyone has tales of the hold of Mary, come prepared to share.”
Michael was Patricia’s husband and creative partner in the Black Earth Institute, a think tank dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.
Reviewer Dennis Daly says Mary: A Life in Verse “magnifies a simple naïve young woman into a goddess of secular goodness and the preternatural hope of mankind.”
Annie Finch, American Witch poet and performer, calls Mary: A Life in Verse “A remarkable, absorbing, and quietly revolutionary book” that offers readers
the sweet and sublime fruit of an attentive and courageous spiritual life. It brings us a new Mary, a Mary for the world and for the ages, who stretches beyond the limits of the Christian story and partakes of something far more ancient, larger, and more glorious: Mary as a woman, and a goddess.
A celebrated writer and editor, Patricia Monaghan was our beloved co-founder of ASWM. Much of her extensive work focused on mythology and spirituality, especially Irish and women’s spirituality. Her books include The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, Wild Girls, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog. She also edited Goddesses in World Culture and The Encyclopedia of Celtic Myth and Folklore.
Join us for this celebration of Patricia’s work and an important reclaiming of Mary in the lives of modern women. The event is held in conjunction with our 2015 symposium. It begins at 7:30 on April 10 at the Red Lion Hotel on the River in Portland, Oregon. It’s free and open to the public.
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