Books to Fuel Your Soul
Marrow Song
When the urge to transform gets primal it propels one both inwardly and outwardly, until both are in balance, and the heart explodes with a great big barbaric yes. From out of this explosion, ancient forests are born. Just so that longing can travel wildly, with abandon, inside of it.
Good stories do not travel in straight lines. Neither does transformation. Or Longing. Or Poetry
The good Stories and the good Poems take you off the beaten path. To edges. To the ephemeral plants in spring. To what was there moments before, now standing as sacred mystery, withering, returning, releasing her last ethereal petals. Back to source. Back to the beginning. Don't be fooled by what appears to be an ending. But also, don't let beginnings fool you either. They aren't always what they seem. Wheels speak subtle truths about seasonings.
Longings come and longings go. We touch into them as long as we are brave enough to dare. Some longings change the course of our lives. Wild panthers that pounce our souls into deep twisted forbidden jungles, where the remembering feels dangerous.
But we must remember. And sometimes it is dangerous. For if we are truly to live, then we must be willing to die. A serpent eats its tail. Someone discovers pomegranate seeds gestating, ripening, bursting forth in the belly.
And inside of that, the wild remembering. Or a Wild Matryoshka. Crack her open.
A poem is born.
This is a collection of moss and marrow. Sweat and Blood. Bellow the surface from the belly songs and Underworld operas. Girltruth. Howling Wolves constellating Stars in the shape of mystical, dancing incantations. An otherworldly apothecary of spells and tomes. Poems. Ten years worth. Gathered from The Wild Matryoshka.
Stasha Ginsburg has been tracking poems and wild matryoshkas in the forests and at the hedges, beyond the other side of oblivion and deep within the below the below. Perhaps where once stood an oak tree, a new songline is born.
The Return Sessions: An Anthology
During the Spring/Summer of 2023, a group of women wrote their way through a 9 week (w)rites of passage, The Return Sessions, led by Stasha Ginsburg of the Wild Matryoshka. These writings reflect a diverse and sensuous tapestry of stories, poems and prose, harvested through the process as each woman wove her voice through story, myth, body, place, imagination and memory.
Waking Red: An Anthology
Thirteen women. Thirteen weeks. Twelve Fairytales/Myths. And a thirteenth creation to emerge as this beautiful spinning wheel collection of their poems and stories.
The poems, voices, stories, testimonies, eulogies and revelations in this collection are the elixirs from the call to adventure - Crack Open the Story -writes of passage from May - July 2024. We met over zoom for two hours to sing, commune, hear fairytales and write our way inside and out of them.
In my cosmology of reality, mythos and fairytale is the much needed water of life of these times. A well, a chalice, the divine feminine Sophia. Alive and devouring. Alive and transforming.
The writings in this bountiful anthology are the creative spells, sacred wells, and eternal flames that thirteen women retrieved on the path of story. English was not the mother tongue of each woman. The women wrote from diverse locations on the map -United States, Poland, England, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Morocco. It was a profound honor to witness and guide these women. Our writing journey was a healing blessing of transformation and renewed sisterhood. An emerging living poem glistening with stardust and moss.
May these raw, sensual, fierce, captivating, intoxicating, enchanting, truthful, deep and soulful voices stir the cauldron of inspiration in you too. May you be enraptured, ensouled, enlivened. May the red rose of beauty awaken and unfurl the red in you. And so….we begin with the scent of something hidden, something forgotten, something lost, now found, emerging, remembered. At the center of Crack open the Story.
There Blooms
their Blooms...
