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Judith-Kate Friedman
photo by R. David Zaslow
AT ESSENCE we’re all creative.
Our artistry thrives when conditions are good. We can create these fertile conditions. Now is the time—to look within, give gratitude for last year’s gifts, and plant seeds and kindle visions for 2025.
In these challenging times, every one of our truths and voices are needed. As the great songwriter Charlie Murphy once sang:
“No one can bring in the harvest alone.”
I’m an award-winning composer, performer, consultant, cultural organizer, and life-long teaching artist. I also coach creative people who wish to move beyond stuckness, fear, and doubt, into greater joy, ease, confidence, and success. I’m here to help you embody the power that comes from being all of who you are.
Are you a seasoned arts adventurer? An emerging performer or writer finding your voice? Are you launching a fledgling project? Exploring a new form? Stepping into–or back into–an artistic identity? Welcome.
Aliveness Through Arts is a playground of diverse offerings to enhance your purpose, practice, and possibilities. I’m honored to support your journey and success.
A Celtic tale:
The God Lugh seeks to enter into Tara, dwelling place of the Gods. At the gates into the Other World, Tara’s denizens say yes only to those with talents they truly need.
Lugh approaches and beseeches, naming one of his many skills: smith, harper, poet, magician, metal-worker, historian, physician….
Each time, he’s told they already have, and don’t need, what he brings.
Yet, unstoppable, Lugh asks again, and again, each time offering a different aspect of himself. One day, finally exasperated, he proclaims his true fullness: “I am all this!”
Swiftly the Gates open. Lugh is granted access to unforeseen, long-guarded, and longed-for realms.
It is this way with us, too.
Each part of who we are matters. Our deepest selves, projects, and those with whom we’re in meaningful relationships, are just waiting for us to claim and re-claim all we are.
Creativity opens the heart of us and others. The combination of gifts, skills, imperfections, and interests we have make each of us like none other on earth. And that’s a wondrous thing.
Let’s talk about how I can support you, or your community, to open new doors and move through the gates of what once seemed impossible.
May I support you in your unique work?
Judith-Kate Friedman is an award-winning composer, producer, and a multi-modal artist and author.
Support for Your Creative Thriving in 2025
Judith-Kate offers musical and multi-modal commissions, concerts, workshops and masterclasses, coaching, mentoring, and consulting.
Ways we can work together include:
Your Breakthrough Year
Small Group Cohorts for Creative Women artists, dreamers, leaders, and changemakers
Individual Coaching and Packages
“Free or Find Your Voice or Vision, Speak or Sing Your Truth!”
Tending the Inner Nest
A workshop for your creative exploration and flourishing
in a fail-safe/fail-forward zone of goodness, and discovery.
2 hrs on Zoom. 2025 Date TBD.
Publications and Press
“A tremendous songwriter with a real gift for prose, too.”
“We never give up, although we give in
We drink the above and grow from within
We wave in the breeze
We watch you begin
And teach you to listen for what weaves and spins”
Journeying in the Marvelous.
Oral Tradition stories and songs have guided my sense of kinship all my life, across Time’s great mystery. Singing, discovering and then writing songs helped me way-find through a rocky urban childhood (and have since). Fortunately, those early edgy places taught me courage—because truthfully, as for so many of us, courage was required. I found many things and people who made me well up and sing, whether for joy or justice.
And so it still is.
The poet William Stafford talks of a “thread” we follow.
My thread is like the tapestry yarns on this page, persistent, plucky, insistent strands of confidence, like those young girls carry in old tales, or a calling that weaves through puzzles and invitations, that asks for and rewards attention and follow-through….that’s learning about aging, too. Creative playgrounds I’ve explored and adored include Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Western Mass., Oberlin College and Conservatory, London, Italy, Israel, Indonesia, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and the far rural Pacific Northwest I now call home.
You’ve followed circuitous paths, too. And here we are.
In 2025, I’ll wend my way through several journeys, and invite you to join me:
• New Songs Weekly. As part of a great group of writers taking up the REAL PEOPLE, REAL SONGS challenge, I’ll be “dropping” a new song each week at least through March. You can tune into all of our new music daily on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
• Coaching Cohorts and Individuals. If creative camaraderie is what you seek, check out the “Skilled Yet Thirsty” and “Seasoned and Staying Amazed” cohorts here. Or focus on Finding/Freeing Your Voice/Vision and Singing/Speaking Your Truth with coaching here.
• Songwriting Works’ 35th anniversary is January 15th!
The non-profit charitable organization I founded is poised for a renaissance as we move into mid-age. Stay Tuned!
• Stories and Songs: The Mythsinger Legacy Project keeps alive the work of my belated beloved Daniel Deardorff (1952-2019), musician, songwriter, mythteller, author, ritualist, and revered teacher. On the last Wednesday of each quarter we hold StoryNights around the Virtual Hearth online. Save the dates! And join us on FEB 12th for the 4th annual LOVE DOGS : A beautiful video of the evening Daniel and I swapped Love Songs, many written for each other, at our local theatre. This year we’ll be adding new live Music, Poetry, and conversation.
If you’ve yet to read it (or only know an earlier edition), I highly recommend The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche, 3rd ed. (Inner Traditions, 2022). The morsels and medicine woven into this short yet labyrinthine book will give you much to ponder, chew on, and turn toward to mythically aid in understanding and navigating whatever initiatory or milder happenings 2025 brings.
• Commissions—I compose musical and multi-modal works for all occasions. Contact me about commissioning a piece or collaborating.
Elsewhere on this site:
• My podcast interviews about myth, story, and my work and life with mythsinger Daniel “3D” Deardorff.
• The multi-modal gallery for my Poetics of Imagination creative dissertation “Mandorla Rising”.
• Check the events page, subscribe to my lo-fi missives, or follow me on social channels for more news.
• Several recent poems of mine appear in Arbella Poetry Magazine Winter 21/22 and the London Writers Salon’s Writing in Community anthology #2 (2022), #3 (2023), and #4 (forthcoming).
Thanks for sharing in the beauty!
Current and Recent Projects
Tapestry, Deer Park, Olympic Mountains, WA —Judith-Kate Friedman