Publications and Press
“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”
“A tremendous songwriter with a real gift for prose, too.”
Journeying in the Marvelous.
“Life is a deep dive. Initiatory experiences happen to us all the time.
The question is — will we be accompanied on our journeys? Or confirmed when we return?”
— Judith-Kate Friedman
Oral Tradition songs, stories, and sagas have guided my sense of kinship all my life.
Singing, discovering, and then writing and carrying songs, I was ever curious about Time’s great mystery.
For me, Music was always a life-line. Music and Sound include, influence, and dance with Poetry.
And Poetry, most definitely responds in kind.
As a singer in the old sense, I’m called by rhythm, cadence, and the intrinsic melody of expression, out loud, whether spoken or sung,
Early on, these elements helped me way-find through a rocky urban childhood, and they have since.
Edgy times and places like that became teachers of courage. For so many of us: courage is required.
Sometimes I’m asked what makes me want to sing? To write?
Proximity to the unexpected.
Causes of justice. Love. Creating and sharing the beauty of the Living World.
Joy, grief, laughter, sheer wonder….. The arts are paths to happiness. They keep becoming more so.
In his poem, “The Way It Is,” William Stafford writes of a “thread” we follow. Granting ourselves and others permission to follow is key to deepening creative adventures and well-being. As we tend our creative adventures, accompaniment is so important.
The many modes we’re called to explore are all our birthrights. Yet we don’t create in isolation.
There is everything (and everyone) past, present, and future in the larger tapestry. And there are always all the parts of us.
LINKS TO JUDITH-KATE’s PUBLICATIONS:
• Podcast interviews about myth, story, and Judith-Kate’s work and life with mythsinger and author Daniel “3D” Deardorff.
• “Mandorla Rising” - a multi-modal gallery for Judith-Kate’s M.A. Poetics of Imagination creative dissertation at Dartington Arts School, UK
• Poems recently published in the Stafford Challenge Anthology 2024-25, three London Writers Salon Writing in Community anthologies #2 (2022), #3 (2023), and #4 (2024-2025), and in Arbella Poetry Magazine Winter 21/22.
• Judith-Kate stewards the Mythsinger Legacy Project and represents Daniel Deardorff’s book The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche, 3rd ed. (Inner Traditions, 2022). Available at your favorite booksellers and directly from the publisher.
• Here are links to select songs and lyrics by Judith-Kate and to some of her recordings.
UPCOMING EVENTS:
• Stories from The Other Within: Check the events page,
FURTHER MUSINGS:
How rich life becomes when we listen to everything, essence to essence.
Along with following threads and yarns, I adore touchstones. Some literal, some imaginal.
Many of us carry sustaining touchstones, much like young girls in old tales. Sometimes they’re of a place, always of a time.
If carried in our pockets, they become wanderers, nomads, tourists, wastrels…. as we travel.
Far from inanimate, they’re alive, informing us at each new arrival.
The more multi-modal I become, the more resonances I find between all disciplines and art forms rising through and around me.
They peak my interest whether made by me, through me, or by others and call me, til either I or they let go!
There are so many layers of energies.
For instance, the tapestry yarns on this website’s home page reflect a plucky, insistent energy that is beyond merely my own.
This is my first tapestry. I didn’t realize while weaving it up at 2,500 feet at Deer Park in the wild Olympic Mountains, that its warp strands held confidence in me, before I even began.
A dear friend and artist-neighbor Laura Martin, of blessed memory, gifted me its frame loom and wove the warp to get me started.
Then I wove the story onto them.
Now Laura’s energy, no longer a casual thing, upholds it all from further afar.
I think about these things when considering threads of interconnection.
It’s Poetry, even more than Music that bids me to slow down, to sit with a word, an idea, the process….
And then there are so many options! It can be ever-heartening, and confounding.
Such abundance, like Nature herself, is nearly infinite, and ultimately unified in its complexity.
So many choices can be overwhelming, making it hard to start or finish a given piece.
A teaching shared at a memorial gathering for poet, scholar, activist, and environmentalist Joanna Macy is helpful:
“We’re not allowed to overflow. Joanna’s instruction was to only become larger.”
Here, in late summer 2025, I’m pondering how sharing my own work, and championing others in theirs, support us to become larger.
To become “right-sized containers”—for ourselves, individually and collectively—which seems essential in these times.
I’m reminded of the image and directive that poet Frederich Hölderlin gave us: To be “strong enough for water.”
There’s more to say, of course, about how you and I got here to this moment at this page.
Life continues to beckon and weave, tempting us to new callings and ages-old ones.
I’m glad that your thread-following has led you here, and I hope we’ll have a chance to explore some connections of resonance.
Be it through the printed or recorded word, a mythopoeic or musical event, on line or in-person—I thank you for being part of my creative life and for welcoming me to be part of yours.
See you in the marvelous!
With love and gratitude,
Judith-Kate