Fadó Fadó, The Sovereignty Knot

My Book's Birthday + How to Stay in Relationship with Your Past Work

Fadó fadó is the Irish language equivalent of “once upon a time.” 

And, as my book turned four years old this month, and, since four years is an endless age in the contemporary media landscape (particularly these last four years), it seems appropriate to say fadó fadó, The Sovereignty Knot was born.

The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic was written in the beforetimes.

Before covid.
Before so much changed.
Before too little changed.

Before I was forty. Before I needed reading glasses. And, before I was changed by writing and living the ideas in this book.

Maybe it’s not important how many years have passed since publication day. Good books remain relevant, and, at least in this moment, I can gather the creative confidence that says mine is a good book.

No one prepares you for the strange experience that is “the book birthday.”

Heck, no one can prepare you for how it feels to release a book, period. This is triply true when it’s a book that is rooted in personal stories and describes the ongoing process of your own becoming.

It’s all rather surreal on release day.

Exciting, terrifying, overwhelming to receive such attention and then rather devastating when the book buying buzz fades into what (you hope) is the silence of readers captivated by what’s between the covers.

Four years later, the book seems more and less real.

Readers have sought me out to say that this book changed their lives. One woman attended an online workshop I led and told me that reading about my family connection to Prince Edward Island inspired her to leave an unsatisfying relationship and return to that island that had once been her home.

And some of the people closest to me haven’t ever mentioned the book at all. Based on experience and conversations with other authors, I’ve come to understand that this just… happens.

Maybe they didn’t read it. Maybe they did, and felt like they entered a conversation with me but forgot that I couldn’t hear them the way they could hear me. Maybe they didn’t have the words to respond. Maybe folks just aren’t accustomed to talking to an author, seeing as reading seems like such a solitary enterprise. Maybe it just wasn’t the book for them, and that’s ok.

Staying in relationship with your own creation is an act of creative sovereignty

It would be easy enough to let this book birthday pass, unremarked upon.

I’ve learned to be happy with the small royalty payments that drop into my bank account. It adds up to little more than coffee money each month, but it’s still a reason to celebrate because it means someone discovered me while browsing their local bookshop or happened to hear me mention the book in the KnotWork Storytelling intro.

Plus, I’m like many other creatives - because I’m always focused on exploring and writing something new, past creations fade into memory. The work from a few years ago almost seems to be written by someone else.

That said, when you read The Sovereignty Knot you’ll absolutely recognize the voice and themes. You’ll come with me into a cave in County Roscommon to meet the dark goddess. You’ll sit next to me in mass during my crisis of faith in the Catholic god. You’ll be invited to see yourself in the heroines who walk across the page. You’ll recognize that I was sowing the seeds that would become KnotWork Storytelling and Myth Is Medicine.

We’re afraid to dwell on the past, but sometimes that means we fail to make a home in our creative world.

Caught up in the hustle to make more, be seen, and do better, I couldn’t give myself permission to fully inhabit the stories and ideas I offer you in the book.

I moved on too fast and disowned some of my own magic.

But this year, I feel a shift. It seems I’ve taken my own medicine and can truly stand sovereign in my own story. I am allowing myself to return to this dwelling, which is somewhere between the cliff, castle, and cave. (To understand what I mean by that, you’ll just have to read the book!)

Mirabai Books in Woodstock, NY was the first shop to put The Sovereignty Knot on their shelves! They were so kind when I entered the shop, whispering that I had a book their customers might enjoy,

Even after all these years, The Sovereignty Knot has a lot to say

Four years. Sixteen seasons.

Collectively, we’ve been changed utterly and barely at all.

Individually… well, I’d love to hear your story. I feel like I’ve been transformed, and yet I endure.

This book is about the quest to root into an honest relationship with ourselves and be real about our state of interrelationship with our beloveds, our community, our culture, our earth. We’ve come a bit further. We have a long way to go.

Plus, the mythic stories that punctuate the sections of this book - Brigid, Medb, Cailleach, and others - are as true today as they were on publication day, as true as when they were recorded by the scribes, as true as when they first passed from the lips of the first bards.

Over the next weeks, I’ll be returning to the stories and ideas from my book - from the central triad of “Free the Princess, Crown the Queen, Embrace the Wise Woman” to the thorny question of what it means to champion something as potentially toxic as “sovereignty” in this modern world.

For this week only, you can get the Kindle edition of The Sovereignty Knot for free. 

One of the best ways for an indie author to keep moving books into the world (and make a livelihood) is to give away books for free once in a while.

When you download the Kindle edition for $0.00 between today, February 21 and Saturday, February 24 you help create the buzz that boosts the algorithm and increases the chance that The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic will be recommended to new readers.

If you prefer to hold a copy in your hands, and support an independent author and/or an independent bookseller with your purchasing power, I would love to sell you a book! When you order a paperback copy through me you also get a Sovereignty Note, which includes a personalized archetype reading.

Already have The Sovereignty Knot in your collection? Please leave a review on Amazon. Reviews are the best gift you can give the authors in your life!