In Episode 43, we talk to poet and teller-healer Audrey Dimola about radical mental health, ecological wellness, and working with archetypal stories and myths to foster healing, personal growth, and community.
Audrey Dimola is an earth-centered storyteller-healer exploring myth, mental health, and the ecologies of spirit; a proud Queens NYC native and 1st generation Southern Italian (Polignano a Mare!). She is a lifelong artist, writer/poet, and performer; youth mentor and public speaker; and has nearly a decade of experience as a NYC-based event curator and sacred space-holder working creatively in diverse communities– including her beloved Socrates Sculpture Park, the renowned community-engaged outdoor art museum where she has served as Director of Public Programs since 2016. Audrey is the author of 4 books of poetry and prose including the most recent “WILDLIGHT” and “THE BOOK OF LEGEND,” which has been called her “own unique unrepeatable genre, a new species of book.” She has been published in Mad in America, Dark Mountain Project, and Rebelle Society; created immersive art installations for the Southeast Queens Biennial and CultureLab LIC; and performed in venues both intimate and massive around NYC including The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, and Brooklyn Museum. Audrey is passionate about empowering alternative healing modalities, (re)connection to nature and more-than-human kin, multidisciplinary art, radical vulnerability, co-creating safe and generative spaces, and sharing “folkloric futurism” and the sacred aliveness of Story with the world. Thanks to all who Stand With Her Always, both in the topside world and the other realms. Learn more at her website, audreydimola.com; follow her on Instagram @audreydimola; and check out her books here.
This episode was recorded on December 16, 2020. Because we recorded via Zoom, there may be occasional audio hiccups. Our theme song is “4 am” by Makaih Beats. You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher and follow us on Twitter @WritingRemixPod.
People, Texts, and Places Mentioned in the Episode
- Socrates Sculpture Park
- Pasqalina Azzarello
- Joanna Macy
- Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
- Joseph Campbell
- Danny Deardorff
- Martin Shaw
- Robert Bly
- Marion Woodman
- IDHA
- “How to Convert Your Life into Legend: Inside the Hero’s Journey with Audrey Dimola”
- CRAZYWISE
- Dzieci
- Juan Ramón Jiménez
- Steve Dalachinsky
- Great Weather for Media
“It’s so beautiful and such a blessing to work for a place where…you can be yourself.” @audreydwrites
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“Being a student and just listening and feeling what was happening in my body…that was what changed my path, my journey, my life.” @audreydwrites
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“Being a poet and being an alchemist is the same damn thing.” @audreydwrites
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“It’s all about context. It’s all about narrative. And if you can choose something that is empowering versus what is given to you, all this other landscape opens up.” @audreydwrites
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“Be[ing] adaptable [is] what I think is going to carry us forward. That’s one of the things that should come out of this time of breaking this container of all of these habitual patterns and this grind and the narratives that we’ve been running along with…How do we get back to presence? How do we understand? How do we adapt? Shapeshift?” @audreydwrites
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“How do you work in story? How do you walk inside these myths? How do you show people that they have these landscapes inside them right now?” @audreydwrites
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“It really was the difference between life and death for me, experiencing these alternative narratives.” @audreydwrites
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“Myth is about holding tension and…being able to hold and be in the space of paradox.” @audreydwrites
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“We are in mythic time.” @audreydwrites
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“Sometimes there are stories from other traditions and other histories, other lives, other paths, and they arrive to you, and they work inside you and in you.” @audreydwrites
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“Stories work inside you for years before you’re ready to tell it sometimes.” @audreydwrites
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“So much about myth is about place.” @audreydwrites
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“I come from a tradition that is beyond me, that is lives beyond me, that I am here to carry.” @audreydwrites
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“Surrender to what’s greater so it can co-create with you and it can move through you…Lean into the great mystery. Be okay with not knowing…That’s myth too, how much comes from the admittance and the surrender to the uncertainty.” @audreydwrites
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