Creation Myths for the Turning of the New Year - Mythsinger Legacy Project

Join us on Saturday Dec 28th for the 3rd annual Creation Myths for the Turning of the New Year, hosted by Judith-Kate Friedman and Audrey di Mola of the Mythsinger Legacy Project.As always, we invite you to partake and add your voice to the magic that happens when we join together around the virtual hearth to share music, hear master mythteller and beloved teacher Daniel Deardorff beaming in from the archives, and “feed the stories” and the mythic experience which so deeply feeds us. Blending ancient tales and 21st century technologies in the Oral Tradition, we’ll meet on Zoom and listen to Daniel's and Judith-Kate’s original music. Then we’ll follow Daniel into the StoryHut (via video) and witness as he calls fire in the traditional manner, with flint and steel, and sings about the tradition of calling, and tending, fire.

This season’s StoryNight stories are the trio of Creation tales that Daniel always shared at the turning of one year into the next. Three myths will be told from very different traditions: one Norse, one Sumerian, and one from the Toba people of South America.

In our soulful circle, we'll explore the ideas in each story and the associativity between cultures as the stories speak to each other and their different sources mix in us.

If you’ve joined us around the Zoom hearth before you know that, amazingly, the potency of what Daniel delivered in person, when well-captured on audio and video and held in a sacred circle, truly conveys the essence of what he hoped we could receive from him for generations.

If you never got to meet Danny in his lifetime, it’s truly not too late. Those who knew him well, and those meeting him for the first time through these events, speak to the power of his presence as an ongoing gift.

In these challenging times with so many unknowns, we turn to the old stories for a sense of what endures over time. For the old stories hold medicine, and in traditional lore are understood, as mythologist Sean Kane has it, to be “the voice of the earth herself, speaking through people.”

WHEN: SATURDAY DECEMBER 28th at 1-3pm Pacific Time

WHERE: ZOOM - link will be sent to you upon registration

TICKETS available through EVENTBRITE are offered on a DONATION basis.

$5-$45 pay as you wish, pay as you can.

All funds contributed will benefit the continued work of the Mythsinger Legacy Project– allowing us to continue our quarterly StoryNights and more– throughout 2025. Thank you for your support!

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About the Mythsinger Legacy Project:

When Daniel Deardorff flew “out of this story and into the next” in 2019, he left a great many recordings, teachings, and ways for us to continue to access his guidance, love and wisdom. The Mythsinger Legacy Project (MLP) is honored and grateful to carry on his legacy and to work toward fulfilling his vision and mission– to restore the wisdom of myth to culture and community. MLP does this by creating experiential programs and contexts that bring together a growing international community of artists and misfits of all ages, cultures, and abilities. Those who gather share a common purpose or conundrum: to acknowledge, honor, and ultimately welcome the Other in society and in ourselves. We give people access to hearing the “old stories” (ancient myths) which Deardorff carried, in formats that catalyze healing.

MLP is also proud to represent Daniel's classic text, , published in a posthumous, expanded, 3rd edition (Inner Traditions, 2022, distributed internationally by Simon and Schuster).

Founded in January 2020 to carry forward the music and mythic arts of Daniel “3D” Deardorff, MLP operates as an independent charitable organization in WA state and is, for national and global projects, a fiscal sponsee of Songwriting Works Educational Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit arts organization.

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About mythsinger Daniel "3D" Deardorff (1952-2019):

If you knew Danny’s songs, his mythtelling or his classic book, you know his way with a story. Longtime friend and collaborator mythologist Martin Shaw says: “Deardorff was the greatest storyteller I ever saw… a Taliesin moving between hawk, salmon, and grain of wheat. It’s breathlessly exciting, what he is pointing towards.”

Daniel Deardorff was a "Singer" in the old sense: musician, storyteller, mythologist, and maker of ritual, a composer, performing artist, independent scholar of myth, author, and survivor of paralytic polio. In his mythtelling, he accompanies himself on djembe drum and invites us to find our own lives in the old stories. A survivor of childhood polio and resulting paraplegia, he used a wheelchair for most of his sixty-seven years; his lived experience of “otherness” gave him a perspective that deeply informed his views on myth. Daniel’s career in music and myth spanned five decades including ten years opening stadium shows for soft-rock icons Seals and Crofts, producing albums for notable NorthWest artists, and becoming a mythteller and scholar working with poet Robert Bly, Shaw and others. John Densmore of the Doors, in his endorsement of Daniel’s book and mythtelling writes: ”As I said to fellow wordsmith Michael Ventura just before I went on stage to play drums with Danny, maybe Deardorff should be Jim Morrison's replacement. He won't be wearing leather pants, but his depth of soul is a match."

Learn more about Daniel at mythsingerlegacy.org

Learn more about the project to archive and make accessible his unpublished recordings and related ephemera at www.mythsingerlegacy.com/the-mythsinger-legacy-collection.

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About your hosts:

JUDITH-KATE FRIEDMAN, Steward, Mythsinger Legacy Project

An award-winning vocalist and performing songwriter, Judith-Kate was Daniel Deardorff’s life partner of 14 years. She is honored to continue in the lineage of her beloved Daniel “3D” Deardorff, keeping alive his music, myth-telling arts, and vision of restoring the wisdom of myth to culture and community, in addition to her own multi-modal work as a musician, poet, bricolage artist and coach/mentor to creatives. A three-time National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient for her projects with Songwriting Works™ Educational Foundation, the non-profit she founded to restore joy, hope, vitality, and community through story and song, Judith-Kate has been exploring and championing her own and others' access accommodations since childhood. She holds a M.A. in Poetics of Imagination (Dartington Arts School/ UPlymouth, UK, 2021) where she studied extensively with Dr. Martin Shaw. Her background in curation, event and record production, and preservation, began in her teens as a singer and folk song enthusiast and then as a student of folklore and ethnomusicology at Oberlin College (B.A. 1983). Her creative lineage follows Deardorff, Shaw, Robert Bly, Life/Arts founder Anna Halprin (somatics), jazz vocal improvisational singer Rhiannon, Cantors Richard Kaplan and Linda Hirschhorn (music), and most recently Dr. Jean Houston (leadership). Learn more at judithkate.com.

AUDREY di MOLA, Co-host and Mythsinger Community Weaver

A celebrated oral tradition storyteller and facilitator, multidisciplinary artist/writer, sacred space-holder, and ever-grateful student of Deardorff’s, Audrey brings 15 years of creative curatorial and community-building experience to MLP and has worked closely with Judith-Kate Friedman since 2022. NYC born-and-based, since 2021 Audrey has been storytelling and facilitating international groups for online communities including: Dr. Sharon Blackie's Mythic Imagination Network and Substack, The Fifth Direction, and her own independently held story-spaces. She is dedicated to re-membering the imaginal in holistic care, and bringing the revivifying waters of re-story-ation back into modern society. Find out more about her work at: https://audreydimola.com/folkloric-futurism/

Host or Publisher Mythsinger Legacy Project