WELCOME!
I’m an author, storyteller. and producer who brings a mythic perspective to everyday life.
For many years I’ve helped people write and tell their stories through the power of myth.
My books, short films, and websites all serve to deepen people’s engagement with their life stories and the myths we live by. Not all of our collective narratives are healthy, and my work offers an opportunity to see, question, and reframe our underlying stories and assumptions.
Through workshops and creative projects, I have worked with many groups of people, including survivors of cancer and other acute and chronic illnesses. I’ve served as a facilitator, producer, and Artist-in Residence for a number of agencies, including Gilda’s Club of Greater Toronto, and Casey House, a hospice and treatment center for people with HIV-AIDS.
My fiction and non fiction books include How to Ride a Dragon, which tells the real real life dragon stories of women who are dragon boating after breast cancer. The Canadian Nursing Oncology Journal hailed the book as “intellectually challenging, emotionally wrenching, and practice changing.” I’ve also written my own memoir of living with chronic pain, The Tower Princess: A Fairy Tale Lived, which won a Kirkus star.
If you’re interested in digging into the myths we live by, I’ve created a website called WonderLit Fairy Tales. Through courses and other tools, it helps people to find and engage the fairy tales that have influenced some of our most entrenched assumptions, attitudes and behaviors..
Through WonderLit Productions, I’ve produced award-winning short films, and, most recently, The Departure Train, a sonically rich audio play which theatre director and actor Layne Coleman has described as “the passage of a train moving through the fire of truth.”
I’m pleased to welcome you to this portal to many different adventures into mythic imagination. The books and productions are meant to inspire, and the courses are meant to take you into your own rich inner world.
May you find new sources of personal enrichment here!
Michelle has a rare talent for helping people to go beneath the surface and work with their stories. I consider the time I have worked with her to be a gift that has enriched my life.
– Eleanor Nielsen, Founder, Dragons Abreast Toronto