About the Conference
Art: Marin Magat; Photo: Amy Young
This is the Great Mother Conference –
An annual pilgrimage for poets, storytellers, artists, musicians, dancers, and seekers of images arising from a deep well of imagination. Fifty years ago, Robert Bly and a circle of kindred spirits set the fire and invited others to sit beside it. Since then, year after year, the embers have been tended—through poetry and music and story, movement and silence, myth and memory. The GMC, in all these forms, continues to call many of us back year after year, and welcomes newcomers or those who arrive from time to time.
The GMC is a place for poets, dancers, dreamers, and musicians. For mythologists and seekers, for those who have spent years working with ancient stories and those who have just begun to sense the pull. Some come for the poetry and story. Some come for the arts and movement. Some come because they are standing at a crossroads and need to hear an old story to make sense of their own paths ahead. You might come as an artist, a teacher, a therapist, or simply as a human looking for something beyond the edges of ordinary conversation.. For the hundreds of people who form the GMC community, whether they attended once or they attend year after year, the result of taking seriously the forces inside of story, poetry, art, and music has challenged and deepened their imagination.
The GMC has seen Robert Bly and Martin Shaw as guiding voices during different points of its fifty plus years of existence. Notable minds such as Tony Hoagland, Coleman Barks, Joseph Campbell, Gioia Timpanelli, Marion Woodman, Marie-Louise von Franz, Cornelius Eady, Mary Ruefle, Terrance Hayes,Jane Hirshfield, Ilya Kaminsky, and Martín Espada have shared their gifts as teachers. And our guiding stories have included the Odyssey, Parsival, The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, Gilgamesh, The Mabinogion, selections from Fionn mac Cumhaill, and so many others.
Each year, a new theme unfolds—sometimes emerging from the old stories, sometimes from the time we find ourselves in, sometimes from the quiet voices inside us all. In 2025, we will gather again, listening for what needs to be spoken, sung, and welcomed into being.
If your heart leaps at the idea of myth, imagination, and embodied storytelling, you belong here. If you are someone who wants to challenge and deepen your own creative impulses, if you believe that myths and fairytales are not just dusty old stories but living energy that moves through us, if the land and the water call you, we invite you to spend an unforgettable week with us in May.
What to Expect (and What You Can’t Plan For)
Through daily programing of story, poetry, music, art, and ecology; focused workshops taught by world-class teachers; small-group sessions; one-on-one meetings to strengthen your writing, singing, and artistic voice; and a vibrant community of like-minded people, you give yourself the time you have been craving to come back to yourself, come back to your True North, and find the joy in what it means to live.
You’ll find in these pages information about daily activities, the story and the teachers, you may have heard about the song circles and the movement and exploration of the land—but the real magic lives in what can’t be scheduled:
Conversations by the shore or with the meals, in the cabins or on the paths, the ones that shift something in your bones.
Workshops where the body speaks the language of myth with movement, or where words form to bring an image and unseen force to life.
Poetry read aloud in the salons or by the fire, when the words land softer than the stars overhead.
Shared meals where strangers become family.
Quiet time alone in nature, where the trees, water, and wind are the oldest storytellers of all, time to just be.
Evening presentations, where craft and magic and movement and song arise and fill the hall
Time in between the here and now and the imagination, where we find ourselves for 7 days on the shores of Lake Damariscotta.
We invite you to come and see, come and listen, come and be part of what unfolds.
If you have questions about dates, location, or logistics, you can find them elsewhere in these pages. But if you’re wondering why this place calls to you, why myth still breathes in the world, why poetry and song matter now more than ever—well, you may have just found the right people with whom to ask that question.
Come. Sit by the lake and the breeze. In beauty it’s begun.