WRITING . THE WOLFF DEN
Mythic memoirs
from the threshold.
Mother, poet, animist — writing from Burgundy, France on grief, motherhood, and the spiraled cycles of reclamation and return.
The Wollf Den is where I write most freely — long essays woven with poetry, plant medicine, ancestral memory, and the kind of truth that only arrives when you've stopped performing and started listening.
THE WOLFF DEN ON SUBSTACK
Where the real
writing lives.
Mythic memoirs from Burgundy, France
Ancestral & plant medicine
The trees as teachers. The wound carried in the bloodline. What the hawthorn, the rose, and the ash know about grief, healing, and the return to wholeness.
Motherhood as initiation
Not motherhood as a role to perform but as a rite of passage — the dissolution, the becoming, the sacred mess of loving something more than yourself.
The Wollf Den is not a newsletter in the conventional sense. It is a place where I bring my full self — the poet, the mother, the animist, the woman still in the middle of becoming. Each piece is long-form, carefully made, and offered to those who are willing to go somewhere slow and deep.
I write about grief as a portal, not a problem to be solved. I write about what the trees know, and the medicine that waits in the ancestral wound. I write about motherhood not as a domestic category but as one of the great initiatory thresholds of a woman's life. I write about the spiraled path — the descent, the dark, and the return — because I have walked it, and am still walking it.
I write, sometimes, in poetry. I write the way the hawthorn teaches — with thorns and with sweetness, with something that breaks you open so the heart can expand to hold what was always there.
Grief & the descent
Grief not as malfunction but as medicine — the spiraled cycles of loss and return that shape a life and offer, if we let them, the deepest kind of freedom.
Life on the land
Letters from La Ferme du Cerf Bleu — the seasons, the bees, the medicinal plants, and what it means to live in genuine reciprocity with the earth.
A RECENT PIECE
From the
archive
MYTHIC MEMOIR . PAID ESSAY . SEPTEMBER 2025
The Witch in the Thorn Grove: A Mother's Wounding and Wild Return
What happens when you become the woman your mother warned you about — and it saves you? A mythic weaving of the hawthorn tree, ancestral wounding, and the soul's initiation through motherhood.
Beginning with a poem written along the hedgerows of Burgundy — rose hips and gall wasp pincushions, an Italian grandmother who died too young, a BRCA gene carried quietly through her lineage — the essay spirals into the deeper wound: the early maternal losses that mark a lineage, the firewalls built around pain, the children left without grief rituals. And what the hawthorn, with her thorns like daggers and her tiny red heart-medicines, has to teach about the breaking open that heals us.
Near my home in Bourgogne, hawthorns hold spears along the forest edges,
guarding the passage, the turtle doves, the song thrushes,
their crimson berries that recall the tales of fairies.
I have a mind to reach up and grab handfuls of them
to tincture a heart medicine, but they are not ready
until the first frost glitters and pinches the ground.
The full archive lives at rosewollf.substack.com. Free and paid tiers available — paid subscribers receive the full essays, guided journeys, and plant recipes & rituals.
SUSCRIBE TO THE WOLLF DEN
Letters that find you
when you need them.
Free subscribers receive every essay as it lands. Paid subscribers receive the full pieces — including the guided shamanic journeys, plant medicine guides, and ancestral practice materials woven into each post. The writing itself is always the heart of it.
"Every family has a secret." My son said this, aged seven, in a car park outside a shopping mall in New Jersey. What he meant by secret, I understood later, was wound. Something woven that whispers beneath the surface, invisible until the one who is paying attention goes searching for its name. This is the kind of thing I write about.
Free to read. Paid tier unlocks full essays, guided journeys, and plant medicine materials. You can also subscribe directly at rosewollf.substack.com.
WRITING COURSES
For the woman who knows
her story has something to say
Two courses that use myth, ancestral wisdom, and shamanic practice as the container for deep transformative writing work.
GROUP COURSE . SMALL COHORT
Writing Your Personal Myth
Your life has mythic structure — a wound, a call, an ordeal, a return. In this course we study the anatomy of myth and use it to understand and write your own story in the language of the universal. The result is a piece of writing unlike anything you have written before, and a process that changes you in ways that outlast the page.
GROUP COURSE . FOR MOTHERS
Mother Myth & Memoir
A course for those exploring the mythic and ancestral dimensions of their own journey — through fairy tale, myth, the archetypal mother, ritual, and guided writing that becomes a sacred personal memoir. For anyone who has been born from a mother who knows that their story has been tied to both her shadow and her light.