Kathleen McGowan – Exploring the Legends of the Divine Feminine
OM Times caught up with Kathleen while she was promoting her recently released “The Ballad of Tam Lin” and asked her to give us more insight into her work.
OM Times: Did you always want to be a writer?
Actually, I did not start out as a fiction writer but as a journalist. In 1989, I started researching elements of history that had been improperly told, specifically how women in history had been maligned, misunderstood, and most often, scapegoated. I was looking to see how we could restore history. But while immersed in all this research, I came to the understanding that it wasn’t just women in history but very specifically the spiritual contributions of women in history had almost been completely erased. So I set out to write a non-fiction book called Herstories, where the plan was to profile about 10-15 different women from history.
OM Times: How did working on Herstories lead you to The Magdalene Line?
The women I set out to research were originally women such as Anne Boleyn, Maria Antoinette, Lucrezia Borgia and Mary Magdalene. So in the 90s, when my work became focused on Mary Magdalene, the research I was uncovering was so scary, and so dangerous that no one would publish it. And after being rejected just about every way known possible, I was told that if I wanted to even think about re-writing biblical history, I had better have a PhD behind my name and tenure at some very highly respected university.
