Maureen Murdock
Author.
Educator.
Photographer.
Maureen Murdock is author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey, whose 30th anniversary edition continues to inspire a new generation of women. Her most recent book, Mythmaking: Self Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir, draws upon her experience as a psychotherapist and memoir writing teacher. It explores connections between ancient myths and popular contemporary memoirs to help readers examine their own life patterns and map their personal stories.
Welcome
Welcome to my website, which is devoted to memoir writing and the heroine’s journey. My work explores the mysteries of the psyche, a fascination with mythology and a love of story telling and memoir writing. In 1990 I wrote the best selling book The Heroine’s Journey as a response to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. It was groundbreaking at the time and continues to inspire a new generation of women. A critical stage of The Heroine’s Journey addresses every woman’s yearning to create, so we will also explore memoir writing as a powerful creative expression of each person’s desire to understand the complexities of their life and the lives of others.
I hope you will also visit my photography gallery, Changing Woman: Contemporary Faces of the Goddess, where I present portraits and interviews of women whose focus is feminine spirituality.*role="textbox"**tabindex=0*
— Maureen Murdock
MORE ABOUT MAUREEN
Every woman has to learn where her true source of validation is.
― From The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness
Books
Maureen Murdock’s books have enriched the lives of thousands of people and been translated into 24 languages.
“Maureen Murdock's important book on the heroine's journey contains a wealth of insight that is of great value to contemporary Western women. It explores a rich territory of the feminine psyche and opens an understanding of female development that relates not only to personal transformation but cultural transformation as well.”
—Joan Halifax,
author of Standing at the Edge
The Heroine's Journey:
Woman's Quest for Wholeness
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of its original publication, Shambhala Publications has reissued Maureen’s groundbreaking book, The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, as well as The Heroine's Journey Workbook: A Map for Every Woman's Quest. The new edition of the book includes an updated preface from Maureen reflecting on the last 30 years of women’s experiences and a new foreword by Christine Downing, PhD.
The Heroine’s Journey explores the rich territory of the feminine psyche and delineates the psycho-spiritual journey for women. Maureen wrote the book in response to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces when he said to her, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there.”
Drawing upon cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need for—and the reality of—feminine values in Western culture today.
The Heroine's Journey Workbook:
A Map for Every Woman's Quest
This workbook, part of the 30th anniversary release of the original Heroine's Journey, is designed to guide the reader consciously through the different stages of the Heroine's Journey, and look at the myths and fairytales that shed light on these archetypal experiences. Based on workshops conducted by Maureen with women of all ages, it can be used individually or in a group.
Mythmaking:
Self Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir
Like myth, memoir reveals a profound unity to the human condition—that we all share similar hopes, dreams, and desires as well as fears, losses, and heartbreaks. Psychotherapist and writing teacher Maureen Murdock explores connections between ancient myths and popular contemporary memoirs to help readers examine their own life patterns and map their personal stories.
Unreliable Truth:
On Memoir and Memory
A captivating treatise on the corruptibility of memory that also provides tools for exploration of the self and soul through personal narrative. It started as an essay about the similarities between myth and memoir but took on a more personal meaning as Maureen’s mother struggled with Alzheimer’s disease.
Fathers' Daughters:
Breaking the Ties That Bind
One of the most profound relationships in a woman’s life is with her father. Through myth, fairy tale, case studies, and Jungian psychology, Maureen explores the unique relationship between a "father's daughter" and her father, its rewards and pitfalls, and how this idealized relationship affects the mother daughter bond.
Spinning Inward:
Using Guided Imagery with Children for Learning, Creativity and Relaxation
If you have ever wished you could show children and teenagers how to enrich their lives with meditation and visualization, this book will delight you. Drawn from Maureen's personal meditation practices, these guided imagery techniques offer adults as well as children a unique way to tap the wealth of creativity and wisdom within.
Monday Morning Memoirs:
Women in the Second Half of Life
This dazzling collection of intimate stories was written by ten remarkable women who first met in a creative writing class at UCLA in the mid-nineties. This wildly different, yet amazingly similar group of women, aged forty-five to eighty, have provided a unique view of the second half of life across several generations.
Podcasts, Interviews & Presentations
Maureen Discusses Her New Book Mythmaking at Chaucer's Books
After a nice introduction by her friend Carolyn Butcher, Maureen talks about her book Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir at Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara.
Why Women Need Their Own Myth: A Podcast on The Heroine's Journey
Independent podcast host Amy McPhie Allebest discusses how Maureen Murdock rewrote the myth of the hero for women, and what The Heroine's Journey reveals about our culture.
The Once and Future Goddesses Conference Presentation
Maureen's presentation at a 2025 gathering at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara that reflected upon the emergence of the archetypal feminine in the fields of Women’s Spirituality, Mythological Studies, and Depth Psychology during the 1970s and explored current perspectives and developments in the field.
Changing Woman:
Contemporary Faces of the Goddess
Photography Gallery
View Maureen's extraordinary portraits and interviews with women artists, dancers, activists, and writers whose focus is feminine spirituality. This photographic essay grew out of Maureen's interest in the rise in consciousness about the goddess in the 1980s and how she figured in the lives of contemporary women. Maureen wanted to know how the women she interviewed and photographed understood the idea of a sacred feminine and how they integrated her into their lives. The images shown here are from Maureen's gallery exhibit at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1987.
VISIT THE GALLERY
Colleen Kelly, Ritualist and Artist
Workshops & Speaking Engagements
Stay tuned for news about Maureen's upcoming workshops and speaking engagements and join her mailing list to receive updates on her work.
Maureen will be speaking at
Goddess-Makers 2026 Conference
Goddess-Makers 2026:
Oracles of the Creative in an Age of Collapse
August 28th – 30th, 2026
Pacific Graduate Institute
801 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108
There are moments in history when the ground trembles. Old certainties loosen. Institutions strain. Stories that once organized collective life begin to fragment. In such times, many experience an almost existential fear — the sense that something foundational is giving way.
From a depth psychological perspective, collapse is not simply catastrophe. It is threshold. It is the dissolution of symbolic structures that no longer carry psychic life. Alchemy called this stage nigredo — the darkening that precedes transformation. What appears as breakdown may in fact be initiation. In myth, it is precisely at such moments that the oracle appears...
Goddess-Makers 2026 gathers scholars, artists, clinicians, and leaders to stand consciously in this moment. Together, we will explore creative practice as oracular force — sacred listening to the creative unconscious in a time when old myths falter and new images press toward form. At the threshold, we do not retreat. We descend. We listen. We midwife what seeks to be born.
Maureen combines her interest in the mysterious workings of the psyche with a study of mythology and a love of storytelling and memoir writing. To that end she helps people explore meaning in their lives through the excavation of their memories in lectures and workshops throughout the United States.
She has taught memoir writing in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s memoir certificate program, “Writing Down the Soul”, and at the San Francisco Writing Salon, UCLA Writer’s Program, and the International Womens’ Writing Guild.
The job of writing memoir is to find one’s truth, not to determine the accuracy of what happened; that is history, a testimony, perhaps even an interesting tale. The memoirist, instead, both recounts an event and makes meaning from it.
― From Unreliable Truth:
On Memoir and Memory