My great-great-grandfather was the fornaio—the hearthkeeper and baker of bread—in his village of San Giovanni Canavese in northern Italy, where the whole village once shared a communal hearth, the forno comune.

When I was eight, I lived above my grandfather’s Italian bakery in upper Michigan, shaping cornetti with him, mesmerized by the flames as dough turned gold. The rotating hearth oven he and his father shipped from Italy is still working today, one of the few vintage ovens of its kind in the United States.

I grew up singing my grandfather’s Italian songs at summer festivals with Piedmontese neighbors, blessed with “Mangia! Mangia!” over my great-great-aunt’s polenta and bagna caulda. Good food and old stories nourished me. I grew wild among thimbleberries and white pine and knew the woods like the back of my hand.

But my small-town education in the 1980s was rigid and rote. I didn’t yet know learning could be alive with story, movement, imagination, and soul.

I found that aliveness later through Waldorf and holistic education, and at Goddard College, where I earned my Master’s in Transformative Language Arts and explored embodiment, human development, the healing power of Story, and (w)rites of passage.

I have been in love with fairy tales and myths for decades. I have followed Little Red Riding Hood into the metaphorical belly of the wolf, and Story into the living terrain of body, memory, place, and imagination.

For more than twenty years, I have followed the path of Story with children, adults, and whole communities.

Good stories, like good bread, need a nourishing hearth. They need warmth. They need tending. They need time to rise and turn gold.