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Nicole Nehrig, "With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
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Renee Garfinkel
Welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm your host, Renee Garfinkel. We're going to begin this new season with a series of episodes that explore the complex topic of healing. What does it mean to heal? Healing isn't only about the body. It reaches into the mind, into relationships, and into our spiritual lives today. And in the next several episodes, I'll be in conversation with authors and scholars who bring their own perspectives to the phenomenon of healing through history, literature, psychology, philosophy, and most of all, lived experience. First in the healing series is Nicole Narig, a clinical psychologist and researcher whose practice helps individuals and couples process trauma and live creatively. Dr. Narig's own creative interests in knitting and sewing have served as metaphors for psychological transformation in her own life and inspired the book we'll discuss today called with her own Women Weaving Their Stories. Nicole Narig, welcome to the show.
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Nicole Narig
Thank you, Renee.
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Renee Garfinkel
Nicole, during a challenging period of your life, your hobby, which was knitting, became a lifeline for you. Tell us about how that happened.
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Nicole Narig
Yeah, it's actually been a lifeline in a few different moments in time. The most apparent was during the pandemic when the world all shut down around us and we kind of had to make use of what we had available in the home and in a more limited kind of sphere to make meaning and satisfy our needs for creativity, intellectual expression, these kinds of things. And I was working as a full time clinical psychologist and researcher at the Manhattan va, a veterans hospital. And so I was doing that job, trying to do that job full time remotely while taking care of two young children. My children were three and five at the time. My husband also had a full time job. So we were taking turns doing our jobs and taking care of our kids. And I really had no time for myself outside of those roles. But the one thing that I could do for myself still was knit. And it was a really prolific time for knitting. Despite having so little time. I was really, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I thought, well, I'll never be able to knit now. When will I ever have time? Because I knit it on subway commutes and during research meetings at work and at meetups with knitting friends outside the home. But I actually found I was knitting more than ever because it was really holding me together at that point and it was satisfying all of these needs. I was still connected with friends around this, you know, remotely, but we would message each other about what we were working on and it was a creative outlet. I learn new skills. So I was challenging myself intellectually and it really made me think, what has this work meant for women at other Times and other places when they couldn't be a clinical and research psychologist, maybe they couldn't satisfy their needs for social connection and emotional processing and intellectual engagement and everything in places outside the home, the way I had been used to doing throughout my life and career. And so it made me curious about this subject. Just how have women used textile work, which I think offers a lot of opportunities beyond what some other household tasks might offer. You know, there is a real intellectual and creative component. There is kind of opportunities for the emotional processing through kind of repetition, through the soothing practice, repetitive practice of weaving or spinning or knitting. So I embarked on this quest to kind of understand this both in researching history and anthropological accounts and also talking to women doing this work now all around the world.
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Renee Garfinkel
So you had your own personal experience. How did your professional work with trauma survivors shape your perspective on textile crafts as, as a coping mechanism or maybe more. We'll get to that.
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Nicole Narig
Yeah. So I had done at times, I had popped in to co lead a knitting circle at the VA that was with trauma female trauma survivors. It wasn't really meant as like a trauma processing group, but it was a place where women would gather and sometimes they would talk about traumatic material. And it was a really, I mean, it was a wonderful way to gather people together without necessarily this therapeutic component, but in a way that became therapeutic even if trauma wasn't necessarily directly discussed in all the sessions. So that had been really meaningful to me. And I had read accounts of parallels between knitting, the bilateral stimulation of knitting, and things like EMDR as a trauma processing treatment. And it did make me think about when women did gather together and do this work and maybe talk about difficult things, maybe during times of war, during times of other kinds of strife or emotional difficulty in their own lives, was this kind of mechanism, this way of engaging with their hands, not maybe having to make eye contact all the time, being able to kind of talk about things with people while doing this work. What function did that serve in trauma processing? So I think that that's been an area of interest. But then researching the book, I found all of these incredibly powerful stories about. There's this organization, Common Threads project, which does trauma processing groups with women around the world in different areas affected by conflict, where a lot of gender based violence is experienced in the context of these conflicts. And women processing their trauma through story cloths, through stitching their stories into these story cloths, you know, making something that is very hard to talk about, you know, translating it into something visual that comes through their hands rather than through their Voices, you know, when their voices might be very hard to speak about things. A way to kind of express the unspeakable at times and maybe give words to it. Maybe allow the imagery and everything to say something that is hard to say, or put it a little bit of a distance through symbols and everything. I think symbolization is really important in trauma processing. So being able to kind of express it symbolically and then maybe find the words for it, because it's kind of come out of you, it's now something that you can look at and reflect on. And so there are a lot of powerful stories that have. That I came across in terms of trauma processing through this work that really touched me and made me think how connected this is to the work we do as psychologists and trauma processing therapy, and how this is another tool maybe to process trauma.
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Renee Garfinkel
So you've told us about your personal experience. You've talked a little bit about your professional experience. Tell us about the challenge of writing a book that blends memoir with academic, anthropological and historical research as well as psychological.
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Nicole Narig
Yeah, it was challenging, although I think it really fits with how I think about things. I've always been pretty interdisciplinary. I really struggled a lot in figuring out what I wanted to do career wise because I had so many interests in so many different subjects. So I think I changed my major in college four different times and I ended up with a double major in psychology and fine art. But I've always had a lot of interest in literature and history and gender studies. And so it kind of was natural to me to draw from all of these places. And it felt enriching. I mean, I think I'm drawn to complexity and being able to kind of have these different layers and bring together these different threads felt natural and also important in this context. When this work, I think, does have so many layers of meaning. But organizing the book was challenging because it's not linear. It doesn't follow a timeline of the history of textile work. It moves around geographically a lot, and then it moves around in terms of what I'm drawing from, whether it's psychoanalytic theory or philosophy or anthropological study. It was tricky, and some of it is somewhat associative for me. How do these things thematically relate and how can we tie them together to create a picture of what this work has meant to women throughout history and around the world?
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Renee Garfinkel
In the book, you mention several mythological traditions that link weaving to destiny. Why do you think weaving became such a universal metaphor for fate and for time?
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Nicole Narig
Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, I think it was something that was done so commonly at that time that it was. You know, we've seen the ways textile words have kind of come into our language, and we have these terms that we don't even really know always connect to textile or that we kind of use. Very dissociated from textile work now, but we talk about weaving together ideas and things like that. I think that it was such a ubiquitous activity that it was natural to draw metaphor from it. I think there's also something about. With weaving, there is something about. You do have to have this kind of predetermined structure to the setup of the loom before you start. So you have to kind of decide what pattern you're gonna weave, because you have to know how many warp threads to put on the loom to begin with, and then there's only so much variation that that structure then will allow. So I think that there is something that kind of sets up this predetermined structure that lends itself well to ideas of fate and destiny. The spinning metaphors, too, you know, that there's this idea that, like, you're spinning a thread, and, you know, the thread is so long, or the thread is made out of certain materials. So these ideas that, you know, people's fates are tied to the spinning of a thread and the length of that thread and everything. You can only live as long as that thread will allow. I think these things kind of naturally aligned.
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Renee Garfinkel
And you also mentioned that textiles can be a form of storytelling and a way to craft identity. Tell us the story about the Nigerian woman whose work was both an art form and an act of resistance.
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Nicole Narig
Yeah. So Olutosin is this woman in Owo, Nigeria. She recounted a story of trying to ask her husband for help with their young baby. She was tired. She had had a difficult childbirth, and the baby wouldn't stop crying. And her husband was watching tv and she just needed a break and asked him for help. And instead of helping her, he beat her. And she. That was a huge turning point moment in her life. She went to the hospital. The doctor there said, you know, do not stand for this. Meanwhile, the kind of family members were saying, oh, you know, it's common for men to beat their wives. And, you know, you should just kind of put up with it. And this doctor said, do not put up with it. You know, either leave or, you know, take a stand and say, absolutely not. And she had this kind of need to suddenly find a way to empower herself. And she felt very low, felt, you know, like Nothing. She talked about feeling like trash, like something that had been misused and discarded. And she started making beautiful textile art from kind of scraps of fabric. She didn't have a lot of money. It was kind of the remnants that would end up in a tailor's dustbin or something. And she started to realize, if I can make beautiful things from these discarded pieces of fabric, you know, I can also make something beautiful from my own life. And, you know, if I can make this beauty with my hands, then that means there's beauty within me. And it became this really transformative process for her of recognizing her beauty and skill. And it was very powerful to be using these scraps of fabric that other people didn't see the potential in, and that she was able to transform them into something much more, much more than what anybody could really imagine just looking at them. So she makes these incredible fabric paintings, really, using just these little scraps, and they're so layered and detailed because the piece. The scraps are very small that she's working with, but she doesn't want anything to go to waste in that. And then she used that as a metaphor in creating a wonderful program for helping women, particularly women who have been abused in the home or who have been kind of cast aside, maybe labeled as witches or something in the community where they've kind of been pushed out and don't really have a home, don't really have a connection to family, and has taught women these skills then to weave, to sew and make beautiful things and useful things. You know, some of the things are decorative. Some of them are, you know, clothing, quilts, and, you know, even, like, food storage bags that can keep food cool or hot. So she's really been instrumental now in helping women through her region transform their own lives. And many have gone into business with each other as seamstresses. Now, once they've acquired these skills and it's been a way to process trauma together, she has a residence called Sister City, where women live together, they learn these skills. They also talk about what has happened to them in their lives and process trauma in this way through community with other women. It's really powerful work that she's doing.
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Renee Garfinkel
And of course, very creative work. You make the point in the book, and I don't think anyone can disagree, that historically and probably still today, women's creative work, actually women's work in general has been dismissed or viewed as a threat. Do you think that's still the case? Has anything changed?
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Nicole Narig
I think it depends where you're talking about, like what areas of the world. And in some places it's more recognized than in other places. I think that historically it has been really dismissed. And you know, even at times when women were doing what seemed like back breaking labor in the home, you know, maintaining the home, doing the laundry by hand and you know, cleaning everything by hand when there were no machines to help and everything, you know, this work was still considered kind of easy compared to, you know, working in a field or doing other types of manual labor because it was in the the home. And a lot of women, you know, worked in the field and then went to the home and did all the work of the home as well. But I think that it has been somewhat disregarded. There's also of course, gendered assumptions that women should be self sacrificing and should kind of, you know, want to do these things. Their life's work should be about caring for others. And you know, that that kind of also minimizes the amount of labor that is actually being done. You know, Elizabeth Whalen Barber, I quote this in the book. She says something like, you know, this is what a woman's life would have been. You know, she would have spun the wool, she would have cooked the food and cleaned the house and you know, on and on and on. And you know, basically a woman's work was never done. It was kind of nonstop. And I think that that idea that women should be self sacrificing and should be doing all of these things and should want to do them because her desire is to care for her home and her family has minimized the amount of actual work that has gone in and how hard it has been and you know, how challenging it has been and maybe even made it hard for women to recognize that and speak up about it because they felt like this is what they're supposed to be doing and if it's hard, then that's their problem instead of a kind of societal problem in the way women's work has been viewed.
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Renee Garfinkel
Yeah, there's a lot of that going around.
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Nicole Narig
Right? For sure.
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Renee Garfinkel
Let's switch our focus a little bit and talk about spirituality. Tell us something about the intersection of textile work and spirituality.
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Nicole Narig
Yeah, it's something that I struggled with a little bit, and I didn't actually write that much about spirituality in the book. Felt in a way that that could be a book of its own. And I said something to that effect in the introduction that the intersections with religion and all that are really vast and varied depending on which kind of religious tradition or spiritual tradition you're talking about. But I did touch on things related to like Peruvian cosmology and everything that the textile work has a lot of metaphor for their spiritual practices and ideas. And textiles are woven to ward off certain spirits or bring about certain wished for events. Certain iconography is put into textiles meant for different purposes, ceremonial purposes. And I think this is true in a lot of. A lot of cultures, a lot of indigenous cultures still today, that there's, you know, a lot of meaning in these symbols, spiritual meaning, rich, deep meaning that is put into the cloth. And the cloth, I think, was a carrier for these spiritual ideas and traditions in many places around the world and continues to be in some places that it's a. It's a way of capturing these things when things weren't really written down. You know, it was a form of writing, a form of record keeping and continuing on certain spiritual practices. And so, you know, I talked to weavers in Peru who would talk about these certain iconographies and how they would learn them at a young age. They would learn the meaning behind them. Weaving them in the textiles was a ceremony in a. In and of itself. It was very powerful to be weaving in these elements into this cloth. And then the textiles would be used in these ceremonial purposes. And that's true for, you know, the guna of Panama. That's true for Native American cultures that there's, you know, power in these images. And these images have meaning spiritually and connect to. To their ideas of how the world came about or what kind of prayer one needs to do in order to bring about certain desired outcomes or ward off certain feared outcomes.
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Renee Garfinkel
Our world today is so different, and in a world that is increasingly focused on digital creativity. How do you see the future of handcrafts like weaving and knitting the like.
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Nicole Narig
I think it's been really remarkable to see the resurgence of interest in these crafts that when I first started knitting, which was in 2005, the Stitch and bitch movement had happened or had begun in the late 90s. And so there was some, you know, kind of cool thing happening around knitting at that point. But it was small. I didn't know anybody who knit. When I learned, I learned from YouTube videos. YouTube had just started. I learned from, you know, some knitting books, some skills and everything, but I didn't know anybody who. Who knit. I wasn't part of any kind of knitting circle. I didn't really even know any yarn stores other than kind of Michael's or, you know, these, like, big craft stores that had a bunch of stuff, including some yarn. And it's really transformed since then. And, you know, there's ravelry, which is this amazing online knitting community and pattern database, and that's really connected people from around the world who knit and crochet. I think there are 9 million members of. Of Ravelry. Yeah. And there are many more young people taking up knitting and crochet. I think there's a longing right now to do things with your hands and to kind of counter the digital world that we live in. And I think there's also something really satisfying and powerful in being able to make something that's tangible that you can see and use versus, you know, what you might do throughout the day digitally. Like, there's really not much satisfaction in responding to emails or making spreadsheets or, you know, doing things online that kind of never seem to end or produce anything like real. And you can knit a hat and then you can actually have a hat and wear a hat or gift a hat to a friend or something. And I. There's something really. It's like a foil to the digital life that we live. And I think that we really are craving that. So it's been interesting. When I did pitch the book, I had to do research on what are the communities of textile makers now and what are the age ranges, kind of for marketing purposes, who would this book be marketed towards? When I was writing the proposal for the book, and the largest, you would think, you know, the kind of stereotype of people knitting, quilting, doing crochet, sewing would be older women. But it's actually pretty equally divided. It was like, you know, a third of the community is women, like 18 to 25, and then a third is 25 to 45 or something. And then. Sorry, I'm not getting those quite right. But it's like young people, like under 30 and then like 30 to 50 and then 50 plus. And it's kind of equally divided between those that it's really being taken up by a lot more young people now than even 20 years ago when I started.
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Renee Garfinkel
Is it being taken up by some men as well?
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Nicole Narig
Yes. And that's been a really wonderful thing, too. And, you know, in different parts of the world, men were involved in textile work. And at different points in history, men have been very involved in textile work. So I, by no means intend to exclude men from this. Even though the book is called With Her Own Hands, I do think that women's work and women's history has not been as well represented. So it felt like it was important to kind of fill that gap in the literature with this book. And this has been something that has been more often women's work. But at many points in time, men have been involved, and in places in the world, you know, men have, like, an equal role in textile production. Men weave raffia cloth while women embroider it. And so I think that there's a lot of room to recognize the work men have done. And there's a great book called Queering the Subversive Stitch that talks about men's work, men's needlework as well. And recently, though, there has been, like, in the kind of Western world, uptick of men coming into this work and finding meaning in it. And you go to knitting circles now, and there are often a couple of men in the group. There are men's knitting groups that meet on their own, and there are a lot of knitwear designers, wonderful knitwear designers who are men now as well. So I love that. I love, you know, anything that kind of brings people together in general is a wonderful thing. And this is something that, if you have a passion for this work, it really brings people together, and people from different backgrounds and, you know, maybe who wouldn't find a lot of commonality otherwise, can really, like, nerd out together over their textile work and be really excited to talk about it, because I think the people who do it generally really love it. You kind of don't spend 30 hours making a sweater because it's just like a thing you kind of do every now and then, and it's like, okay. And you're kind of ambivalent about it. Like, you're pretty committed to doing it, if that's what you're doing, if you're spending that kind of time and money and effort to make things now. So, yeah, I think it's wonderful to bring people together and share in these interests.
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Renee Garfinkel
How did writing this book change your own relationship with textile work, with the knitting that you do?
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Nicole Narig
I think it connected me to a broader community. It made me more aware of how much is out there and how many people are out there doing this work. And I feel so much more connected. And it really moved me from that pandemic isolation into greater connection to this community, which has really enriched my own practice. It's also made me try a lot of different types of textile work. I mean, I had done some sewing. Knitting was my first love and my primary focus in my textile practice. But I had done some sewing and. But I hadn't really tried crochet or embroidery and quilting. I had always kind of admired quilters and thought, that seems like such a cool thing to do. But I had tried it a couple of times and never gotten very far with it. I think sitting, having to sit down at a sewing machine for long stretches of time didn't really fit with my lifestyle. With two little kids around, the portability of knitting really helped me get stuff done and make progress on things because I could take it on the subway and, you know, knit during meetings or knit while I was watching cartoons with the kids. But it really, this has really opened my eyes to how much there is out there, what people are doing. It's been very inspirational, I will say. While I was actually writing the book, I did not have very much time for textile crafts. And it was always an exciting thing for me. When I would finish one, like when I finished the first draft of the book and turned it in, it was like, woohoo. I can cast on a new sweater because now I'm gonna have a little bit of time while I wait for edits to come back from the publisher. And so like, there would be these moments where I'd be like, oh, I'm freed of writing for a little bit and I can tangle myself up with some yarn now because the writing was really all consuming. The bulk of the book was written written in a year. So that was a pretty intense year. I had done some research leading up to that, but it was a big push and definitely it was kind of. I always thought like, oh, isn't it ironic I'm writing this book about textile practice, but it's not allowing and how much it means to people and how important it is, but it's taking me away from my ability to do that myself. So I still did some, but I was not nearly as prolific. But then I would feel this, like, expansiveness when I would finish, kind of hit a point of finishing some aspect of it and then have this bit of time and then I'd, you know, oh, I'm going to make a quilt during this time or I'm going to start a new granny square blanket or something like that. And I couldn't wait to get into things finally.
- [34:36]
Renee Garfinkel
Nicole, what do you hope readers take away from your book? Especially those readers who have never picked. Picked up a knitting needle or even seen a loom?
- [34:47]
Nicole Narig
I think for those kinds of readers, I would hope that this would just maybe broaden their ideas about what this work is or make them think about it in a different way. I remember telling a friend of mine about this book when it was just an idea still. And I was kind of explaining the idea of it to her. And she's a knitter, but she thought, oh, you know what? My mom used to weave baskets. And I always thought when I was a kid that that was like such a dumb hobby, you know, like it didn't really register to me as anything, you know, meaningful. I was like, what do you need with all these baskets? Like, you know, baskets of all things. And she said that she was very dismissive of this as a. As a hobby of her mom's growing up. And that, you know, hearing about my book made her really think about it in a different way. And I think that a lot of us kind of dismiss this work or don't think of it as, you know, something as rich as maybe it is for many people. And so I would hope that maybe it would broaden people's ideas about what this work may have meant to women, maybe humanize women a bit more in the work they do, that, you know, women weren't just making quilts to keep their kids warm at night, although that was a part of it. But that, you know, it was also their own creative expression. It was also their own emotional processing. It was also, you know, their own intellectual engagement, the workings of their mind being realized through their hands. And, you know, it's not just a self sacrificing thing that people did. It was maybe a real kind of human centered experience that brought together a lot of aspects of people of who they were and what they thought about and what they wanted to express about themselves to the world. So for those readers, I hope that it kind of broadens their perspective. For people who do this work already, you know, I hope it speaks to their own experience to some extent or maybe helps put words to experiences that they may not have put words to or thought about so deeply. And I think anybody who does anything with their hands, you know, whether it's woodworking or cooking, baking, gardening, you know, that they find connections or think about the meaning of what they do with their hands and what it might bring to their lives and add to their lives Because I think that, again, this kind of. In this digital age, we are kind of removed from this. And there's research showing that our brains are not happy about not using these parts of our brain, the parts connected to the motor cortex. I think a third of the motor cortex is devoted to hands. And so if we're not using our hands the way we have historically used our hands, which was a lot, that part of our brain might not develop as well, or it might atrophy over time. That there really is so much richness and meaning in doing something with our hands, whether it's textile work or something else. So I think that, you know, for people who don't do anything with their hands, maybe it makes them think, I'd like to do something. I'd like to feel like I can create something with my hands that's like a tangible product.
- [38:31]
Renee Garfinkel
Right. We're not just brains walking around on stick figures. Right, right.
- [38:36]
Nicole Narig
And that our bodies are so integrated into all of that. You know, if we're not using our bodies in complex ways, then, you know, we're not using those parts of our brain. The brain's not just for computer work and things. The brain is very bound up with the work of our bodies, and we.
- [38:56]
Renee Garfinkel
Can develop both for reading. So the book is With Her Own Hands, Women Weaving Their Stories by Nicole Narig. Nicole, thanks so much for talking with me today.
- [39:09]
Nicole Narig
Thank you, Renee. This was wonderful conversation, and thanks to.
- [39:13]
Renee Garfinkel
Our researcher, Bela Pasakov.