Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Renee Garfinkel
Guest: Nicole Narig, PhD, Clinical Psychologist and Author of With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Date: September 3, 2025
Episode Theme: The healing power, rich history, and cultural depth of women’s textile work—knitting, weaving, sewing—and its significance as craft, therapy, storytelling, and resistance.

Overview

This episode inaugurates a New Books Network miniseries on healing, focusing on the multi-layered role of textile crafts in women’s lives, past and present. Dr. Nicole Narig, whose clinical and personal experiences inspired her new book, joins host Renee Garfinkel to explore how making things with one’s hands serves as both creative engagement and a powerful tool for psychological resilience and community. Their conversation weaves memoir, science, anthropology, and history, illuminating threads of healing, identity, creativity, empowerment, and resistance.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Knitting as Lifeline: Craft in Times of Crisis

• Narig’s Personal Experience During the Pandemic
  • Knitting became a crucial source of stability and self-expression during COVID-19 lockdown. Despite life’s pressures (remote clinical work, young children, household isolation), knitting provided connection, creativity, and comfort.
  • Nicole realized how textile crafts offer much more than mere utility or entertainment. They satisfy deep psychological needs for order, creativity, and social linkage.
  • “I actually found I was knitting more than ever because it was really holding me together at that point and satisfying all these needs.” – Nicole Narig [04:38]

Textile Work as Trauma Processing & Community Healing

• Professional Insights: Craft, Therapy, and Recovery
  • Narig describes leading knitting circles for trauma survivors at the VA, where the craft became quietly therapeutic, facilitating peer connection and gentle approach to hard topics.
  • Bilateral stimulation in knitting (moving both hands rhythmically) shows parallels with EMDR therapy for trauma. Textile work’s repetitive motion soothes—and opens doors to sharing and processing difficult experiences.
  • Common Threads Project (featured in the book): women in conflict settings worldwide process trauma by stitching “story cloths”—transforming pain into visible, symbolic narratives.
  • “A way to…express the unspeakable at times and maybe give words to it…symbolization is really important in trauma processing.” – Nicole Narig [09:04]

Weaving Life: Memoir Meets Scholarship

• Crafting a Multilayered, Interdisciplinary Book
  • Narig’s book blends personal memoir with history, psychology, philosophy, literature, and anthropology. Its structure is “not linear,” following thematic and associative links across times and cultures rather than mere chronology.
  • Challenges included bringing coherence to a non-sequential, multi-pronged narrative.

Universal Metaphors: Weaving, Fate, and Time

• Weaving in Language and Myth
  • Textile metaphors (weaving, spinning, threads) permeate mythology and ordinary language, frequently symbolizing destiny and life’s structure.
  • The predetermined setup of a loom echoes ideas of fate: “There is something that sets up this predetermined structure that lends itself well to ideas of fate and destiny.” – Nicole Narig [13:44]

Textiles as Storytelling and Resistance

• Case Study: Olutosin from Nigeria
  • After escaping domestic abuse, Olutosin transformed the “scraps” of her life—and literal scraps of fabric—into intricate textile art, rebuilding her sense of self-worth and community.
  • She now teaches other marginalized women to weave, sew, and find financial independence—a radical act of creative empowerment and resistance. “If I can make beautiful things from these discarded pieces of fabric, I can also make something beautiful from my own life.” – Nicole Narig recounting Olutosin's story [15:55]

The (Un)Appreciated Labor of Women’s Hands

• Societal Dismissal of Women’s Creative Work
  • Women's craftwork, and care work in general, has often been belittled or rendered invisible, both historically and currently.
  • The stereotype of ‘self-sacrificing’ women has masked the labor’s real challenge and value.
  • “It has been somewhat disregarded....how much actual work has gone in and how hard it has been…maybe made it hard for women to recognize that and speak up about it.” – Nicole Narig [20:14]

Cloth and the Sacred: Spiritual Dimensions

• Spirituality in Cloth
  • Textile work is deeply intertwined with spiritual practice in many cultures—e.g., Andean cosmology, Native American, and Guna traditions—where cloth encodes sacred symbols, protects, or invokes spiritual power.
  • Weaving is often a ceremonial act, “a way of capturing…spiritual ideas and traditions in many places around the world.” – Nicole Narig [23:18]

Revival and Transformation of Textile Crafts

• The Digital Age and Handcraft Renaissance
  • Contrary to assumptions, handcrafts are thriving, particularly among younger generations, as a counterbalance to digital life’s intangibility.
  • Online communities (like Ravelry) connect millions globally. Making something tangible—“knit a hat, wear it, gift it”—offers concrete satisfaction rare in screen-based work.
  • “There’s a longing right now to do things with your hands and to kind of counter the digital world that we live in.” – Nicole Narig [26:32]

Inclusion: Men in Textile Work

• Textile Craft is Not Just for Women
  • Men have played major roles historically in textile traditions worldwide. Today, more men are knitting and designing—challenging gender stereotypes and deepening community.
  • “You don’t spend 30 hours making a sweater because it’s just a thing you do every now and then…you’re pretty committed to doing it if that’s what you’re doing.” – Nicole Narig [29:57]

Personal Transformation through Research and Writing

• Connecting to Global and Local Community
  • Writing the book broadened Narig’s sense of connection to a global community of makers and inspired her to try new techniques beyond knitting (crochet, embroidery, quilting).
  • The irony: writing about textile work consumed her “making time”—but finishing writing let her “cast on” new projects.

What She Hopes Readers Take Away

• For Non-Makers: Re-examine assumptions about craft; recognize its creative, intellectual, and emotional depth; see women (and craftspeople) as agents, not merely helpers.
• For Makers: Find validation and vocabulary for the transformative potential of their work.
• For All: Consider the cognitive and emotional benefits of working with one's hands—in textiles, woodworking, baking, gardening, or otherwise.
  • “Women weren’t just making quilts to keep their kids warm at night...it was also their own creative expression, emotional processing, intellectual engagement...” – Nicole Narig [36:19]

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Knitting as Survival:
  “It was really holding me together at that point and it was satisfying all of these needs.” — Nicole Narig [04:38]

• On Textile Work and Trauma:
  “A way to...express the unspeakable at times...allow the imagery to say something that is hard to say.” — Nicole Narig [09:04]

• On Metaphors and Fate:
  “There is something that sets up this predetermined structure that lends itself well to ideas of fate and destiny.” — Nicole Narig [13:44]

• On Olutosin's Transformation:
  "If I can make beautiful things from these discarded pieces of fabric...I can also make something beautiful from my own life." — Nicole Narig, recounting Olutosin's story [15:55]

• On Craft Dismissal:
  “There’s also, of course, gendered assumptions that women should be self-sacrificing...that also minimizes the amount of labor that is actually being done.” — Nicole Narig [20:14]

• On Spiritual Meaning:
  “Textiles are woven to ward off certain spirits or bring about certain wished for events...the cloth was a carrier for these spiritual ideas and traditions.” — Nicole Narig [23:18]

• On the Power of Making:
  “There is really not much satisfaction in responding to emails...you can knit a hat and then you can actually have a hat and wear a hat...” — Nicole Narig [26:32]

• On the Value of Hands:
  “I think a third of the motor cortex is devoted to hands. So if we’re not using our hands...that part of our brain might not develop as well, or it might atrophy over time.” — Nicole Narig [37:57]

• On Craft for All:
  “We’re not just brains walking around on stick figures.” — Renee Garfinkel [38:30]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:30] Knitting as lifeline during the pandemic
• [06:54] Craft and trauma processing—clinical observations and global programs
• [10:34] The interdisciplinary challenge of writing the book
• [12:45] Weaving as metaphor for fate and time in myth
• [14:49] Olutosin’s story: textile art as resistance and empowerment
• [19:39] Societal dismissal of women’s work, past and present
• [22:12] Textile work and spirituality—global spiritual symbolism in textiles
• [25:13] The resurgence of handcrafts among young people, the counter-digital impulse
• [28:47] Men in textile work: inclusivity, history, and new communities
• [31:35] How researching and writing the book changed Narig’s own practice
• [34:46] What Narig hopes readers—makers and non-makers—will take away
• [37:57] Hands, brain, and holistic human fulfillment

Closing

Dr. Nicole Narig’s With Her Own Hands weaves together history, psychology, anthropology, and lived experience to illuminate how textile crafts are a vital source of healing, expression, and solidarity—across cultures and through time. Even for those who've never held a knitting needle, this conversation reveals the deep human need to create, the power of community, and the wholeness found in working with our hands.

For more, find the book: With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories by Nicole Narig (W.W. Norton, 2025).