THE AWARD-WINNING Book By Michael McRay

The Wild Way

Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New

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When the old story ends,
the wild way begins.

In The Wild Way, award-winning author and experiential narrative guide Michael McRay offers a soul-stirring companion for the space between stories. Part memoir, part mythic reflection, and part field guide, this book is for anyone navigating rupture, reckoning, or reinvention.

With poetic insight and hard-won wisdom, McRay invites us to unlearn the stories that no longer serve us and live into the ones that do. Not with tidy answers, but with presence, practice, and a lantern for the dark forest. Healing doesn’t follow a five-step formula.

This isn’t a return to safety. It’s a return to yourself.

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The wild way doesn't offer safety—but it does offer truth.

In The Wild Way: Navigating the Space Between the Old Story and the New, award-winning author Michael McRay offers a poetic, piercing, and deeply human exploration of the moments when life unravels.

Most of us live by stories we never consciously chose. Stories about what makes us worthy. What love should feel like. Who we have to be to belong. When those stories fall apart, we find ourselves in a wild place—uncertain, in-between, directionless.

This book is for those moments.

Through his vivid storytelling and grounded insight, McRay blends memoir, myth, and meditation to help readers navigate the threshold between what was and what might yet be. Drawing from his own journey through divorce, trauma, and a decade of story-guided healing, McRay doesn’t give a roadmap but a field guide.

A companion for practicing the narrative intelligence needed to restory our lives.

This is not a book of answers. There are no step-by-step formulas, no tidy hero arcs.

With echoes of The Comfort Book by Matt Haig and The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, The Wild Way is a lantern for seekers, skeptics, and anyone wandering the dark forest of change.

This isn’t a return to safety. It’s a return to yourself.

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Michael McRay
About the Author

MICHAEL McRAY

Michael McRay is a Nashville-based storyteller, experiential coach, and narrative guide for those longing to become better stories. He is the founder of Becoming Restoried and leads Istoria's narrative certification programming. Michael’s work weaves together narrative practice, trauma integration, and meaning-making to help people reconcile with their stories.

For over a decade, Michael has taught and spoken across the U.S. and abroad—training leaders, guiding communities, and walking with individuals through the dark forests of their stories. With a master’s in conflict resolution and experiences across international conflict zones, Michael developed a reverence for truth-telling and the role of story in healing.

Michael’s storywork has ranged across industries—from nonprofits to the corporate sector to NASA. He’s the author of I Am Not Your Enemy (winner of the 2020 Best Book Award in Social Change) and the founding host of Tenx9 Nashville, the city’s longest-running live monthly storytelling event with over 100 events and more than 1,000 stories told.

What fuels all his work, though, is personal: a story of self-loathing and attempted suicide transformed into purpose; a life marked by mistakes and mending; and the endless, ordinary beauty of raising a young child.

For Michael, story isn’t just art—it’s alchemy.

Learn more and get in touch at www.michaelmcray.com.

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What Others Are Saying

"Story lets us approach the hardest parts of life—a little from the side. We gain new vantage points, ones that helps us see ourselves with greater clarity and compassion. In The Wild Way, Michael McRay does something remarkable: he brings old stories to life, grounding their universal truths in the grit and grace of everyday experience. With a blend of timeless folktales, personal memoir, and soul-stirring insight, he offers readers not just perspective—but medicine. This is more than a book of stories; it’s an invitation to trace your own narrative thread through the wildness.”

Selena Garefino
Somatic storyteller, life artist, host of Mapping the Self

“Michael McRay has built a vibrant career on the belief that the stories we tell about ourselves are a multi-directional force—capable of shaping us, healing us, and freeing us. In The Wild Way, he takes a compassionate step into the darkness where so many of us find ourselves—the liminal, the lonely—and offers a toolkit for reclaiming that power. It’s the power we lose when we lose our wild self: the unconditioned, intuitive part of us that makes meaning from the bottom up. If you're in a place of loss, uncertainty, or transition, this book won’t just resonate—it will walk with you.”

Jeremy Snow
President of TEDxNashville

"Joseph Campbell described the challenges we face along our journeys as a ‘road of trials.’ In The Wild Way, Michael McRay reminds us that we are not the first to walk this path—nor will we be the last. The space between the familiar and the unknown, between safety and transformation, is one we mythically revisit time and again throughout our lives. McRay’s dispatches reignite the quiet, persistent force within us—the one that keeps us moving forward through periods of stagnation and languishing, guiding us toward the unfolding of a new story."

John Bucher
Executive Director of The Joseph Campbell Foundation

"Michael McRay's memoir of loss and retrieval reminds us of the wildness that connects us to what's real, the foolhardy courage that sets us back on our soulful journey, and the sacred losses that can help us find our truest path again.”

Karla McLaren, M.Ed.
Author of The Language of Emotions and Missing the Solstice.

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