Ceallaigh's Blog

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The When Words Collide festival has released its tentative final program, so I thought I'd share my itinerary:

Friday 3 PM - Canmore - Fairytales, Fables and Folklore Remade

C.S. MacCath, Carol Parchewsky, Jim Jackson, Ron Oswald [PM]

Fairytale remakes, historical reimaginings, using themes from the past to create a new story. What is...

I'm seeing so much disappointment online over the Game of Thrones ending that I want to weigh in a bit more on the series finale than I already have on social media. So here goes:

On the Matter of Prophecy:

I'm seeing quite a bit of grumbling about partially-fulfilled prophecies (Melisandre's prophecies about the promised prince and Arya Stark in particular). While I realize readers and viewers who have seen the prophecy trope in other works of fiction might have the expectation that prophecies are like gum balls (stick a quarter in the divination machine, and out comes a treat), that's not how divination works in life. At their best, prophecies are image-rich proclamations containing enough truth that both the prophet and the listeners believe something unexplainable by science has been said. In fact...

This blog entry is an effort to externalize my thinking on a possible relationship between the search for authenticity among contemporary Pagans and the problem of racism in contemporary Paganism. I include under the Pagan banner all people practicing a reconstructed or revitalized polytheistic animism, such as Wiccans, Druids, and Heathens. My own practice is a gnostic, hybridized Druidic Heathenry, and I'm a PhD candidate in the Folklore Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, so my perspective and approach are rooted in these spiritual and intellectual traditions.

To begin, I want to problematize authenticity via the work of Regina Bendix, whose book In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies has influenced my thinking. She writes that:

The notion of authenticity implies the existence of its opposite, the fake, and this dichotomous construct is at the heart of what makes authenticity problematic. In religious...

Last night I was a guest on CKDU 88.1 community radio's The Witching Hour discussing folkloric aspects of the Satanic Panic, especially as they relate to legend studies. The show is archived in three segments: 7:00-7:30, 7:30-8:00, and 8:00-8:30. You should listen to the whole show, but my contribution begins just after 7:30.

If you're interested, you can also download and read the PhD...

Behold the F is for Fairy cover! This is the sixth instalment of the Alphabet Anthologies series, and it contains my short story dually titled "B is for Burned / Every Broken Creature." Here's the press release:

“Anyone who believes that faeries are wee, golden-haired creatures with dragon-fly wings and sweet intentions has never met a real faerie.” –Suzanne Willis, “A Silver Thread Between Worlds”

Retellings of familiar favourites from new perspectives, and brand new stories share the pages of this fairy-themed collection. Within these offerings you’ll find fairy music and food, contracts (making and breaking them), changelings, circles and curses–these stories deliver all the things you already love about fairies and a few new tricks as well.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'll be introducing you to folklore genres with help from scholars Alan Dundes and others, discussing how the concept of genre can be both helpful and problematic, detailing a few ways to classify genres, and showing you how to use this information as a writer.

What is folklore?

In 1846, British writer William Thoms coined the word "folk-lore" in a letter written under the pseudonym Ambrose Merton to a literary magazine called The Athenaeum. Thoms contributed little else to folkloristics, but because he gave the discipline its name, we remember him for it. Indeed, he would not have had it any other way. Alan Dundes writes that among other self-congratulatory gestures, he was given...

Editor Rhonda Parrish has announced the title of the next instalment of the ALPHABET ANTHOLOGIES series, which will be F IS FOR FAIRY. I've known about this for some months and have already started work on my own contribution, which will be set in the north of Iceland in the year 1625. Here's the link to Rhonda's announcement.

This semester I opted to complete a pedagogical project for my Music 7007: Race Gender and Class course in lieu of writing a traditional term paper. This project required me to prepare a graduate-level lecture and teach it to a group of classical musicians. I'll teach that class on Tuesday, and it will be my first time teaching Master's-level students, which is exciting for me. My topic will be the Norwegian metal scene in the 199os, how it shaped European metal thereafter, and the ways Northern European symbols like Thor's Hammer and the Elder Futhark have been used in metal music.

I won't be able to upload the materials for that class to Academia.edu, since the platform doesn't really support the sharing of pedagogical materials. So I'm uploading them here. Please feel...

This semester, I'll be writing a paper on performance theory, activism, and scholarship using the work of a few well-known activist scholars but primarily that of Dwight Conquergood. My research question, while not fully formed yet, will have something to do with positioning the self in scholarship when the topic is familiar, or even dear to the researcher. I'm presently in this position and will continue to be so throughout the remainder of my PhD research and writing, since I'll be studying the beliefs and performances of animal rights activists in Canada.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the idea of subject positioning, Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre define it as:

...the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably...

During Yuletide, I made a set of runes using birch wood I brought back from Iceland in April of last year. Because I'm a folklorist, I thought it might be interesting to document the process in pictures and share them with you. The tools and the burning/soldering kit (not shown) were gifts from my husband (I've needed proper electric tools for a while now), the cutting board oil is made of coconut oil and essential oils that smell faintly of lemongrass, and the velvet comes from my grandmother's quilting stash, which I inherited in the late nineties before she passed away.

I usually allow a set of runes to germinate for at least four seasons; two to cure the wood, one to make the runes, and one to let them rest before blessing them. I prefer to make runes at Yuletide, and I'll bless this set on May 1st when I return from Newfoundland. Meanwhile, it sits on the altar in my studio at home in Nova Scotia, sleeping as the snow falls outside.

This is a particularly sacred...

There’s a reason I use the word “fuck.” I was raised without the word and several others like it by conservative, religious parents and a grandmother who said “h-e-double-hockey-sticks” when she meant “hell.” But as an adult who valued the full richness of not just my own mother tongue but that of all languages, I came to resent limitations placed on my use of certain words for the sake of other people’s (real or feigned) linguistic fragility (I don’t worship your god, and mine don’t care which words I use).

To some extent, that fire has mellowed, though I do still actively defend my right and that of others to use the entirety of whatever language we’re speaking. I also believe minority language preservation and propagation is crucial to understanding the full range of human expression, past and present. That’s at least part of the reason for my interest in Gàidhlig and Gaeilge.

I learned yesterday that the Trump administration has cast the authority of the...

You are the Kintsugi of our fragments,
Golden Joiner, come and mend what has broken.
To the liberal transgender woman and the blue collar conservative, come.
To the factory farmer and the cow, come.
To me and to those for whom I have enmity, come.
To all who do not want to heal, who cannot find the way, come.
Oh Lady, please, I beg you.
In this hour when I am small and in the middle of my life,
in this place where my two hands can only do so many things,
paint gold between the broken pieces of the whole that was severed.
Reunite us with the rest of ourself, remind us that we are but one vase -
meant to hold this Earth, this life, together.
One flawed and shining union of souls.

...

First and foremost, I want to make something clear. As a person of Western and Northern European descent, I condemn and repudiate Neo-Nazism, Neo-Nazi ideology, and President Donald Trump's support of them both. Neo-Nazis and other racists aren't saving the world for me, and I never want to benefit from what they're creating.

I've been Pagan for thirty-two years, so I've weathered my share of misunderstanding as a result of my faith. But I wore the symbols of that faith proudly even so; the pentacle when I was practicing Wicca in my twenties, the Celtic cross when I practiced Druidry in my thirties, and the Thor's Hammer I wear now as a Heathen. I always believed, and still do, that it was important to be...

After the US presidential election last fall, a conversation circulated among my writing colleagues about the kinds of stories we ought to be writing and reading in the face of that terrible moment in history. The conversation wore a number of faces. "Writing as activism" was an important one, where artists were encouraged to make art that reflected their perspectives on world events. Another pointed to the recent spate of post-apocalyptic novels, which were no longer so far-fetched. Still another presented a more practical question: What do readers want to read now, and what do writers want to write?

At the time, I was so busy with my first semester of university that all I could manage were a couple of poems posted to my blog. But now I'm working on a story for the next...

Between June 16th and 20th, you can download my first collection for free from Amazon, and you can buy my second collection at a reduced cost. You'll find the links below.

➝ Download The Ruin of Beltany Ring for free here.

➝ Buy The Longest Road in the Universe for $2.99 here.

Last year, Sean and I went to Iceland as tourists. This year, we returned as friends to participate in a knowledge exchange with the owner of the northernmost vegan and raw food restaurant in the world. You see, Sean makes tofu from scratch, and the owner of the restaurant wanted to learn the trick of it. Conversely, she's a raw food wizard, and Sean wanted to spend some time in her kitchen. I offered to update the restaurant's web site, which was in need of attention, in order to help make her offer of free room and board more equitable. But when she learned that I had recently written a paper on Newfoundland fairy abduction legends and had an interest in...

We arrived in Reykjavik at 6:00 AM yesterday morning during a spring snow squall that made the road to Akureyri impassable. But our friends Vigdis and Sveinn took us in, fed us Icelandic pancakes, and sent us to bed, for which we were grateful. We're on the road today after a good night in the company of good people and two sweet-tempered cats who curled around us while we slept.

Iceland isn't a foreign country to me anymore, breathtaking because I have never seen her before. Now her snow-covered mountains and spring-brown soil are familiar, even welcoming. I love this place from volcanic bones to glacial crown. She is a young queen among geological elders, still showing off to the world.

I said something to Vigdis about that love that I think is worth...

Because we're spread out all over the world, Rhonda Parrish asked us to record an excerpt reading of our D IS FOR DINOSAUR stories for publication on her blog. Mine went live this morning. I recorded in a closet with my new voice recorder in one take, so it isn't perfect. But it was hella fun to do. Have a listen!

Over the years, I've withheld one story from my collections of previously published work. It was originally printed in The Stolen Island Review in 2003, but it wasn't Pagan enough for The Ruin of Beltany Ring, and it wasn't quite mature enough stylistically for The Longest Road in the Universe.

But I'm a completist, and it isn't a bad tale, though I think it reads a bit more like an outline for a longer story than a fully-fledged story itself. If you're interested, I've made it available again for a buck at the vendors listed above. You might give that link a few days to become active; I just...

I should be catching up on writing career things while I'm between semesters, but now that I have my studio back, this blog post is crowding the front of my mind. So I'm going to get it out of the way first, and then I'll work on that story stamping its feet in the queue.

So, Trump will likely be president, barring some Electoral College miracle. But even if somehow Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office, we've learned something about the level of right-wing ideology in American1 culture, and it's higher than we thought. Of course, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community have been shouting this at the tops of their collective lungs for years now. Meanwhile,...

I'm still writing poetry. It's been cathartic for me to make political art for its own sake and publish it to my blog. Here's another piece.

Surfacing

You cannot always be drowning.
You cannot sink forever in a bottomless sea.
Brine fills the lungs, but these are finite vessels,
and the body cannot endure that awful fullness.
It spasms, pinches the larynx shut, blackens the mind.

You do not want to die.
Even the small fish of the deep make plans,
zipping past your body toward a story you cannot fathom,
while the whales who pursue them sing in tongues -
too profound for any human understanding.

Fight the flailing of your limbs.
Fight the clenching of your throat.
Fight the darkness at the edges of your sight.

And rise.

There is a vault above, and in it there are -
yellow leaves browning on the earth,
winds like herons' wings upon your...

From now until the end of the year, I'm going to donate all of the profits I make from the sale of The Longest Road in the Universe: A Collection of Fantastical Tales to Planned Parenthood. I'm doing this because American women are facing the greatest challenge to reproductive health I've seen in my lifetime, and I want for Planned Parenthood to be there for them, just like it was for me. I'm also doing this because it's something I can do besides sit and stew in my own fury at the election of Trump/Pence (which I'm already doing in spades). I have to do something.

Ebook sales make me about $1.50 apiece (depending on the retailer), and paperback sales make me $2.55. So it might not be much. But it's money I make from my own art, and I want for my art to count for something. I'll also match...

Merry Samhain to you, and welcome to issue #21 of my newsletter, e-mailed to subscribers on Samhain 2016.

A Book Is Born

The Longest Road in the Universe: A Collection of Fantastical Tales is now in print! I'm so proud of this book, and I'm equally proud of Nancy Farmer's cover art and Kimberly Mayfield's cover design. I hope you enjoy reading these tales as much as I enjoyed writing them. Here's where you can buy the collection: