Greetings, Everyone!
As promised, I'm writing to let you know about the launch of Field Notes for Storytellers: Research, Security, and the Archival Muse. I'm putting the finishing touches on the course, but it's available for pre-order now and will launch on the Winter Solstice, which is December 21st this year. You can find it here: https://csmaccath.store/b/fieldnotesforstorytellers.
Field Notes for Storytellers is a standalone course, but I've designed it to support your writing in ways that complement The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore, which will be completed in 2026. The course provides you with best practices for organizing and conducting the research behind your stories, which makes it great for the world-building process. It also guides you toward archival searches and ethnographic interviews as resources for storytelling and teaches you the basics for conducting both. For the ethnographers, journalists, and non-fiction writers among you, I provide OpSec, InfoSec, and PerSec guidance from my own experience as a doctoral field researcher in the Toronto animal rights community for conducting ethically sensitive inquiries. Finally, I draw upon my experience as the CEO of my family's technology company to bring you guidance for creating a technology tool kit that supports the creative process. Field Notes for Storytellers is a practical course comprised of often overlooked but absolutely necessary supports for the storytelling process drawn from my work as a folklorist, a storyteller, and a technologist. They're my own tools, the ones I've field tested and use in my own creative and scholarly life, and I want you to have them, too.
Because this is my last note to you in 2025, please allow me to thank you for being on the other end of these words I write. From defining InfoSec to discussing Pagan ceremonies, I think of this work as sacred because it brings me closer to the stories that shape our understanding of the world and one another. It's been a year for hard stories, sad stories, awful stories, and it would be easy to surrender to them. I do sometimes, in poetry, where I can shape the darkness into something that helps me and perhaps others understand it better. But when I light a candle at the beginning of my workday, the one that burns until I've written my last word and gone down for supper, I remember that there is never a darkness so complete that a candle flame cannot dispel it. Our words, individually and collectively, have the power to be that candle flame in dark times. So write them, however imperfectly, and make of them a blessing. I'll keep trying to do the same.
Wishing You a Blessed Return of the Sun,
Ceallaigh
Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran holds B.A. in Celtic Studies from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Maine, and a PhD in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. She's also an author, poet, and musician under the names Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran and C.S. MacCath. Her long-running Folklore & Fiction project integrates these passions with a focus on folklore scholarship aimed at storytellers, and she brings a deep appreciation of animism, ecology, and folkloristics to her own storytelling. You can find her online at csmaccath.com, folkloreandfiction.com, and linktr.ee/csmaccath.
© 2025 Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran. All rights reserved unless Creative Commons licensing is specifically applied. To read the full "Copyright Statement and Usage Guide," visit https://csmaccath.com/copyright.