Folkbyte August 2025

Greetings, and welcome to the August 2025 edition of the Folkbyte Newsletter. The apples are ripening on the trees, the wheat is golden in the field, and there is a welcome harvest on the horizon in my career as well. So I'll get right to it.

I'm delighted to announce that my literary work is now represented by Kelly Thomas at Serendipity Literary Agency. Kelly is a Certified Copy Editor with a bachelor’s degree in English from Pace University. She is an associate member of the Association of American Literary Agents (AALA), a member of the New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT), Women in Film (WIF), and a member of the Editorial Freelance Association. Serendipity represents a diverse range of clients from authors to illustrators in both the fiction and non-fiction spaces, and the agency's enthusiasm for The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore has made me feel most welcome. I'm so excited to see where we'll go together.

Speaking of The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore, the folk narrative chapters are finished, and I've moved on to folk belief. These are the chapters on religion, ritual, superstition, charm, and curse. So the book is coming along nicely. I'm also committed to releasing a couple of micro-courses on folklore and storytelling by the end of the year, and these will be the first in an ongoing "Solstice Series" of topics that supplement The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore with targeted instruction not found in the book. Right now, I'm looking at streaming them from the Payhip platform, and the price point will vary depending upon the length of the material. But I want to make these micro-courses affordable and accessible, and I also want to build a library of coursework storytellers can access while I'm writing my own fiction, poetry, and songs.

Finally, I have an academic review in the latest edition of the Journal of American Folklore for a new book titled Stories of the Past: Viewing History Through Fiction, written by Chris Green. Here's the first paragraph:

Historical novels undergo several transformations as they are written, read, critiqued, and adapted. Authors include story elements in ways that serve narrative construction, while readers encounter these elements as unique visitors to story worlds created at the intersections of the texts and their imaginations. Critics may situate historical novels alongside others of their kind and in the wider milieu, while filmmakers, television producers, and theatre directors may adapt them with different audiences in mind. Scholars of history and literature naturally want to understand the historical contexts of these novels, but it can be difficult to reach this data under so many interpretive layers. Green's book proposes several methods for doing so by analyzing the layers from greater to lesser complexity; from literary tourism, to adaptation, to critical review, to the writing of a novel itself and by proposing various methods for deconstructing these layers.¹

From the Folklore & Fiction Archive

In May 2019, I released another Folklore & Fiction dispatch about the folkloristics of traditional narrative and belief. The topic was the personal experience narrative and the ways it might be utilised in storytelling. In it, I offered as an example one of my favourite personal experience narratives from a time in my life when I was a professional truck driver. Here's a teaser:

The Rig, the Bridge, and the Bayou Beneath

Between the summer of 1997 and the summer of 1998, I was an over-the-road truck driver. A couple of days before Thanksgiving, I was assigned a Texas-Arkansas-Illinois run, and my boyfriend Sean came with me. On the Texas part of the run, I started having trouble with the tractor's electrical system, but I hated leaving it on overnight because of the diesel fumes. So after I picked up the load of paper waiting for me in Arkansas, I stopped the truck at a derelict, bayou gas station and turned the tractor off while we slept.

The next morning, the proprietor of the gas station banged on my door, offered me coffee, and politely asked me to move (I can't begin to describe this gas station to you. I thought it had been abandoned for years and was amazed to see lights on inside). But the tractor wouldn't start, so I had to contact my dispatcher, who called a tow truck to jump it. The fella who arrived in the tow truck looked like the gas station and couldn't bring himself to believe I was the driver. He kept talking to Sean, and Sean kept gesturing at me, and finally the fella pointed at my truck and asked, "You let her drive that thing?"

I threw up my hands, handed the necessary paperwork to Sean, and asked him to get the fella's signature. And because this was the middle of Arkansas bayou country in the days before GPS was commonplace, I asked him to get directions to the nearest truck mechanic as well.

Here's where the story gets interesting.

You can read the whole dispatch here.

So far this summer, I've completed my celestial navigation certification through Sail Canada, swum the St. Peter's canal between the Bras d'Or Lake and the Atlantic Ocean, and spent several mornings at Dalem Lake swimming in sunshine and fog while loons called out to one another over the water. So I send you the guiding light of distant stars, the sting of tiny jellyfish to keep you from complacency, and the cry of mated loons to remind you that love exists everywhere, in every being.

Yours in the glory of summer,
Ceallaigh

Footnotes

1. MacCath-Moran, Ceallaigh. “Review of Stories of the Past: Viewing History Through Fiction by Chris Green.” Journal of American Folklore 138, no. 548 (2025): 230-232.