Folkbyte March 2025

Welcome to the March 2025 edition of the Folkbyte newsletter, coming to you from a new virtual private server, a new website, and a new mailing system. Monthly newsletters resume with this missive, but first, my apologies to anyone who received duplicates of the September 2024 edition. My old website was already nearing end-of-life, and it was on a shared hosting plan besides, so it began to fail as more people signed up to use the Folklore & Fiction archive. My new website is coded from the ground up by my excellent in-house web developer and husband Sean. That said, there might be a few bugs to work out in the coming weeks, so if you find something amiss, please report it to me at https://csmaccath.com/contact. (Please note that to cut down on spam, you must be logged in to use the contact form on my website.) Onward!

A Bit of Preliminary Housekeeping

If you had access to the Folklore & Fiction archive on the old website: You simply need to log in at https://csmaccath.com/user with your current username and password to request archive access again. Select "Apply For Archive Access?" on the form provided and enter a sentence or two in the "Reason For Archive Access" box. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours for me to approve you, so do reapply at least a day before you need to use the resource. Please also note that you will be able to manage your subscription options for the Folkbyte newsletter on this form.

If you were only subscribed to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter: You have an account on the new website now. If you want to apply for access to the Folklore & Fiction archive or change your subscription options for the Folkbyte newsletter, please choose a password by visiting https://csmaccath.com/user/password and following the instructions under "Reset your password."

Thanks very much!

Click here to pre-order The Folklore & Fiction Ballads on Bandcamp

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I've completed work on The Folklore & Fiction Ballads, and pre-orders for the EP launched on February 17th. In case you've forgotten about the project, here's my introduction from the liner notes:

"From 2019 to 2023, the Folklore & Fiction dispatches and podcasts brought the principles of folkloristics to storytellers of all kinds. They were recommended by the American Folklore Society as a trusted source of folkloristic scholarship, they were the topic of peer-reviewed ethnographic research, and they were adopted as an aid to creative writing in several college and university classrooms. They were also an opportunity for me to sing several ballads in the English and Scottish tradition. Many of these Child Ballads, so named because Francis James Child collected them in the 19th century, were also categorized in The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. This made them ideal candidates for rich discussion of sung folk narrative traditions, so I made projects of them whenever possible by researching the lyrics and music of the ballads, often with the help of Bertrand Harris Bronson’s The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. I included the rough mixes that resulted from this research in the dispatch and podcast editions where I discussed the ballads in question, but my renditions were popular in their own right, so I promised that I would someday gather them into an EP. Here they are along with my deepest gratitude for every reader and listener who has ever supported my work."

I hope you enjoy these voice-forward, story-forward traditional songs.

"Ancient Threads, Modern Cloth"

Northern Spirit House recently published my essay titled "Ancient Threads, Modern Cloth." It's about the intersections of Heathenry and Buddhism in my spiritual practice with emphasis on the 10-ft tall White Tara statue in the Cape Breton wilderness where I live. The statue was given to my dear friend Jangchub Zangmo shortly after the founding of Karma Samadhi Ling, and it has become an important part of local spiritual life.

Recently on Social Media

I release a few short educational videos for storytellers every month, but I put that work on hiatus while my website was being rebuilt. Here are the videos I released in September 2024 after the last newsletter went out.

• Children as Characters

• Traditional Ballads and Fictional Magic Systems

I re-started these videos prior to my website launch in February with a three-part series on the folkloristics of superstition.

• Writing Superstitions I
• Writing Superstitions II
• Writing Superstitions III

I also wrote a few blog posts in the autumn and early winter. Here they are.

• Newsletter Hiatus and Website Launch
• Year-End Newsletter 2024 (And A Final Note about the Plagiarism Thing)
• The Devil We Know

From the Folklore & Fiction Archive

In January 2019, I launched the Folklore & Fiction newsletter with an "Introduction to Folklore Genres," writing that:

One of the ways folklorists come to grips with this wide variety of subject matter is by means of classification, and this is where the term "genre" comes into play. Trudier Harris writes that in an effort to establish folklore as a unique discipline, scholars such as the aforementioned Alan Dundes and others worked hard to define the things they did. Since the concept of genre already existed outside the academy, and since categories like "myth" and "ballad" were already in use as descriptive terms for types of folklore, the idea of folklore genres was particularly attractive to these scholars. Harris further writes that "The umbrella concept of genre thus became for folklorists the basis for classifying and authenticating those forms that they judged to be peculiarly within their realm of training, expertise, and scholarly supervision."¹ So, simply put, genres are academic systems of classification for various kinds of folklore.

You can read the whole dispatch here.

Final Thoughts

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If you've made it this far (Gods bless your bones), I imagine you won't mind a personal story. I returned to St. John's in October to attend my PhD convocation, and it was the proudest moment of my life, especially because I didn't graduate from high school. I was raised in the Jehovah's Witness cult, and among other kinds of indoctrination I don't care to discuss here, I was discouraged from getting an education. When I was disfellowshipped and left home at sixteen, I was like most exJWs. I had lost my family, all my friends, and my spiritual community, and I knew very little about the world. It took me a long, long time to recover, but I promised myself that if I ever earned a PhD, I would frame it with my GED. I picked up that framing at Yuletide. It hangs in front of my desk, where I can look at it and remember how far I've come.

So I want to end here with a note to any exJWs or JWs on the fence who might be reading this newsletter. You can be free. You can get an education if you want one. You can be queer. (I'm bisexual.) Yes, the world is in trouble right now, but that's all the more reason for you to join us in it. We need you, and you deserve all the great, messy riches your life has to offer. If you need resources, the exJW reddit community is a good place to start. If you're bristling at my use of the word "cult" to describe the Jehovah's Witnesses, I understand, but do check out this excellent resource called the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control and see what you think after you've read it. I wish you every good thing.

That's all for now. Thanks so much for your time! I'll be back in April with another Folkbyte.

Blessings of the Spring Equinox, 
Ceallaigh