Folkbyte September 2025

Greetings, and welcome to the September 2025 edition of the Folkbyte Newsletter. It's been a busy month behind the scenes here, but I haven't much to show for it yet. Still, here's what's on the hob.

Dispatches from the Word Mines

If you're a subscriber reading this, you'll have received the first in an irregular Special Dispatch series titled "Ⓥ🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈/Shorthand" on August 11th. I've been experimenting with ways to bring you an occasional essay without making the piece vulnerable to LLM scraping, and I'm pleased to report that I can now deliver these essays via email and post them to csmaccath.com/folkloreandfiction.com as special content for logged-in subscribers. I can't promise you'll get a lot of them; I'd honestly rather see my books in your hands than my essays. But once in a while, some topic or another piques my interest, and I want to write about it as a folklorist and storyteller. When that happens, you'll get an essay out of me.

On the academic front, The International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) recently called for papers for the 2026 conference in Reykjavik, and I've submitted a proposal to the "Narrative ecologies: folklore, fiction, and cultural response to climate change" panel. I'm interested in the recent growth of climate fiction both as a narrative scholar and as a person who writes it, and my paper would explore climate fiction as activism via novels written by fellow Climate Fiction Writers League members. The call for papers closes in October, so I'll let you know if my paper is accepted sometime in the winter.

On the storytelling front, I'll be at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton this year, which is taking place between October 30th and November 2nd. I've volunteered to participate in programming, and the organizers are endeavouring to put everyone who volunteers on a panel or workshop, but the schedule isn't finalized yet. I'll let you know when I have more news on this. However, I can tell you that after the convention, I'll be travelling to Scotland for a week. I'm a member of the Clan Colquhoun Society (my maternal grandfather was a Patrick descended from Kilpatricks), so I've requested a tour of Rossdhu House near Loch Lomond, which is historically significant to my extended family history. I'll also be touring the Kilmartin Museum, which is situated near several important prehistoric monuments, and I plan to visit them as well. Last but not least, I'll be visiting Tam Lin's well (yes, that Tam Lin and that well) and bringing water home from it. You may be certain that I'll have plenty of folklore to share with you upon my return.

On the music front, I'm slowly re-skilling on the guitar after the long hiatus that was my dissertation. Meanwhile, my friend Deborah and I spent an hour practising together last Saturday while we sailed around the Bras d'Or lake in her 60' aluminum sailboat aptly-named "Heavy Metal." Later that evening, we performed at an open mic at the Baddeck Yacht Club. She sang and played guitar, and I played bodhrán and sang "Cruel Johnny" a cappella halfway through the set. It was good to perform in front of people again, even if I looked like I'd been on a boat all day.

Finally, The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore progresses apace. I've wrapped the "Religion" chapter, and I'm moving on to the "Ritual" chapter this week. I'm also writing and submitting poetry again, so I'll let you know when my poems find new homes.

Last Month on Social Media

I made some experimental posts on social media in August as well. There was an Instagram carousel summarizing "Ⓥ🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈/Shorthand". There was also an Instagram carousel on vernacular healing systems based on a foraging workshop I took. There was a longer Instagram post about conversion experiences and religious abuses of power in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Finally, there was an Instagram carousel about The Museum of Small Things in Eyjafjöður, Iceland.

From the Folklore & Fiction Archive

In June 2019, I released the first Summer Solstice dispatch about folklore in my own storytelling. My short story titled "Every Broken Creature" had just been released in Rhonda Parrish's F is for Fairy anthology, and much of it was based on my travels in northern Iceland and the interviews I conducted with two Icelanders about the huldufólk while I was there. Here's an excerpt of the dispatch:

Ásbyrgi is a busy place folklorically; it is the shelter of the Gods and the capitol city of the álfar or huldufólk. These elves or hidden people are said to live in the rocks of the canyon, where they've constructed lovelier, sturdier versions of the houses, concert halls, and other buildings found in our world. It is possible to imagine there that just beyond the veil between us, a jagged rise of stone is a turret, and a resonant howl of the wind is a pair of voices raised in conversation. It was my own experience of this that inspired the name of the elven father of my half-elven twins, Vindgnýr, which means "the sound of the wind" in Icelandic. With these bits of folklore and travel memory in mind, I created a fictional Ásbyrgi canyon that serves as both a refuge and a capitol for the unearthly beings who live there.

You can read the whole dispatch here.

That's all for now. The sun is setting as I write these words, and there is a cedar-scented breeze blowing in the open window. We'll cross the equinox before I write to you again, so I'll wish you a bountiful autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and fertile spring in the Southern Hemisphere. May good things grow because you were there to plant the seeds.

Yours by dusk and candlelight,
Ceallaigh