In 2017, I conceived the Folklore & Fiction project as a series of blog entries that would eventually culminate in a book. Since then, the project has explored the intersections of folkloristics and storytelling with monthly dispatches and podcasts covering a variety of topics and reached a growing community of newsletter and podcast subscribers. I've been delighted to learn about your creative and commercial successes as a result of my work, and I hope you'll continue to share those successes with me! I've also realized that Folklore & Fiction is an umbrella for sub-projects. The first of them concludes with this dispatch and podcast, and the first book will follow in 2024. I have several other sub-projects in various stages of development, but before I launch the next one, I need to re-tool my approach.
Unfortunately, the Folklore & Fiction project has been plagiarized, and while I've successfully defended it and will continue to do so, my intellectual property attorneys in the US and Canada have advised that I need to be careful about the work I freely release to the public going forward. I also know with certainty that generative artificial intelligence models have been trained on my dispatches and podcasts, which is a violation of my copyrights. So I can no longer use the project as I have in the past; as a place to test ideas in a public forum where they might be useful to others. In addition, the level of scholarship I invest in the Folklore & Fiction project is time-consuming. I was less concerned about this as a student, but now that I'm soon to graduate with my PhD in Folklore, I need to value my work in a way that contributes to my livelihood.
With these concerns in mind, the first five years of Folklore & Fiction dispatches have been placed behind an access wall on the Folklore & Fiction website. They remain free for you to enjoy, but you'll need to sign up for an account at folkloreandfiction.com to read them. In addition, the public podcasts and vodcasts have all been replaced with previews. Your free Folklore & Fiction account will provide access to full versions of the vodcasts, which are embedded at the top of their corresponding dispatches, and this will give you both the text and audio of the material. I'm doing this to help protect my existing work from further misuse, but I also want to keep interested people in the loop about the future of the Folklore & Fiction project. While I can no longer release pre-publication material in the dispatches and podcasts as I have in the past, I do plan to release complementary dispatches and podcasts for future Folklore & Fiction books after they're published, and it occurs to me that people who use the archive might also want to know about new releases.
Speaking of the mailing list, I've closed my Mailchimp account and moved my list in-house. Starting in February, I'll be using it to send out notifications about the monthly Folkbyte newsletter, which will be posted to the website and contain news about the Folklore & Fiction project, my academic, literary and musical work, and a folkloristic topic of interest to storytellers. On occasion, I'll also send notifications about books and webinars that emerge from the project, my availability and rates for professional folkloristic manuscript evaluation and research, and other news of potential interest to subscribers. Finally, paying Patreon members will receive all of the above along with the perks related to their patronage tier, to include full versions of new podcast editions when they are released, exclusive access to posts about fiction, music, and research in progress, discounts on books, webinars, and professional consultation, and other benefits. My Patreon account has been upgraded to reflect this, and new offerings for patrons can be found at patreon.com/folkloreandfiction.
So, as promised, the first five years of Folklore & Fiction dispatches and podcasts will always be free for you to enjoy. I hope they continue to be of help to you. I also hope you'll join me as I continue to offer folklore scholarship aimed at storytellers in a way that honours and sustains my career. You can sign up for a free account and subscribe to the Folkbyte newsletter at folkloreandfiction.com. Look for the first newsletter edition on February 6, 2024, and as always, thank you for your interest in my work.
Folklore & Fiction Facebook Group
Are you a storyteller with an interest in folklore? If so, the Folklore & Fiction Facebook group might interest you.
Support Folklore & Fiction
If you like what you're reading and want to support the Folklore & Fiction project, you can buy me a cuppa here or become a patron here.