Ceallaigh's Blog

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. At the summer and winter solstices, I mimic the sun and pause to reflect on my own creative work. In this edition, I'm discussing representation issues in fiction with a passage from my short story "D is for Duel/One Who Dies as a God Dies," which was published in the D is for Dinosaur anthology.

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about folk customs with help from scholars Richard Sweterlitsch and Wayland Hand, author Naomi Novik, and friends Vigdís Andersen and Sveinn Svavarsson, among others. This edition of the newsletter marks a departure from folkloric belief and the beginning of a broad-strokes introduction to various folklore genres designed to fill the rest of the year. Each of the upcoming topics is widely studied by folklorists, but because they're less immediately applicable to writers, I'll only be glossing them. However, the structure of the newsletter will remain the same, and my hope is that you'll find something useful in the material for world-building, setting, and dialogue. Next year, I'll be starting something altogether new!

A good friend and fellow author recently mentioned that it's a terrible thing to have a book published during a pandemic. She's proud of her work but doesn't feel she should promote it while so many are worried about so much.

This is where I come in. I care very much for my writing community, and I want to help my fellow authors in these troubled times. With that in mind, here are several new releases and a newsletter by fellow Canadian authors. If you're at home and looking for something to read, they've got you covered.

Here are the folklore-related blog posts and memes I published to social media in March 2020.

Blog Posts: Folklore & Fiction Supplement: Keeping a Journal in Uncertain Times