Folkbyte February 2026

Greetings, and mòran taing (many thanks) for taking the time to read my newsletter. This is the February 2026 edition of Folkbyte, and it comes to you a week late as I was tied up meeting a deadline for The Storyteller's Guide to Folklore. I still have no official announcement to make, and I likely won't for a few months yet, but things are definitely looking up for my wee book. Here's what's on the hob.

Dispatches from the Word Mines

On January 15th, my doctoral dissertation research was featured on Emilia Leese's Think Like a Vegan podcast. It was a pleasure and privilege to share excerpts of my work with her audience. Here's Emi's introduction:

What happens when a folklorist goes inside vegan and animal rights communities, not as an outsider looking in, but as someone documenting their lived beliefs? Dr. Ceallaigh MacCath-Moran joins me to discuss her research in St. John’s and Toronto, where she explores veganism as a counter-hegemonic tradition and activism as performative resistance. We delve into how media and academia often misrepresent these movements and why insider voices matter. From Gramsci to grassroots protest, this conversation challenges the idea speciesism is just common sense and asks what justice really sounds like when dissent speaks.

You'll find the episode here.

(By the bye, did you know that Folklore is a sub-discipline of Anthropology focused on expressive culture? It's true!)

Editor Jeffrey Sun had a few kind words for "A Mouth Full of Stones" in his Issue 4, Autumn 2025 recap for The Daily Tomorrow:

As a palate cleanser from all that timeliness, we go back some untold tens of thousands of years for “Dream Stealer” by Liam Hogan, his second in our magazine. It’s a story which is really at the edge of even our expansive definition of science fiction, but just too good to pass up. I feel similarly about “A Mouth Full of Stones” by Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran. A folkloric vignette about memory and immense depths of time, it was just too good, and felt too fitting for the dark mid-December, to pass up.

For those of you who might have missed it, January's Special Dispatch was a discussion of the Maggie Wall Witch Monument in Scotland rooted in the folkloristics of belief and material culture, with photos of my recent pilgrimage there.

You'll find it here.

Final Thoughts

I'm pushing the Dunino Den Special Dispatch back a month to March in favour of an essay rooted in topical ethnomusicology. Subscribers will have it in their inboxes next week. Meanwhile, I want to share with you a prayer I first read in Madeline L'Engle's classic novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet. May it be a comfort to you in dark times.

"The Rune of St. Patrick", "The Faedh Fiada", or "The Cry of the Deer."

At Tara in this fateful hour 
I place all Heaven with its power, 
And the sun with its brightness, 
And the snow with its whiteness, 
And fire with all the strength it hath, 
And lightning with its rapid wrath, 
And the winds with their swiftness along their path, 
And the sea with its deepness, 
And the rocks with their steepness, 
And the earth with its starkness: 
All these I place, 
By God's almighty help and grace, (I prefer "the Gods'" here.)
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

Beannachd Leibh,
Ceallaigh