Cunning Folk Mentoring Scheme

Many come to Cunning Folk with a thirst for creative inspiration and an openness to learning. Among our readers are many aspiring writers, but we know this path can sometimes seem intimidating and inaccessible. In light of this, we’re facilitating a mentoring scheme, inspired by the great work done by WoMentoring (which unfortunately no longer exists).  All the mentors below in some way work with our themes in their writing: magic, mythology, folklore and/or the occult. Importantly, this is a free opportunity.

Become a mentor

If you are a writer and you’d like to offer mentoring, on a voluntary basis, to an aspiring writer, please get in touch at cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. In line with the niche, we’re interested in magical realism, fantasy, Weird Fiction, folk horror, and stories that draw from folklore, mythology, or the occult, as well as non-fiction and poetry. We are pretty open regarding theme and influence as we know creativity in itself can be quite a mysterious process.

Applying to be a mentee

What might you expect from mentoring?

All our mentors are different, as are the exchanges between mentor and mentee. Here is a testimonial from Elspeth Wilson, who was mentored by Kirsty Logan:

“Accessing mentoring through the Cunning Folk Scheme helped grow my confidence and gave me the focus and deadlines necessary to finish my novel in challenging personal circumstances. Kirsty Logan was an incredibly generous and insightful mentor who encouraged me to think about my characters and plot in new ways whilst also giving me helpful insights into the world of publishing and agents. She challenged and pushed my ideas for the novel which allowed me to grow as a writer and have the confidence to make significant changes my work.”

What does it cost?

Nothing! We at Cunning Folk are facilitating this on a voluntary basis—our mentors are generously donating their time on a voluntary basis. As such, it may take a while for us to get back to you. Thank you for your patience.

Who can apply? 

-Anyone who has a writing project that has some connection to the themes laid out above. 

-Most mentors have said they will give priority to writers from a background less represented in publishing. 

Guidelines

Please Note due to the volume of submissions we anticipate, we will not be able to forward on or consider submissions that do not follow the guidelines below.

1. You can only apply for one mentor at a time, once every 6 months. 

2. You must email cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com . Do not email the authors directly. These emails will go unanswered. 

3. Your subject line should be Cunning Folk Mentoring: (name of preferred mentor) 

4. In the body of your email, state your name.

5. Attach one word file or PDF with: a short statement of no more than 300 words explaining why you’d benefit from mentoring AND a writing sample of up to 1000 words. **Edit: Your sample does not have to be a complete story, and it does not have to be from the work-in-progress you want to work on with your mentor, but it should be somehow give a sense of your work. If you want to work on verse, send verse. If you want to work on prose, send prose. If your project is non-fiction, send non-fiction.

6. Before applying, please research each mentor and see whether they’re a good fit. We recommend reading their work.

7. We are all voluntarily putting time and effort into this project, so it will take a while before you hear back. If you do not hear back within 6 months, please assume you have been unsuccessful this time, but feel free to apply again (either by submitting a different writing sample and project idea or applying to work with a different author who might be a better match). 

Molly Aitken

Image © Christy Ku.

I am a novelist and short story writer with a focus on folklore, myth and magic. My novel, The Island Child was published by Canongate in January 2020. I have an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University where I won the Janklow and Nesbit Prize. I have been shortlisted and won several short story competitions. I also work as a developmental fiction editor. 

I explore the alchemy of creativity on Instagram @molly.aitken and twitter @MollyAitken1

This is what Molly can offer:

-One mentee every 6 months working on fiction that in some way deals with magic, mythology, folklore and/or the occult.

-x2 1-hour Skype/phone or in-person meetings (location dependent). 

-Reading and feedback on up to 5000 words. 

-A recommended reading list based on the writer's project.

Kirsty Logan

Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Things We Say in the Dark; she is the author of three short story collections, two novels, a flash fiction chapbook, a short memoir, and collaborative work including ‘Lord Fox’, a live show of spoken word, song and harp music, and ‘The Knife-Thrower’s Wife’, an Angela Carter-inspired album. Her books have won the Lambda Literary Award, Polari Prize, Saboteur Award, Scott Prize and Gavin Wallace Fellowship. Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

What Kirsty can offer:

I can offer three 1-hour mentoring sessions (in person in Glasgow, or over video chat/phone, or text chat if voice chat isn't possible) to one person every 6 months. I will give priority to women, LGBTQ+ people, and POC.

I'd like [prospective mentees] to send 300 words max on why they'd benefit from a mentoring session, and a 1,000-word max writing sample (doesn't need to be the piece they'd work on in the mentoring session, it's just to give an idea of their work).

Elizabeth Lee

Elizabeth Lee’s debut novel, Cunning Women, will be published by Windmill Books in February 2021. Her work has been selected for the WoMentoring Project and Penguin’s WriteNow Live. She studied on the Curtis Brown Creative Six Month Novel Writing Course, having received the Marian Keyes Scholarship. She lives in Warwickshire. Find her on Twitter @EKLeeWriter.

Elizabeth would like to work with the same author for one year. She would like to mentor someone who feels they're disadvantaged, financially or otherwise.

This is what Elizabeth can offer:

• x4 1-hour meetings (location dependent)/Skype calls/Phone calls over the year.

• x4 written feedback on 3,000 words.

Laura Purcell’s Bone China and the Cornish Pisky

Growing up on Bodmin Moor, my childhood was steeped in Cornish folklore. At school the teachers told stories of giants, mermaids and piskies. At the weekends I would search for signs of piskies on the moors, tiny footprints or wooden doors nailed to trees.

The influence of folklore in Cornwall has never really left the county, with stories just as prevalent now as they were hundreds of years ago. Annual celebrations remind us of the region’s rich Celtic heritage, from Obby Oss in Padstow, to Bodmin Riding Festival. With stories of the Bucca and The Beast of Bodmin, it seems as if everyone has a little bit of folklore within them. Given Cornwall’s economic reliance on tourism, many parts of the Celtic history are diluted to become more palatable.

The Cornish Pisky is mainly spoken of as an amenable character, if not slightly whimsical in its behaviour. These days piskies are more commonly used as a noun to describe drunk people getting lost (being 'pisky-led/whisky-led'), or thought of as small bronze figurines that are bought in a seaside shop for a pound and rubbed for luck. In Cornish folklore, there are actually five types of pisky – ranging from the harmless Knocker to the cruel Spriggan— an entity to be feared. 

There is however a new trend emerging in literature that returns to the pisky’s folkloric roots. Increasingly we are seeing a return of the Cornish Pisky and other Celtic Fae portrayed as truly malevolent beings— creatures more likely to steal souls away than guide you home at night.

In Bone China, Laura Purcell's third Gothic historical fiction novel, the threat of the Cornish Piskies is woven in with the threat of consumption. The story is set in the fictional Moroven manor house on the Falmouth coastline, sitting above the mouths of caves. 

Purcell's piskies are those that hunt for bodies to take and children to steal away to their underground – usually on the lookout for beautiful young women, in the book they seem ready to attack anyone who infringes on their land.

The consumptives are living in the caves in the cliff face, under the impression that the sea air will cure the incurable. At night, a haunting knocking on the wall keeps them awake. The piskies the reader is introduced to in Bone China are taunting and relentless in their cruelty and Purcell's writing ensures you are never certain if they are real, or if they are a narrative device, indicative of the decaying minds of her characters.

There are only two named piskies in Cornish folklore: Jack O' the Lantern and Joan O' the Wad (wad being an archaic Cornish term for 'torch'), who are seen as the Pisky King and Queen respectively. Though their names may make them seem kindly, like Willow O' Wisps guiding the lost home at night, there are more tales of them tricking the lost by appearing as lanterns, dooming them to wander the moors alone for an eternity – or killing them, than there are of them helping.

There is a bardic oral tradition in Cornwall, with folklore passed on through word of mouth and story-telling, rather than the written word. T. Q Couch, author of 'The History of Polperro' recording some popular Cornish rhymes which show the King and Queen of the Piskies in a rather negative light. In one, the speaker is calling for the help of Jack O' the Lantern to guide him home, after Joan O' the Wad has 'tickled the maid and made her mad'.

Another is thought to be the original words of the nursery rhyme 'Margery Daw', with these lyrics dating back to the 17th Century:

See-saw, Margery Daw,

Sold her bed and lay on the straw;

Sold her bed and lay upon hay

And pisky came and carried her away.

For wasn’t she a dirty slut

To sell her bed and lie in the dirt? 

In Bone China Purcell is, intentionally or not, reminding her readers of the Pisky that will taunt young and unmarried women in order to spirit them away for their own uses, and in doing so banishes the cheerful 'leprechaun-esque' image many people see when they hear 'Cornish Pisky'.

Perhaps it is Purcell's place as a writer of Gothic fiction that makes the representation of Cornish folklore in Bone China more realistically and sensitively employed than in other pieces of modern literature and popular culture.

In the Harry Potter franchise, one of J.K Rowling's magical beasts is the 'Cornish Pixie', bright bluer and small in appearance, the pixies are described as having 'painted faces' and 'voices as shrill as a budgie'. At this level, it would seem like this representation of the pixie was as true to Cornish folklore as the grey suited animated pixies in Nickelodeon's cartoon, 'The Fairly OddParents'. 

When you look at the companion book to the Harry Potter novels, 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them', a back story is provided for the Pixies that seems to be taken straight out of Cornish Folklore: a holidaying witch is visiting Cornwall when she is abducted by a tribe of Cornish piskies. When she is returned, she finds herself troubled for life. 

Of course, when we compare this to traditional folk stories, it is unlikely that the witch would have been returned at all. More likely she would suffer a fate more similar to that  of minister and folklorist Robert Kirk, who legend says was taken away to fairyland for revealing the secrets of the fairies in his book The Secret of The Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies. He didn’t stray from exploring their more malevolent side.Sally Magnusson's upcoming novel The Ninth Child (19th March, Two Roads Books), set during the building of the Loch Katrine Waterworks in 1856, explores the 'after life' of Robert Kirk. Magnusson taps into the Celtic folklore of the area and the mystery surrounding Kirk’s death. In the novel, Kirk has been left to roam the land, looking for a soul to offer up to the Fae. Some 200 years after his death, the faery folk are still taunting him. 

Purcell also plays with the idea of a person being returned by the piskies, with one character believing she was abducted by them as a child, and devoting the rest of her adult life to protecting her charge from enduring the same fate. Where Purcell's character Creeda employs lines of salt and dolls to trick the piskies, old Cornish tales favour the scent of dead fish, grease and a salt water wash to keep the piskies at bay. A side of the Cornish pisky many people forget about when they pop the tiny figures in their pockets for good luck, the Spriggans were thought to steal babies and children and leave changelings in their place. The idea of being swapped or changed is explored in the novel, both in terms of folklore and madness. As characters fall foul to strange behaviours, it is up to the reader to decide if this is the act of a Pisky or an ill mind.

I spoke with the author and she told me that part of her inspiration for the piskies in her novel was a tale that originated in Devon, Ottery St. Mary. A local bishop decided to build a church in Ottery St. Mary, and commissioned a set of bells to come from Wales. On hearing these plans, the piskies were worried— they knew once the bells were installed they would no longer rule the land. When the men arrived with the bells, the piskies placed a spell on them, attempting to lead them off the edge of a cliff. One man stubbed his toe before he reached the edge of the cliff and said 'God bless my Soul!', and then the spell on the men was broken and they successfully installed the bells. The piskies were then banished to a cave known locally as the Pixie’s Parlour. 

For Purcell, the idea of writing a story set in a dark, dank cave came before anything else. During her research she discovered the real life story of John Crogan, a doctor who placed consumptive patients in caves. He was American, but feeling like she knew more about 19th Century England than America, Purcell moved the location to the UK. Cornwall was chosen as a setting for reasons of both logic and inspiration: it is a place Purcell knew had many caves and she is a huge fan of Daphne Du Maurier and wanted the chance to spend time in the County. The idea for the piskies came last, with Laura saying 'I thought that if I was setting something supernatural in Cornwall, it would be a crime to not use some of that wonderful folklore'.

Using elements of Cornish folklore, as well as pulling together sinister elements of other Celtic Fae in 'Bone China', Purcell has written a book that pulls the Pisky away from the seaside shop and back into the supernatural.

In Search of King Arthur

Tapestry showing Arthur as one of the Nine Worthies, wearing a coat of arms often attributed to him (c. 1385)

 "But Arthur's grave is nowhere seen, whence antiquity of fables still claims that he will return.”

William of Malmesbury in 1125

“Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross.”

― Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur

One day King Arthur will return to save England. It’s a motif recurring in English literature since Old English. King Arthur, like Jesus Christ, will be resurrected, and return when the land needs him most. Many cultures have their own myths of the king asleep in the mountains, ready to be awoken when the time is right. It’s a romantic idea and one that has inspired many retellings. Some legends say Arthur is buried beneath the abbey in Glastonbury, that he ruled from Avalon. Landmarks associated with Arthurian legend abound in Britain, from South Wales to Tintagel to Winchester. 

The conception of King Arthur derives from folklore and literary invention and there is no evidence King Arthur and his round table ever existed. Even so, the enduring appeal of the story tells us something about the value of myth. War, uncertainty, divisive politics, the climate crisis; we are forever longing for a song to awaken the land.

Arthurian Romances - Chrétien de Troyes



“Through their kisses and caresses they experienced a joy and wonder the equal of which has never been known or heard of. But I shall be silent...; for the rarest and most delectable pleasures are those which are hinted at, but never told.”

― Chrétien de Troyes

Chivalrous knights on quests to save damsels in distress, young men who defeat monsters and are knighted at the royal court, romantic love comparable to the divine. These are all now are tropes in the fantasy genre, and have been retold and retold, but in Medieval Europe this type of story was new and exciting. Chrétien de Troyes, writing in 12th century France, wrote about King Arthur, Perceval and contributed Lancelot to the mythology. He incorporated into his stories courtly love, popularised in Provençal poetry. Chrétien’s stories are often seen as precursors to the modern novel.  

The Mabinogion - Anon

“So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptised her, and gave her the name of Blodeuwedd.”

― Mabinogion, The Mabinogion, from the Llyfr Coch O Hergest, and Other Ancient Welsh Mss.

For those who have read Chrétien’s tales, many of the stories here will be familiar. The Mabinogion, written in Old Welsh, is the pinnacle of Wales’ rich literary history. With its shapeshifting animals, sorcerers and fierce female characters, it is believed that some of these stories are inspired by pre-Christian precedents in Celtic folklore. Historians consider Culhwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabwy important as they potentially preserve older stories with were told orally before the Medieval period, filling in gaps in what is often speculative archeology. They tell of an Arthur quite different to the one central to the myth of a heroic age. 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien and later Simon Armitage, among others, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the better known—and most discussed—Arthurian stories. This 14th-century middle English chivalric romance tells the tale of how Sir Gawain, a knight of Arthur’s Round Table, accepted a challenge from a mysterious Green Knight. J. R. R. Tolkien said the Green Knight was the "most difficult character" to interpret in Sir Gawain. In English folklore, green was traditionally associated with nature, fertility and rebirth; it has also been associated with witchcraft and devilry. Sir Gawain also contains the first recorded use of the word pentagle in English, which some academics have linked to magical traditions. 

The History of the Kings of Britain - Geoffrey of Monmouth 

"I have not been able to discover anything at all on the kings who lived here before the Incarnation of Christ, or indeed about Arthur and all the others who followed on after the Incarnation. Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time.”

—Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain

Geoffrey of Monmouth chronicles the lives of the kings of England, from Brutus who slayed the giants to King Arthur. Geoffrey helped popularise the King Arthur myth, telling the story of how Merlin’s magic spell spurred Arthur’s conception, through to Arthur’s conquest of Northern Europe and his defeat of Mordred. The strange thing about The History of the Kings of England (or Historia Regum Britanniae) is that it blends history and myth. Potentially taken as historical until the 16th century, it is now considered a valuable piece of medieval literature. 

Le Morte Darthur - Thomas Mallory

"Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born.”

Published in 1485, Le Mort d’Arthur is yet another reworking of Arthurian legend, featuring Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. For many future writers inspired by Arthurian legend, this is often the principle source. Mallory places emphasis on the Christian idea of ‘divine right to rule.’

Les Lais de Marie de France

A lai, or lay, is a form of short story from medieval English and French literature; it’s a rhyming tale of courtly love and chivalry, often featuring Celtic motifs. These Breton lais were written in the late 12th century by a female writer, Marie de France. Little is known about Marie except she was born in France and wrote in England. She was likely a contemporary to Chrétien de Troyes and several of her lais mention King Arthur. 

The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend by Alan Lupack

This is a good critical history of Arthurian legend in literature through to contemporary pop culture, including art, music and film. The book is easy to navigate with chapters dedicated to characters and particular stories that come up again and again, including the Grail quest and the story of Tristan and Isolt. Recommended reading as a companion to the original texts. 

Excalibur (1981 film)

Merlin : You brought me back. Your love brought me back. Back to where you are now. In the land of dreams.

Arthur : Are you a dream, Merlin?

Merlin : A dream to some.

Arguably the best film re-telling of the King Arthur legend, John Boorman’s epic historical fantasy adaptation stars Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson and Nigel Terry, among others. Based on Le Mort d’Arthur, it also borrows from other stories. Legend has it King Arthur pulled the legendary sword Exalibur from the stone. Later he was gifted the sword by the lady of the lake, a reminder of his heroic destiny and divine right to rule. This is the journey of the sword. A 2011 study by Jean-Marc Elsholz demonstrated how closely the film Excalibur was inspired by the Arthurian romance tradition. Boorman emphasised the film is about mythical truth, not historical truth: "That's what my story is about: the coming of Christian man and the disappearance of the old religions which are represented by Merlin. The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious."

King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition By Carolyne Larrington

Written by a fellow in Medieval Literature at St John’s College Oxford, this book focuses on the enchantresses of Arthurian Romances, from Morgan le Fay (sometimes Morgana) to the Lady of the Lake, and their enduring magic. Morgan(a)’s potential connection to Celtic or pre-Celtic deities, like the Morrigan, is briefly touched upon.

King Arthur: Myth-Making and History by N. J. Higham

Through studying the enduring myth of King Arthur we can see how myths change on each re-telling. N. J. Higham explores how historians and writers from the Middle Ages to the present day have portrayed Arthur differently, with an in-depth examination of The History of the Britons and the Welsh Annals. The author asks important questions about the political and cultural reasons for the evolution of King Arthur and the weaponisation of myth. It raises important questions about the myths we tell today and how they shape our beliefs and consumer behaviour. It also emphasises the importance of myth in inspiring people.

Last words: ‘the power of myth’ 

This last book is particularly pertinent as we look for solutions in a world in strife, from the climate crisis to gross inequality and suffering. There is an ongoing discussion regarding the value of myth and storytelling in world building. 

Yuval Noah Harari in his international bestselling non-fiction book, Homosapiens, wrote: ‘Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.’ So myths help us cooperate. We may well be able, through telling stories that inspire people to do good (and dismantling those which cause divisiveness), to change the world, or our little corner of it.

Mythology is and has been weaponised to serve political means, but at its core there is something that strives toward something akin to a universal truth. Joseph Campbell, in the Power of Myth, said it best: “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” If we choose our re-tellings wisely, from these ever-enduring stories, we may still find a song to awaken the land. 

Women and the Sea: A Reading List of Old and New Tales

The sea has long been viewed as a feminine force, recorded in myths and legends as powerful and dangerous. Ships are called ‘she’ and feminised with figureheads of Greek goddesses to protect them. Not only is the sea herself feminine but often so too are the mysterious creatures who inhabit her. These creatures have long been part of oral tradition, tracking our love and fear of the ocean over time. From childhood we become familiar with Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid and tales of selkies from the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. We grow up associating women with oceans. Later, when we are older we encounter The Odyssey by Homer, either by reading it ourselves or coming across representations in modern culture. In this ancient tale, the sirens are cast as a threat, taking pleasure in killing men. This violent portrayal of a feminine ocean is no accident. It comes from a tradition of some Western tales that are deeply misogynistic, showing a disregard both for women and the waters associated with them. But writers have long been aware of this stereotype and have sought to reconfigure and reimagine it. 

Photo by Michael Vince Kim

Here is a reading stack if you’re looking to deep dive into women’s link with the sea. 

The Fabled Coast: Legends & Traditions From Around the Shores of Britain & Ireland by Sophia Kingshill & Jennifer Westwood


Every culture that has links to the sea has told stories about it. These tales have largely been of conquest rather than coexistence. Vengeful mermaids kill sailors. Selkie brides abandon their husbands and children for the call of the sea. The message is abuse nature at your peril, but we continue to live imbalanced with the sea. In this detailed collection two renowned women folklorists, Kingshill and Westwood, retell folktales from around Britain and Ireland that relate to the sea. They recount the story of a wealthy woman who appears at church then vanishes into the sea, tales of women pirates, and tell of the belief that when the tide comes in a child is born and is it ebbs someone will die. This compendium gives an idea of the scope and variety of the old tales about the sea from just a few islands. It is organised geographically so you can dive into the places you know best or explore new waters. 

Mermaids by Sophie Kingshill

Mermaids have long captured people’s imaginations but apart from their tails across legends they differ wildly. Kingshill’s slight book - ideal to fit in a large pocket - is a detailed account of the mermaid tracking from our time to the ancient world. It is also overflowing with illustrations women with tales throughout history. Mermaids and their sisters have traditionally been highly sexualised. Kingshill draws our attention to this by pointing it out over time, as well as giving examples like the Copenhagen statue of The Little Mermaid who has been defaced many times, including her head being sawn off as a form of protest against her sexualised image. Kingshill ends with this message: DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCH! DON’T GIVE UP YOUR LIFE, TAKE CENTRE STAGE!

The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan

The way in which folklore mixes with our world can be subtle and magical, the lines blur. This is nowhere more apparent than in contemporary magical realist fiction. Kirsty Logan’s novel The Gloaming melds our world with the magical and less understood underworld of the waves. Set on a Scottish island, where the sea and island itself hold power over the characters. Mara, the protagonist knows she’ll eventually end her days atop the cliff, turned to stone and gazing out at the horizon like all the villagers, drawn by the otherworldly call of the sea. Then one day Mara meets a woman who has a job as a mermaid. This is a present-day fable told in language that shimmers. 

salt slow by Julia Armfield

Feminist, magical realist short stories are in many ways contemporary folktales. Often they play with the elements of folktale but are firmly rooted in a modern context. Sometimes these types of short stories will subvert folktales making them understandable and relevant for readers today. Short stories can arguably examine taboo with a playful experimentation that is harder to retain in the length of a novel. In salt slow author Julia Armfield explores women’s bodies, blurring the mythic and gothic with the contemporary British life. ‘Smack’ depicts a sleepy sea-side town is invaded and transformed, creating a landscape constantly shifting to hold on to hold on to its inhabitants. In the titular and last story, a couple are afloat on the sea of a waterworld dystopia while the woman waits to give birth to a sea creature. 

Salt On Your Tongue: Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie

The sea can have a very personal connection for us, one that we find hard to grasp and name but is ever present in our lives. This is what Charlotte Runcie’s Salt On Your Tongue: Women and the Sea explores. It’s a memoir about motherhood that intertwines effortlessly with tales and histories of the sea. Runcie poetically elucidates women’s deep and eternal connection to the ocean, signalling how it mirrors our bodies as her own grows with a child. This is a beautiful and quiet read with a power and weight like all tales about the sea. 

The Seas by Samantha Hunt



Sometimes it can feel like the sea offers all the answers to the problems and complexities of our landed lives. It whispers and sings to us in a voice that may know all the answers. This is explored in Samantha Hunt’s novel The Seas, a story about being two things at once. The narrator of the novel, a nineteen-year-old girl may or may not be a mermaid. Trapped in a seaside town where she works as a chambermaid, she is in love with an Iraq veteran thirteen years her senior and suffering from PTSD. This is a creepy and precisely told story that revolves around the ocean: its potential for magic and to wash up the past. 

Diving Belles by Lucy Wood


Our connection to the sea has always been linked to our connection with the land. In Diving Belles Lucy Wood explores our links between land and sea with stories firmly rooted on Cornwall’s coast. In one story a shipwreck salvager invades a couple’s home bringing with him seawater, sand and humidity. Soon tiny shells are pouring out of the bathroom taps instead of water. The title story is perhaps the most fascinating. Fishermen keep disappearing to live a life as mermen under the sea so an entrepreneur woman sets up a business where women can wear diving belles in order to go beneath the waves and get their husbands back, even if only temporarily. In this collection land and sea merge in beautiful and surprising ways, reminding us how integral both our to our existence. 

Molly Aitken’s The Island Child is out in the UK on 30 January 2020, published by Canongate.

Cunning Folk’s Most Anticipated Books 2020: The First Half

There are so many great books coming out in the first half of 2020. A few Cunning Folk contributors and readers have collated a list of the books we’re most excited about. Thankfully we’re restricted by genre or this would be a much longer list. We have grimoires, books introducing new spiritual paths, on folklore, and re-connecting with the natural world. Fiction-wise, expect tales of the weird, uncanny, magical realism and stories inspired by myth.

In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Serpent’s Tail

Release Date: 02/01/2020

In the Dream House is a memoir about Machado’s time in an emotionally abusive relationship. Her phenomenal short story collection Her Body and Other Parties drew inspiration from folklore, fairytale and followed in the footsteps of Angela Carter’s strangeness and Shirley Jackson’s haunted mind—this memoir does too. Machado is conscious that her experience mirrors that of others, and she identifies the fairytale tropes and motifs she should have seen coming. Still she emphasises this is a story worth telling, when so many other authors of stories about same-sex relationships feel a pressure to downplay dysfunction. This is a stark reminder that we can learn about ourselves and our own experiences through reading stories. Machado so well depicts the sense of wonder that draws us to something, or someone, and the spectral echoes of tumultuous lives that go on haunting a place long after we’ve left it. 

Outside the Charmed Circle by Misha Magdalene - chosen by J. P. Humphrey

Imprint: Llewellyn Publications

Release Date: 08/01/2020

Outside the Charmed Circle is an exploration of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in magical and polytheist practice written for all readers, whether queer or straight, cis or trans. Misha has a voice that is clear, accessible, pointed & direct when necessary, humorous and tangential when the mood strikes. Thought-provoking & amusing writing on @PatheosPagan blog made me a fan. Plus footnotes!

Of Cats and Elfins by Sylvia Townsend Warner - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Handheld Press

Release date: 20/01/2020

’Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of our finest writers,’ reads a cover endorsement from Neil Gaiman. Handheld Press have published some incredible anthologies in recent years, reminding us of the existence of female writers of the weird, the fantastical, and the uncanny. Sylvia Townsend Warner is perhaps best known for her slim novel, Lolly Willowes, featuring a defiant spinster who forgoes the life expected of her and instead becomes a witch. Handheld Press introduced new readers to her work in the reprinted short story collection Kingdoms of Elfin. The remaining short stories are to be published in Of Cats and Elfins, alongside the unpublished tales of The Cat’s Cradle Book. I’m a major cat lover so this was always going to be a winner for me.

Black Dog Folklore by Mark Norman - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Troy Books

Release Date: 20/01/2020

Most of us who grew up in rural England can recall a local story about a black dog haunting our streets. Says the publisher: ‘Apparitions of ghostly Black Dogs have been seen in England for nearly a millennium and yet a comprehensive information source has never been published. Author and researcher Mark Norman (Devon, UK) delves deep into the largest Black Dog archive in England, providing a comprehensive study of sightings with an extensive gazetteer of over 750 eyewitness sightings as well as references from folklore traditions.’

Pine by Francine Toon - chosen by Lucie McKnight Hardy

Imprint: Doubleday

Release Date: 23/01/2020

‘It’s a beautifully crafted gothic tale of isolation and not belonging, thoroughly gripping and stunningly atmospheric,’ says Lucie McKnight Hardy. ‘I can’t wait to see it out in the world — and just look at that cover.’ The publisher’s description: ‘In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.’

Rootbound: Rewilding a Life by Alice Vincent - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Canongate

Release Date: 30/01/2020

Recommended to readers of Olivia Laing, Amy Liptrot and Alys Turner, Rootbound explores how we can discover another part of ourselves by reconnecting with plants. Rewilding is an increasingly hot topic, particularly among those of us in cities like London, where nature can seem inaccessible. Says the publisher: ‘Mixing memoir, botanical history and biography, Rootbound examines how bringing a little of the outside in can help us find our feet in a world spinning too fast.’

The Island Child by Molly Aitken - chosen by Polly Crosby

Imprint: Canongate

Release Date: 30/01/2020

Twenty years ago, Oona left the island of Inis for the very first time. A wind-blasted rock of fishing boats and sheep’s wool, where the only book was the Bible and girls stayed in their homes until mothers themselves, the island was a gift for some, a prison for others. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan says 'Aitken stitches together many themes--folk-legend, family saga, love story, coming of age tale. The result is the sort of book you want to sink into a hot bath with and not emerge until it's finished.'

Unknown Language: A Science Fiction by Hildegard Von Bingen and Huw Lemmey - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Ignota Books

Release Date: 03/02/2020

This is a story inspired by the work of the 12th century Christian mystic, polymath and visionary, Hildegard of Bingen. She created her own language, Lingua Ignota, the purpose of which is still unknown; in her illustrated Scivias, she described strange visions, today attributed to migraine or temporal lobe epilepsy. Here Huw Lemmey takes over in and history becomes interwoven with speculative fiction; these Scivias, we learn, got lost during the collapse of the information age, and in the future fragments of the lost text are found by Pinky in an amethyst sea cave on the planet Avaaz. ‘Unlocking the secrets of viriditas, Hildegard's mythic quantum energy threaded throughout her communiqués, provides the seeds for humanity's rebirth on Avaaz. Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's visionary 'unknown language', arrives just in time for a world in flux, one whose coordinates are being recast.’

Warriors, Witches, Women: Mythology’s Fiercest Females by Kate Hodges

Imprint: Aurum Press

Release Date: 04/02/2020

From the cover star Medusa, with her snakes for hair, to feminists fairies, to seductive voodoo goddesses, Kate Hodges introduces readers to some of mythology’s fiercest females. Each profile is paired with illustrations from Harriet Lee-Merrion.

The Living Wisdom of Trees by Fred Hageneder

Imprint: Watkins Publishing

Release Date: 11/02/2020

A reprint of the popular book published in 2005, this is an illustrated guide to the natural history, symbolism and healing power of trees. The author looks at the significance we humans have attributed to 55 varieties of tree, and their place in world myth, magic and folklore.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Editions


Release Date: 19/02/2020

‘The witch is dead,’ begins Hurricane Season, set in a fictional Mexican village. Immediately we know she will never speak for herself, though she will remain the subject of discussion, spoken about from a distance. Fernanda Melchor writes with a style reminiscent of Bolaño, interrogating the subject through the villagers, who rely on gossip and hearsay to form a portrait of a lady who has been ‘othered’. Central to this book are themes of misogyny, superstition and prejudice. This is a brilliant translation from the Spanish original by Sophie Hughes.

Escape Routes by Naomi Ishiguro - chosen by Molly Aitken

Imprint: Tinder Press

Release Date: 06/02/2020

Characterised by its own brand of pleasingly unsettling magic, this short story collection is inventive with a fairy-tale allure. Whether snared in traps artfully laid for them, or those of their own making, the characters in this collection yearn for freedom and flight. Neil Gaimon says 'Naomi Ishiguro flits playfully between genres. She threads magic through carefully observed realism. This is a writer whose voice I hope to be following for many years to come.'

A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes - chosen by Molly Aitken

Imprint: Canongate

Release Date: 06/02/2020

Discovered amidst a tangle of sea grape trees by the childless Rachel Fisher, baby Moshe’s provenance is a thing of myth and mystery; his unusual appearance, with blueish, translucent skin and duo-toned hair, only serves to compound his mystique. Jennifer Egan describes it as 'captivating from the first page.'

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave - chosen by Molly Aitken

Imprint: Picador

Release Date: 06/02/2020

After a storm has killed off all the island's men, two women in a 1600s Norwegian village struggle to survive against natural forces and the men who have been sent to rid their community of witchcraft. Madeline Miller has described it as 'visceral and immersive; the muddy, cold life and politics of a fishing village leap to vivid life.'

Bad Island by Stanley Donwood - chosen by Callum James

Imprint: Hamish Hamilton

Release Date: 13/02/2020

A graphic novel for our times. As the Island moves from primeval wilderness to civilisation an apocalyptic, dystopian, modern myth unfurls, and rehearses the history of our species in stark monochrome. 

An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke by Phil Legard and Alexander Cummins - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Scarlet Imprint

Release Date: Late February 2020

The Excellent Booke and Visions chronicles the magical experimentations of Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, transcribed from the Elizabethan manuscript held by the British Library. In the publisher’s own words: “The Excellent Booke and Visions are, as Legard writes in his Preface, ‘unique documents of sixteenth century magical practice: ones that deserve to be widely read and studied by scholars and practitioners alike since they preserve a detailed account of both the making and the use of a grimoire.’ Dr Alexander Cummins’ and Phil Legard’s essays on necromancy and grimoire magic help contextualise this work and present it to new readers.

The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting - chosen by Yasmina Floyer

Publisher: Hachette

Release Date: 19/03/2020

This historical novel is the first instalment in a trilogy written by the author who penned Norwegian Wood: “Norway, 1880. In the secluded village of Butangen at the end of the valley, headstrong Astrid dreams of a life beyond marriage, hard work and children. And then Pastor Kai Schweigaard comes into her life, taking over the 700-year old stave church with it’d carving of pagan deities. The two church bells were forged by her forefather in the sixteenth century, in memory of conjoined sisters Halfrid and Gunhilde Hekne, and are said to have supernatural powers…”

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey - chosen by Molly Aitken

Imprint: Peepal Tree Press

Release Date: 02/04/2020

A novel that weaves together myth and magical realism to tell a story of a cursed woman denied a rite of passage, surrendering to romantic and erotic love. March 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch, at the start of the rainy season. A fisherman sings to himself in his pirogue, waiting for a catch–but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn’t expect.

Sharks in the Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn - chosen by Molly Aitken

Imprint: Canongate

Release Date: 02/04/2020

In 1994 in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores is saved from drowning by a shiver of sharks. His family, struggling to make ends meet amidst the collapse of the sugar cane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favour from ancient Hawaiian gods. Author Benjamin Percy calls it 'a volcanic powerhouse of a debut.’

The Magical Writing Grimoire: Use the Word as Your Wand for Magic, Manifestation & Ritual by Lisa Marie Basile - chosen by Elizabeth Sulis Kim

Imprint: Fair Winds Press

Release Date: 21/04/2020

For writers who love the author’s Light Magic For Dark Times and US-based Luna Luna Magazine, The Magical Writing Grimoire is sure to delight. What to expect: ‘Part guided journaling practice, part magical grimoire, The Magical Writing Grimoire explores the transformative power of ritual and writing, showing you how to incorporate writing as a magical tool to live a ritualistic life, create healing, manifest your visions, set intentions, and amplify spell-casting.’

Trollrún by Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold - chosen by Callum James

Imprint: Scarlet Imprint

Release Date: 2020, unspecified

The Northern Traditions are less well known in Britain than they should be. This is a book of folk and cunning magic, packed with spells, mythology, star lore, runes, curses and sacrifice. As an insight into Scandinavian traditional magic it promises to be without equal.

Sisters by Daisy Johnson - chosen by Yasmina Floyer

Imprint: Johnathan Cape

Release Date: 02/ 07/ 2020

“Johnson’s previous publications include a debut short story collection Fen, hauntingly atmospheric with elements of folklore woven throughout. Her novel that followed, Everything Under is an innovative retelling of the Oedipus myth and was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2018. It is no wonder, then, that I eagerly await her next novel, Sisters. The press release on the Penguin website describes the book as follows:

“After a serious case of school bullying becomes too much to bear, sisters July and September move across the country with their mother to a long abandoned family home…Inside the house the tension among the three women builds, while outside the sisters meet a boy who tests the limit of their shared experience...With it’s roots in psychological horror, Sisters is a taut, powerful and deeply moving account of sibling love…”

Review: Ness by Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood

Orford Ness is a bizarre, eerie, ever-changing shingle spit off the Suffolk Coast. It once housed the British contribution to the nuclear weapons project and, before that, other highly sensitive adventures in military R&D. It is now managed by the National Trust, and its bleak horizontals are broken just occasionally by the weird, squat buildings that used to house all this top-secret activity and which now are subject to a policy gloriously named “controlled ruination’. The Ness is also designated a National Nature Reserve and thrives as such: an unusual habitat in between the rust-busted reinforced concrete and the crumbling pagodas. On one side the Ness shelters the sleepy River Ore, on the other it faces the oncoming wrath of the North Sea.

This is the setting for Robert Macfarlane’s latest book. A thin volume, it commands the level of respect that all thin volumes do: the unspoken claim that though it may have fewer words, they must therefore be chosen better and have fuller effect than most. It is a book of prose-poetry, with some prose, and some poetry. 

Macfarlane has been the undisputed King of the new nature writing since his late twenties when he burst into the public consciousness with his incandescent book Mountains of the Mind, not a history of mountaineering, but a history of mountains in the human imagination. Since then he has done more than almost anyone else to bring about a revival of the literature of landscape and nature. His writing is characterised by an astonishing breadth of reading, a lyrical skill for narrative and for the fact that he has, more than most, walked the walk: and, in his case, climbed the mountain, swum the lake or slept the night on the haunted Iron Age fort.

The new nature writing has been developing for the last twenty years. It has largely sat within the equally modern genre of narrative non-fiction. From the beginning it has intersected with climate and ecological campaigning, with autobiography (particularly around mental health), with the revival of interest in 70s ‘folk horror’, and with the resurgence of interest in ‘folklore’. It has walked a tremulous line between the premises of scientific materialism and an emerging form of animism that it hasn’t quite yet articulated. Macfarlane might be the furthest along this path within the mainstream. Recently there has been a shift in his work from books easily placed into the narrative non-fiction genre, to works which are neither fiction nor non-fiction, they are simply story.

Ness is the latest of this kind of text. Although based on Orford Ness, the shortening of the title to Ness is our first hint that this is a more universal, more mythical text. Ness also suggesting the suffix -ness, makes this book perhaps a description of qualities: strangeness and eerie-ness.

Throughout Ness, a ritual is taking place in a building called The Green Chapel. It is one of the ruinous buildings in which bomb casings and fitments were tested for the nuclear program of the 1950s. Whilst the Americans were busy exploding bombs in the Pacific, our role centred on the mechanics of the weaponry such as detonators and containers. The ritual is being performed by characters with titles like The Physicist, The Ornithologist and The Bryologist all led by The Armourer. If the ritual comes to its conclusion, something apocalyptic will be set in train. "Ness draws on numerous myths and legends but most of all it looks to " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which The Green Chapel is called “the most accursed church”. The Green Chapel is where Sir Gawain must face his certain end. Gawain travels to the chapel and his death at the hands of The Green Knight. The actual building on Orford Ness has a series of large, elongated crosses on the wall, like a kind of modern gothic, they were tracks that were used to lift and hold the weaponry. The ritual is one which is intent on bringing us all to our end in nuclear conflagration. 

Standing opposed to this ritual are five creatures called As, It, He, She and They. The five are moving inexorably towards the Ness and the Green Chapel. Each creature has a different character. A lesser writer would have opted for a purely elemental division but that would have been unreal, merely a cipher. These are nature spirits and monsters, they are made real by their specificity and by a refusal to be romanticised. It, is also named Drift. It is the spirit of oceanic movement, a swirling, immensely powerful creature that has lasted through all time and will continue to the end. But it is not ‘pure’, it is not some avatar of pristine nature, “its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle-top, rises from sift, is lashed and trussed with fishing line”. They, is a spirit of stone and shingle, “rock-cored flint beings” both one and many at a single moment. As, is an aerial spirit, a moist, misty creature “who exists only as likeness, moves as mist & also as metal.” There is a spirit of heaving soil, of loam and mycelium, of lichen, fungi and moss. There is an arboreal spirit; instead of simply describing a tree-made-sentient, this is a creature of water and marshes, as much Bird in its dynamics as Tree “by day from his throat fly finch & fire-crest & in anger he speaks only in swifts”.

These five beings seem like the natural conclusion of all Macfarlane’s writing to date. His books about ancient tracks, mountain fastnesses and strange underground realms are about responding to the reality of a place, to its spirit and the spirits that inhabit it. When it comes to writing a new myth, Macfarlane doesn’t reach for stock characters off the shelf—these are the actual spirits of Ness. These strange, impure, momentum-filled monsters are the spirits that he has encountered on his countless journeys to and over the Ness. We are left feeling that if we were to visit, we too would meet these creatures. 

Ness is a meditation on permanence and transience. It appears the five are going, like Gawain, to meet their certain death in The Green Chapel, in nuclear cataclysm. In fact, the ritualists never stood a chance. The precision of scientific splitting is overmastered by creatures of agglomeration and stickiness. The infinitesimal second of explosion is damped by the timescales of geology. The power of the creatures is that their existence is not contingent on anything human and given time, deep time, they will dismantle the ritual, the military buildings and the Ness itself.

***

Reading Ness has forcefully reminded me of a chance encounter I once had with an old lady who, for reasons I never fathomed, had been to visit Dungeness. It is another place where we have retreated to in order to take atoms apart. It is dominated by a nuclear power station. I told her about Derek Jarman, the queer filmmaker who famously lived there and created a garden behind his cottage on the shingle. She looked at me and said with eyes that seemed nearly afraid, “It was a strange place, it seemed to me it might be either the beginning or the end of the world.” Perhaps all Ness has this quality, perhaps this is why It, As, He, They, and She are conjured, to keep the world from ending, to hold onto its being.

‘Going Occult’ In The Man In The High Castle And The Way of Zen

Two books remind me how sometimes we need to follow chance to uncover hidden worlds.

Image © Rachael Lloyd

Most enthusiasts of the occult and strange would agree that all is not quite as it seems: the world we see around us isn’t the whole story. But if measurements, observations and rational deductions won’t reveal such ‘hidden’ layers of reality, how can we uncover them? 

Some people lay claim to direct channels to the mystery realm—in the form of ghosts, familiars, spells and invocations. Others follow rather more chemically-activated routes, courtesy of that bloke down the pub selling packets of doubtful powder. 

But if neither ghosts nor hallucinogens are your thing, another way to go beyond the rational and logical is to invoke chance. The occult tradition is full of chance as a route to revelation. Turning up the next Tarot card produces mysterious clues about your future. A random page in the Bible delivers a message from God. Breaking apart the fortune cookie reveals, in a shower of crumbs, next month’s sales figures.

I regularly turn to two particular books when I need reminding how luck can sometimes reveal wiser ways to live. The first is Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), a classic story of an ‘alternative world’ in which the Allies lost the Second World War.

Or did they? In fact most of the novel’s protagonists suspect the world they see is not real: there is another ‘occult’ reality, one in which the Axis powers lost the war. This occult real real world is revealed in book-within-the-book The grasshopper lies heavy, ostensibly written by the titular ‘man in the high castle’, Howard Abendsen. 

With the help of the I Ching, the mystical Taoist ‘book of changes’, Abendsen uses chance to divine Grasshopper’s plot and details. He follows the ancient fortune-telling method of throwing yarrow stalks, selecting, based on the random pattern formed by the fallen sticks, mysterious portents from the I Ching, which form Grasshopper’s message about the real nature of the High Castle world. In a nicely meta-postmodern touch, some biographers assert that Dick actually used I Ching in the same way, to write The Man in the High Castle.

In fact, almost all the book’s characters, trapped in their illusory world, use random consultation of the I Ching to uncover the hidden truths about their world. Dick’s message is that to reach inner truth, invoking chance, unpredictability, disturbance from deterministic logic isn’t just a nice idea: it is necessary. 

For me, this necessity of invoking chance to reveal what is real is the core meaning of High Castle. In the occult approach, following a fixed, deterministic set of rules or logical analysis ultimately cannot reveal hidden truth. You need something unexpected, spontaneous.

Which brings me to Alan Watts’ classic The Way of Zen (1957). Watts describes a clear historical line from the I Ching through Taoism to Zen Buddhism. Invoking chance or spontaneity to reach understanding is embodied in the Zen koan: the ‘puzzle’ set by the Zen master, the solution of which will lead the novice to enlightenment, to revelation of what is. To every novice’s frustration, it seems no amount of logical processing of the terms of the koan will reveal the answer. 

A famous story tells of a Zen novice who, trying hard to solve the koan, is only enlightened when his master suddenly hits him over the head with a stick. Only this spontaneity, unexpectedness, somehow enables the koan to reveal what is. 

The link from High Castle to Zen is a natural one: most of High Castle’s action takes place in the Japanese-occupied west coast zone of the former USA. Mr Tagomi, a high-ranking member of the Japanese occupying administration, has spent his life following intricate, subtle rules of ‘face’, the elaborate code of honour and social behaviour. But one day he is forced to kill a German agent, a massive, spontaneous and unexpected departure from his deterministic rules of behaviour. 

It’s no coincidence that this is the moment when Mr Tagomi is afforded a glimpse of an entirely different world, what he realises is the real world. Deviation from his hard logical rules of behaviour, forced upon him unexpectedly, has led Mr Tagomi to a revelation of the true what is.

Importantly, accessing the hidden world is about more than just occult curiosity: it is a route to a more authentic way of life. Mr Tagomi realises that the occupying forces, with all their apparent dominance, not to mention the Nazis’ insane philosophy of the Aryan superman, are wrong about how the world really is. 

Meanwhile, another character, antique dealer Robert Childan, arrives at authenticity by a different but equally unexpected, rule-defying route.

Childan struggles to prove that his antiques have the historicity much prized by his Japanese customers. Only a perfect, unbroken string of historical evidence—akin to a perfect logical argument—can provide the confidence that an object is genuine. 

Simultaneously Childan goes to increasingly desperate lengths to curry favour with his Japanese clients, attempting to follow their meticulous, and for Childan ultimately unfathomable, rules of social status. But he knows that one day both he and his antiques will be denounced as fakes.

Childan’s solution invokes the unexpected, the unplanned, in the form of creativity: ditching the antiques, he instead turns to contemporary artworks. It is no longer a question of following the rules: the art is what it is—it is authentic, it has its own inner truth not based on logical verification. 

The customers can take it or leave it: Childan ceases to try to manipulate them into valuing his items, and instead trusts to the unknowable outcome of a creative process. 

This is a very Taoist approach: letting something happen, letting things be, and trusting to the wisdom of spontaneity. According to Lao-Tzu, the poet-philosopher of Taoism, ‘The principle of the Tao is spontaneity.’

What these examples share, for me, is a concept of ‘wisdom’: an expertise that goes beyond training or rules.  Wisdom solves the koan, wisdom enables Mr Tagomi to accept the fundamental wrongness of his world. 

Wise actions are not constrained to follow logical rules: Childan’s switch to contemporary art does not satisfy the Japanese customers’ thirst for historicity and will not establish Childan’s social credit with them: but it is wise, because it offers him an alternative path to a more authentic world, closer to inner truth.

I like to re-read both The Way of Zen and The Man in the High Castle every couple of years, if only as a reminder that sometimes we have to take seemingly odd paths toward solving our problems. We all find ourselves in situations where the ‘rulebook’ lets us down, or when what should be simple rules create levels of complexity we are at a loss to cope with. 

So maybe sometimes we need to abandon the rules, at least temporarily: to ‘go occult’, to turn the cards and throw the yarrow stalks, to find a different way forward. 

Mark Haw is an academic based near Glasgow. When not teaching engineering, he writes fiction and non-fiction. His book ‘Middle World’ (Macmillan) recounts the tale of an obscure Scottish botanist whose microscopic observations one June morning in 1827 led to a revolution in physics, chemistry and biology. Mark also runs reallysmallscience, a team of researchers taking science and engineering into nursery, primary and secondary schools across Scotland.

Women’s Weird: Ghosts Must Be Real For The Author

Ghosts may or may not be real, but behind all good ghost stories there is a grain of truth. We spoke with Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890-1940, about the real fears underlying the stories that scare us.

“‘It makes me creep to think of it even now,’ she said. ‘I woke up, all at once, with that dreadful feeling as if something were going to happen, you know! I was wide awake, and hearing every little strange sound for miles around, it seemed to me. There are so many strange little noises in the country for all it is so still.’”

The Giant Wistaria by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

On dark nights we’ve all watched the shadows and wondered whether something in the darkness was watching us, something unknown. Weird fiction happens when we dwell on these stranger parts of reality. The editor of Women’s Weird, Melissa Edmundson tells us ‘…for me, Weird is often “quieter” than horror. There’s something ominous waiting just below the surface. Unlike horror, there is also more left to the imagination.’

Weird Fiction appeared in the late Victorian period, coinciding with the occult revival and the rise in paranormal investigation societies like The Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research. Typically we associate the genre with writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville and William Burroughs, but many women have written weird fiction too; Women’s Weird recognises this. This chilling collection of short stories brings together Weird fiction from women writers including Edith Wharton, Mary Butts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Nesbit. Edmundson reminds us that women have long been associated with magic, and the intuition necessary to communicate with whatever hides behind the veil. In the stories found in this collection, a strange presence is felt in a new build, weird things happen when a man destroys a bed that’s been in his family for generations, an architect explores the crypt and no good can come of that. 

To introduce Women’s Weird, Edmundson cites Mary Butts’ essay ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’: ‘A writer must, if only half-consciously, believe in what he is writing about. Details he can invent, and setting; terror and wonder he must have known and may have reflected on.’ Writing can be an opportunity to ask others—’is it just me who feels this way about reality?’—and to realise many others feel the same.

The stories in this collection unsettled me (and therefore worked for me) because they felt weirdly real; I too have felt that strange, dreamlike terror in the small hours of the morning when everyone else is sleeping. It’s a feeling, more than anything; we seldom pin down its source or perpetrator(s). True to life then, Women’s Weird prioritises subtlety and psychological terror over the explicit. What little is shown remains largely unknown, unfinished, uncertain. Edith Nesbit writes this to introduce her short story “The Shadow”: ‘You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are alike in these respects — no explanation, no logical coherence.’ Humans are hard-wired to hate uncertainty. We don’t like unanswerable questions, nor things we can’t control, like nature. We worry about what lingers in the darkness. We like our monsters to be predictable, and therefore beatable. Even modernity hasn’t killed uncertainty; there may no longer be bears and wolves that lurk in the woods in Britain and Ireland, but there may well be other things we don’t yet understand.

Many of our fears can be contextualised in a time and place. Some contend with personal experiences, trauma and mental health. Others are near-universal but taboo. In Women’s Weird, some of the stories deal with personal beliefs commonly held at the time, often beliefs in the occult or spirit realm. Edmundson tells us the author Margery Lawrence, for instance, ‘was a lifelong believer in Spiritualism and frequently connected to those who had passed to the “other side”. She wrote Ferry Over Jordan in 1944, her treatise on Spiritualism which included many of her own personal experiences making contact with loved ones—humans and pets!’

The aforementioned author Mary Butts was an occultist and studied under the infamous Aleister Crowley. ‘In her supernatural writing, she was also influenced by M.R. James, so perhaps she represents a good balance of “story” and “belief.” May Sinclair was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and used her supernatural fiction to work through her own ideas of the unexplained.’

Fears related to personal experience and trauma also feature prominently in this collection. Only as hauntings or monsters can some sorrow be expressed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, after the birth of her first child, was made to undergo a “rest-cure” for severe postpartum depression. ‘She wrote her most famous story “The Yellow Wall-paper,” as a response to that treatment and sent her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, a copy. In her 1913 essay “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’,” she ends by saying the story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” Her ghost stories definitely reflect her feminist views.’

Edmundson says: ‘…Much like dystopian fiction today, Weird fiction may outwardly be about unexplained supernatural or supernormal forces, but underneath it tells us something about our own “real” world that we must come to terms with. I don’t think our fears have changed too much.’

Awareness of what scares us—and the ability to reflect on these fears—is integral to writing Weird fiction and Horror in general. The fear of death, inevitable as it is, is a common concern for horror writers. Anne Rice, author of Interview with a Vampire, wrote that: ‘Vampires are the best metaphor for the human condition. Here you have a monster with a soul that's immortal, yet in a biological body. It's a metaphor for us, as it's very difficult to realise that we are going to die, and day to day we have to think and move as though we are immortal.’ Fear of loss, or our self-destructive tendencies, are other common fears we struggle to articulate in waking life. The bestselling author of horror Stephen King was abandoned by his father and suffered from alcoholism and addiction. His fears of abandonment and his own vices continue to haunt his fiction. 

Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House, knows how to write a psychologically terrifying story. In her lecture “How I write,” she wrote: ‘Now no one can get into writing a novel about a haunted house without hitting the subject of reality head-on; either I have to believe in ghosts, which I do, or I have to write another kind of novel altogether.’ She described finding a note written to herself with the words ‘oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora’, which she couldn’t remember writing, and this frightened her. ‘I began to think that maybe I had better get to work writing this book awake, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing in my sleep, and I got out the typewriter and went to work as though something was chasing me, which I kind of think something was.’ 

These stories are scary because, to paraphrase Robert Bresson, they ‘render the real more precise.’ Try as we may try to ignore the darkness, it’s still there. We may or may not have had strange visitations from ghosts and spirits, but we all know how weird and wonderful the world is, how terrifying it can feel to be alive, to feel powerless in difficult circumstances, to be alone in a dark room, to wake up from nightmares, to know our lives are finite, to face the void and uncertainty, to wonder who we are, to find ourselves changing from one day to the next, to have a consciousness and to feel at the mercy of our minds and bodies. And these fears are very real and persistent—writers of fiction dare not look away. 

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890-1940 edited by Melissa Edmundson, published by Handheld Press on 31 October 2019. Catch the book launch at the beautiful Soho bookshop The Second Shelf on 30 October.