I attended Captivating Criminality 6 on the coast of the Adriatic. Pescara was once an Olympic venue. Pier Paolo Passolini passed there on his coastal roadtrip. It was very hot and surprisingly humid, so you can imagine how enervated I was (melting! melting!). Though I knew co-host Fiona Peters, I met folks I’ve known online…
Tag: academic writing
Tove in Tokyo
I have been invited by the Finnish Institute of Japan to give a keynote lecture…
Charms Conference #FolkloreThursday
Sneaking into the last few hours of #FolkloreThursday and finally sharing a bit about the Charms Conference I went to last month at Harvard. It was great: even better, there’s a proposed proceedings volume in the works so you may be able to share some of the exciting things I heard and saw that weekend….
Out Now: Tarot in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
My essay “The Unlikely Milliner & The Magician of Threadneedle-Street” has been published in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature. Click the 1st link to read a free PDF; click the 2nd to find information on ordering the issue (you can get it through your library, too). There’s a…
My Schedule @Worldcon75
WorldCon in Helsinki is coming up shockingly soon. Hope to see you there. I’m unlikely to have much time to post while I’m there, but I’m sure to be tweeting. I hope to meet up with a lot of friends I’ve not seen in a while (relatives, too!). My schedule is conveniently grouped for single…
The Great Grey Beast
‘The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter. He didn’t think much of his chances…’ It’s rare that those words do not pop…
Happy ‘No’ Year
Happy New Year! I plan to make this the year of ‘no’: it’s not as negative as it sounds. For many years I have said ‘yes’ to far too many things. I am always hungry for experiences. And I generally only do things I actually want to do (I’ve become much better at not doing…
Why Women Witches?
Over at my History Witch column, I explain something that I’ve come to call ‘The Great Conflation’ or what Michael D. Bailey theorised about how a Dominican theologian might have inadvertently changed history, leading to the specific gendered nature of the witch hunts of the Early Modern era and the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Of…
K. A. Laity 