Hello friends! Today I’m sharing a little clip from last week’s Cave of Dreams workshop session, the Gates of Winter. It’s a guided visualization based on supernatural ballads and stories in which human beings enter the otherworld and interact with the beings there, such as fairies or elves. For context, at the start of the clip you’ll see that before this visualization we were singing the ballad Tam Lin together. In many fairy and elf narratives, it’s clear that poetry and music and other...

This week I had the pleasure of catching up with my friend Daniel Allison in a podcast episode that will appear both on my podcast, Fair Folk (check it out if you haven’t!) and Daniel’s, House of Legends. You can also listen right here. The episode opens with Daniel telling the story of the god Lugh (after whom Lughnasadh is named) at the hall of the king Nuada, leading us into a discussion of how we might approach Lughnasadh folklore and mythology now. Next, we share what each of us has been...

Hello friend, I'm here today to wish you a beautiful solstice time, whenever it is you celebrate that in this week or so of ultimate daylight and shortest night. I'm about to present at a festival called Cascadian Midsummer that's held outside of Olympia, and as I was reading the booklet for the festival that was created by my friend's publishing house called Hyldr, I came across a goosebumps-inducing piece inside written by Ilana Hamilton, a storyteller who lives in Portland, Oregon. Ilana...

Welcome to my Substack, immigration makes me feel like a mammal, & where to find me this summer. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit enthusiastica.substack.com/subscribe