I will be speaking in Bloomington, Indiana on February 28 at 5:30 at the Bishop Bar and then again the next day at the black metal conference/festival in the same town.
I will post other speaking dates as they’re scheduled, mostly around the midatlantic and the midwest for now.
The tabletop roleplaying game I’ve been working on for ten years, Penumbra City, is now being shipped to the Kickstarter backers and regular orders are open.
This week’s post is one of my favorite things I’ve written in a long time, because it’s something I’ve never known how to write, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years.
Every morning I walk my property with my dog while he traces the invisible paths of the deer and the turkeys and the rarer things. He runs this way and that, leading me to everywhere everything slept on the land the night before. He finds me turtles and bones while I hold onto the leash and slowly train him not to pull.
Lately I’ve tried something new and taken him out at night as well. He has more energy than god, and I’m afraid of inertia, I’m afraid of my bones settling into place for good sooner than they ought, so a second walk is good for us both. But I work until sundown and then eat dinner at twilight, so the second walk is under the stars or the moon.
It’s a different world at night, as everyone knows. The second world, maybe the otherworld. Oddly, where I live, I’m less alone at night. The ridge behind my house is just forest in the day, but at night I can see the house up there. Another neighbor down the hill, daytime I only know her by the woodsmoke, but at night her windows glow soft red. In the day the animals are quiet except for the birds. An hour after sunset, everything is alive in the moonlight, screaming their heads off.
The concepts of the wild and of magic used to be inseparable in my mind, but as climate change looms and the ecosystems of the world collapse into ruin, as insect populations plummet and everything grows rarer, I find myself longing all the harder for magic, raw magic, for the hidden realm beyond this material world.
I remember the first time I heard a deer bark. It made no sense, and I had to check youtube to confirm what I’d heard. I remember the first time I heard a fox cry out, and simply put there is no more terrifying sound. I remember the first time I heard holler dogs: the barking of dogs half a mile down the fold between the mountains.
Tonight I heard coyotes, and I remembered why my neighbor has a glock on his hip every time I see him. Coyotes around here lure domesticated dogs to their death, like sirens and mermaids and the will o the wisp. There’s a lot of folklore in this world about creatures that lure you into the woods or water to eat you. For dogs, it’s true. Or so they tell me around here, and I’m glad for the tall fence I put up for Rintrah.
Tonight I heard coyotes and soon after I heard a fox, setting the holler dogs off to barking. My dog is a holler dog to most of my neighbors, since his deep bark echoes from the hills and he loves to scare away birds and airplanes and cars passing on the halfway-distant road. Try as he might, he didn’t scare that fox tonight, and it screamed right back, wherever it was in the hills.
Later on the walk, he alerted to something across the road, something on the neighboring hill. Nothing I could see by moonlight, nothing I could see by flashlight. “Stop that, you’re doing me a scared,” I told him, because I’m a millennial and I talk like that when there’s no one but a dog around to hear.
We walked further through the woods, parallel to the road, and there on the hill across from me, where there is no house, there were two lights. I’ve seen them before, up in the graveyard.
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