SoulFire77's blog

The dumb supper is older than the version most people meet today, and its original purpose was almost the opposite. "Dumb" here means mute. In the British Isles and rural America, Halloween was once prime time for love divination, and the dumb supper was the most elaborate of those rituals -- a meal conducted in complete silence by young women hoping to glimpse the man they would marry. The folklorist Wayland D. Hand traced it back to an English...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent A reader named Katharine wrote to ask me two things. The first was whether I would go and see a fishing captain named Ellery Thompson, out of Stonington, Connecticut, a draggerman who paints. The second was whether I am a vampire. I will take them in order, and I will do a better job with the first, because the first has an answer. I went up to Stonington to find the captain, and found instead...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I was at the party where Sherwood Anderson swallowed the thing that killed him, and I did not see it happen, and neither did he. It was late February of 1941, on a ship at a New York pier, one of those bon-voyage affairs that were still permitted then, where the friends of the traveler come aboard before sailing and drink the traveler's health in the traveler's stateroom and up on the deck until...

"Invention... can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself." - Mary Shelley

Ray Bradbury kept two IBM Wheelwriters in the basement of a yellow house in Cheviot Hills. Around them were masks, tin robots, dinosaur models, Disney cels, comic strips signed for him in the 1940s, before he was anyone the cartoonists had heard of, a model of the Nautilus built for him by Disney Imagineers, a small wooden desk he had used in the forties and kept after he stopped using it, thirty-one filing cabinets, and about four thousand...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In the fall of 1968 I set out to interview Wilma Dykeman, and the animals of the mountains would not let me arrive. She was the reason for the trip and I should say who she was, because she has never been as famous as the country she wrote about deserved. Thirteen years before, she had published The French Broad , a book that took a river and its whole watershed and the people strung along it and...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent There were forty-four speeches in that room on the Fourth of July, 1873, and a man killed every one of them with a single sentence, and I was there to watch it done. I was also, I should say at the front, carrying the forty-fourth. The occasion was the Independence Day dinner of the Americans in London, held that year with the full pomp the exiled patriot brings to the business of missing home. I...

I receive more positive feedback about The Less Miserables than any of my other work... and nothing makes me happier. I love these stories, and I thought that all of you might want a "heads up" about the approaching end of the series. The next story is called "The Less Miserables Find a Way". I think this is the point of the entire series: finding a way . The lessons behind each story are principles of self-mastery. Hopefully, anyone who reads...

The paperback of Son of September is here — two hundred and six pages, a spine with the title on it, for those of you who told me you wait for paper. UK: https://amzn.eu/d/03ZpHOjs US: https://a.co/d/09rLIwhJ The Kindle edition follows on September 1st. Pre-order that version if you prefer. There's an acknowledgements page in the back, and you're on it. It thanks the readers and editors of ABCtales, who have read me for years and made room for...

After a long time in the drawer, my novel Son of September is out. It's available now on Amazon for Kindle, with a paperback to follow. The summer of 1991, two foster children in South Florida start hearing a voice through equipment that should be dead. It tells them what's coming, and the day it arrives, and that they're the only two placed to stop it. What follows is nine years of getting them ready — and the slow question of who they become...