Welcome to Fairyland!
Welcome to the official Substack for I Might Believe in Faeries! If you are familiar with my podcast of the same name, then you will enjoy this as well. I wanted to have a place to write down my elusive and erratic thoughts on myth, folklore, and fantasy all filtered through a Catholic lens.
I have four kids, one of whom is a newborn, so I will try to write when I can get a spare moment. As with my podcast, I will cover a wide variety of topics such as major themes in fantastical and speculative fiction, mythology, and Scripture. Given my background in entomology, I will incorporate insect folklore into this project as well. Authors such as Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty, Poul Anderson, Manly Wade Wellman, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis will feature on here. Maybe I will have guest posts as well. The sky is the limit!
There should probably be an “About Me” section. As I am nearly hopeless with technology, I have not figured out how to create one. Maybe I will someday. Anyway, here is an abbreviated “About Me” section: I grew up in and still live in Minnesota. I have an accent that gets worse when I talk to other Minnesotans with thicker, “you betcha” accents. It’s almost like a defense mechanism. I work with farmers as part of my day job, so this happens quite often.
My wife, Rachel, and I have known each other for nearly our entire lives. She was my first kiss at 6 years old in Mrs. Melbo’s kindergarten class. We attended elementary school, middle school, high school, and college together, but we didn’t start dating until Junior year of college. Now, we’re married and have four kids with no signs of slowing down.
Jim Gaffigan once said “You know what it's like having five kids? Imagine you're drowning. And someone hands you a baby.” We’re not at five yet, but the water is getting pretty dang high. It often feels like we’re wading through chest high floodwaters during a tornado while we’re trying to calmly teach wild animals to read.
I have a bachelor’s degree in ecology and a master’s degree in entomology. I really like the Order Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants) as well as the Lepidoptera (moths, butterflies) and Coleoptera (beetles). Yes, that does mean that I am a “Master of Insects” and I would like to be referred to as such! FYI: Bees are fuzzy, chunky, and herbivorous; wasps are sleek, angry, and carnivorous.
Rachel and I both attended a Catholic elementary school, but my parents were not particularly devout. My mom came from a Lutheran family and my dad was raised in a Catholic one. As anyone who knows anything about Catholic education and mixed religious families, my falling away from the faith would not be surprising to them. I have my own share of the blame. Stubbornness mixed with pride is a potent drug. My return to the Catholic Church was in large part due to my wife and her family (praise God) and my imagination being formed by some fantasy/speculative fiction I read before coming back. I will write more on that topic later.
That’s pretty much all I’d like to say at this point. There is more to come in the future. Paid subscriber content will be available at some point as well.
Fairyland is perilous so take this with you:
But not with Goth physics' time.
Arron
I've finished listening to you and you wife read the Nican Mopohua, and enjoyed it very much. I'm going to recommend it to my son's family in Kansas. But I couldn’t leave a comment on that page so I had to came back to this one. And, seeing the text about Odonata and my novel, I realized that I should let you know that the heroine of a "Tale of Two Times", Rhoda Knox, not only has an in with dragonflies, but she speaks Nahuatl, and she and her betrothed spontaneously compose a war lament in Nahuatl. Rhoda's mother is a mestiza whose ancestry goes back to Aztec and Spanish royalty. And more than that, Rhoda has a special devotion to Juan Diego and has a first class relic of him. Her family tradition says that as a youth Juan Diego was present at the bloody dedication of the Temple of Tenochtitlan. In fact, that event gets into the story. These are more great reasons to get into "A Tale of Two Times", but I must warn you it is a saga (980,000 words) of a half dozen intertwined story lines and it does things with the intertwined times of the cosmos and the gods, (I’m afraid Tim Powers doesn’t have the time thing right.) which it takes Goth physics, explained along the way for geeky readers, to fully understand. Two and a half volumes remain for my editor (my wife) to finish. And, then, the ninth and final volume, "War in Heaven", in which the Odonata stand forth, will be published next year in time for the Presidential election.
JBSP