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THE FRACTURED MIRROR: November Remembers
By EDWARD KARSHNER This was supposed to be a Halloween column about pumpkin spice, witches, and ghosts. Folklore teaches that life is unpredictable and we must learn to pivot when confronted by the unimaginable, like hurricanes in the mountains or a vile creature returning from the past “nursing a hard grievance” toward the drēam (Old…
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The Fractured Mirror: Fishing for Metaphors
By Edward Karshner Maybe it was the forty-eight days without sunshine in Northeast Ohio, but I woke up fitful that morning questioning those stories we tell ourselves about the act of love. That was just the intellectual puzzle I needed to pull myself out of my “bleak mid-winter.” When I was younger, my dad tried…
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The Fractured Mirror: Taking Your Half with You
By Edward Karshner During my 2022 summer fellowship at Berea College Special Collections and Archives, I nerded out over many variants of familiar folktales. I love the idea that stories and traditions continue to evolve, grow, change. One story, however, was new to me. It has haunted me ever since I read it. It’s a…
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The Fractured Mirror – The Fabulous Fiction of Folklore: A Conversation with Icy Sedgwick
By Edward Karshner Icy Sedgwick is a blogger and host of the Fabulous Folklore Podcast which explores a range of folklore and mythology including its appearance in art and film. She is working on a PhD about haunted house films. When research gets tiresome, she writes dark fantasy and gothic horror fiction. You are the…
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The Fractured Mirror: Tell Me the Biggest One You Know
By Edward Karshner My day job is researching the intersection of time and folklore. I study how stories reveal an understanding of ourselves in time. Do we flounder in, what David Southwell calls, “the warped gravity” of nostalgia? Or do we founder under the crushing weight of fatalism? In folktales, I’m always looking for a…
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The Fractured Mirror: Winter Solstice, Christmas, and the Axes of Time
By Edward Karshner In the volumes written about the folklore of Christmas, what gets lost is that Christmas, like its cousin winter solstice holidays, is about the restructuring of time. We never really stop to consider that time, like folklore itself, is a construct orienting us to a world that seems, in the words of…
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Dinè Storyteller
A Conversation with Sunny Dooley By Edward Karshner I met Sunny Dooley toward the end of my time working in the Pine Springs Community, on the Navajo Nation. I had spent nearly ten years learning about the inner workings of Dinè folk-metaphysics and culture. With Sunny, however, I learned about the power of story. And…
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The Fractured Mirror
Results will Vary: The Disruptive Necessity of Story by Edward Karshner Folklore is the rawest, most subversive type of literature. It adheres to no genre. It belongs to the people, the folk, not institutions or mass media conglomerates. As David Southwell writes “any folk culture that could not be regarded as heretical is short-changing the…
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The Fractured Mirror: The Tree and the Well at the Center of Folklore
by Edward Karshner My daughter, Alex, was five years old when I took her home for the first time. Home meaning the homeplace, a narrow road through a hollow called Spud Run. My origin place, settled by my great-grandparents, who I know only through stories. As we drove through the hills and hollows of southeastern…