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EdKarshner 🫈

@edkarshner.bsky.social

Homesick Hillican. Writer. Weird and dark folklore aficionado. Professor of English & Department Head of English and Media Arts at Robert Morris University.

231 Posts805 Follower641 Folgt
EdKarshner 🫈@edkarshner.bsky.social · 3d ago

Yesterday, I made a research trip to Braxton County West VA. The Flatwoods Monster Museum was amazing. The WVa Bigfoot Museum has an exquisite collection of Boggy Creek memorabilia. The jewel was the town of Sutton, a @hookland.bsky.social town where the land asserts itself & refuses to be ignored.

Braxton County West Virginia mural feature the Flatwoods Monster and Bigfoot.Flatwoods Monster Museum display case with depictions showing the evolution of the monster over time and telling. A display of movie memorabilia from the cult classic docu-drama The Legend of Boggy Creek. A burned out bank whose interior, including the vault, is slowly reclaimed by the hills and woods.
The Swamp Wytch@theswampwytch.bsky.social · 5d ago

Southern tradition holds that inner corn husks from the first harvest are saved to craft usually faceless dolls. Ritually, these "First Shuck" figures become vessels - bound with intention to guard the hearth, store seasonal virtue, and anchor home protection through the winter. #FolkWitchFriday

A handcrafted traditional corn husk doll made of dried, folded tan corn shucks, featuring a blank, faceless head, an apron skirt, and dried flower details. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_husk_doll#/media/File:Corn_husk_doll.jpgA page from Foxfire 3 featuring a vintage black-and-white photograph of a finished cornshuck doll wearing a layered skirt and bonnet, holding a small miniature bucket made from a plastic cap. Below the image, printed text details instructions for adding accessories like buckets, flowers, and tiny brooms.A page from Foxfire 3 featuring two vintage black-and-white photographs showing hands step-by-step assembling a cornshuck doll. The top image shows folded shucks being shaped into the doll's body, and the bottom image shows sleeves being wrapped around the arms near a spool of thread, accompanied by instructional text below.
Malarkey@malarkeybooks.bsky.social · 2w ago

We coat every page of our books with a patented clear resin, harmless in low levels, that activates when a page is digitally scanned, releasing a generational curse on anyone who is using our books to train LLMs. Fear not, scholars and librarians have access to non-cursed editions.

EdKarshner 🫈@edkarshner.bsky.social · 4w ago

Huge congratulations to @cultauthor.bsky.social on this delicious collection of @hookland.bsky.social fragments. I had the great honor of writing the forward. You don't want to miss this!!!! David, so very pleased for you. Well done!

hookland.bsky.social@hookland.bsky.social · 4w ago

As promised to link to my first actual Hookland book. It is only small, but covers a lot of the ghost soil. If enough of you buy it and like it there will be a Volume Two. www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1068598123 It will also be available in an actual bookshop soon.

The coverplate of the book HOOKLAND FRAGMENTS VOLUME ONE by David Southwell featuring a picture of the Ghost Bear of Hookland by Maria Strutz and the following blurb: I firmly believe David Southwell’s Hookland to be one of the great imaginative achievements of our age. One that will one day be spoken of the way Lovecraft’s Mythos is now. Hookland is the folklore of the county that exists on the edge of our vision, an unseen but sensed Britain that is at once familiar and strange. It is the land just to the left of where we live. David’s work is made even more remarkable by his open invitation for all to come and play there. Though of course visitors to Hookland must be wary, the county exacts its price from us all. – R.J. Barker, award-winning author of bestsellers such as The Bone Ships and Gods of Wyrdwood. As a visitor I am more frequently in Hookland than the barrows and chalk downs of my childhood. – Roger Clarke, best-selling author of A Natural History of Ghosts. Hookland is gold standard eldritch world building. – Ian Simmons, Fortean Times news editor. This a shimmering place of deep time, cold wars, old gods and ever renewing mysteries.The heartland and home county of the restless and the outsider, a lamp glow to welcome the lost, a pole star for those who dare to step into the dark and follow its glorious glowing ghostlight. – Rose Ruane. Artist and writer of Birding and This Is Yesterday. Hookland has been called many things. Psychic shrapnel embedded in place. A re-wilding of folklore. The English Eerie told in strange fragments. According to its creator David Southwell, nothing in Hookland is made up, just remembered differently. Hookland Fragments Volume One offers both an introduction to Hookland and an exploration of its agenda of re-enchantment as resistance.
EdKarshner 🫈@edkarshner.bsky.social · 4w ago

This is something the reductionist totally miss...the Appalachian dad's affinity for international music. My dad had a vast collection of Peruvian Pan flute music. There was nothing better than hearing it blasting from the garage as he sharpened a lawnmower blade.

KG Hutchins@songsforhorses.com · 4w ago

Egypt is doing it for my dad who played this song on cassette in the car every day on our 5am commute from one small town in Appalachia to another small town in Appalachia for like 10 years straight: youtu.be/2kwKP_Myg6M?...

@cultauthor.bsky.social · last mo.

There is a similarity between those pisspuffins that say ancient aliens taught man how to make fire and those AI lickspittles who claim LLMs can do things we can’t. Both groups erase humanity’s ingenuity, ability to learn and agency. A pox upon them all.

Alice Wickenden@awickenden.bsky.social · last mo.

I agree with all the takes about an attack on the humanities being an attack on critical thinking, &c. It’s also about joy, though. ‘Why bother studying that’ is always also a sneer at — why do you think you should get to do something you enjoy? Grow up and be miserable all the time!

EdKarshner 🫈@edkarshner.bsky.social · last mo.

I'm more than excited to get to represent Dutch Creek Winery for Ohio Brew Week. I'm going to look at how Appalachian Storytelling took Mothman from a "winged weirdo" to our monster. It's going to be fun! (And there's mead!)

Mothman and Mead Sunday July 12th 2-3pm at Dutch Creek Winery.Mary Hyre newspaper clipping from original Mothman flapJohn Keel display at The Mothman Museum Shiney Hiney!
Reckon Review@reckonreview.bsky.social · last mo.

We have new fiction for you today from Curtis C. Morgan. Morgan spent four years operating a commercial beekeeping farm in Bradford County, PA, before a 40-year career in IT contracting took him across four continents. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia.

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EdKarshner 🫈@edkarshner.bsky.social · last mo.

In a few weeks, I'm giving a talk in Athens Ohio on the evolution of Mothman in place and story. It's at a winery. Not my usual venue. I was feeling skeptical. Then, I went to Dutch Creek Winery over the weekend... it's making sense now.

A Mothman poster A Mothman figure over the restroom door Mothman figure lurking in the woods Me with Mothman over my shoulder
EdKarshner 🫈@edkarshner.bsky.social · last mo.

Yesterday I turned an academic meeting at the Pitt Archives into some archival voyeurism with this beauty. Dad and I used watch The Devil Rides Out when it was in rotation on Night Owl Theater in the late 70s. Funny how grief finds it's expression in the weirdest flashes of time and place.

The sign for University of Pittsburgh's Archives and Special Collections. The title page for the script The Devil Rides Out. Pitt's Horror Studies display case.