We’re donating 10% of everything we make from this launch to the ACLU of Minnesota and the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund. Because community is everything and free speech is our constitutional right.

Also, defund ICE. 

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:

We finally did it. 

We’ve created a brand-new course about MYTHOLOGY.

Myth is, of course, one of the big three folk narrative categories, along with legends and fairy tales, and it’s real bedrock-of-society stuff. 

It’s taken us since 2018 (?!) to circle back to this topic, and we’ll tell you more about why that is later this week. But in the meantime, here’s our pitch:

The story of the world has never been simple.

(If you’ve been around Carterhaugh for a while, you know our tagline is basically “it’s complicated.”)

But we do know that we tell stories to try to make sense of it all – why we’re here, how love works, what happens after we die. And no matter where we go in the world, we find the same thing:

Myths. Mysterious, strange, sacred.

Not because they offer tidy answers, but because they hold our most important questions.

Where does love come from?

Why do we fear the dark?

What makes us human?

Some say all myths boil down to one universal tale.

We say: not even close.

Welcome to Ravens in the Labyrinth: World Mythology as Folklore!

4 weeks. 20 daily lessons. 20+ myths. 4 live gatherings. 2 folklorists. 1 magical community. And you.

Will you join us in the labyrinth? Click here now!

More soon!

P.S. Early bird pricing will run through this Friday, January 30th, until midnight ET, so if you want our best price, tap this link and enroll before then!

The post Ravens in the Labyrinth is OPEN! appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

We’ve also been told by some of our wonderful librarians in the community that you should be able to watch through your local library’s Hoopla binge pass for the Great Courses and possibly through Kanopy. Please ask your friendly local librarian to help you find it if you go this route!

If you want to learn more about what urban legends are (and what they aren’t), cryptids, foodways, aliens vs fairies, ghosts like the vanishing hitchhiker, conspiracy theories, exploding toilers (we can’t make this stuff up), and so much more, we hope you’ll check it out right here.

We’ll have a lot more to say about this series soon but…

2) Sara is down with an unbelievably vicious bout of bronchitis that will not quit (you may recall that last year, Sara came down with CROUP despite being, you know, over the age of 5 – respiratory illnesses are not her friend), and Brittany is holding everything together with her teeth solo. Thank you in advance for your patience if response times on emails are a bit slow. We’re going to be in triage mode until Sara is back on her feet.

That’s all for now, and we hope you love the series – if you do, please leave a review, it helps so much!

P.S. The set the Great Courses built for the urban legends series is AMAZING. So many little Nessie Easter eggs and such a vibe. Mad props to them for making it look so perfectly atmospheric and on-theme.

The post Our Urban Legends Series is LIVE! appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

You step into a room carved from story — wood-paneled walls whispering secrets, shelves groaning under the weight of half-forgotten legends, sunlight pooling in dusty corners.

The air is thick with magic and memory.

Books are everywhere. Stacked neatly on shelves, piled into towers on the floor, perching precariously on desks.

You reach for a soft blue book. Silver-gilt letters shimmer across the cover:

Fairylore.

You open the pages — and something opens in you.

Ready to get your library card?

Introducing The Carterhaugh School Fairylore Library — a living, growing archive of everything you wish you’d learned about fairies, from people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about.

This isn’t a vibes-only aesthetic.

It’s a curated, scholarly, delightfully irreverent collection of stories, lectures, resources, and lore from all over the world — designed for the deeply curious and the enchantment-hungry.

You’ll find:

• The terrifying truth about Irish fairies (yes, we start with the scary ones)
• The perils of goblin fruit and Victorian poetry
• A breakdown of why Dorian Gray is actually (secretly) about fairies
• Fairy ballads, grimoire pages, and your very own customizable library card
• TWO brand-new LIVE lectures in August!

This is the kind of deep nerdy joy that makes your inner lit major cry sparkly tears.

And the best part?

The library is alive. It’s only going to grow — more videos, more insights, more doors into the realm. And if you join now, you get lifetime access to everything we add!

Click here to join us in the library!

And please reach out if you have any questions!

P.S. Early bird pricing is available until Wednesday, 7/16 at midnight!

The post The Fairylore Library is OPEN! appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

Apparently, we woke up feeling feisty and slightly polemical. So let’s get into it, complete with our own tales of rejection, woe, and burning nasty correspondence while dancing around a bonfire.

We’ve been teaching writing for a long time now, both here at Carterhaugh and when we were university instructors. We also exist on the internet, where writers have been known to dwell. 

By dwell, we do mean “post pictures of their laptops and notebooks strategically positioned next to an artful chai in an effort to avoid actually writing.”

(To be clear, hi, it’s us. See: the first 15 minutes of literally any time we were writing/ not writing our dissertations.)

And here’s what we’ve noticed:

Writers are often, in the immortal words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, sensitive plants. This can be a super power – the ability to observe, feel, and take in the world around you is real good fodder for making art.

But it also can be their downfall.

A single rejection can cause a tailspin or unleash a tsunami of “NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MEEEEEE! I WILL NEVER BE APPRECIATED IN MY TIME.”

(Again, hi. Brittany once ran away crying IN THE STREET over a revise-and-resubmit. Sara left an entire beautiful plate of sushi untouched over one of her first form rejections.)

(Maybe the moral of this story is actually that we shouldn’t check our email while we’re out with friends? Something to contemplate )

Here’s the honest-to-god truth: writing is subjective as hell.

There is no poem, no novel, no essay, no NOTHING that everyone is going to think is the sh%t. 

You cannot please everyone with your writing. It will never, ever, ever happen.

So you might as well please yourself.

And here’s the secret:

The most successful, prolific writers we know? They write, and they write what delights them.

They adjust what “success” means to them, removing it from things that they can’t control (like publication and awards) to things they can.

Did you write today?

Did you enjoy writing? Is there something about what you made that you love or find satisfying? Did you learn something from the day’s efforts? 

Then ta da: SUCCESS.

We’re not saying this to be Pollyannas or because getting published isn’t nice. We’re ambitious AF, and we’ve racked up almost 200 publications at this point.

No, we’re saying this because 1) it’s true and 2) it’s WAY more motivating. You will write more if, in your brain, taking time to write what you love = success. (And you’ll probably publish more too because you’re making more art, art that’s true to you and your perspective.)

We still don’t love rejections, but we’ve found ways to roll with it.

One time, when we got a REALLY nasty rejection letter that well and truly got under our skin, we built a bonfire in Sara’s backyard and ritually burned it while dancing around to Gothic metal.

Usually, it doesn’t take a whole bonfire anymore. We can just laughingly say, “huh, it’s really sad that they have such terrible taste,” resubmit, and keep writing new stuff.

This has served us well. Last week, one of our favorite poems that we’ve ever co-written was accepted.

It had been rejected 10 times!

But you know what? It completely delights us. We freaking love that poem. Every time we look at it, it makes us smile. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what matters most about the art you make?

Enrollment in the Carterhaugh Writers Society is open again, and we’re so excited to write with everyone throughout the month of June!

If you want to get more words on the page, hear us wax poetical about redefining success, and join a fabulous and supportive community, you can sign up here.

The post If You’re Writing, You’re Not Failing appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

Wildly. Obsessively. Hopefully.

And it’s finally ready to share with you.

Let us set the scene: 

Once upon a time, a king told a girl to spin a roomful of straw into gold. She looked at him and said “Are you crazy? I’m a miller’s daughter, not a magician. You’ve got the wrong girl.”

In another kingdom, another girl looked up at the glass mountain before her and then down at the iron shoes on her feet. She wondered if she’d ever get to the top.

And over the sea, another girl stared at the thousands of lentils scattered across the dirt and knew she could never gather them up alone.

How do you complete an impossible task? How do you get into the palace, carry water in a sieve, or catch the moon?

How do you make magic when all you have is straw and despair?

You turn to folklore, stories, and art. You turn to each other.

You practice hope.

And then you make some goddamn magic.

Welcome to HopeLore, a restorative and empowering four-week course that uses folklore, art, and psychology to help you cultivate tools for resilience, hope, and joy while living in an uncertain world.

You deserve to re-fill your well. You deserve sanity and kindness, confidence and joy. Ways to feel stable and powerful, even when everything feels heavy. Laughter and delight, which are criminally underrated but absolutely vital.

Stories have power. Folklore has power.

We have power.

Sometimes, it’s hard to remember this and even harder to really believe it. If you don’t see it already, HopeLore will help you remember.

The stories and questions we’ll explore together point to possibilities and strategies. They show us tricksters and boldness, heartbreak and wild imagination. Imagination that can help us recover, recharge, and take action, together. They show us how tiny steps are what hope is made of.

If you’ve been feeling burned out, overwhelmed, and like your spark is being doused with a firehose…

If you’re struggling to tend to your own needs…

If you want to feel resilient, creative, and powerful, all by unlocking the power of folklore, art, and community…

HopeLore is for you.

We’ll have lots more to say about HopeLore in the coming weeks, and you can get all the details (dates and time, payment plans, bonuses) here.

But we do want you to know that early bird pricing is available until this Friday, March 28th.

If you have any questions, shoot us an email – we’d be happy to help!

We’ve put our hearts and souls into this, and we can’t wait to share it with you!

The post HopeLore is Open!! appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

It’s called Find Your Fairy Tale, it’s SUPER bite-sized, all about taking control of your own story, and (for about a week) it’s only $7.

The thing is, we really wanted it to be fabulous, and we may have gotten a little carried away? (See: the 40 page PDF workbook we made to go with it )

This means it all took a little longer, which means it’s almost Valentine’s Day.

And we also have an extremely seasonally specific Valentine’s Day mini course, complete with fairy-tale weddings (yikes!), lore about the holiday (yay!), and more.

We usually don’t open enrollment to multiple programs at the same time, unless they’re part of a bundle…

But screw it. Everyone deserves a pick-me-up this week if they want it.

So. We’re doing it. Until next Monday, February 17th, both mini courses are on super sale.

Find Your Fairy Tale is $7 (yes, $7!!)

Happily Ever After?: Valentine’s Day Lore, Fairy Tales, and Fairy-Tale Weddings is $47.

After Monday, the price for Find your Fairy Tale is going up, and Happily Ever After is going back in the vault.

Here’s a quick overview on both courses.

Find Your Fairy Tale –

Tell your story. Live your magic.

Stories are powerful, and the stories we tell ourselves are perhaps the most powerful of them all. Fairy tales, with their endless variety and flexibility, can be the scaffolding, the metaphor that holds all the twists and turns of your journey.

Welcome to Find Your Fairy Tale, a bite-sized mini course made to help you connect genuinely with the world of fairy tales and tap into the personal stories that underpin your life – so that you can harness their power or even start to change them. We guarantee academic excellence, dedication to whimsy, and an avenue right into a real sense of everyday enchantment.

Learn more or join us right here.

+

Happily Ever After?: Valentine’s Day Lore, Fairy Tales, and Fairy-Tale Weddings –

In our enthusiasm, we’ve packed a truly absurd amount of material into this mini course. We’ll be talking about the legends and superstitions that inspired the holiday, including some really lovely lore about birds. We’ll guide you through some seriously demented fairy-tale weddings and then discuss how the murder and mayhem gradually gave way to the idea of “fairy-tale romance.” And we’ll talk about what romantic relationships actually look like in fairy tales – the good, the bad, and the… liminal?

Above all, we want to re-establish Valentine’s Day as a holiday of kindness and love – not just romantic love, but all kinds of love. For our friends, family, creativity, animals, and the world writ large.

Learn more or join us right here.

Questions? Click here to shoot us an email! We hope these mini courses give you a bit of a lift this week <3

The post Not One, But TWO Pick-Me-Ups For This Week! appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

Final number raised for the ACLU from Fairy-Tale Heroines enrollments: $1850.40.

We sent them the donation yesterday. 

THANK YOU, every single person who enrolled or spread the word! And thank you for all the things you do every day to make a difference in the world

Today, we wanted to take a quick pause and check in with you.

We have a LOT of ideas for what’s coming next at Carterhaugh. As always, we’re only ever going to create things that we’re 1000% confident that we can deliver with real expertise, but we also really value hearing what you’re hoping to see next.

Several of the courses we’ve taught over the years were concepts that students (i.e. YOU) asked for.

The Wine Dark Sea: Folklore of the Ocean? Student suggestion. A big course on myth? Ditto.

So we’re going to take a minute to tell you what we’ve got on the backburner, and invite you to tell us what you’re most excited about, plus a chance to email us any dream topics you’d like us to consider.

Here’s what’s simmering in our cauldron, in various stages of completion:

• A $7 mini course is dropping in the next few days. It’s super bite-sized and all about helping you find the fairy tale that resonates most personally. 
• There’s a very, very good chance that our next big course is going to be on the folklore of hope. Think a mix of cozy and fierce stories, a good dollop of Rebecca Solnit, action items as quests, lots of community and fellowship. If you loved Rapunzel’s Circle: Folklore and Resistance, we think you’ll love this, too.
• Another round of the Carterhaugh Writers’ Society
• Dark Academia: Fairies. Or maybe Dark Academia: Breaking the Rules. We have LOTS of ideas for these.
• A talk on murder ballads. Because murder ballads.
• Opening up the Fairylore Library again – this is definitely happening, date TBR depending on some coordination with some very special guests!
• A course like Enchant (i.e. the magic of everyday life through folklore and fairy tales) but, like, if Disney villains were putting it together. Very empowerment, very villain-era energy. 

We have more (you don’t even want to see our planning document for 2025, it’s exploding with ideas), but now we sincerely want to hear from you.

Will you email us (or reply to this post) and tell us what you’d love to see most from us, either from this list or something from your own, beautiful head?

We will read every single response.

Finally, because this week has been A LOT and it’s only Tuesday, we wanted to share the Folklore and Resistance roundtable that we put together back in 2022.

It’s still relevant: the tagline is “how folklore can help us find meaning, resist helplessness, and take action.” If you want to hear Terri Windling talk to you in a soothing and powerful manner about making the soup, plus insights from a bunch of folkloric superstars, you can check it out for free right here.

Can’t wait to hear from you!

The post What’s Next? appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

2. Spend some time in nature, even if it’s just a 5 minute walk around your neighborhood or staring determinedly out your window at a really nice tree. Hell, plant a tree for $1 if you feel like it.

3. Be intentional AF about what news you consume. For us, at this point, that basically means Heather Cox Richardson and Rebecca Solnit. 

4. Reach out to someone with kindness. Send a text to your bestie. Bring your neighbor some cookies.

5. Be kind to yourself, too.

Meanwhile for Reasons (*gestures at national stage*), we’ve put the self-guided version of our Fairy-Tale Heroines course on sale for the next two weeks, and we’re donating 15% of all enrollments to the ACLU, an organization that exists to promote and defend immigrant rights, trans justice, reproductive freedom.

Honestly, we just don’t have it in us to talk it up today – we’ll share more about it later this week – but we do want to mention that in it we explore tales from India, Venezuela, England, the Philippines, Nigeria, Japan, and Iraq, as well as indigenous stories from the US. Plus many, many more. 

These are incredible stories of courage, kindness, and wonder. And they’re about heroines from all over the world winning respect, recognition, and their own happily ever after.

If a course is out of your reach right now, you can catch the recording of our Be Your Own Fairy-Tale Heroine workshop that we ran last week, for free, by signing up right here. You’ll immediately get access to the curriculum page, where the recording is up along with a few other goodies.

We hope it brings a little bit of sparkle to you.

The post What Can We Even Say? appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

If you need a cozy yet slightly sinister pick-me-up, a quick reminder that enrollment for our winter mini course Kindling a Light in the Darkness: Winter Fairy Tales and Folklore ends TODAY, January 1st at midnight ET!

It’s short, sweet, and was actually first developed as an antidote to the January doldrums. If you’re feeling under the weather, this really is the perfect thing to watch on the couch to cheer you up. 

You’ll get access to everything immediately upon signing up, and we guarantee access to the course for at least a full calendar year, so you can binge or savor as you prefer.

It also makes an excellent gift!

What’s in it?

• Six video recordings
• A list of further readings
• A murderous fashionista cat
• A seasonal Welsh folkloric rap battle involving a festive horse skull on a stick
• Our favorite wintry fairy tales
• Hygge coziness
• Icelandic snow terrors
• MORE.

Questions? Shoot us an email. Want the mini course? Get it here.

Happy New Year! Sending light, cheese, and cat monsters to you and your loved ones.

The post Need a January Pick-Me-Up? appeared first on The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

How about an exploration of the Gothic or Dark Academia or witches in folklore?

Choose any individual course a la cart from the Halloween offerings… or grab the bundle of ALL of them for more than 50% off the sale prices (!!)

If you have any questions, you can learn more about the courses and lectures on their original sales pages (which are linked.) You can also hit REPLY and ask us right here.

Click here to access the sale… and Happy Halloween!! 

P.S. The Halloween Vault is open through Nov. 1!

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