Surprise! If you’ve been poking around our Facebook group the last few weeks, you might have noticed a post gauging interest for a Carterhaugh School book club. Basically, we wanted to know if people would be interested in a monthly book club focused on “mythic fiction” (i.e. fiction inspired by folklore.)  We’re talking Charles de Lint, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Terri Windling, etc. etc. The authors WE (and many of you!) love because they fill their books with magic of the best kind. The answer was a resounding YES, and so we started to plot in earnest. We have LOVED the “book club” sections featured in a few of the courses we’ve done, and we feel like the world really needs a regular mythic fiction book club!

We’ve been wanting to launch this club for AGES, but we’ve had a few decisions to make and kinks to work out before it was really ready to go. It’s an ongoing time commitment, and we didn’t want to take away from the courses we offer or our live lectures. But we have a plan and a full and fabulous 2020 calendar, and we are officially ready to go! 

After much deliberation, we’ve decided to run the book club as a kind of membership program via Patreon. We’ve been considering setting up a Patreon account for a while now, as we want to keep making the magic of Carterhaugh even better for all of our students AND available in different ways (and at different price points.) The mini-courses have helped a LOT with that goal, but we know that, to some of you, they’re still just not in the budget. That doesn’t have to mean you can’t be part of Carterhaugh though. Joining us on Patreon will give you access to exclusive content, bonus grimoire pages, the book club, and MORE (we’re still thinking of things to add!)

Book club access starts at the $7/month tier level and up (basically as low as we could make it!) If you support us at that level, you will get a special invite each month to an online chat “meeting” via Crowdcast. The two of us will be live on video, and we will come prepared with discussion questions, but the floor will be open for questions and observations from you guys too. Each session will last around an hour or so, and we’ll work together to set a meeting time around the latter part of each month. Also, even if the time doesn’t work for you, you can send in your questions and observations to us at carterhaughschool@gmail.com before the club meet, and you can watch the video at a later time to hear the answers to your questions or listen to the discussion. The chosen book for each month will be announced at the end of the previous month as well – this way, if it’s not something you’re interested in, you can switch to a lower tier before you’re charged and come back later if you want to!

It’s a little too late to have a book for January, and we wanted time to get the word out anyway, but we’ll go ahead and announce that our first book will be The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. We know a lot of you have read it (maybe even some of you at our recommendation!), and we hope you’ll join us at our first book club meeting at 7pm on Sunday February 16th to geek out about how gorgeous it is! We have a LOT of thoughts to share on this one, and we can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

So, without further ado, here is the link to join us on Patreon – we thank you so much for supporting Carterhaugh, and we hope to see many of you there!