Celebrate Creativity

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 355 - Poe and Vampires While Edgar Allan Poe didn't write about traditional vampires, his exploration of vampiric themes places his work within a broader context of vampiric literature, showcasing the versatility of the concept beyond just blood-drinking monsters.  And hopefully within the next few minutes, Mr. Poe will make an appearance to...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 355 - Why All the Fuss About Dracula Episode 354 should be a relatively short episode - the subject is Stoker’s Dracula - and I want to briefly explore some reasons WHY Dracula is considered a great book.  But before I start, I am going to be talking about all kinds of aspects of Dracula - and I know some of them are completely new to you - stick...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 354, Encountering Poe’s Ghost Revisited I looked at the time I have left for podcasts this month, and realized that I had just enough for one more episode - and this will not be a long episode at all.  So I would like to revisit the first episode, and update it a little bit.  By the way, this first episode was one of the most listened-to of all 3...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - and this is episode 353 - Loathsome Mass of Detestable Putridity Hello, my name is George Bartley, and the Ghost of Mr. Poe is here right beside me. I hope you have listened to the previous episode for sections from 5 of Poe’s six hoax stories.  But there is one more - a story that is very much a hoax, - not an exploration story or trip to the moon - but...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 352 - Poe’s Hoaxes, Part One  Being April Fool’s day, today I want to look at Poe’s six hoax stories - in fact, Edgar Allan Poe approvingly called his time the “epoch of the hoax.” Even though Poe’s motives in writing hoaxes may sometimes seem odd or obscure, his hoaxes live on as a quirky and fascinating part of literary history.   After a great...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 351 - From Feast of Blood - This is the final episode of Celebrate Poe - at least for now - devoted to Varney the Vampire.   Now, as mentioned in a previous episode, the entire work spans 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters, totaling nearly 66,000 words.   And the author does a rather good job of holding your interest from issue to issue....

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Be Content to Suffer - This is episode 350 of Celebrate Poe - a bit of a milestone for this podcast.  And I must admit that when I started Celebrate Poe, I had no idea I would make it this far - and there is still so much of Poe’s life, his works, and the many influences on his writing to delve into - and I would be most honored if you take that journey...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - episode 349 - Varner (I mean, Varney) the Vampire Hope you have listened to episode 348 about Varney the Vampire but you might be asking yourself, How does Varney's sympathetic portrayal differ from other vampire stories of the time? Well, Varney the Vampire stands out as a pioneering sympathetic portrayal of vampires, differing significantly from o...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 348 Feast of Blood Varney the Vampire is an extremely influential work in the vampire genre, first appearing as a serialized gothic horror story between 1845 and 1847. The was well before Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Varney was published as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets known as "penny dreadfuls," targeting a mass-market audience interes...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 347 - The Origins of Vampires - Today I would like to delve into what is believed to be the beginnings of the vampire myth. So this specific episode will NOT be dealing with Dracula or Nosferatu, or any of the relatively recent names that we associate with vampires, and not specifically with Edgar Allan Poe - except in passing - although this pod...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 345 - Challenging Male Authority Well, I had planned for the previous episode to be the last one where I dealt with Carmilla - but I soon found out that the work was easy to get into, but hard to get out of.  So what follows is another - and hopefully the last - episode regarding Carmilla. You see, ”Carmilla" focuses more on psychological te...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - This is episode 345 - Stirring Sexual Desire I was looking at the podcast episodes I have done, and realized that I had written three or more episodes for each subject.  But I only did two for Carmilla, and have come to realize that the narrative does deserve more attention.  You see, there is no question that Carmilla has lesbian/homoerotic undertones t...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - This is episode 344 - Leaving Me Trembling Hope you are doing well, and I will just jump right into it - One of the most explicit passages in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla that hints at lesbian desire, within the constraints of Victorian Gothic literature, is as follows: "Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate 343 - The First Lesbian Vampire After looking at some of the alleged crimes of Elizabeth - and by this time, I am ready to call her actions a part of folklore - I’d like to delve in a definitely fictional female character who helped shaped the Gothic tradition in literature. The novella by Sheridan Le Fan was called Carmilla (1872) and the work builds upon man...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - This is episode 342 - Confined to a Castle This episode is the fourth episode of Celebrate Poe dealing with Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess accused of serial murder.  Now it was next to impossible for a person of her statue to be imprisoned, so it was said that she was confined to a Castle in Slovakia in  until her death. The nature of Báthory&...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 341 - Liz in Court Well, today’s episode continues an examination of Elizabeth Nadasdy and what might be called her torture trial - probably full of half-truths and political lies. First, the belief that Count Ferenc Nádasdy played a role in introducing his wife, Elizabeth Báthory to acts of violence and torture is rooted in historical accounts a...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 340 - Teaching Torture Techniques?    Elizabeth Bathory is certainly a fascinating figure.  I guess that ultimately we will never know exactly what she did or did not do, but the reaction to her alleged crimes tells us a great deal about the times in which she lived - especially attitudes towards the supernatural, as well as attitudes towards wom...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 339 - “Blood is My Beauty Secret” I want to devote the next few episodes to Elizabeth Bathory -I read that she was a distant descendant of Vlad the Impaler - sounds interesting but like so many of the tales of the region - apparently was a fabrication. But - getting back to Elizabeth’s life - her existence (I am not sure how much of it is true) ...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 338 - The Haunted Palace As you may know, The Castle of Otranto was written by Horace Walpole and first published on December 24, 1764. While the first edition was dated 1765, it was released at the end of 1764, making it the true publication year. And I think it is especially interesting that Horace Walpole was inspired to write The Castle of Ot...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 337, The First Gothic Novel I’d like to begin this podcast episode with an excerpt from the opening chapter of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole - an excerpt which captures the dramatic and supernatural tone of the novel. This passage describes the event that sets the story in motion: the mysterious death of Conrad, Manfred’s son, on his we...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 336 - A Medieval Soap Opera Let’s jump right into The Castle of Otranto - a book that is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel and the foundation of all Gothic literature. Written by Horace Walpole, the book introduced many of the genre's defining elements, such as supernatural occurrences, medieval settings, and an atmosphere of suspens...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 335- Meddling With Life and Death This episode is a continuation of a discussion between Mr. Bartley and the Ghost of Edgar Allan Poe regarding Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.  Support the show Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 334 Poe and Frankenstein Both Mary Shelley and Poe delve into Gothic themes such as monstrosity, isolation, guilt, and the boundaries of human experience.  For example, in Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein's creation of the monster explores the consequences of transgressing natural limits, as well as themes of guilt and alienation.  Poe&apos...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I want to delve into what is generally viewed as the first vampire novel - the VAMPYRE by John William Polidori and published in 1819. This novella marked the beginning of modern vampire fiction and introduced the archetype of the aristocratic vampire through the character of Lord Ruthven. Polidori's work was inspired by a fragment of a story written by Lord...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 332 - Darkness The Vampyre and Frankenstein are two liteary works that came out of the literary competition at the Villa Diadati - but another lesser known work is Lord George Gordon Byron’s Darkness.  There is a lot of information in this episode - after an introduction, I am going to analyze the poem line by line - and then when you hopefully h...