Penny Wagers

Yeah, bush souls. Ever met up with yours? If you have, you’re lucky. Truth is, the modern world has forgotten how. Never mind St. Anthony’s cave; we only get about 20 minutes to ourselves a day if BLS numbers are to be believed. Meanwhile, we spend several hours daily staring at magic rectangles. As a result, ours is a culture full of people who are not quite themselves. Let’s try to define that,...

I escaped from my own nixie just this week. Made moves to, anyway. Gave notice that I would be leaving my well in a few weeks’ time and that neither flax nor bucket nor blunted axe will ever be touched again. I just don’t want to heft those things anymore. And I don’t want to take them with me. What that means for me will be different for you, of course, so let’s not muddle the message with Jungia...

The various Lives of Ciarán of Saighir share varying degrees of detail and information, but one thing I feel fairly certain about is that Ciarán’s bell was very small. In his time, it would have been relatively easy to keep it handy and wait for its announcement that you have found the Place You Were Meant to Be. So small, it would have been easy to lose. These days, our own bells have to compete...

(This story may seem tragic or disturbing, but please know everyone involved speaks of it fondly. It’s just one of those things.) A long-distance runner, my dad used to get up at 4:30 every morning to run 17 miles. Then he’d shower, make coffee, eat his two bran muffins and wake me up for school. More than a bit Type A, my dad. His running route would bring him by our new neighbors. He’d pass by t...

He galloped toward the forest’s bound and rode in on a path he found, where there were hoofprints, freshly made by horses passing through the glade. “This is the way the people took, the ones for whom I came to look.” He galloped through the forest fast, not stopping while the trail would last. — Perceval by Chrétican de Troyes There’s nothing for it but to strip down naked and make an assessment....

“ Where’s your head at? ” This is something my father asked me all throughout my childhood. Almost always when my head was somewhere it shouldn’t be. Continuing that line of thought, I’d argue that entire dissertations could be built upon contemplating the significance of just where exactly Saint Winifred’s head is at. Consider the chase. Caradog’s on the horse, sword in hand. The outside threat c...

Happy Whit-Sunday! When I was growing up, Memorial Day marked the official start of the crazy season. The lake would be full-on packed, my car’s A/C would break down and there was no way I’d not be getting overtime every week until Labor Day. This one, though, had me thinking of the other holiday this weekend, and a story that I like to return to in lieu of older community gatherings. I’ve a bette...

Hear the story first, before we get to what’s below : There’s an old Anglo-Saxon word that would be helpful in a conversation such as this. We don’t know it anymore, but you can find it in the first lines of Beowulf . Þrym . We say it means something like “glory”—that’s how it’s often translated, anyway—but the real meaning is much harder to pin down because we don’t use words in the same way we o...

Late Wednesday afternoon was not a time for phones or wallets. The cottonwoods were already shedding, sprinkling the air with motes as weightless as the late day sunlight. You can’t catch their linty stipples; snatch as fast or as stealthily as you like, they just pass around and through your fingers on their descent toward the creek. The whole span of the water was awash in their fluid bokeh. I d...

As I mentioned at the start, this one’s a real beauty of the Fenian Cycle. So much to unpack in just a few short minutes. The story does of course take place in an older Ireland, before Christianization. Some folks might be quick to judge the story on those grounds. I understand the impulse, but some things I’d point out before we toss it out: * It’s precisely because of Irish Christians telling t...

These stories likely seem silly today. They’re not real, right? Like, did they really happen? What does the historical record say? My answer to these aligns pretty closely with why I’m sharing them. There’s a lot we have to untangle first, though. For my part, I’m going to have to over-extend a bit, and tread a little past where my toes can touch. I hope you’ll bear with me; I think these are plac...

Check out more of Joe Heaney’s storytelling on his website . I, too, have met the Short Little Man. He didn’t look anything like Fionn’s companion, of course. Things are different in North America. It was a day or two before I moved to Australia. One thing I still needed to do was drive back to my office and pick up my bike. (I built it myself, so no way was I going to abandon it.) It was a Saturd...

Weird story, right? Was the woman some kind of witch, or princess under an enchantment? What finally got into the bones of the old man to take to the forest that day? What I like about the story is that, short as it is, it doesn’t accommodate such questions. Instead, it invites you to practice what a Disney animator friend of mine calls confusion tolerance. Part of that is knowing that sometimes y...

There’s a lot in this story I like to sit with. For starters, I wonder if anyone out there can relate to the fisherman father. Actually, no I don’t. I wonder if in this place and time there’s anyone who can’t. All the fish in all the world are nothing compared to the one thing you don’t even know you have. Yeah, that sits with me, too. It’s interesting that Lucas decides to be a cooper. Why a coop...

Hey, happy Good Friday! I have something I’d like to read for you that I think you might find interesting. Let me know if anything here sounds familiar... Definitely not a version of the Gospel most folks would be familiar with today, is it? This is the Heliand , sometimes referred to as “The Saxon Gospel.” There are two versions I’d recommend: The prose translation by G. Ronald Murphy I’d pick up...

The fun thing about myths is that they’re great for visual thinkers. You aren’t to narrow them down and flatten them into any lesson or actionable takeaway. In their dreamlike narratives, the images are the thing. In this story, I find myself sitting with the last few scenes the most. It seems we have a tendency to personalize iron string music these days. It’s often all we listen to. We watch ove...

My daughter’s got this chart in her classroom. It’s a two-column thing that teaches kids the difference between fiction and non-fiction. According to the chart, fiction is anything that isn’t factual. It’s made up, and its purpose is entertainment. Non-fiction, on the other hand, is truthful. Look, you gotta start somewhere, I get that. But there’s a reason that my daughter at second grade feels f...

To commemorate the feast day of the Shamrock Saint, I figured I’d share this story with you. Please do send it to the poets you know if they haven’t heard it already (and may it also serve as a reminder to be nice to people during job interviews). Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

It was a bad line from the start, that much was obvious. We had been good about setting the raft square into the rapids, but this approach looked bad, this looked dangerous. Expletives started rising. There’s a huge gap in my memory. But I do remember that at the bottom, our raft started taking in hundreds of gallons per second from the falls. Everyone was gone and my side rising up, up, up, out o...

I knew two twins growing up: Hank and Mr. Weatherby. Mr. Weatherby was my high school Computer Applications teacher. He always wore a bowtie, a pocket protector and what can only be described as NASA glasses. He also founded and ran the school’s Robotics & A/V club. I’m sure Mr. Weatherby had a first name, but by his students, his family and everyone who ever knew him, he was always and forever kn...

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods,” C.S. Lewis told us. “Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’” We may read that today as Lewis being cute with hyperbole. But that’s because we aren’t talking about the same...

Y’know, I wasn’t going to start this. The plan wasn’t to record and put these on Substack; I was just going to share ‘em at in-person venues here and there. But three things have been nagging on me and got me to change my mind. * It would be dishonest, in a way. These stories continue to take up a great deal of my time and attention. I can’t treat this here Substack as some kind of curated persona...

My dad started running just a few years before I did. Living 45 miles away from his job at the planetarium, he was inclined to wake up around 7 o’clock to get me and him out the door by 8. But then he started waking up a little earlier. I heard the front door slam around 6:15, but after that I didn’t hear the snowblower like I thought I would. Okay, so if it wasn’t the snow, what was he doing out...

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too. I’m going out to fetch the little calf That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too. —Robert Frost, “The Pasture” The Easterlings are passing through th...

This week’s story is “The Ice Giants,” recorded by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. This cold snap is really something else, man, I’m telling you. Cailleach Beara ever tightens her icy grip on the long-shadowed land. I ventured out for a bit of social severance in the midst of this icy nonsense, but I didn’t stay out for long. The Old Hag plastered the forest in rimy sheets of cellophane; no surface wa...