MAY 2026: THE GUIDE, a new collection of work by Arthur Machen
NEW POETRY
Never Without by Joshua Alan Sturgill
Dale Nelson dives into Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
“Is there some obscure instinct, buried very deeply in the human heart, persuading men that the highest happiness is to be found at the gates of horror?” – 1919
Coming Soon: A collection of rare and unknown work by Arthur Machen. This new book will be issued in a limited, individually numbered edition from Darkly Bright Press.
“And that is why I like the traders of the street, being always a lover of humble things and humble people.” – 1921
Join the mailing list for updates and early ordering: info at darklybrightpress dot com.
“But the truth is, that in most of my dreams I walk in a world of terror.” – 1935
The Feast Day of St. Teilo is on February 9th.
NEW POETRY
Joshua Alan Sturgill sends his Best Wishes.
Tent Revival
My dad dreamed of a tent staked to the ground:
preachers at the pulpit like batters at the plate,
soles in the dirt, coaxing souls from the dirt.
My husband slept in a tent, his dreams
the drums of a Cherokee reservation,
his church pew the buffalo grass.
With bedsheets, I build a tent for my sons.
Flashlight like an acolyte’s flame,
I teach them only to kneel.
Copyright 2026 by Heather Cadenhead. All Rights Reserved.
What It’s Like Underneath by Joshua Alan Sturgill
I Believe in Beef and Beer: Mr. Hecht says we eat far too much, and further and especially that we eat too much meat. Both of these propositions are erroneous. The truth is that we don’t eat enough, and that we don’t eat enough meat. There is a subsidiary error to the effect that food may be defined as body-building substance. The definition is bad, inasmuch as it is accidental instead of being essential. Good food is stuff that we like eating: bad food is stuff that we hate eating.
NEW POETRY
The Institution by Joshua Alan Sturgill
Beer and the Present Discontent: When are going to have an end put to all this nonsense? The nonsense, I mean, of watering good English ale, and talking about “specific gravity” and those “d——d dots,” which no one understands or is meant to understand, and selling the lieges inferior and melancholy wash with a smack of ditchwater about it at a scandalous price, and turning everybody into the street at half-past nine as if they were little children who ought to be in bed.
POETRY NEWS
Joshua Alan Sturgill will be teaching a course for The Symbolic World, entitled The Art of Imitating Heaven: Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology. Enrollment is now open. This week, Sturgill offers Some Fell Among Thorns.
Jesse Keith Butler, the author of The Living Law, has published a new Arthurian poem, The Last of the Longships.
What the Anglo-Catholic Congress Means: The Anglo-Catholics now in Congress desire, no doubt, to reform the Church, so that, in all essentials, it would be pretty much the Church of the Middle Ages. The Protestant party would prefer to see it not unlike the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. What will the end be?
NEW POETRY
Automated Imitation by Joshua Alan Sturgill
Beer Rations: For the Low Latin for ale is cervisia, which must be derived from the Welsh cwrw, and thus it may probably be inferred that at the time of the breaking up of the Roman Empire and in the wild days afterwards, it was the Britons who were notable for the making of beer.
AN ARTHUR MACHEN CALENDAR: WHY NEW YEAR?
NEW POETRY
The Story And The Lens by Joshua Alan Sturgill
The Spirit of Christmas—According to Dickens: It often amuses me, in reading comments on Dickens and, more especially, on Dickens’s conception of Christmas, to see that most illustrious man kindly excused and let down gently, as it were, on account of the things in him which are his chiefest and his rarest merit.
From the December 24, 1920 edition of the Evening News:
NEW POETRY
Joshua Alan Sturgill returns with Things.
Scrooge 1920: Scrooge was undoubtedly getting on in life, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Ten years had gone by since the spirit of old Jacob Marley had visited him . . .
How Will Mr. Machen Spend Christmas Day?
Folk-Lore, Water Babies and Mermaids: The last reported appearance of a mermaid is so recent as the end of April 1910. Several people, including Martin Griffin, my informant, saw what they are firmly convinced was a merwoman in a cove a little to the north of Spanish Point, near Miltown, Malbay. She was white-skinned, and had well-shaped white hands. The party tried to make friends with her, giving her bread, which she ate. Then a Quilty fisherman got frightened, said she was “something bad,” and threw a pebble at her, on which she plunged into the sea and disappeared.
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