M. Lucero

December 5, 2018December 12, 2018Essays & Articles by M. Lucero

Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Night

If America can be said to have a coherent, unified folklore of its own, then Mark Twain certainly has a place in its history and character…

Pokémon One Hundred Fifty-One Demon Night Picture Scroll

August 31, 2018December 23, 2018Essays & Articles by M. Lucero

Yokai: The Folklore Roots of Pokémon

When Pokemon GO! released in the summer of 2016, it wasn’t my first encounter with a breed of monsters and ghosts unlike any elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore…

December 11, 2017December 5, 2018Short Stories by M. Lucero

Constellation

It was a sound he might have heard any night on the edge of the woods, machete in hand, bent from cutting bamboo from the slope beyond the highway…

November 17, 2017December 5, 2018Essays & Articles by M. Lucero

‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetry

Especially in The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien’s writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…

November 3, 2017December 5, 2018Short Stories by M. Lucero

Citrus

If the ferry didn’t come soon it wouldn’t come at all, and Simon would be stuck on Hogfish Key another night…

October 27, 2017December 12, 2017Short Stories by M. Lucero

People of Sand and Waves

I spit — salt on my lips, thick on my tongue, and sand, and something worse…

November 17, 2016December 5, 2018Short Stories by M. Lucero

Tides

She has only been on the island for twenty minutes, and already she’s disappointed…

October 11, 2016December 21, 2018Short Stories by M. Lucero

The Marsh Ghost

Drew climbs out of the truck and whistles as heat blankets him…

May 17, 2016December 5, 2018Short Stories by M. Lucero

The Sea Island

The sound the stone made as it chipped the old oak was dull and hollow…

August 1, 2015August 29, 2018Essays & Articles by M. Lucero

Sorrow and Light: Reflections on Rewatching Lost

Characters, not mythology. Mystery, not answers. Five years after Lost’s polarizing finale, I look into the eye of the Island again. How I felt then, why I drifted away from the show, and what I saw when I came back to rewatch it — all six seasons — for the first time since “The End.”