M. Lucero

September 13, 2019May 13, 2020Serial Novellas Southern Dust by M. Lucero

Chapter II. Not a Ghost, But an Echo

The stranger thrust them on in short strokes, stabbing the creek with his paddle like a heron spearing fish…

September 11, 2019May 13, 2020Serial Novellas Southern Dust by M. Lucero

Chapter I. A Salt-Edged Blade

It was nearing five o’clock and the breeze, muted here beneath the pines, carried the smell of the marsh…

December 5, 2018August 5, 2020Essays & Articles by M. Lucero

Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Night

A look at two parallel ways Twain uses folklore and superstition in his works, and what this split says about the author himself.

Pokémon One Hundred Fifty-One Demon Night Picture Scroll

August 31, 2018October 7, 2020Essays & 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, 2017May 13, 2020Short 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, 2017November 19, 2019Essays & 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…