We talked a little yesterday about a podcast I like and it reminded me that October is for storytelling.

It’s cold. It’s colder today than it was yesterday and it was colder yesterday than it was last week and this trend will continue until spring. So, we come inside and we gather and we talk about how great summer was or what our plans for winter are and when we run out of things to talk about, we tell stories.

Gather around the campfire, the hearth, the kitchen stove. Find a warm place and talk about the past.

Storytelling has changed over time. We have more ways to tell our stories and more opportunity for new and wider audiences. Time will tell if this is a positive or a negative.

When I was little, I was a voracious reader, but eventually the forced reads of high school and college beat that out of me. It’s only been recently that I’ve come back to it, a convenient Kindle in hand. I use Goodreads to keep track of what I’m reading and to see what friends are into. And I follow the path laid out by the Goodreads and Kindle challenges (“Read a book from this list by this date and complete the challenge!). The autumn challenges have me looking at lots of books about witches.

And when I tire of reading, there is an entire world of podcasters ready to tell me their stories. October brings me back to Tanis (https://tanispodcast.com/) and the Black Tapes (https://theblacktapespodcast.com/). They’re both a decade old and haven’t had new episodes in years, but they’re still hauntingly October. When you’re done with those, Rabbits and The Last Movie are in the same vein and from the same people. Want shorter stories? Spooked with Glynn Washington. Spooked has a couple live shows coming up in LA and Oakland if that’s your thing. My friend Chris turned me on to Old Gods of Appalachia some years ago and I listen sporadically, so I never know for sure where we are in the stories (https://www.oldgodsofappalachia.com/. They only have 90 episodes, so maybe I’ll just start over.

Or maybe I’ll work on a story of my own.