For the Season 2 finale, Matt sits down with Douglas Batchelor of What Magic Is This? for a wide-ranging conversation about the strange territory where magic, folklore, and lived experience meet. Together they explore Joshua Cutchin’s Ecology of Souls and Fourth Wall Phantoms, fairy traditions, ancestors, saints, the dead, spirit ecology, magical practice, imagination, storytelling,…

Oops, Everything is Alive This episode begins with a remembrance of Gordon White, whose work inspired the name The Campfire’s Edge and who helped give language to the idea that humans belong in a strange, haunted, more-than-human world. I’ve also shared a written remembrance of Gordon on our Patreon, available as a public post. It…

In this episode we interview Haw River Assembly Executive Director Emily Sutton about our wild and damaged river, in a discussion that spans environmental strategy, river-personhood, and our worries for the future. HRA is lobbying NC’s Environmental Management Commission. The group that is responsible for setting state pollution regulations is taking public comment on their…

In the 1960s, deer-hunter, CPA exam grad, and my future dad Paul Stansberry witnessed a figure flying on a floating platform in near Akron, Ohio. What might have been taken for a secret military test flight quickly shifted to something otherworldly as the platform the humanoid shaped being was standing on accelerated so quickly, to…

Episode art by Sarah C. Rose, black bear paw, pen, colored pencil and gouache on paper. Western North Carolina opened a new chapter this year: the first regulated black bear hunts in some of the steepest, coldest, and most tangled country in the state. Sarah and Matt both drew tags for this historic hunt. In…