I commented several years ago that now that I was retired, I could finally write. My friend, Chris, laughed at me. “What,” she asked, “do you think you were doing for The Rune and for classes you’ve taught and all the other things you’ve been writing for all these years?” Point taken.
The Rune was a small regional journal that I had written articles for before Lane Lambert and JoLynne Walz, the founders of the magazine, decided to do other things. That’s when I took over as the editor, and stayed at it longer than I care to admit. I had a lot of fun working on that publication, including encouraging new writers, tracking down events for the seasonal calendar, and the other jobs that editors with very small staffs find themselves doing. On a few occasions, we were a page short in the layout, and I had to figure out, on very short notice, how to fill the space. Some of the more fun articles that I wrote were among those fillers.
Now that I’m getting on in years and looking back at all that stuff I wrote, I decided this was as good a time as any to archive, in a public way, all those good, bad, and indifferent articles. My blog now has a new section called The Rune Archives. Only my own articles and the ones from the Tarcanfel Society are there because all copyrights from The Rune have reverted to the authors. If you’re curious about the old articles, poems, stories, art work, and so forth, as complete a set of The Rune as we could manage to compile is at the University of Kansas Library.
I’m not posting all the articles at once, instead dribbling them out as I get to them. You see, I’m a bit busy at the moment working on making my father’s World War II memoir an e-book (available, I hope, within the next few months), gardening (also known as battling rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels for meager scraps of vegetable matter), and attempting to have a social life in a cautious post-pandemic way.
I must say, revisiting the pages of that old magazine is being an entertaining stroll down memory lane. I hope you’ll enjoy the articles if you decide to visit them. And if you were ever a contributor to The Rune, thank you so much.
Image: Some issues of The Rune. Created by Lane Lambert. Photo by Marilyn Evans.