david carron

What they talkin’ ‘bout?
They ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’. – Kendrick Lamar

So, here I am at my mother-in-law’s house. It’s Christmas time, and my wife’s family is big on the holiday, so naturally, when Judy Collins is doing a Christmas show near her mom, we go. It was a lovely time; honestly, time spent with my mother-in-law usually is. It took me a while to really understand how that family works, but now that I do, it’s an extreme pleasure to get to watch my wife be loved. On our way out the door to go home, she and I stopped and talked about that for a moment—about the way that people constantly miss the things we both see so clearly about her. About the way she is assumed to be working in bad faith, or trying to be provocative before she’s even opened her mouth. But I’m ahead of myself, because it was that morning, after taking a shower, and getting a little early packing done that I walked out into the living room, when my wife handed me her phone.

“You’re not going to like this,” she told me. Reader, I didn’t.

El had gotten a letter from the Northeast Thing’s Special Investigation Committee informing her that she was banned from their event, citing a rule that had simply not been there when it might have been used to consider the targeted harassment levelled at my wife and my community by that event’s president, David Carron. I would love to say I was surprised by this, but I don’t think anyone who’s been paying attention possibly could be.

I have, to this point, kept my tongue. Not that this has stopped multiple people from silently unfriending or blocking me over El’s actions—which is wild for a group of people that spent years not raising an eyebrow at someone whose husband paraded around the event with a confederate flag mug. But I don’t want to flame out of the community, even though I feel its leadership is making cruel and frankly dangerous errors, because I love it, and I’ve loved this event. I have hinted at this in some places, and stated it in others, but my primary work right now—and if you know me, you will know how important my work is to me now that my health is in a place where I can finally do that work—is studying to become a priest of Sága, a goddess of language and divination for whom I keep a small vé at the event. Each year, I’ve run a ritual for her, and have a couple more years worth of ideas for how I’d change and grow that ritual now that I’ve had a couple runs to teach people what to expect from it. The space itself had gravity. We set it up as a social space; a goddess of language needs stories, and stories come from people, not just books. Unsurprisingly, this drew in a mostly young to middle aged queer crowd, several of whom I know have also had seismic spiritual experiences in that vé, in the space I set up and invited my goddess into.…

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Stop playing with me ‘fore I turn you to a song. – Kendrick Lamar

Ever since Monday there’s been this Draugr following me around. Weirdest thing. 

OK, look, let’s say up front, this is a petty footnote. “Exiting the Draugr Castle” is a major work on my part—a big swing essay tackling important topics. This is some bullshit—an update to enliven the holiday weekends of the sort of people who check Eruditorum Press on a holiday weekend. 

The essay went over about how I expected. Good number of people who are still cool with me, more who aren’t. Landing slightly more punitive than I’d hoped—caught some Facebook blocks from people I’d honestly expected more empathy from. But like I said, you don’t write an essay like that unless you’re ready to lose friends over it. The good news is that nobody’s played “collective guilt” and taken it out on Penn or something. 

Except, like I said, this one fuckin’ Draugr. And the funny thing is, he’s the one I hemmed and hawed on including, cause I was less sure I thought he deserved it than some. Needn’t have worried, turns out. Cause the Quisling went on an absolute unfriending spree, dropping not only Penn but a swath of other friends of mine, and also managing to blow up his local community in the process. Must have been something I said.

Thing is, some of those blocks I caught seem to have been in response to him accusing me of “all but doxing” him. And as that’s lie worthy of Tyr himself, I think it’s time for one last ray of disinfecting sunlight. 

So, here’s the thing he’s pissed at me for—a Bluesky post I made where I included these two screenshots.

Now, as you can see I went through and blacked out everyone’s names there except, of course, David Carron’s. I labeled the two people who had been characters in Draugr Castle, and left their Facebook icons, which I suppose means that if you really wanted to go scavenging around Facebook you could probably find them, but come on. That’s not fucking doxxing. For one thing, I’d already identified the Quisling as Associate President of the Troth. In what is probably not a surprise to you, the Troth’s website will readily inform you who its current Associate President is. Anyone who was terribly interested who the Quisling was could have figured it out from the original essay, which has been read by 2500 people at this point, and had a far easier time than they would reverse engineering his Facebook icon from a screenshot.

And I knew that when I posted the essay. I, in fact, put a lot of thought into exactly how identifiable people were. I wrote it so that anyone in the community could trivially solve the roman a clef for most of the main figures, but so that readers from outside the community would not. The only two exceptions were David Carron, because fuck him, and the Quisling, because it was impossible.…

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