Neshaminy: The Bucks County Historical and Literary Journal. Spring/Summer 2024. No. 9

by Don Swaim, William Donahue (editor), Leigh Stuart (editor)

In this Bill Donahue examines how medieval notions of witchcraft persist to this day, and that even in the more enlightened 19th century, rumors circulated of a female witch in the Bucks County community of Telford. Also, ghostly spirits arise from the waters of Lake Galena in a supernatural story perpetrated by Don Swaim. In the 1960s, urban blight struck many American cities and towns, and while some turned to failed urban renewal schemes, one Bucks County borough did the opposite. Lee Bigelow Davis and Melissa D. Sullivan show how Doylestown reinvented itself, not by replacing historic buildings with parking lots, but by renovation, fresh paint, and strategic landscaping, turning the county seat into a destination—as shown by before and after photos. A once celebrated American author, Christopher Morley (1890-1957), never lost sight of his Pennsylvania roots, as Don Swaim reports in an extensive biographical sketch. And reprinted from 1920, Morley himself writes of a canoe trip up the Neshaminy Creek, namesake of this journal. The history of William Penn’s Quaker settlers by Kimball Baker. A profile of photographer Rob Hall. Poetry by Helen Behe, Julie Bernstein, Thaddeus S. Kenderdine, Matthew Kirby, Joseph Chelius, and Linda Andress.

171 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 18, 2024

About the author

Don Swaim is a writer, novelist, journalist, and winner of the 2011 Pearl S. Buck short story prize. His novel, The H.L. Mencken Murder Case (St. Martin's Press), was republished as a trade paperback under the Authors Guild's Back in Print program. Born in Kansas and educated in Ohio, his daily feature "Book Beat" was broadcast on major radio stations through the CBS Radio Stations News Service, and can be heard on the Internet at Wired for Books and at Book Beat:The Podcast. After a career at CBS in New York and Baltimore, Swaim founded the Bucks County Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. He edits the web's definitive Ambrose Bierce Site. His fiction and articles have been published in small magazines and on the web.