Patience Worth's Magazine.
1917--1918 Monthly
St. Louis, MO.
Publisher: Patience Worth Company.
1/1, August 1917-2/5, May 1918.
$1.50-$1.00 a year, 16-20 pp.

The journal was devoted to the words of "Patience Worth," a spirit who claimed to have been born a Puritan in England in 1649 and then moved to New England to be slaughtered at 30 (or 45) by marauding Native Americans, and who, beginning in 1913, communicated voluminously through Pearl Lenore Pollard Curran [Rogers Wyman] (1883-1937), a housewife in St. Louis.

"Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. I make my bread at thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog."

The tales originally were received by ouija board in an archaic dialectical English interspersed with creative and consistent neologisms, and were voluminous in the extreme, consisting of millions of words dispersed in thousands of poems, vignettes, short stories, novels and plays. Curran had been a published novelist and a newspaper writer before encountering Patience Worth, but the body of work produced by them as a team was vastly popular, widely sold, and highly praised by critics. The writing was unusual for the genre in that it contained no messages, teachings, fortune-telling prognostications, or tales of the Summerland and merely recounted the life and thoughts of Patience Worth and described events of other eras that she somehow knew. Curran's original partners in using the ouija board were her mother, who transcribed the sessions, and Emily Grant Hutchings, who was charged with rewriting and punctuating the transcriptions. Hutchings and Patience Worth soon parted ways over the liberties Hutchings was thought to be taking in transcribing the seances, and Hutchings went on to publish her own Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board (New York, 1917) with the stories and wisdom of the deceased Mark Twain. (She was promptly sued for copyright infringement by Twain's executors and faced with the conundrum of either admitting her own authorship of the text or surrendering her profits from its sale. She agreed to destroy existing copies and stopped its publication.) Curran eventually abandoned the ouija board and directly channeled the words of Patience, opening her house without charge on many evenings to all who desired to hear Patience's words, and making herself available for Evenings with Patience Worth to raise money for charitable causes. All in all, with the exception of royalties from published novels, at least one movie, and compilations of sessions, Curran claimed to have lost considerable money on her communications with Patience Worth. This journal was no exception, and Curran said that in its short life the journal lost more than $4,000.00, despite what appears to be a substantial amount of commercial advertising. Contributions by John Curran and Casper S. Yost who were also the principals of the publisher of the journal. Yost was editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and wrote Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery. An Account of the psychical Experience of Mrs. John H. Curran (New York, 1916), an introduction to Patience Worth's stories and poems, and edited various other of Mrs. Curran's works. NYPL; LOC.

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