When I first started this blog way back in 2009, I was still in graduate school for library and information sciences. I had been reading lots of different books in genres I had not previously explored for at least two of my classes – a readers’ advisory class, where we read a different genre each week, and a multicultural fiction for young readers class. We had different ways of tracking what we read for each class and for one of those classes, we had to create a wiki.

As I was completing my library sciences degree, I knew that I wanted to work in public libraries and that readers’ advisory was a part of public librarianship. I wanted to create a space to continue to track my reading in a way that would help me (and others) on my journey into public librarianship. In those days, the genre of fiction that I had been most familiar with was contemporary fantasy. Charles de Lint, Holly Black, Emma Bull, – these were the novelists whose work I was very familiar with. Especially Charles de Lint, who has written a ton of books. I started reading his works back in the mid 90s.

Books that involved the fae, or faery, were especially appealing to me. As an adoptee, stories about changelings and wandering orphans resonated – especially those from the Celtic tradition, which was the only heritage I could claim with any kind of certainty.

I have always been a private person, and was now blogging on the internet. I needed a protective space for my own mind. A dun is a hillside fortress or just a hill in Scottish Gaelic and Irish.

Duns would most certainly have been used by both humans and fey. I’ve never been to Ireland or Scotland, but I’ve read a lot of stories that take place in those locations. A dun can straddle worlds (between here and the Otherworld).

So that’s where the dun in this website’s name comes from. It’s also why I have a picture of a local hill on the website.

And the color red can signify many different things.

Most importantly, I liked the play on words.