Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born on November 19, 1911, in
Birmingham, Alabama. She began writing poetry as a child and sold her first poem at the age of six. She later moved to
Gainesville,
Georgia, where her father was a faculty member at the Riverside Military Academy. She attended the University of Alabama and Alabama College (now
Montevallo University). Presumably, this was the short story, "The Devil Himself," which ran in the November 1931 issue of
My Self, the first issue of the retitled
Mind Magic. Counselman's work appeared in
Weird Tales, ''
Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, and other magazines. Her tale "The Three Marked Pennies", written while she was in her teens, and published in Weird Tales
in 1934, was one of the three most popular in all of Weird Tales'' history. Readers mentioned it in letters for years after its publication. Another story, "Seventh Sister" published in
Weird Tales in January 1943, is a rare example of a voodoo story written by a woman. In describing her philosophy of writing horror fiction, she said, "The Hallowe'en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with (never
at) those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared." Later, Counselman worked as a reporter for
The Birmingham News. Counselman taught creative writing classes at Gadsden State Junior College (now the Wallace Drive Campus of Gadsden State Community College) and at the University of Alabama. She completed a novel about witchcraft, and in 1976 received a $6,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. The late
August Derleth anthologised her poems in
Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre and
Fire and Sleet and Candlelight. For most of her life she resided on a
houseboat in
Gadsden, Alabama, with her husband, Horace B. Vinyard, whom she married in 1941, and a large entourage of cats. ==Books==