Writing the Occult: Hauntology

Saturday 30 November, 2024

Starts 1pm UK / 9am ET

Early bird tickets £35, regular tickets £40. Sales end at midnight GMT on 29 November.

It’s not just ghosts that haunt us: we are revisited by thoughts, ideas and phenomena. And this idea of a social or cultural past is perhaps never more prevalent than in times like these, when we’re deep in the existential angst of what is no longer, what is not yet, and what may never be.

It’s this concept - dubbed “hauntology” by those who do such things - that we’ll dive into at our next Writing the Occult. The past persists beyond mere nostalgia; we have cultural memories, retrofuturism, lost futures, and more. The rose-tinted glasses can be out in full force, or our past may come back to haunt us in very real terms.

In Writing the Occult: Hauntology, we’ll spend the day looking at haunted spaces, haunted ideas, haunted emotions. We’ll consider why some relics persist and resist. We’ll look at trauma as a suppressed history that remains unresolved, and how spectral narratives can reflect cultural wounds and futures that never came to pass. Come and join us, or the FOMO might just haunt you…

Running order:
1pm UK / 8am ET: Welcome & housekeeping (5 mins)
1.05 UK / 8.05 ET: Hauntology 101, with Professor Robert Edgar (60 mins)
2.05 UK / 9.05 ET: Hauntology on film, with Dr Icy Sedgwick (60 mins)
~10 min break~
3.20pm UK / 10.20am ET: Trauma and hauntings, with Sarah Jackson (60 mins)
4.20pm UK / 11.20am ET: Invasive species as connections to the sociocultural past, with Mina Ikemoto Ghosh (30 mins)
~10 min break~
5pm UK / noon ET: In conversation with Evelyn Hollow (60 mins)
~15 min break~
6.15pm UK / 1.15pm ET: Haunted places, with Robert P. Ottone (30 mins)
6.45pm UK / 2.45pm ET: Infusing fiction with a hauntological atmosphere, with Adam S. Leslie (60 mins)
~15 min break~
8pm UK / 4pm ET: Writing hauntology workshop, with Lindz McLeod (60 mins)

Writing the Occult is a boutique series of events brought to you by the Society of Ink Slingers, in partnership with Alex Davis Events. Our approach is to bring together the fiction world with folklore and academia to bring a well-rounded view to a specific area of interest to both speculative fiction writers and those with a hankering for the esoteric.

Speaker bios and session details at writingtheoccult.carrd.co. Follow @societyofinkslingers on Instagram for announcements.

Writing the Occult: Hauntology

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