In this chapter … things go downhill. But not, we hope, for the lovely indie (and trad) authors who have a shout out at the end of the episode! Head over to cmrosens.com to check out my 2025 Author Spotlights and you’ll find a whole host of books awaiting you.
Don’t forget to support the podcast on Ko-Fi!
CWs: loss of bodily autonomy, violence
Music Credits:
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins
Soundtrack: Devastation and Revenge, Final Count, The Stages of Grief, Gregorian Chant, Morgana Rides
Spooky Conference Season
Designing the Mortress’s realm and the worldbuilding I did around this for Yelen & Yelena inspired a workshop that I delivered online in 2024. This was the Designing a Hellscape – Worldbuilding Workshop at the last Romancing the Gothic conference in 2024, Devils & Justified Sinners, which commemorated the 200th anniversary of the publication of James Hogg’s novel, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
My workshop kicked off the 2-day online event, and was entitled: ‘Create a Hellscape: Using Theology in World-Building’.
These are annual events, and the 2025 conference has just been announced!
This year it is celebrating 100 years since the publication of M.R. James’s A Warning to the Curious, and the 2-day online conference will be focused not just on this book, but on ghosts and the supernatural in fiction more generally. There will be an author panel with Nghi Vo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Suzan Palumbo, so if you want to hear them talking about modern supernatural short fiction, get your Early Bird ticket now!
Romancing the Gothic presents its fifth annual online conference over two days – 23rd and 24th August. The conference celebrates 100 years of M. R. James’ A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories with a series of talks, events, workshops, live readings and an author round table with Nghi Vo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Suzan Palumbo.
The conference is designed to cover different timezones so the days are long. People are recommended to come for as long as they want. The talks and sessions are recorded so that you don’t miss anything even if you can’t be there in person for specific times/sessions.
Early Bird Tickets, Concessions and Free Tickets
There will be early bird discounts on tickets until 30th June 2025. Concession tickets are for students, the unwaged, retired people or anyone whose economic situation makes it necessary. We also offer a limited number of free tickets for those who cannot pay the ticket price, please email sam@romancingthegothic.com for more information. You can donate a ticket for those who are unable to afford to come.
Accessibility
We have live auto-generated captions. We provide slides and, where possible, scripts before the conference with alt-text for images. We have regular breaks and encourage people to take part in ways that are most comfortable for them. There is no forced participation.
If you have any accessibility needs, please get in touch at sam@romancingthegothic.com and I will do my best to make sure these accommodations are provided.
PROGRAMME
Saturday 23rd August
10.00AM – 10.30AM – Introductions
10.30AM – 11.30AM – Panel 1 – Jamesian Architecture (panel chair: Brontë Schiltz)
Octavia Cade – Opposite Architectures: The Jamesian Well as Inverted Lighthouse
Helen Grant – Stained Glass and ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’
11.30AM – 11.45AM – BREAK
11.45AM – 12.45PM – Keynote – Darryl Jones – A Warning to the Curious: ‘flying Time and all it had taken out of my life’
12.45PM – 1.00PM – BREAK
1.00PM – 2.30PM – Writing Workshop – Mimi Manyin – ‘Summoning the Ghosts in Haunted Objects: A Study of MR James’ Ghost Stories and Crafting Cautionary Tales’
2.30PM – 3.15PM – LUNCH
3.15PM – 5.05PM – Panel 2 – Archives and Archaeology (Panel chair: Rebecca Stone Gordon)
Amy Leblanc – Think about what you don’t get to see: Ghosts, Archives, and Images in Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook: Ghost Stories
Susan Maxwell – A Catalogue of Terrors: Archives, Fiction, and Archival Fiction
Mark P. Williams – Excavating the ()ole Complex: Re-reading M. R. James via Reza Negarestani; Or Chthonic Modernism of ‘Count Magnus’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ and ‘Mister Humphreys and His inheritance’
Tracy Hayes – Codicology releases Demons – The Antiquarian Gothic
5.05PM – 5.15PM – BREAK
5.15PM – 7.00PM – Panel 3 – Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Writers (Han O’Flanagan)
John Hartley – Streamlined with the spears of mysterious forces: anthologies of ghostly, supernatural and weird short fiction in the 1920s and 1930s
Stefanie Tegeler – Antiquarians in Frankenstein’s Footsteps? Reading M. R. James’s Characters as Gothic Mad Scientists
Kellie Miller – The Specter Speaks – the channeling of Feminine Voices in Victorian Ghost Narratives
Sontje Schulenburg – Overshadowed by M. R. James: The Supernatural Fiction of Eleanor Scott
7.00PM – 7.15PM – BREAK
7.15PM – 8.45PM – Panel 4 – Haunting Obligations: Political Ghost Stories (Panel Chair: Wade Newhouse)
Corinne Anderson – “She saw herself domesticated with the Horror”: a Comparative Analysis of Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”
Beth Kusko – “Alone and Afraid: Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Loneliness in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House”
Wade Newhouse – “Seeing Dead People: Haunted Spectatorship in Ghost Story and A Ghost Story”
8.45PM – 9.00PM – BREAK
9.00PM – 10.00PM – Cocktail and Mocktail hour with Julia O’Connell (original recipes inspired by M R James stories!)
Sunday 24th August
9.45AM – 10.00AM – Introductions
10.00AM – 11.00AM – Panel 5 – The History Behind the Tale (Panel Chair: Kasey Waite)
Lukasz Haydrych – The dead speak?! The fear of wraiths in early modern Poland
Lily Bentley – Ghosts in the Courtroom: M. R. James’ ‘Martin’s Close’ and supernatural justice in Early Modern England
11.00AM – 11.15AM – BREAK
11.15AM – 12.15PM – Keynote – Zoë Lehmann Imfeld
12.15PM – 12.30PM – BREAK
12.30PM – 2.00PM – Panel 6 – Language and the Ghostly (Panel Chair: Julie Larson)
Jenny Amos – I seen it wive at me: an exploration of dialect representations in M R James’ Suffolk characters
Susan Vanderborg – Porpentine’s Ghosts: Kenning the Bodies, Exhuming the Poems
David Oakey – A corpus-assisted exploration of reticence in The Collected Ghost Stories of M R James
2.00PM – 3.00PM – LUNCH
3.00PM – 4.45PM – Panel 7 – Sound and Senses (Panel Chair: Evan Hayles Gledhill)
Kendra Leonard – Sound and Music in M. R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Jamie Stephenson – ‘A Dead Man’s Eyes’: Rethinking Gendered Tropes of Grammar in the Jamesian Weird Through Sound
Eptisum Laskar – Horror of the Mind, Horror of the Stomach: A Comparative Study of Supernatural Hunger in M. R. James and Bengali Ghost Stories
Allie Pino – You’ve Blown it Now: Who is This Who’s Coming?
4.45PM – 5.00PM – BREAK
5.00PM – 6.15PM – Workshop – ABS – (Title TBC: Theme – Exploring the Weird: Psycho-geographical exploration)
6.15PM – 6.30PM – BREAK
6.30PM – 7.30PM – Author Panel – Supernatural Short Fiction Today
Confirmed Guests: Suzan Palumbo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Nghi Vo
7.30PM – 8.00PM – BREAK and Final Discussion
8.00PM – 9.00PM – Live Dramatic Readings of M R James with Robert Lloyd Parry
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