Writing the Occult:

Hauntology

    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…

    Featuring:

    • Parapsychologist, author and presenter Evelyn Hollow

    • Writer and academic Professor Robert Edgar

    • Author and podcaster Adam S. Leslie

    • Folklorist, academic and podcaster Dr Icy Sedgwick

    • Writer and editor Sarah Jackson

    • Writer and poet Lindz McLeod

    • Author Robert P. Ottone

    • Author and illustrator Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

    Meet our special guests below.

    Sessions will be recorded for those who can't make it live to the whole event.

    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.
    Follow @societyofinkslingers on Instagram for announcements.

    Evelyn Hollow is a Scottish parapsychologist, TV/radio presenter & writer. Featured in award winning BBC radio shows such as; Uncanny, The Witch Farm, and The Battersea Poltergeist. She also appears in several TV shows — Spooked Scotland, Spooked Ireland, and Uncanny. Her first book, Atlas of Paranormal Places, is out now worldwide, published by Ivy Press / Quarto.

    Robert Edgar is a writer and academic. He is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture in the York Centre for Writing at York St John University, UK. His publications includeScreenwriting (2009), Music, Memory and Memoir (2019), Science Fiction for Survival (2019), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (2019), Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition(2023), Venue Stories (2023), The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2023 )and Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television (2024). He is currently writing on Alan Garner, hauntology and memoir, and the 18th century roots of folk horror. He is a series editor for the forthcoming Spectres, Hauntings and Horrorsseries with Bloomsbury Academic. He is the convener of the Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group.

    Adam S. Leslie is the author of hauntological folk-horror novel LOST IN THE GARDEN, published by Dead Ink Books. He is also co-host of Retrotube – a podcast dedicated to simultaneously critiquing old TV and wallowing in its cosy nostalgia – as well as a screenwriter, songwriter and musician. Adam grew up in the 1980s in deepest rural Lincolnshire, a couple of miles from Moondial, under the shadow of a cold war radar mast, and with a telephone area code named after an Anglo-Saxon burial mound. What could be more hauntological than that?

    Dr Icy Sedgwick is the host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast, investigating European folklore, legends, and mythology. She also holds a PhD, after examining the representation of the haunted house in contemporary Hollywood cinema. In case she tires of research, former ghost hunter Icy also writes Gothic horror fiction.

    Sarah Jackson (she/they) writes gently unsettling speculative fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere. In 2024 she published The Haunted Tea Set & Other Stories. She is editor of Inner Worlds magazine.

    Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer and poet who dabbles in the surreal. Her short prose has been published/is forthcoming in by Apex, Catapult, Nightmare, and many more. Her longer work includes the award-winning short story collection TURDUCKEN (Spaceboy, 2023), as well as her books SUNBATHERS (Hedone Books, 2024), THE UNLIKELY PURSUIT OF MARY BENNET (Harlequin, 2025), WE, THE DROWNING (Android Press, 2026), and the collaborative anthology AN HONOUR AND A PRIVILEGE (Stanchion, 2025). Her work has been taught in schools, universities, and turned into avant-garde opera. She is a full member of the SFWA, the club president of the Edinburgh Writers' Club, and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.

    Robert P. Ottone is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of THE TRIANGLE and is also the best-selling author of CURSE OF THE COB MAN, THE SLEEPY HOLLOW GANG, THE VILE THING WE CREATED and NOCTURNAL CREATURES. His short fiction has been collected in WRAPPED IN PLASTIC AND OTHER SWEET NOTHINGS as well as HER INFERNAL NAME & OTHER NIGHTMARES. He holds two master’s degrees in Education, as well as an MFA in Children’s Literature. A bagel-loving fabulist of spooky absurdity, Ottone enjoys cigars, cocktails and time with his wife.

    Mina Ikemoto Ghosh is a British-Japanese author-illustrator of YA Japanese fantasy 'Hyo the Hellmaker' and the adult historical fantasy novella 'Numamushi'. She has a BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and MSc in Japanese Studies from the University of Oxford. She uses both as sources of inspiration, alongside interests in folklore, history, human-animal boundaries and the creation of community. Recurring motifs in her stories include curses, tied to places and people.

    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.
    Follow @societyofinkslingers on Instagram for announcements.

    © Society of Ink Slingers, 2024. All rights reserved.