Writing the Occult: Connection to Land
Saturday 15 June, 2024
Starts 1pm UK / 9am ET
Early bird tickets are £35 until 8 June 2024, or £40 from 9 June. Sales end on 14 June – tickets from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/writing-the-occult-connection-to-land-tickets-906670705487
It’s that time of year when the land is in flux. In the northern hemisphere, we’re blooming, growing, getting ready to bear our fruits; in the southern hemisphere it’s the time of waning, harvest, and preparing for the long winter ahead. This is the time of year where folk horror stories live and breathe, when mythology takes over, when ritual and spiritual practices thrive.
And it’s the time when we are, all of us, connecting to the land in some way.
What does that mean for us as writers and storytellers? That’s what we’ll explore in this fifth edition of Writing the Occult: how writers can connect to the land for inspiration, for plot, for creativity, for character, all timed for the week of the solstice.
We’ll look at connecting to land myths, ritual landscapes and spirits of place. We’ll use our land to spark fantasy creations, and land in general as a driving force in your story. We’ll look at not just the beauty, but the hostility, too. And we’ll ask how the climate crisis is impacting the writer’s connection to land—and what we can do as writers to raise awareness of climate needs in a responsible and ethical way—with a special panel featuring climate fiction writers. And finally, we’ll bring it all together with a generative writing workshop so you can go forth into Solstice week with sparks of your own new land connections.
Speakers confirmed so far include:
Ally Wilkes
Caroline Wise
Tiffany Morris
Penny Billington
Kerry Hadley-Price
Xan van Rooyen
Akintoba Kalejaye
Lindsey McLeod
Renan Bernardo
Lindsey Trout Hughes
With lots more yet to be announced!
Full schedule to come at the end of May.
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.
Tickets from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/writing-the-occult-connection-to-land-tickets-906670705487
