Jimmy Packham

Thanks, both! As I suspected, I was being overly worrisome. The Horsley tactic sounds wonderful!

(I had my first ever piece of student feedback this year asking if I could lecture without spoiling the plot... The plot under discussion was Moby-Dick... The least amount of available plot to spoil...)

Also: I am probably overthinking this...

Possibly one for @tattersdill.bsky.social and @clareclarke.bsky.social.

A Q. for detective fiction scholars! Do people have an opinion on whether or not discussions should refrain from revealing twists/whodunnit, if they can?

I am writing about a Christie book and discussing the character who turns out to be the murderer (a fact irrelevant to my discussion!).

Thanks!

That this advice was printed in a heap of languages except English suggests we are all either profoundly multi lingual or doomed to get slimed…

Sound but unnerving advice from the evil looking toy in our eldest’s latest party bag.

Exciting update! ‘Summoned to the Séance’ is out next Thursday 12th December! 👻 Find it at @britishlibrary.bsky.social @waterstones.bsky.social @whsmithofficial.bsky.social and many more: shop.bl.uk/products/sum...

Thank you!

Thank you! I hope people enjoy what we’ve put together — and that’s it’s all a spur for more conversations, and more localised weirdness.

2 days until our online seminar with Dr Isabelle Gapp: join us on Zoom at 3pm (UK) this Thursday – details below!

Oh wait! Maybe email isn't a good idea if you're locked out! I'm not sure I can send a DM here yet – but let me know what's best way!

Great – will email!

Phew... Almost of all this issue is open access, and I'm very happy to share the 2 pieces (Introduction and Commentary) that aren't if anyone is interested!
Thanks again to all – and happy reading, I hope!

commentary: Kyle Turakhia, 'The National Literacy Trust Haunted Birmingham Campaign: How Might 'Scary stories' Connect People to Place, Heritage and Literacy? COMMENTARY The National Literacy Trust Haunted Birmingham Campaign: How Might ‘Scary stories’ Connect People to Place, Heritage and Literacy? Kyle Turakhia National Literacy Trust, Birmingham, England ABSTRACT In the dark winter of 2023, the National Literacy Trust asked young people and adults across Birmingham to write ‘scary stories’ set somewhere in their home city. More than 250 residents took up the challenge: populating local streets with monsters and ghouls, and setting loose nightmares into their schools, shopping centres and restaurants. In this commentary, I will introduce the National Literacy Trust and our work in Birmingham, before explaining the origins and delivery of the Haunted Birmingham campaign. I will then analyse the stories submitted, exploring what emergent themes and common settings tell us about the relevance of ‘scary stories’ to contemporary cities. Finally, I will share the results of impact surveys measuring Haunted Birmingham and present opportunities for readers to engage further with this work.

In a final commentary, Kyle Turakhia offers a lovely reflection on the ghost story workshops run with the National Literacy Trust, with school and adult learners in the West Midlands – thinking about new ghosts that might be populating the region.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Rob Francis and Paul McDonald, 'Wave Goodbye to the Future: Haunting, Music, and Cultural Stasis in the Regional Novels of Catherine O'Flynn and Joel Lane' ABSTRACT Using Mark Fisher’s reconfigurations of Derrida’s Hauntology, this article explores the interactions between these narrative features in the works of Catherine O’Flynn and Joel Lane. Fisher reworks hauntology in relation to the distinct features of ‘futuristic’ music and ‘retro’ perceptions of what lay ahead. He links this psychic and cultural trap with ideas of the weird and the eerie. Both O’Flynn and Lane have produced eerie texts set in the off-kilter and marginal West Midlands regions, placing their characters in literal and symbolic haunted sites. Their respective spectres – people, places and cultures – are caught in a perpetual liminality and psychic looping: a hauntological position. These play out through the motifs of melancholic landscapes, personalities and cultural currents, most notably in music. This article interrogates these strange conjugations and interfaces that play out in the fiction of O’Flynn and Lane.

In the final research article, Rob Francis and Paul McDonald consider lost futures and the role of music and forms of cultural stasis in the Midlands writing of Catherine O'Flynn and Joel Lane.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Thomas Knowles, 'Queering the Postindustrial Landscape in Joel Lane's Short Fictions' ABSTRACT This article explores the under-examined short fiction of Joel Lane, which is largely set in the postindustrial landscapes of the English Midlands and the Black County. In so doing, it links Lane’s employ- ment of the weird, the eerie, and the numinous to processes of mourning and melancholia in the face of the unacceptable and unacknowledgeable – by society at large – losses of the Anthropocene, of industrial decline, and of the HIV AIDS crisis. It argues that Lane’s queering of mourning and melancholia offers modes of resistance to the recuperation of radical losses and the transformation of storied place into homogenous space.

Thomas Knowles offers a wonderful examination of queering and melancholy in Joel Lane's West Midlands & Black Country postindustrial fiction.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Jimmy Packham, 'Weird Waterways: Blue Humanities and Eerie Canals in the Midlands' ABSTRACT This article explores the eerie and uncanny qualities asso- ciated with the Midlands canal network, with particular focus on the gothic and weird fiction produced by three writers: Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and L. T. C. Rolt. The article redresses the neglect canals have faced within the field of study known as the blue humanities and argues for the distinctive – and haunting – forms of affect and knowl- edge that canals can bring to humanities scholarship invested in bodies of water and their histories. Because of the extensive size of its canal network, the Midlands makes an excellent case study for establishing the role of the canal in the blue humanities. At the same time, the article argues for the value of apprehending the Midlands, particularly Birmingham and the surrounding region, as a richly aqueous or ‘blue’ space, a region saturated and shaped by its inland waterways.

In my piece, I think about what the Midlands and its canal network can offer blue humanities scholarship, via case studies of Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and LTC Rolt.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Scott Brewster, 'Mercian Charms: From The Lair of the White Worm to Penda's Fen' ABSTRACT This essay traces the unlikely affinities between Bram Stoker’s novel The Lair of the White Worm (1911) and David Rudkin’s television play Penda’s Fen (1974), showing how both involve the mythopoeic rein- vention of Anglo-Saxon Mercia as a heartland of visionary change. These texts resist alien beliefs and defend territorial integrity, but also extend a welcome to outsiders or incomers. Stoker and Rudkin turn the storied landscape of ancient Mercia into a crucible of difference, a sinuous entanglement or coiling of hybrid origins and affiliations. Their narratives constitute intense meditations on nation and belong- ing at different moments of imperial and post-imperial uncertainty in the twentieth century, when the continuity of Englishness as an identity formation is challenged by shifting relationships within and beyond the British and Irish Isles. Whereas The Lair of the White Worm seeks to delimit the transformative power of these middle lands, however, Penda’s Fen unleashes its potential.

Then, Scott Brewster examines the connections between Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm and the folk horror film Penda's Fen, via their shared interest in Mercia and questions of belonging, hybridity, and insiders/outsiders.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Nicola Bowring, 'Recapturing History: Newstead Abbey and Romantic-Gothic Interpretation' ABSTRACT Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, is widely known as the ancestral home of the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Its connections to Romantic-era literature and its influence on the early Gothic tradition, however, run much further than this. Horace Walpole, the ‘father’ of the Gothic genre, Ann Radcliffe, ‘mother’ of the Gothic romance, and Washington Irving, a key figure in the rise of the American Gothic, all visited the abbey, which inspired their Gothic tastes and writing. This essay explores their connections to this East Midlands site, arguing for its significance to the Gothic tradition. Newstead helped to cement what would become one of the key themes of Gothic fiction: engagement with the past and history through material remains, primarily the written text and the ancient building. The Nottinghamshire abbey thus played a key role in the development of the Gothic tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Next, Nicola Bowring explores the centrality of Nottinghamshire, especially Newstead Abbey, to the early gothic tradition: looking at Walpole, Radcliffe, Byron and Irving.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Imogen Peck, 'Edgehill, Naseby, and the Ghosts of the Civil Wars' ABSTRACT This article explores the shifting significance of the spectres of Britain’s Civil Wars from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the supernatural stories that have adhered to various Midlands sites, and to the battlefields at Edgehill and Naseby in particular, it illuminates the ways in which the ghosts of Britain’s domestic conflicts have been used to interrogate and express contemporary anxieties about the impact and aftermath of conflict across several centuries. In so doing, it draws attention to the significant – but often overlooked – role that the Civil Wars have played in the Gothic tradition. It also establishes the signifi- cance of Midlands sites as loci of Civil War memory, engendering a multi-layered reading of land and memory in which spectres of war, both past and present, might enter into dialogue over the meaning of conflict and the enduring presence of the past.

The first research article by Imogen Peck is on the ghosts of Britain's Civil Wars and their place in the Midlands as well as the gothic literature and spiritualism.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

Introduction: Towards the Haunted Midlands by Jimmy Packham ABSTRACT The English Midlands is home to a rich and distinctive gothic tradi- tion: vast landscapes with nebulous borders disorient the traveller spatially as well as temporally, the unsettled legacies of ancient Mercia seep into the present day, and the ghosts – and ecological repercussions – of industrialisation haunt regions such as the Black Country. Yet this cultural tradition is largely underexplored. This introduction to the ‘Haunted Midlands’ special issue of Midland History begins to elaborate the ways in which the Midlands can be productively placed within, and complicate, critical frameworks asso- ciated with regionalist literary studies. It does so with specific refer- ence to a selection of key Midlands gothic texts, all of which evidence a fascination with place, placelessness, and the relationship between the Midlands and the nation of which it forms a significant part.

The Introduction to the special issue does some critical set-up around gothic regionalism and the Midlands, mostly via short close readings of 6 key authors –and the Commonwealth Games...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Midland History is a history journal, so I'm really grateful for the editorial board for allowing us this foray into literary and cultural studies!

They're keen for more in this vein, too! So, lit folks, do reach out to them – and I'm happy to chat about the experience, as well.

Midland History Haunted Midlands. Volume 49, Issue 3 of Midland History

Hi everybody: I’m excited to be able to share a new special issue from the Midland History journal on the ‘Haunted Midlands’ – all articles open access! Thanks to all involved!
Please share with anyone who might enjoy spooky Midlands!

www.tandfonline.com/toc/ymdh20/4...

I might be able to help out with this!

A trysteratops for the ages!

Haunted Shores online seminar: Dr Isabelle Gapp, 5 December 2024 Haunted Shores online seminar series 3pm (UK time) 5 December 2024 Online (Zoom): link to be circulated ahead of seminar to registered attendees. We are delighted to invite you to the Haunted Shore…

Please share, as Haunted Shores hasn’t quite made it to the new place yet!

The next Haunted Shores online seminar with Dr Isabelle Gapp — on reindeer, Sámi herders, & shipboard transportation in Canada — on Thursday 5 December, 3pm (UK).

Info/registration here!

haunted-shores.com/2024/11/26/h...

A yellow sign that reads: PROJECT SERVATOR. Together we've got security covered. To help keep this area safe, we run regular

Project Servator — seemingly run by the animorphs

But then in the snow all of this nonsense erupts…

Ours did an exceptional job of this over the summer whenever it got slightly warm. This is, despite appearances, a video…