It’s that time of year again! Romancing the Gothic is running it’s charity teachathon! A whole day of Gothic and horror classes and workshops. Choose your price. Come and go as often as you please. Talks recorded and sent out so you can catch up on any you missed! You can even sign up if you can’t come on the day and you’ll get the videos! Sign up here R omancing the Gothic is running a charity event to support Magic Breakfast, which provides school breakfasts for children who need them. The event is a day of online classes and workshops with academics, experts and writers. You can come in and ..read more

As we do every year in preparation for the upcoming conference, Romancing the Gothic is offering a free abstract writing workshop to anyone interested. You don’t have to be coming to our conference to join us! We’ll go over some basics of abstract writing for humanities (in a British context). A lot of the information will be more broadly useful but the workshop is based on the context of the conference. There’ll be input, some fun exercises and a chance to get feedback on your own abstracts. You can sign up here ..read more

Every week Romancing the Gothic runs an online book group (everyone’s welcome as often or as infrequently as they like – use the contact page to get in touch if you’re interested!) We read short stories, graphic novels, novellas, novels, watch tv shows and sometimes play interactive games. At the end of each year, I send out a form for our members to fit in where they can vote for our five-star reads. Gothic and horror adjacent books with the Romancing the Gothic seal of approval. Have a look at this year’s stand outs! I was hoping to curate a ‘top ten’ list but the votes were against it with ..read more

It’s that time of year! This is a top ten count down of talks from 1st December 2022 to 30th November 2023. These were the most popular talks on the YouTube channel. Have you caught them all? Don’t stop there either. There are lots of fascinating talks this year on a wide range of subjects. Why not go learn something new!? 10) The Parallel Lives of Agatha Christie and Muriel Spark with Gray Robert Brown October was detective month and we ended it with this exploration of two of my favourite writers of crime and all things terrible! 9) Lancashire Gothic and the Lancashire Witches in the 21st C ..read more

I am currently putting together the 2024 programme (January – June) of talks for Romancing the Gothic. We hold talks every week at the weekend and run each talk twice (time zones permitting!) to make sure as many people from as many time-zones as possible can join us. Each talk fits in a one hour session, with approximately 40-45 minutes for the talk and 15 minutes for questions. We have a diverse audience from around the world and from all areas of specialism and interest. Each talk should aim at a general audience and be engaging for both experts and those encountering the field for the firs ..read more

Happy Halloween everyone! We’re finally at day 31 of the ‘A Scare A Day’ challenge. I hope you’ve enjoyed the stories and the blogs! It’s been a lot of work but I’ve loved seeing everyone’s opinions (whether you joined the discussion here, on social media or just in chatting to me!) and the blog has made me thing a little harder about each of the stories we’ve read. If you’ve enjoyed the challenge and my blogs, you can always tip me here! Today’s story was ‘The Girls That Follow’ by J. Choe which was published by Nightmare Magazine this very year (we’re on the cutting edge over here!). You can ..read more

Today’s story was published in Fantasy Magazine in 2022 and you can read it online here. The story opens with the revelation that you can now grow your own girlfriend. Just add water (and some liquid nutrients to enhance your desired characteristics). Our protagonist isn’t interested in a girlfriend though, she’s interested in transformation. As I was reading this story, I kept coming back to parallels with Frankenstein, another tale of human creation. ‘Girlfriend Material’ can be usefully placed into conversation with Mary Shelley’s novel, I think, a modern, sapphic variant of the tale which ..read more

Today’s story is the novellete ‘The Night Cyclist’ by Stephen Graham Jones. You can read it here. Stephen Graham Jones is perhaps best known for his novels like The Only Good Indians and My Heart is a Chainsaw (an ode to the slasher) which have both won a couple of awards. Today’s novellete was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award in the novellete category. The story focuses on a chef who loves to cycle home at night. He’s just come out of a long relationship, one that he deliberately sabotaged, finding himself a way out through an affair. His cycling is weighted with meaning, connected to th ..read more

Today we take a leap forward into much more current writing. Hesper Leveret’s short story ‘Not a Basking Shark’ was published by Fireside in 2022 and you can read it here. If you’re wondering why these lists often jump from the early 20th to the early 21st century with little in between, it’s because both copyright and access become more of an issue in the mid-20th century. I have to admit to loving the end of the list though. It’s an opportunity to share some of my favourite new stories and to explore some authors who are writing now and producing new work to look forward to! When I read this ..read more

Today’s story is the 1882 tale ‘The New Mother’ by Lucy Clifford (the publication was under the name Mrs. W. K. Clifford). You can read it or listen to it here. ‘The New Mother’ was part of a collection she wrote for her children called The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise. The collection was illustrated by Dorothy Tenant and there are two illustrations of ‘The New Mother’ The preface tells us briefly that: ‘These stories were not written for very little children, but those of the middling size; and for the big folk who are not above reading about the little folk.’ Despite this claim to a ..read more