Skip to main content

Arisia Panel Announcements for 2018


Arisia 2018 Panels have been announced and it looks like I'm going to be on a bunch in 2018. Go me!

Arisia, if you don't know, is a small fan-run, fan-centered annual SFF convention in Boston. I've had incredible experiences in the past taking part in panels on literature, media, gaming, and science. 


Two of the panels, "Writing Horror, the Occult, and the Macabre" and "Emotional Impact — How to Make Readers Care," are the first writing panels I've been invited to. I'm not claiming mastery in either but with a few stories under my belt I hope I have a few useful things to share.

I'm also on the "2017: The Year in Stephen King" panel which was my reach goal for the year. I count myself as an enormous fan of King's oeuvre and this has certainly been a banner year for the author from Bangor. From television series based on his work (Delores Claiborne and The Mist) to a pair of movies (one reportedly terrible and one I quite enjoyed) there has been an upswelling of interest in his work. But that alone doesn't feel all that different from any other year. The fact is, King is one of the stalwarts of not only speculative and horror fiction, but general, mass-market literature. I'm hoping that this panel will delve into the far-ranging influence of King's work and its impact on contemporary genre work.

I'm also pleased to announce I will be on the "Houses of the Dead: Haunted Houses in Fiction" panel. This seems to dovetail nicely with the a few of the other panels, King especially, so I'm pleased to have a chance to discuss what makes haunted houses such as Shirley Jackson's Hill House, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves so compelling.

Finally, I've been given an opportunity to read some of my stories:) This is an awesome privilege as I've had a decent number of pieces come out this year (or scheduled to appear).

I'll be keeping you all apprised of how plans go. Expect a few posts on the topics described above and I hope to see you at the convention! It promises to be a great one.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl
Post a Comment
Read more
I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a
1 comment
Read more

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that happen
1 comment
Read more