Have Yourself A Gothic Little Christmas from OGOM

Posted on 21st December 2015 by Sam George

OGOM wishes you a gothic little Christmas!

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Have yourself a gothic little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on, our troubles will be out of sight
Have yourself a gothic little Christmas
Make the Yuletide dark
From now on, our troubles will be miles apart
Here we are as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more
Through the years we all will be together
If the fates allow
So hang a cobweb from the highest bough
And have yourself a gothic little Christmas now
Through the years we all will be together
If the fates allow So hang a cobweb from the highest bough
And have yourself a gothic little Christmas now

merry gothic xmasimages

Why not make Jack the Pumpkin King proud and try some gothic Christmas ideas like our black cat inspired gothic tree (Darkness visible) Or dig up some genuine witch balls. Up in Cumbria where I was raised we hung olde witch balls from our Christmas tree not baubles and these were coloured or silvered glass, originally used as a charm against witchcraft (I swear this is true). You could see your own distorted reflection in them (which was spooky in itself).  No wonder I am named after a witch (but a good one).

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The Publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Posted on 20th December 2015 by William the Bloody

On this date (20 December) in 1812, the Grimm brothers published the first edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). Richard Cavendish writes about it here.

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Review of ‘Rules for Werewolves’ by Kirk Lynn

Posted on 20th December 2015 by firekrank

This is a very exciting and promising review from The Guardian for Kirk Lynn’s Rules for Werewolves (2015). It shows the increasing variation in presentations of lycanthropy and the overlaps between weres and feral children. Definitely one to get your teeth into over the festive period.

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CFA: Company of Wolves Publication (Reminder)

Posted on 18th December 2015 by William the Bloody

Just a gentle reminder from us about submitting articles for the Company of Wolves publications, which are due by 30 January. Please can you pay special attention to the formatting; if you have any questions about this, do ask. To clarify, endnotes should be used, in MHRA style; full references should be given as endnotes on the first citation with a short reference for subsequent citations; and a ‘Works Cited’ list should be provided.

This is from the original Call for Articles:

As promised, we are inviting you to recast your conference papers into essays. We will be publishing a ‘Company of Wolves’ edited book collection with Manchester University Press and a special issue of Gothic Studies.

First drafts (of 5000–7000 words, including endnotes but excluding works cited) should be submitted by 30 January 2016 as an email attachment in MS Word (12-point, Times New Roman, double-spaced) document format to both Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk; and Dr Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com.

Please use UK spelling and punctuation and conform to the MHRA format, with endnotes and short-title references and a separate works cited section. Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be sent in the following format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email address (5) Abstract (6) Article/chapter.

In addition, as you may be writing on TV programmes, we advise this:

MHRA style does not specify exactly how episodes in TV series should be referenced; we have adopted the following convention:

Initial references should follow this style: title of the specific programme, if there is one, in single quotation marks; writer and director; the title of the series in italics; series creator (where relevant); season and episode numbers; broadcaster; date of first transmission. Further details can be included if the programme has appeared in DVD format. For example:

‘Once More with Feeling’, dir. and writ. Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created Joss Whedon, 3.5, UPN, 30 October 2001 [on DVD: Fox, 2007].

Subsequent references should appear as:

‘Once More with Feeling’

We wish you all a wonderful Christmas!

Bill, Sam, and Kaja

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‘Wolfgirl’ Trailer

Posted on 16th December 2015 by firekrank

Earlier this year NBC ran a competition to find the next ‘ground-breaking comedy’. One of the potential comedies was called ‘Wolfgirl’ and the mini-episode is still available to watch on YouTube. Unfortunately voting is no longer open and the winner was not ‘Wolfgirl’ but it is still worth a watch. Even in this short episode it is possible to see many very interesting and pertinent ideas coming through many of which also arose during Company of Wolves.

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OGOM Migration Announcement

Posted on 16th December 2015 by William the Bloody

Dear followers,

We have now successfully migrated the Open Graves, Open Minds website and blog from the WordPress domain to our own OGOM domain name here (where we had our original website). This makes us easier to find through the more memorable www.opengravesopenminds.com domain name and allows more control over the content and appearance. Over the course of the year, we’ll be making improvements and adding resources, so please keep following us!

If you have subscribed to us with the WordPress ‘Follow’ button, you should have been transferred to the new site and still receive email alerts. If this hasn’t worked, you will have to subscribe again on the new site; if this is the case, we do apologise, as we do for any other inconvenience this has caused.

Bill, Sam, and Kaja

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Savage Girls and Wild Boys

Posted on 15th December 2015 by Sam George

Those of you who attended the OGOM Company of Wolves Conference will know that I have a special interest in wild or feral children and by coincidence one of the authors that Kaja has just posted on, Katharine Rundell, has also written a story called ‘The Girl Savage: ‘Wilhelmina Silver’s world is golden. Living half-wild on an African farm with her horse, her monkey and her best friend, every day is beautiful…..’

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Marcus Sedgwick’s Dark Horse is my favourite ever story of a feral or wolf child with a hidden past – those who find her destroy her wolf family in the belief that they are saving her but in fact she is happy in the caves and she retains her wolf memories – the book poses the question of whether she will eventually betray her human ‘kin’, recover her lupine nature and return to the forest (and then of course there is the question over her mysterious human identity). I’m excited to be teaching this brilliant evocation of the Rousseauvian child of nature (with a supernatural twist) on  Generation Dead: YA fiction and the Gothic. The course is due to start on January 18th.

I am busy revising my feral children paper for the forthcoming CoW book too and I have been doing further research on Peter the Wild Boy. I will be presenting a paper ‘The strange and surprising adventures of Peter the Wild Boy’ at the Heritage Narratives symposium on the 18th December at University of Hertfordshire. This is convened by Dr Ivan Phillips, who is a staunch supporter of OGOM and has a chapter in the OGOM book. The symposium is on from 9.45-4.00 (AA 191 Art and Design Building, College Lane).

I’m uncovering lots of new material on wolf children which I hope to post about shortly!

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A Festive Post on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Posted on 15th December 2015 by firekrank

Over on our Facebook page, Bill has just shared an article by the AV Club, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer staked its claim to a twist on a Christmas classic’. It’s a very thoughtful article on the Season Three episode, ‘Amends’, which follows the increasingly complex relationship between Buffy and Angel as he comes to terms with living both with what he has done in the past and with a soul that causes him to regret the things he has done. Just to make sure it isn’t too introspective, there is also a Christmas miracle at the end.

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Wolfish Treats

Posted on 15th December 2015 by firekrank

 

In the spirit of Christmas and the festive season, I just wanted to post the very thoughtful gift I received from my colleague for Secret Santa. For those who can not appreciate my somewhat dubious camera skills it is a wolf-shaped stamp and an edition of The Last Wolf: A Story of England in the Fourteenth Century (1900) by Mrs Jerome Mercier.

The Preface reads: ‘This story of the slaying of the last wolf, well known in the districts of Cartmel and Furness, pretty in itself, is an emblem of the change which was coming over England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – brute force giving way to civilization, though, alas! that has its evils too. The effort of these simple pages is to picture the transition, from a study made on the spot’. My appetite is certainly whetted!

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A Round-Up of the Best YA and Children’s Literature of 2015

Posted on 14th December 2015 by firekrank

The Guardian has written a round-up of the best children’s literature of 2015 (including YA literature). It’s worth looking through for the tales that have Gothic or lupine tropes. There are a few that sprung out for me: Deep Water by Lu Hersey, A Song for Ella Grey by David Almond (which is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and was praised highly Marcus Sedgwick), Darkmere by Helen Maslin and Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell.

I am particularly enamoured by the concept of Wolf Wilder due its wolfish qualities – unfortunately there is an incredibly long wait for it at my local library. In an interview for The Guardian, Rundell makes it clear that she loves wolves and this is something she wanted to bring out in the novel. I find myself warming to it already!

There’s still enough time to either request these for Christmas presents or pick them up for yourselves before the festive holidays begin. Happy reading!

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