Exercising Daemons/ Exorcising
Demons
Writing Life and Writing Horror with Sean Moreland
Pre-registration via Tickets Please
Early bird rate (until April 19) $30.00 per registration
Regular rate $40.00 per registration
Almonte Readers & Writers is pleased to present the May series of Art of Writing workshops and courses exploring aspects of creative and technical skills development in literary arts, offered as part of the 2025 Lanark Lit Festival of Writing.
Overview
In this workshop, we will explore the intersection of two seemingly separate genres, horror fiction and autobiography. horror can be a powerful and liberating lens through which to look at and write about ourselves, along with our inner lives and inner demons. Using horror to exorcise (or exercise) them can offer insights into our fears and desires while making for more unconventional writing and provocative stories.
What will we do in this workshop?
Together, we will read excerpts of fictional and autobiographical work by selected authors, analyzing how these passages work and what kinds of effects they produce. Using these passages as prompts, we will respond by fashioning our own short narratives. These elements of the strange and speculative will allow for our own personal narratives to be unsettled and illuminated, creating rich and intriguing stories.
Who is this workshop for?
This 2-hour workshop is open to all interested writers, both beginners and those with more experience.
About the instructor:
Sean Moreland is an educator, editor and reluctant writer whose essays (often focused on gothic, horror and weird fiction in its literary, cinematic, and sequential art guises) have appeared in many journals and collections, including Horror Literature Through History, Lovecraftian Proceedings, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Making and Unmaking Ancient Memory, and The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe.
They have (co)edited collections including Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror (2013), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters (2015), The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation and Transformation (2017) and New Directions in Supernatural Horror: The Critical Legacy of H.P. Lovecraft (2018). They also write short fiction and poetry, some of which has been published in venues including The Malahat Review, Dissections, Vastarien, Lackington’s, Black Treacle, Bywords, and Over The Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the
Margins.
Sean teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa - view their profile here. They occasionally interview, review, and ruminate about weirdness at Postscripts to Darkness. More on Sean is available here.
The 2025 Lanark Lit Festival of Writing is presented by Almonte Readers & Writers thanks to the generous funding support of Lanark County, the Municipality of Mississippi Mills, the Perth & District Community Foundation, and the Elizabeth Kelly Library Foundation, with community partnership from the Mississippi Mills Public Library, the Perth & District Public Library, Mill Street Books, and the Almonte Writers Guild
