The cards have been sent, the gifts are all wrapped, and this afternoon I go into Newcastle for my annual Christmas whiskey-drinking session with a local pal. In other words, this is the perfect moment to reflect on the past year.
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Island Dynamics: Darkness conference
This coming weekend, I’ll be starting my two day journey to Svalbard, a small town inside the Arctic Circle, for this year’s Island Dynamics: Darkness conference. At this wonderfully interdisciplinary event, I’ll be presenting “That Place Was Trying to Show Me Something”: Womanspace, Balance, and the Dark Side of the Force in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, my rehabilitation of the Dark Side by comparison with sites of self-discovery in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea saga.
This is a very special trip for me: not only is this my first solo conference event outside of Scotland, but I’ve longed to see the Arctic Circle for many years, and even the possibility of seeing the Aurora Borealis and the light display on the Global Seed Bank has me excited beyond words.
If you’re going along, I’ll see you over 15th – 16th January. If not, you can find out more about what you’re missing at https://darknessconference2019.wordpress.com/.
Before I go, just a reminder that GIFCon’s 2019 Call for Papers: ‘Mapping the Mythosphere’ closes on 14th January. We have some truly special guests lined up for you this year, who I can’t reveal just yet (sorry!), but trust me when I say that this will be an opportunity of a lifetime for European scholars of the Fantastic. In the meantime, if you’re a bit stuck for ideas for your abstract, this week, we’ll be running #PaperPrompts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to kickstart your thoughts.
For more information about the current call for papers, including guidance on how to craft an abstract, head to www.gifcon.org.