This is the listing page of panels currently under consideration for the WFC'07 program.

Prospective program participants: please read through the following panels list, and send us a note of which panel(s) you'd most like to be on. We'll also greatly appreciate you reminding us of any special interest or experience you have that's relevant to the panel(s) you're interested in.

If you'd rather not be on any panels, and just have a reading time, please let us know that.

All professional attending members are welcome to sit in at the Autograph Reception on Friday night. Please do plan to join us there!

We anticipate that most of these panels will be scheduled, but not all. The final schedule will be settled, panelists notified, and published in good time before the convention.

Please keep in mind that, due to the limited number of panels and the high number of professionals in attendance, it's often not possible to accommodate everyone. Most professionals other than our guests of honor and current award nominees will be seated on only one panel OR a reading. Most panels will be 55 minutes; most readings will be 25 minutes.

Because we expect a large number of professionals at WFC'07, it is especially important that everyone wishing to participate in program register for the convention as early as possible to confirm their interest and availability.

We'd also like to know when you plan to arrive at the con, and when you anticipate leaving. Program will begin Thursday mid-afternoon, and end Sunday afternoon with the Judges' Panel after the WF Awards Banquet.

Thanks again, we appreciate your interest and look forward to hearing from you!

PANEL TOPICS:

M.R. James and His Successors. The "James Gang," their work, their methods, and their influence.

The Legacy of Shirley Jackson. Did "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House change our (or the public's) ideas about what constitutes a horror or ghost story?

The Ghost in the Machine: The Thoroughly Modern Supernatural, being a discussion of modern imagery and ideas about the supernatural, the haunted internet or whatever, as opposed to sheeted figures in Gothic castles.

Succession Planning/Estate Planning. A panel for writers on how to set up a literary estate.

Sleepy Hollow: The Beginnings of the Supernatural in American Literature.

The Ghostly Lore of New York State. Is this area uniquely haunted?

How a Book Cover is Chosen. Art directors and artists discuss what makes a cover work.

The Evolution of the Ghost Story, from Defoe (or Hamlet) onward. The ghost story as a conscious literary form, rather than just something (like a play by Seneca) that has a ghost in it.

The Varieties of Ghostly Experience. Other forms of the returning dead: zombies, vampires, dancing skeletons, and more exotic varieties, literary and folkloristic.

A Retrospective of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. What it was and why it was important.

Treasures in the Wastebasket: Collectable Ephemera. A panel for collectors. If only I hadn't thrown out that 1947 Arkham House catalogue ...

Belief vs. Non-Belief in the Author. Is it an advantage for the author to be skeptical of the supernatural as Lovecraft was, or will the believer (like Blackwood) write with greater personal conviction.

The Best Fantasy Worlds. Why they are successful. Which ones do we want to read about, or would we want to live in?

The Author as Legend. Sometimes the author seems, as Lovecraft was said to be, "his own most fantastic creation." Our sense of who the author was completely colors our view of his work. Think of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Franz Kafka, or Philip K. Dick. Can an author create his legend intentionally, an artificial persona, or is that just phony? Can the author's life be separated from the text? Should it be?

What the Ghost Does. Its function as conscience, wish-fulfillment, memory, etc.

The Victorian Era as Setting. We still gravitate to it. Is this merely by association, because so many great ghost stories were written then, or is there something inherent about the Gaslight Era which is inherently spooky?

Horror Beyond New Jersey. Creating horror any time, any place, on any planet. MR James insisted that a ghostly story must be set in the present or relatively recent past. Was he right?

Tolkien as a Horror Writer. There are scary bits, undoubtedly. Did Tolkien have any coherent horror aesthetic?

Japanese Horror, from Kwaidan to The Ring. Discuss both books and films.

Neglected Practitioners of the Ghost Story. F.M. Mayor (author of The Rector’s Daughter) and others.

Native American Spirits. How are they different from transplanted European ghosts?

Robert Aickman: The Aesthetics of Ambiguity. Here is a ghost-story writer who did NOT follow the rules. What rules? Do his stories make sense? Do they need to? After all, isn't the supernatural supposed to be, at the end, an incomprehensible mystery? How did Aickman address this and to what extent can his stories be models for others to follow?

Charles L. Grant tribute panel. Remembering a stalwart of our field.

Gilbert and Sullivan as Fantasy. Some of their work, like The Sorcerer, has overtly fantastic content, but isn't ALL of it in a sense the product of another universe? How much have G&S influenced subsequent fantasy in various media?

The Ghosts in Shakespeare. What impact have they had on subsequent literature? We just begin with Fritz Leiber's "The Four Ghosts in Hamlet." There is a lot more. How did the Shakespearean conception of the ghost carry on down the centuries?

The Fantasy Graphic Novel. Think of Watchman, Maus, or The Sandman. How does the graphic novel (i.e. what we used to call a comic book, only different) achieve a depth and complexity on the level of an adult prose novel?

A Tradition of Horrible Ladies. The influence of women horror writers from the 18^th century Gothics to today’s terrors.

Does a Ghost Story Have To Have Ghosts In It? 'Ghost stories' as a misleading description: everyone knows, or thinks they know, what a ghost story is: it features a ghost, right? Wrong. Many of the best 'ghost' stories don't actually feature a ghost: demons, revenants, magic, various other-worldly phenomena, but no ghosts in the traditional white-sheeted-figure-drifting-down-the-hallway sense. Take a look at famous 'ghost' stories and see whether they could be prosecuted under 'truth in advertising' laws.

The New Weird. Is a movement? A publicity stunt? A marketing tool? A package-and-design issue? A sea change in the whole nature of fantasy? What DO we mean when we point at it?

Small Press and Independent Publishers.

Survey of the Field: 2006.

How is the Fantasy Market Changing? Are trilogies still the Thing? Are we seeing a subdivision into a series of new categories, such as New Weird, Literary Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, or has this always been the case?

When Fantasy Becomes Science Fiction and Science Fiction Becomes Fantasy. We read a good book recently about persecuted children with special powers, who yearned to escape to Another Place where their unique abilities would be appreciated… But it wasn't Zenna Henderson's collected People stories or even Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras. It was about fairies and changelings. Do such motifs move between genres depending on which is more popular at the moment, or is something deeper going on here? The story about fairy-children probably could not have been published in the early '50s, admittedly, and would have to be "disguised" as science fiction. Today is it perhaps a more viable strategy to disguise science fiction as fantasy?

The Animal Fantasy. From Aesop and Coyote stories through Animal Farm and Watership Down, this seems to be a universal form. What is the special appeal of having a story acted out by animals rather than people? And how anthropomorphic must they (or shouldn't they) be?

There's an Archetype in My Soup! Much fantasy deliberately employs elements of fairy-tale and myth, often after much scholarly research. But there's still the old argument that if you have to learn an archetype, it isn't one, that these patterns are universal in human storytelling. What is the mythic "buzz" we all know when we see it, even when we have difficulty defining it?

Novel Views of Hell. You can get there by train or bus, as in Bloch's "That Hell-Bound Train" or Lewis's The Great Divorce, but what else is new in the infernal regions? What has been written about the great Down Under (we mean the one that doesn't have kangaroos) in recent years?

Psychic Detectives in Literature. From Carnacki the Ghost-Finder to Kolchak the Night Stalker. Exploring the history of the supernatural sleuth story, and the strengths and weaknesses of this unique form.

What Are the Taboos in Fantasy Today? They shift with the times. Is the writer ever really free to write about ANYTHING?

Mythical Animals. There's a lot more out there in the imaginary bestiary than just dragons and unicorns. Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings is a good place to start. Let's see if we can come up with some genuinely unusual critters. How have they been used in literature?

Other Than Arkham House. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei effectively started everything in 1939 when they published The Outsider and Others and founded Arkham House. But they were not the only players in the game. A discussion of other historically significant specialty publishers and what they did.

Urban Fantasy—Beyond the Usual Suspects. It seems as if most urban fantasy uses the familiar European myths. What other possibilities are there? Which authors have successfully exploited them?

The State of the Lost Race Novel, the Gothic, and Other Obsolete Forms. Some forms and genres are the product of a specific time and set of social conditions. But do they ever truly die out? We saw a novel recently while browsing in The Strand which was a deliberate attempt to revive the Graustarkian Romance. In the hands of a sufficiently competent writer, it presumably can be done. But does such a "revived" form have the same meaning as what it is modeled on, or is it always a self-aware pastiche?

Folkloric Ghosts in Algernon Blackwood's Stories. Obviously "The Wendigo", but also stories that are nominally set away from Canada but obviously draw on Canadian folklore and legends ("The Camp of the Dog", "The Willows").

The State of the Art in Canadian Horror and Fantasy.

The Unpopular Ghost Story. How/why do you write ghost stories in an age when very few markets are looking for them, and what do you do with them when you've written them? What were the effects of the huge influence/availability of fiction magazines between the 1860s and the 1930s on the genre, and what caused its virtual disappearance after WW II, when various people began declaring the ghost story dead? And what really happened to the ghost story then anyway—it went almost into hibernation after the Second World War, and didn't really start to come back until the work of various people (Ashley, Lamb, Parry, Adrian, Dalby) in the early 1970s pointed out all the riches that were lying around, forgotten. Far fewer outlets for ghost stories? The rise of SF and fantasy? A belief that technology would put paid to ghosts once and for all? People weary of the real-life horrors of WW II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the Cold War?

Surrealism Trapped in a Jar. What IS Surrealism, really? It is a word we use very loosely, without any clear definition. CAN it be defined? It is not really practical to demand that any "surrealist" writer or artist have signed the Surrealist Manifesto in the early 20^th century or even have been a pal of Max Ernst or Salvador Dali, but "surrealism" does seem to have stemmed from a specific movement (artistic and literary—we tend to remember the painters more than the novelists) which has had a broader impact on the general culture. Is "surrealism" the same as fantasy, a specific kind of fantasy, or something different altogether? Bring your dripping clocks and fur-covered spoons.

The Medical Horror Story. In some of its earliest market listings back around 1923, Weird Tales announced that one of the categories of fiction it was looking for stories of weird "surgery," among many others. While, in the pulps, this often involved a mad scientist transplanting a girl's brain into a gorilla (just because it's there, presumably), the medical horror story has a lot more going for it than that, such as, for instance, Dennis Etchison's "The Dead Line." Discuss this as a specific form and cite examples.

The Cutting Edge of Tolkien Scholarship. After Tom Shippey proclaimed JRRT "Author of the Century", what else is new in this field? This panel will inevitably discuss the recent The Children of Hurin and how it was assembled.

Shifting Shades. Ghosts in fiction were originally horrifying, as they were seen as the souls of people who did not go to Heaven, or they were supernatural bringers of extremely bad news. Later, while individual ghosts might still be frightening because of their actions, ghosts in general were seen as reassuring because they are proof that you do not sever your bond with your loved ones. What cultural shifts were occurring between Hamlet (circa 1602), "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), and Topper (1926) that are reflected in these very different portrayals of the supernatural?

H.P. Lovecraft and the Rejection of the Supernatural. HPL, hard-headed materialist that he was, explicitly rejected the supernatural as a holdover from the obsolete universe of religion and ancient myth. He then created Cthulhu. A discussion of Lovecraft's ideas about a mechanistic-materialist universe and how he used this concept in horror fiction.

The Pre-Christian Ghost. Ghostly fiction and apparitions before the European Middle Ages. A starting point for this might be L. Collison-Morley's Greek and Roman Ghost Stories. How were the ghosts of the ancients different from the more familiar ones? For one thing, they certainly didn't wear trailing white shrouds, which are a product of the Industrial Revolution. For another, they were more readily attracted by blood sacrifices…

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We are pleased to note that the following will also be scheduled in the WFC'07 program, but these are intentionally not included in the above panels list, for (we think) obvious reasons:

autograph reception

WF banquet and awards presentations

IHG awards presentations

GoH interviews, presentations, &c.

WFA Judges' Panel

opening ceremonies

Saturday evening special event