Haunted Voices | Contributors
BOO and welcome from the editor and contributors of Haunted Voices. Find out more about us below…
Rebecca Wojturska
The Editor
Rebecca Wojturska
Rebecca Wojturska is the Managing Director of Haunt Publishing. She has written three dissertations on Gothic literature. In her spare time she loves to read anything dark and spooky, write horror fiction as well as non-fiction about mental illness, play D&D, and crush her enemies at board games. She likes to think she would be the Final Girl (she wouldn’t be).
Zuzanna Kwiecien
The Designer
Zuzanna Kwiecien
Zuzanna Kwiecien is an illustrator based in Scotland. With her practice she aims to develop bodies of work that capture the visual narrative of the subject and combine it with a distinct atmosphere. Her illustrations usually feature intricate linework and patterns. She enjoys creating pen and ink illustrations with a focus on detail and with foundations in dark folklore.
The Contributors
Fiona Barnett
Fiona Barnett
Story: ‘The Researcher’
Fiona Barnett is an independent researcher and lover of campfire stories. Based in Edinburgh, she writes and presents Past Tense, an in-depth history podcast on the civil war period of 1625–1660 in the British Isles, as experienced by the English, Scottish and Irish – all of whom did a great line in superstition and ghost stories. The rest of the time, she’s a proofreader and high school English tutor.
Paul Bristow
Paul Bristow
Story: ‘The Leerie’
Paul Bristow writes fiction, folk tales and comics, sometimes all at once. He has worked for the Scottish Book Trust as a Digital Storyteller in Residence and, as part of heritage group Magic Torch, he has written folktales, ghost stories and comics that celebrate the more unusual history of the West of Scotland and beyond. His first children’s book, The Superpower Project, was shortlisted for the Floris Books Kelpies prize 2014 and published in 2016, and he has been published in literary magazines such as 404 Ink.
P. D. Brown
P. D. Brown
Story: ‘The Priest of Forvie’
P. D. Brown was born in York in 1957 and grew up in Kendal. In the 1980s he started to rework traditional ghost stories, myths, legends and the early history of pre-mediaeval Britain as stories for oral recitation to live audiences. He has performed, for example, at Caithness Horizons Year of the Ancient Ancestors Festival 2014 and, in 2017, at The Light Club, Burlington, Vermont, USA. His poetry, mainly in traditional forms, is of the natural world and its decline, and the strangeness of the familiar. Storytelling and prosody have in recent years merged to produce works of narrative verse.
Anna Cheung
Anna Cheung
Story: ‘The Bean-Nighe of Glen Aros’
As a child, Anna was fascinated by anything weird, spooky or terrifying, and horror stories were no exception. Her unconventional family would huddle together during stormy nights to whisper tales of terror and she would devour every word as they unravelled into the bewitching hours. Among other writings, Anna has continued to explore the dark side of her imagination, spilling gothic words onto paper. She managed to unleash her spider-ink poetry (‘Thirst’ and ‘Satan’s Garden’) to crawl across the pages of online literary magazines such as such as Dark Eclipse and Dusk and Shiver.
Pauline Cordiner
Pauline Cordiner
Story: ‘Twice-Buried Mary’
Pauline is a storyteller from the fishing and farming traditions of North East Scotland and enjoys telling a variety of traditional folk tales, legends and anything that chills her bones! Pauline also sings traditional songs and ballads and has been privileged to learn from some of Scotland’s most respected traveller and folk singers. She is the current Chair of the Grampian Association of Storytellers. Since 2001 Pauline has been performing at science, archaeology and book festivals, Glastonbury Festival, Cambridge and Stonehaven folk festivals, museums, nature reserves and National Trust for Scotland castles as well as local schools and community groups.
Chris Edwards
Chris Edwards
Story: ‘The Inheritance’
Chris Edwards is co-creator of and one of the lead voice actors for the audio drama podcast ‘Tales from the Aletheian Society’. He has also written plot and performed roles for numerous acclaimed love-action roleplay events (Projekt Ragnarok, Empire LRP and Incarceration, to name but a few). In his spare time, he enjoys running tabletop roleplaying games for both adults and kids.
Fran Flett Hollinrake
Fran Flett Hollinrake
Story: ‘The Stolen Winding Sheet’
If you’d asked Fran at the age of nine what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said “a ghosthunter”. While working as a tour guide in the underground streets and vaults of Old Edinburgh, she further developed a taste for the darker side of history, and loves telling tales of ghosts, spectres, witches and scary things. Fran lives in Orkney. In her work as a tourist guide and custodian of historic monuments, she has surrounded herself with legends, folktales and history, and loves sharing them with others. She gives ghost tours in Orkney’s haunted locations and was instrumental in revitalising the annual Orcadian Story Trust. She has never lost her taste for creepy stories.
Gavin Inglis
Gavin Inglis
Story: ‘Soulmates’
Gavin's recent writing appears mostly in games, from the undead-next-door mayhem of Neighbourhood Necromancer to the cosmic awfulness of Call of Cthulhu, via the Victorian underworld of Fallen London. His spoken word has graced such venues as a reconditioned porn cinema in Glasgow, a dockers' club in Leith, a festival tent in a field near Ipswich and a glorified steel crate on the beach at Kinlochbervie. He has been to Whitby at least four times and once explained the gothic subculture to a visiting reverend.
Daiva Ivanauskaitė | Photo credit: Kristina Meilutė
Daiva Ivanauskaitė
Story: ‘The Girl in the Sauna’
Daiva Ivanauskaitė is a Scotland-based Lithuanian storyteller. She tells tales inspired by myths and folk tradition from Lithuania, Scotland and other lands. Daiva makes every tale her own, finds parallels with her life and explores themes of identity, environment and togetherness. She performs onstage at festivals and spoken word events, with community groups, with families and in schools. She delivers storytelling workshops, training and courses and also facilitates story work and brings the art of storytelling into organisations. Daiva is the artistic director of Lithuania’s first storytelling festival and regularly performs in her native land, her adopted home of Scotland and internationally.
Sheila Kinninmonth
Sheila Kinninmonth
Story: ‘Lambkin’
Sheila grew up in a family that told stories. Family gatherings were times when stories were shared and she has naturally continued the tradition, telling stories to her own children and grandchildren, using oral telling during her career in education and honing her skills through the Scottish Storytelling Centre to become an accredited freelance storyteller on the Scottish Storytelling Directory. There is nothing she likes better than sharing her joy of stories with audiences of all ages. She is particularly interested in researching and telling local Scottish folklore and folktales.
Kirsty Logan | Photo credit: Simon Falk
Kirsty Logan
Story: ‘The Keep’
Kirsty Logan’s latest book is The Gloaming. She is the author of three short story collections, two novels, a flash fiction chapbook and a short memoir. Her collaborative work includes ‘Lord Fox’, a show of spoken word, song and harp music with Kirsty Law and Esther Swift, and ‘The Knife-Thrower’s Wife’, an Angela Carter-inspired album with Kathryn Williams and Polly Paulusma. Her books have won the Lambda Literary Award, Polari Prize, Saboteur Award, Scott Prize and Gavin Wallace Fellowship. Her work has been adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.
Seoras Macpherson
Seoras Macpherson
Story: ‘The House’
Seoras Macpherson is from Skye and has collected traditional stories from the age of three. His stories come from family traditions passed down through many generations in Skye and Argyll. He has appeared globally on TV and radio and was the first ever Scottish storyteller at the Edinburgh Festival. He regularly performs in storytelling events at home and overseas, is a founding member of the Scottish Storytelling Forum and administers the Isle of Skye Storytelling Festival.
Ali Maloney | Photo credit: Rich Dyson
Ali Maloney
Story: ‘Scan Lines’
Ali Maloney was raised with video nasties in the news and Batman licensed as a breakfast cereal . . . and it shows. He has performed on stages as diverse as T In The Park and the Sonic Arts Expo in Plymouth, from live sessions on New York's top alternative radio station, WFMU, to Edinburgh and Glasgow horror festivals. His theatre shows include the bleak panto Ratcatcher and the diluvial romp of Hydronomicon. Currently, he co-hosts the weird art cabaret, Anatomy, and runs the ritualistic horror podcast ‘Caledonian Gothic’. ‘Brilliant’ (BBC Radio Scotland).
Daru McAleece
Daru McAleece
Story: ‘Possessed by Ravens’
Daru is a druid storyteller, performer and artist with the TRACS Scottish Storytelling Forum. He performs around Britain, and his work – informed by a love of myth from Britain, Ireland and around the world – is interactive, exploring inspiration and creativity within individuals and communities. He is interested in exploring and discovering new collective narratives, and often uses storytelling within eco-therapy for adults and children, raising awareness of the natural world around us. His passion for the gothic stretches back to childhood, all the way from early comics, and his tales and scribblings have always been tinged by this world.
Conner McAleese
Conner McAleese
Story: ‘I Live Alone’
Conner McAleese’s debut novel, The Goose Mistress, details Eva Braun’s descent into madness during World War Two. His first short horror story, ‘Polite’, was included in Dark Ink Press’s anthology Fall. His next projects include a PhD investigating how horror during the 1970s reflected the cultural anxieties of a post-Counter Culture America and creating a name for himself in performance storytelling.
Jen McGregor
Jen McGregor
Story: ‘Buried by the Dead’
Jen McGregor is a playwright, spoken word artist and gothic-heroine-turned-monster. Her poetry, essays and fiction have been published in New Writing Scotland, 404 Ink, Marbles Mag and Bare Fiction. Jen’s plays and spoken word performances draw heavily on horror and gothic fiction and she has featured at Inky Fingers, Interrobang?!, Hidden Door, Bona Fide and the List Hot 100 Party. Her solo show, Grave, has been programmed at Flint & Pitch Presents, In the Works Theatre and the Scottish Poetry Library.
Paul McQuade
Paul McQuade
Story: ‘From Abyss to Abyss’
Paul McQuade is a writer and translator from Glasgow, Scotland. He has told his stories to audiences in Scotland, from the bar to the dissection room (literally), working with material from Scotland’s oral and Gothic traditions. He is co-author, with Kirsty Logan, of Hometown Tales: Glasgow (Orion, 2018), author of short story collection Between Tongues (Cōnfingō, 2020) and recipient of the Austrian Cultural Forum Writing Prize.
Ricky Monahan Brown
Ricky Monahan Brown
Story: ‘Anne of the Dark Eyes’
Ricky Monahan Brown is the producer and co-founder of the irregular night of spoken word and musical entertainment Interrobang?! (Saboteur Award winner, Best Spoken Word Night in Britain 2017, and Bella Caledonia’s Top Scottish Alternative Media for 2018). Ricky’s memoir, Stroke (Sandstone Press, 2019), had The Scotsman’s reviewer ‘wincing and cradling her head [after] comparing the brain to a cauliflower and imagining it cut in half, as the author advises the reader to do to explain one procedure’. It’s also ‘an inspirational story with a fascinating, and unexpected, ending’ (Professor Sir Kenneth Calman).
Alycia Pirmohamed
Alycia Pirmohamed
Story: ‘When We Create Our Own Ghosts’
Alycia Pirmohamed received an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying poetry written by second-generation immigrants. Her forthcoming chapbook, Faces that Fled the Wind, was selected by Camille Rankine for the 2018 BOAAT Press Chapbook Prize. Alycia was a 2019 recipient of the 92Y/Discovery Poetry Contest and, in 2018, she won the Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest in poetry.
Gauri Raje
Gauri Raje
Story: ‘The Ghost Wife’
Gauri Raje is an anthropologist and storyteller who works in the UK and India with adults and vulnerable groups and performs regularly across the UK, India and Europe. Her performance projects include directing ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’, translated and told in three Indian languages, ‘Badlands’, storytelling of folk stories of the land and rivers of central India, and ‘Tales of Exile and Sanctuary’, exploring themes of exile. She has researched and co-written a book with biographical and traditional stories of South Asian migrants to the West of Scotland with AwazFM, a South Asian radio station in Glasgow.
Jude Reid
Jude Reid
Story: ‘The Thing in the Corner’
Jude read Frankenstein at an impressionable age and has been infatuated with gothic horror ever since. She lives in Glasgow and writes horror stories in the narrow gaps between her day job, chasing her kids and trying to tire out a border collie. She is co-creator of the audiodrama ‘Tales from the Aletheian Society’, studies ITF Tae Kwon Do and drinks a powerful load of coffee.
Max Scratchmann
Max Scratchmann
Story: ‘Poor Anna’
Max Scratchmann is a late-in-life exhibitionist and owner of the secret identity of Bard of Burlesque. As well as being the crazed genius behind the Edinburgh spoken word theatre company Poetry Circus shows, he is a writer, performer, life model and general theatrical dogsbody in his own right, not to mention someone clinging grimly to the now-fading title of award-winning illustrator. He is available for festivals and events in his persona of Professor Max – Takeaway Poet.
sean wai keung
sean wai keung
Story: ‘The Possession’
sean wai keung is a Glasgow-based poet and performer. He was a 2017 Starter Artist at the National Theatre of Scotland during which he worked on spoken word and performance representations of takeaway food. He has performed live at venues such as Summerhall, Rhubaba Art Gallery and Sonnet Youth and has been featured in livestreamed events at places including St. Anthony’s Well, Edinburgh, and the ruins of the Jerma Palace Hotel, Malta. He was awarded the 2014 Best Debut Performance award at Farrago Zoo Spoken Word Awards. Follow him on twitter @SeanWaiKeung
Dave Watson | Photo credit: Cinders de Leeuw
D. A. Watson
Story: ‘The Cravin’
Novelist D. A. Watson discovered a penchant for poetry when an experiment in spoken word resulted in his Burns tribute piece, Tam O’Shatner, which was published in pamphlet form and deemed gong-worthy at the Dunedin Robert Burns Competition in New Zealand and the Falkirk Storytelling Festival. He has since written and performed a handful of other poems including The Cravin, The Night Afore Xmas, Wasted and his love letter to the ravenous deid, AAAAHHHH! ZOMBIES!!! He can occasionally be found skulking around open mic nights in the vicinity of Glasgow and the west coast.
Katalina Watt
Katalina Watt
Story: ‘Tala in the Woods’
Katalina Watt has a background in spoken word and storytelling performances, most recently as part of the Events team at Golden Hare Books, as well as stage experience as director and cast member of productions with Student Theatre at Glasgow and in various jazz dance troupes. Her fiction has received First Prize for Glasgow University’s Creative Writing Society Short Story Competition 2014 and an Honourable Mention for IntroComp 2017, and has been featured in literary anthology Narissa, of which she is the creator and editor, and online for the Glasgow Women's Library. She has a forthcoming piece in the 2019 BAME Writers pamphlet published by Tapsalteerie.