As the year winds down, we’re offering a pair of new podcasts from Levenshulme Old Library – two very different stories, both shaped by our neighbourhood and made for the long evenings and quiet moments of this season. Think of them as our Christmas gift to you.
On Wednesday 17th December, we’ll release Items, a Christmas ghost story by Manchester writer and performer David Hartley. David’s fiction is an award-winning writer whose short stories have appeared in publications such as Ambit, Black Static and The Shadow Booth, and his short story collection Fauna was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Items, set in Levenshulme, is a haunted house story in the quietest sense, where home seems to be a place that retains what has happened inside it. It’s part of our Ghosts at the Old Library programme, an annual strand of storytelling, events and audio that finds the uncanny in the familiar and rooted in the neighbourhood.
Then on Sunday 21st December, Secret Lake Stories will go live. This is a slow and immersive piece created by composer and sound designer Emily Zurowski. Emily is a composer and audio producer based in Manchester, whose work spans original composition, sound design, live performance and experimental audio practices. She has worked with artists including The Orielles and WH Lung and has co-created immersive installations and radio work. For Secret Lake Stories, Emily has gathered the voices of local walkers, swimmers, fishers and those who know and love the Secret Lake, a hidden lake on the Levenshulme-Reddish border, weaving field recordings, interviews and detailed soundscapes into an intimate portrait of this semi-hidden place.
Together, these two pieces offer different ways of listening as the year comes to a close: one a quiet and uncanny story for the darker nights, the other a reflective sound journey that invites you to slow down, pay attention, and let a place reveal itself through sound.
Both will be available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts. Follow now so you find them in your feed as soon as they drop.