WRITING WITH RESILIENCE
Creating work in difficult times
Saturday 6 November 2021
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Living through a pandemic has generated many conversations about resilience, however, queer writers have needed to harness this quality, long before COVID-19. This panel seeks to explore how writers can continue to create work and be creative during difficult times. Artistic work, including writing, is informed by vulnerability. Is this exploitative, or simply an occupational hazard? How do writers begin to set boundaries in a world that constantly demands more? And how to they do so, while still telling the stories that are imperative for the queer community to learn and thrive?
Moderator - Nevo Zisin (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, Jewish writer, performer, activist and public speaker based in Naarm/ Birraranga / Melbourne. They run workshops in schools and professional development trainings in workplaces around transgender identities. Author of award-winning Finding Nevo (2017), a memoir on gender transition and The Pronoun Lowdown (2021) a useful guidebook on all things related to pronouns. They are a mentor for The Pinnacle Foundation, one of Out for Australia’s 30 Under 30 for 2019, an ambassador for both Wear It Purple and the Victorian Pride Centre as well as a member of the Gender Euphoria cast.
Beau Newham (he/him) is queer Anglo-Australian storyteller from Campbelltown, Sydney. He has been working in community development for over 7 years and is passionate about the intersections of sexual health, public memory activism, and HIV positive advocacy. He currently works as a peer navigator at Living Positive Victoria and is also the co-founder of the Queer Indonesia Archive – a digital archive focused on the collection of materials reflecting the histories and experiences of LGBTIQ+ Indonesia.
Roz Bellamy (they/them) is a writer and the Editor-in-Chief at Archer Magazine. Their writing has appeared in Black Inc.'s Growing Up Queer in Australia, the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Overland and SBS. Roz is a PhD candidate at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at La Trobe University researching the impact of life writing on young LGBTQ+ people. Roz's memoir Mood, about mental illness, queerness and Jewish identity, is forthcoming with Wakefield Press in 2022.
Shruti Sareen (she/her), born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD from the same university., titled “Indian Feminisms in the 21st Century: Women’s Poetry in English” which is now forthcoming from Routledge (UK) as two monographs in 2022. She has had over a hundred poems and a handful of short stories published in journals and anthologies. She is currently seeking publishers for her novel, The Yellow Wall, and is currently working around a hybrid manuscript around lives of queer artists, on themes of queerness and mental health. Her debut poetry Collection, A Witch Like You, was published by Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in April 2021. She was an invited poet at the global poetry festival, hosted by Russia, Poeisia-21.
Rosie Bogumil (she/her) writes unapologetically about mental illness. Performing as Rosie Bee, the trigger warning walking, she doodles a bumblebee beside her name in the vague hope that she will one day require a unique autograph. Rosie originally hails from the coastal town of Geraldton, Western Australia, where she received the Randolph Stow Young Writers Award six consecutive times. Rosie was also shortlisted for the 2020 Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize and her debut collection of poetry, titled ‘Decorating Pain’, was recently published. Rosie’s writing is also informed by her identity as a gay woman, and she fights queerphobia armed with an arsenal of glitter. When she’s not writing or performing poetry, Rosie can usually be found on campus at the University of New South Wales frantically reading material for her thesis in English Literature.