On Saturday 10 September at Burrinja Cultural Centre, Award-winning queer author Roz Bellamy held a story-sharing workshop for young LGBTQI+ identifying people to encourage Queer youth to put experiences to paper.
Recently completing a PhD on the topic just months ago, Roz found Queer people between 16 and 20 years of age experienced an improved sense of mental well being and a better sense of self after writing about themselves.
“As one of the writers said on the day talking about their manuscript that they’re working on… it has some non binary characters or gender diverse characters in it, and that when they work on it, it also helps them express something about themselves and really understand their own identity better,” Roz said.
“I just loved the way they put that, because for me, that’s why writing is such an important tool, particularly for young queer people, because often there’s just not other places…
“There might not be anyone at school they feel safe talking to, they might not be comfortable fully out at home, but if they’re able to either write about themselves or about characters who are going through similar things on the page, it can often give them that sense of not even representation, but being able to really explore [and] grapple with something that otherwise has to be an internal process.”
One participant in the workshop presented their writing in a poem, with Roz encouraging participants in their workshops to share their story in any form they feel comfortable.
They said people coming together in a similar age group is important, but those of different age brackets can also learn from each other, too.
“One [participant] was talking about Tik Tok and about using those sorts of spaces to make videos about identity and go on rants about things
“Sometimes one of the older participants will say something [and] the younger ones are like ‘oh, wow, I didn’t think about that, I didn’t know about that.”
To find out more about Roz Bellamy, visit https://www.rozbellamy.com/
