Writing diverse characters can be a struggle. So often a writer can be paralyzed by fear of getting it wrong or of being too didactic. For those who want some insight in how to write LGBTQ+ characters with thoughtfulness, the Nelson Library will be offering a free workshop on Saturday, January 25, 7-8:30pm, entitled “Empathy, Identity & Storytelling: Crafting Queer Characters.”
The workshop will be taught by local author Ari Lord and participants will leave the workshop with practical tools to avoid stereotypes and tokenism and to represent queer people in all their glorious complexity. The workshop is free and open to all levels of writers, and open to all identities.
Lord is excited to teach the workshops: “Writing queer characters isn’t about checking boxes – it’s about embracing all the quirks, messiness, and magic that come with being human, and having the courage to put that on the page. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the fun of creating characters who take big risks to live authentically, unapologetically letting go of societal expectations.”
Lord recently won the Richard Carver Award for Emerging Writers with their fiction and creative non-fiction. They recently finished a novel and are writing another supported by the Canada and BC art councils. Their fiction has been long-listed for the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize, 2022 Jacob Zilber Prize and nominated for the 2020 Sundress Press Best of Net Awards. They are published in Malahat Review, Ex-Puritan Literary, Plenitude Literary Magazine, Foglifter Journal, Minola Review, and elsewhere.
Nelson Public Library