Our guest of honor at our second salon of the fall will be author and 2019 Jane Hoppen Residency winner Lexie Bean who will speak about Coming Out Through Writing.
This event is 100% FREE and OPEN to all LGBTQ writers and allies.
Lexie Bean chronicled their journey of writing The Ship We Built in an article featured in Autostraddle, exploring how their writing process helped them come out. We will trace Lexie’s steps from first draft to publication, and how the process of writing the book became a sort of mirror that lead to realizations and growth in Lexie’s own life. For many queer people, writing plays an integral part in the process of coming out. Whether it is journaling, memoir or autobiographical fiction, early work of queer writers often involves a very personal life journey as well. We will discuss how writing can be an outlet to explore one’s identity, whether it is can be useful to publish said material, and lastly not letting queerness define what we can write about. To read the article follow this link. We will be going over most of the content, so it is not required to read before, but might be enlightened or encouraging.
Lexie Bean is a queer and trans multimedia artist from the Midwest whose work revolves around themes of bodies, homes, cyclical violence, and LGBTQIA+ identity. Lexie’s writing has been featured in Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Ms. Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Them, Logo’s New Now Next, Bust Magazine, Autostraddle, and more. They have also performed, curated, and facilitated around the world. Their most recent anthology, Written on the Body, with/for fellow trans and non-binary survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence was nominated for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award. In May 2020, their debut middle grade novel, The Ship We Built, will come out with Dial Books for Young Readers at Penguin Random House. Through the residency at Paragraph, they worked on on their feature length screenplay adaption of the novel, as well as a television pilot and another book in its early stages.