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Cultivating queer joy: Letter writing campaign — Aaron Patey

This audio practice note describes a letter-writing campaign dedicated to sharing insider knowledges of Queer Joy. Letter-writing campaigns seek to create a context to share community knowledges of care in ways that can be accessed by members of the community of concern. This campaign begins with a queer invitation to allow members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in our province to write letters about their experience of cultivating queer joy. These letters are then distributed in sessions if a person is struggling to create queer joy in their life. This audio note reviews the care put into the letter-writing invitations. It includes responses from three letter writers and outlines the effects for both readers and writers. I hope that others can create seeds of queer joy in their lives through listening to how others have traversed, creating their queer joy.

Grass Tree overlooking Stirling Ranges near Albany in Western Australia

Threads of identity: Using fashion and narrative practice to explore preferred stories within the queer community — Libby Olson

This video explores the intersection of narrative therapy, fashion and gender identity through the co-creation of a gender-neutral paper doll dress-up game. Drawing from narrative therapy principles, it challenges the rigid gender norms historically reinforced by fashion games, offering a playful yet meaningful tool for identity exploration. Alongside the game, a community collective document is being created to amplify queer voices, sharing stories of resilience and resistance against dominant societal discourses. By integrating creative mediums into therapeutic practice, I examine how narrative therapy can help individuals shape and express their preferred stories.

meadow of wild flowers

Staying alive to prove them wrong: Collaborating with trans people, drag performers and queers in contexts of alt-right violence – Belial B’Zarr and Frankie Hanman-Siegersma 

In recent years, we have seen a rise in anti-LGBTIQ+ violence and hate across the settler colonies of so-called Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Turtle Island North America. This video interview describes a response to anti-trans and anti-drag hate. It spotlights an individual therapeutic exchange that grew into a web of collective care, action and activism. In the context of counselling, people’s responses to discriminatory violence are often pathologised, creating contexts of blame and shame for people who are living through oppression. This video conversation retells significant fragments of a therapeutic relationship. It includes collective narrative practices such as letter writing, externalising and deconstructing the effects of doxing. We invite practitioners to reflect on how we might take our practices from the therapy room to the streets for protest and collective action, and to stages for drag, cabaret and performance art, as we take up our solidarity with targeted groups.

Queer Invitations: Fostering connection between queer young people and their loved ones — Rosie Maeder

This paper demonstrates ways that queer theory can inform narrative practice, including through practices of invitation, deconstruction, questioning dominant discourses and mobilising nonbinary superpowers. The particular focus of the paper is on counselling conversations with queer and trans young people and their families. However, the paper argues that queer theory, with its critical practices that unsettle hegemonic assumptions and call into question the naturalness of taken-for-granted binaries, can fruitfully inform narrative practice in general. Specific examples of practice are included, such as inviting loved ones to join counselling conversations, using therapeutic letters to foster collaboration, guiding conversations about preferred names and pronouns, and responding to pathologising discourses including in relation to gender dysphoria.

Thinking Queerly about Narrative-Informed Organisational Development: A conversation with Janet Bystrom, founder of RECLAIM— An interview with Julie Tilsen

Maintaining a narrative practice within conventional organisational structures that are informed by modernist and medicalised ideas of identity, professional expertise and ethics can present a variety of challenges. In some contexts, governmental regulations and market-based funding directly affect the practices of service providers by imposing regulations and limits that stand in opposition to the relational intentions of narrative practice. This is particularly true for narrative practitioners who work alongside marginalised communities with intentions of doing justice. One organisation, RECLAIM, in St Paul, Minnesota, USA, is striving to meet this challenge. RECLAIM is building a community organisation that serves queer and transgender young people. Julie Tilsen (co-editor of this issue) sat down with RECLAIM’s founder, Janet Bystrom, to learn how, as an organisation, RECLAIM aspires to embody narrative practices and principles, not only in the therapy room, but also in its policies, procedures and everyday organisational practices.

Living Feminism in a Queer Family— Amy Ralfs

In this paper, Amy Ralfs describes how her experiences of growing up and living in a queer family have contributed to the development of a particular feminism. This feminism has certain themes which are explained here: ‘Your body is your own’, ‘The personal is political’, ‘Girls can do anything’ & ‘Difference can be different’. This paper was originally delivered as a keynote at the 5th International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference, in Liverpool in July 2003.

Up the Steep Side of the Queer Learning Curve: Some Things I’ve Learned about Sex, Gender and Sexuality— Mary Heath

This article uses stories about everyday life to explore ideas about sex, gender and sexuality. It questions the dominant idea that there are only two sexes and two genders, and that sex should always be congruent with gender, drawing on queer theory – and intersex and transgendered people’s life stories. It also examines the challenges bisexuality and queer theory present to dominant ideas about sexuality, proposing that there are more than two sexualities, and that sexuality can change depending on time, circumstances, and other factors. The author suggests that people who believe that their own sex and gender are uncontroversial have much to learn from paying thorough attention to the richness of human diversity rather than accepting the dominant two-sex, two-gender story. She suggests that refusing to accept the limitations of the accepted accounts of sex, gender and sexuality opens the way to exciting conversations on these subjects. These conversations, and the social change which they are making possible, have much to offer to people who fit within the dominant models of sex, gender and sexuality as well as those whose lives are currently erased and denigrated by them.

Queer Lives and Spiritual Leanings: Gay Men Talking about How We Stayed Connected, or Got Re-connected, to Spiritual Practices and Religious Values under Challenging Circumstances— Charles Jasper

How do queer people stay connected or get reconnected to spiritual practices and values when the religious communities they grew up may have been powerfully rejecting of gay, lesbian or queer lives? This paper includes the stories of a number of gay men who grew up in Christian communities and describes their journeys in relation to matters of spirituality. The author also provides a framework that could be used to structure similar explorations with lesbian, bisexual, transgender or other queer folk.

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