Writing Themselves In 4 with Adam, Issy and Mac

In this episode Sam interviews Witt Gorrie about a new national fundraiser to provide financial and material support to trans and gender diverse people who are incarcerated. Witt is a white trans social worker who has worked alongside communities impacted by criminalisation for the past decade.

In this episode Sam and Gemma interview Adam, Issy and Mac about the Writing themselves in 4 report, which asked 6,418 LGBTQA+ people aged 14 to 21 about their experiences with education, homelessness, harassment, assault, mental health, community connections and more. Issy and Mac were part of the survey, and Dr Adam Bourne is an Associate Professor of Public Health and Deputy Director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS).

In this episode we interview Omar Sakr, an award-winning poet born and raised in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright  Calanthe Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, as well as The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime  Minister’s Literary Award. He is the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win this prestigious award.

Today on the show Sam interviews Patrick Gunasekera about his new piece in Growing Up Disabled in Australia, which was released by Black Ink Publishing this month. Patrick is a queercrip Sinhala  interdisciplinary artist who lives, works and plays on the Whadjuk  region of the Noongar nation, disrupting white and settler  epistemologies of art through writing, photography,  visual arts, live art, theatre, and advocacy. He has been published in  Voiceworks, Australian Poetry Journal, Seesaw, Pelican and the Centre  For Stories’s anthology Wave After Wave.

In this episode Sam and Gemma interview Joshua Francis, a producer and writer who creates art for social change; advocating for LGBTIQ+ and multicultural communities. Joshua gives us the lowdown on TransForum, an online gathering for trans and gender diverse people to build their capacity in peer support, kick-start new projects and celebrate existing projects within the community.

In this episode Sam chats with Dr Hannah McCann, a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of  Melbourne about her essay 'Queer I: Seeing Queerly' in the NGV Triennial 2020 companion essay collection. Hannah tells us a bit about about the history of queer theory including the provocative work of activist group Queer Nation.

In this episode Sam interviews Tobias McCorkell about his debut novel "Everything in its Right Place", which is a coming of age novel set in Coburg. 

In this episode Gemma interviews Evie Clayton about the difficulty accessing respectful and inclusive healthcare for trans and non-binary people with endometriosis. 

In this bonus episode we interview Marli Kernich-Drew from the podcast "Bourne to Drag" about their upcoming live drag show at Pride of Our Footscray with drag king Freddie Merkin.

Sociologist Dr Fiona McLachlan, is a senior lecturer in sports studies in the College of Sport and Exercise Science and a research fellow at the Institute for Health and Sport at Victoria University. She is the leader of Rainbow Fit, a project exploring issues relating to health and physical activity for LGBTIQ+ people.