I’ve been teaching for over twenty years and I regularly offer workshops and presentations to universities, organisations and grassroots community groups. Read more about my recent work.
For more information about booking a workshop or other event, please get in touch.
I’m currently offering the following workshops (online and in person):
Introduction to Intersectionality (Power, Privileges and Positions)
Intersectionality is everywhere. We’re told it’s crucial, both for social justice and for democracy. It might even be a requirement for funding our projects and organisations. But what does it mean to keep intersectionality at the core of our work? How can we turn theory into practice without falling back on tokenism? What do we need to gain a deeper understanding of power? This workshop offers a space to explore these questions.
Queer Ecology: land and liberation
The systems destroying the environment are often the same as those that exploit and oppress LGBTQIA+ people. Environmental devastation and queer precarity are bound together.
Just as we experience increased risks of violence, poverty, and marginalisation, we are also more exposed to the harms of a wrecked environment such as climate disasters and pandemics. As we experience reduced access to stable work, housing, or healthcare, we also lack access to land and the benefits of healthy ecosystems.
While oppressions of various kinds share common roots, so do our struggles for liberation. The fights to defend the environment and the struggles for queer liberation – as well as countless other movements - are intimately interconnected.
Worldwide, grassroots communities are creating projects and movements that offer alternatives to mainstream sustainable development. Queer solidarity and liberation are combined with environmental connection, defence and restoration as an everyday praxis. Further exploration of these queer environmental networks can prove instructive for finding alternative models that centre the needs of the most marginalised in our communities.
Queer Ecology: the stories we tell
The stories we tell about human and non-human nature have the power to change everything - not only how we live in relation to the environment but also how we treat each other.
What narratives have we been taught about the living world and what are the effects of those stories on our lives? Could queer ecology have a role in supporting marginalised communities? In which ways can learning about nature strengthen our movements for solidarity and survival?
Writing from the Margins
Since releasing my second novel in 2018, I've been holding spaces for marginalised writers to come together, to share challenges - and solutions - and to deepen our craft. I've taught 'Writing from the Margins' in various formats, as a weekly course over several months and as one-off classes. We've covered subjects that include: writing marginalised characters, land and setting the scene, writing utopias and world-building.
Get in touch if you would like to host a Writing from the Margins workshop or course.
Writing workshop: it all starts with the land
Queer and trans life is, for a large part, an urban one. We gather for our safety, and cities can be the building sites for our communities and livelihoods. But there, surrounded by cement and trees in boxes, we can lose touch with the land, if we ever had it to lose. We lose touch and we touch loss for the five billion other species who are also our community. But what if our transness, our queerness, our divergence, and our power, is a call to connect? What if that connection could redefine who we are?
In this workshop from author, Kes Otter Lieffe, we will explore the precious places that cause us to breathe deep. The mountains and rivers and the overgrown corners of car parks. We will find out what happens if we write down our dreams for the places, and beings, we love. Participation in this creative workshop will be by consent: sharing our stories is invited, but never mandatory. The workshop will be focused on writing, but feel free to use whatever medium brings you the deepest joy.
Testimonials
“Kes facilitated two very interesting and important sessions on intersectionality for all staff members of Transgender Europe (TGEU). Kes worked with us from the start to develop a programme that would best respond to our needs. She delivered a highly engaging and well-structured presentation even while creating an atmosphere that encouraged questions, ruminations, and side-bars. The conversation flowed organically while yielding strong insights for the organisation on how to make our programming more intersectional.”
Transgender Europe (TGEU)
“We invited Kes Otter Lieffe as a keynote to our Trans Ecologies Symposium, a fully sold-out event attended by 75 participants over two days. Kes ran a thoughtful, fluent, and powerfully moving workshop on speculative trans ecological fiction – It all starts with the land – in which we reflected together on the crucial roles of sensation and imagination in radical change work that aims to take account of more-than-human agencies. Her genuine, personal, and inclusive approach helped set the tone for the entire symposium, and participant feedback mentioned the workshop as a highlight. We definitely would work with Kes again!”
Sage Brice, University of Durham
“I attended a writing workshop with Kes exploring relationships with place and speculative futures. Kes is a skilled facilitator, guiding us through each writing exercise and extending care around all aspects of the process – we were invited to join her in breathing exercises and in doing simple stretches after each period of focused writing, which I’ve never experienced at a writing workshop before! The environments Kes creates feel genuinely engaged and compassionate, and she is attentive to the complicated feelings that can arise in using writing to explore the futures we want and hope for.”
Felix McNulty, cofounder of Books Beyond Bars UK