Daylesford has long been one of Australia’s most celebrated LGBTQ+ inclusive communities—a town that has welcomed and embraced queer people for decades, and where that spirit of openness and belonging is woven into the fabric of everyday life. It’s a fitting home, then, for a festival that has always believed stories belong to everyone.
This year’s Words in Winter program features two events – highlighting diversity and inclusion in ample proportions:
Trans and gender diverse creativity—beyond the gatekeepers
This is a conversation about what it means to create, publish and find an audience on your own terms. Jasper Peach—trans, non-binary and disabled author of You’ll Be a Wonderful Parent and the brand new picture storybook My Body is My Home—joins writer and social worker Erin Riley, author of the essay collection A Real Piece of Work, and writer, musician and carpenter Liz Duck-Chong, whose work focuses on queer lives, the natural world, relationships and non-monogamies. Together, they’ll explore what it means to tell queer and trans stories in a publishing landscape that hasn’t always made space for them—and how they’ve navigated, subverted and pushed past the gatekeepers to get their work into the world.
This is a conversation about craft, identity, visibility and resistance—and we think it’s exactly the kind of story your readers are hungry for.
Storytime with Jasper Peach
For younger readers and their families, Jasper Peach will also be hosting a storytime session celebrating My Body is My Home—a joyful, affirming picture storybook for young readers illustrated by Beci Orpin. Warm, inclusive and beautifully crafted, it’s the kind of book that tells children—all children—that they belong exactly as they are.
It’s a rich story about queer creativity, about publishing beyond the mainstream, about a small regional town with a big queer heart and a festival that reflects it.
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