The Yarra Ranges Queer Youth Writers Collective (QYWC) formed in 2025 and is making a return this year for keen young writers in the LGBTQIA+ community.
The group has also received a $7000 grant from the Youth Affairs Couincil’s latest round of Healthy Equal Youth (HEY) grants to help facilitate their activities this year.
Workshop facilitator Sophia Thomas said this year’s grant will go towards the young people making their own workshops and leading group sessions, as well as four author sessions.
“We started with an expression of interest to find out what the prospective participants wanted to talk about, and where they wanted it to be and I established a connection with Mooroolbark Library to set up as a home base, with satellite sessions at Healesville and Belgrave,” she said.
“The Yarra Ranges Council Youth team supported me throughout the process, and for me to lead the first session, we had a local zine group run by young people lead a session about zines, and another group member led two sessions about character design.
“Last year was my first time leading a group and workshop, this program has helped me and other young people to build the skills and confidence to talk about our creative practice and teach others.”
Throughout 2025, QYWC participants has opportunities to lead workshops and activities, with sessions on zine making by a local zine group, two sessions on character design by a group member, mini-presentations from everyone in the group about themselves as writers before two editing sessions at the end of the year to refine their stories with the help of a member of the Voiceworks Editorial Committee.
Ms Thomas said having a regular LGBTQIA+ group has helped create a sense of community.
“Learning and writing together has increased their motivation and skills to write, increasing their wellbeing through enjoyment and fulfillment,” she said.
“We had five author sessions last year, these really helped connect us to the local queer writing community, as well as learning from professionals, our author sessions covered talking about identity, giving and receiving feedback, writing about queer history and editing our work.
“Our authors also gave us reading recommendations and let us know of project opportunities like the Emerging Writers Festival and Voiceworks.”
Ms Thomas combined the young people’s stories into an anthology and printed as a zine/booklet and the group ended the year with a celebration where they sat and read each other’s stories.
Ms Thomas said the sessions follow a loose structure of around two to three activities with a lot of discussion.
“The first session we started with an icebreaker of ‘What’s our favourite book or genre?’, we then discussed our favourite aspects of stories and wrote them down and made a collaborative list, and by the end, we came up with our own prompts or blurb using words from the list to write a story about,” she said.
“I also ran a session on comics/graphic narrative, we started with a discussion about storyboards and beat sheets, about how they are used to outline and show important story moments and then took a paragraph from our own stories and separated it into ‘beats’ or actions, and drew a grid of panels to separate these actions out.
“I talked about how panel length and height can convey a sense of time, as well as the gutter in between, we discussed how we can put emphasis on certain moments using this technique, and had a go laying out a page of panels.”
In 2026, the group intends to run more collaborative sessions where multiple group members run activities, lead discussion or give presentations.
Ms Thomas said it doesn’t matter where you are at with your writing, the group is all about learning from each other and having time and space to write.
“Additionally it doesn’t matter whether you write non-fiction, plays, fantasy etc, we can have discussions about different writing forms, and see about getting an author to run a workshop on it,” she said.
“Or if you want to, you can run an activity or workshop teaching the group about it, or workshopping your writing.”
The HEY grants have been supporting community-led projects by young LGBTQIA+ Victorians for 15 years, with 15 initiatives sharing in $100,000 this year.
“We’re building a Victoria where everyone is welcome and celebrated – these grants are supporting young LGBTIQA+ Victorians to live their best lives,” said Minister for Mental Health Ingrid Stitt
“These projects help ensure LGBTIQA+ young people feel safe, supported and empowered in their communities,” Minister for Equality Vicki Ward said.
