A COLLECTION of children’s poetry retelling traditional Scottish myths from a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender perspective has been awarded a £7,000 grant. A short film of a young lesbian woman with telekinetic powers has also won £7,000 funding from LGBT Youth Scotland.
Poet Rachel Plummer, who is based in Edinburgh, and Glasgow-based filmmaker Helen Wright have both been awarded LGBT History Month Cultural Commissions, funded by Creative Scotland to promote innovative artwork exploring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes. The finished pieces of work will be unveiled as part of LGBT History Month in February.
“Both Helen and Rachel put forward unique and thoughtful proposals, and I am excited to see how their projects develop,” said Fergus McMillan, chief executive of LGBT Youth Scotland, which coordinates and promotes LGBT History Month Scotland.
Plummer will work in collaboration with an illustrator on a collection of children’s poetry re-telling traditional Scottish myths from an LGBT perspective.
“As a queer parent and poet, I’ve found it challenging to find children’s books which reflect our family and life experiences,” she said. “What books there are often seem to focus on demonstrating LGBT families to a presumed straight reader [a person who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth] as a kind of social education. I envision my project as including trans and queer themes and characters in a way that allows families like mine to see ourselves in roles that do more than educate, roles and stories that reflect the full complexity of our lives.”
Plummer was a Troubadour prize winner last year and her poetry has appeared in anthologies including 154 (a contemporary response to Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets) and the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year.
She is a Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Award winner for 2016 and is currently working on her first collection, The Woman who Married the Eiffel Tower. Wright will produce and direct a short film, Joey, the story of a young lesbian woman with telekinetic powers entering the LGBT “scene” for the first time.
“Joey’s narrative doesn’t shy away from depicting some of the tougher aspects of life on the gay scene, which sometimes revolves around drinking and drugs and pressurises people in terms of their self-perception and self-esteem,” she said.
Wright hopes to enter the film to festivals around the world.
Her short films, ctrl.alt. and Bond, both use sci-fi and surrealism to explore romantic relationships between women.
Bond was nominated for Best Scottish Short at the 2013 Glasgow Short Film Festival. Dusty Does Dallas, a short film Wright directed as part of the Glasgow 48 Hour Film Project, won the competition and was screened at the world finals in Los Angeles.
Wright has also created comics and zines around LGBTIQ themes and co-founded Lock Up Your Daughters, a filmmaking group for LGBTIQ people, and the Scottish Queer International Film Festival.
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