Sarah Leamy
Sarah Leamy is a writer, editor, and publisher based in New Mexico. Born in England, she has spent most of her life in the Southwest of the USA after exploring Europe in her early twenties and the States in her thirties. G'dog, Finishing Line Press came out 4/22. Hidden, Finishing Line Press, 2021, was named a finalist in NM/AZ Book Awards Poetry as well as Second Place in NM Womens Press Contest. Her short work is out or due out in Best Small Fictions Anthology 2022, Los Angeles Review, Passengers, Immigrant Report and others. Lucky Shot(2014) and When No One's Looking (2016) won NM/AZ Book Awards and Van Life, a travelogue, was named Grand Winner in the Northwest Book Contest of 2017, and named a finalist in the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. Sarah is the recipient of the VCFA Director’s Award, the VT Book Award Fellowship, a Post-Graduate Writer’s Conference scholarship, and Merit Scholarship for her MFA in Writing. She is a mentor for the AWP Writer to Writer Program 2018.
She is the editor of www.wanderlust-journal.com, and on the team of Upstreet. She is also a book reviewer for Hunger Mountain Journal, SF Project Quarterly, and NBCC.
Supervisors: Connie May Fowler (VCFA), Julianna Baggott (VCFA), Hasanthika Sirisena (VCFA), Dr Richard House (UoB), and Dr Anna Metcalfe (UoB)
She is the editor of www.wanderlust-journal.com, and on the team of Upstreet. She is also a book reviewer for Hunger Mountain Journal, SF Project Quarterly, and NBCC.
Supervisors: Connie May Fowler (VCFA), Julianna Baggott (VCFA), Hasanthika Sirisena (VCFA), Dr Richard House (UoB), and Dr Anna Metcalfe (UoB)
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Papers by Sarah Leamy
How do we read fiction when the normal socially constructed gender markers are missing? Why is it so instinctive to place and categorize each other by sex (female/ male) and gender roles (masculine or feminine attributes)?
This critical thesis addresses the lack of ambiguously-gendered narrators in current literary fiction, focusing on Winterson, Yuknavitch, and Myles. As an agender writer, this paper looks at how to create characters that speak to the non-conforming gendered readers looking for validation, permission, and representation.
Talks by Sarah Leamy
In this lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I address the similarities and challenges of both graduate school and Circus Arts.
The first subject is what the essay is literally
about—being a clown, in my personal example here—and the second subject works to hinge together the essay and create depth and here that is craftmanship. To learn and practice a craft is to fail and to fail painfully but it’s necessary to becoming better in our professions.
Drafts by Sarah Leamy
"Even if we are not sure about what identity really is, we can say that it acts as an essentially contested concept...In this sense, whatever it is, identity becomes an issue when it is in crisis." Kobena Mercer
What are you? Including stories of when bullied as a kid, Leamy attempts to understand why it is so ingrained that humans want to be recognised on their own terms, own gender and labels.
Identity is said to be "people's concepts of who they are, of what sort of people they are, and how they relate to others." 2
For the last few years, I have been looking for work that speaks to me. A tomboy, androgynous in looks, female in body, I’m an emerging writer and a non-traditional academic. As such, I wanted to find creative work within contemporary Western literature that reflected my own agender experiences. I needed to understand why there was such a lack of such narratives. Was I alone in this?
The interest began in at graduate college, writing my agender stories, when all around were cis-gendered, heteronormative, and young students. They wondered which gender my protagonists were, male or female. They asked me to clarify but I didn’t have the right language. I asked, why do you care? None of us really knew the answer to that.
Why do we care?
I didn’t understand. I started a doctoral research program, asking why are identities so important – and mis-gendering so frustrating. I read current studies into recent identity theories, into gender, language, and labels, looking for ones that fit me. Next came the question, where are my peers, the writers who grew up as tomboys in the seventies and now publish their stories? And lastly, how do they do so?
In short, can I find literary role models and learn from them?
How do we read fiction when the normal socially constructed gender markers are missing? Why is it so instinctive to place and categorize each other by sex (female/ male) and gender roles (masculine or feminine attributes)?
This critical thesis addresses the lack of ambiguously-gendered narrators in current literary fiction, focusing on Winterson, Yuknavitch, and Myles. As an agender writer, this paper looks at how to create characters that speak to the non-conforming gendered readers looking for validation, permission, and representation.
In this lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I address the similarities and challenges of both graduate school and Circus Arts.
The first subject is what the essay is literally
about—being a clown, in my personal example here—and the second subject works to hinge together the essay and create depth and here that is craftmanship. To learn and practice a craft is to fail and to fail painfully but it’s necessary to becoming better in our professions.
"Even if we are not sure about what identity really is, we can say that it acts as an essentially contested concept...In this sense, whatever it is, identity becomes an issue when it is in crisis." Kobena Mercer
What are you? Including stories of when bullied as a kid, Leamy attempts to understand why it is so ingrained that humans want to be recognised on their own terms, own gender and labels.
Identity is said to be "people's concepts of who they are, of what sort of people they are, and how they relate to others." 2
For the last few years, I have been looking for work that speaks to me. A tomboy, androgynous in looks, female in body, I’m an emerging writer and a non-traditional academic. As such, I wanted to find creative work within contemporary Western literature that reflected my own agender experiences. I needed to understand why there was such a lack of such narratives. Was I alone in this?
The interest began in at graduate college, writing my agender stories, when all around were cis-gendered, heteronormative, and young students. They wondered which gender my protagonists were, male or female. They asked me to clarify but I didn’t have the right language. I asked, why do you care? None of us really knew the answer to that.
Why do we care?
I didn’t understand. I started a doctoral research program, asking why are identities so important – and mis-gendering so frustrating. I read current studies into recent identity theories, into gender, language, and labels, looking for ones that fit me. Next came the question, where are my peers, the writers who grew up as tomboys in the seventies and now publish their stories? And lastly, how do they do so?
In short, can I find literary role models and learn from them?