Liberating the Weird with Lindz McLeod

Join author Lindz McLeod on a wild ride to create ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have dreamt of putting on the page. Through a series of prompts, you’ll explore surreal sensory experiences, create unusual story structures, and generate odd characters. By navigating via a series of common themes and emotions—love, loss, survival, redemption, to name a few—we’ll discover ways to bridge the land masses of Genuine Sentiment over the sea of Weird Ideas to create a tale (whether profound or silly) that a reader can truly connect with.

Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer and poet who dabbles in the surreal. Her short prose has been published by Apex, Catapult, Pseudopod, and many more. Her longer work includes the award-winning short story collection TURDUCKEN (Spaceboy, 2023), as well as her books SUNBATHERS (Hedone Books, 2024), QUEEN O’NINE TAILS, (Hedone Books, 2025), THE UNLIKELY PURSUIT OF MARY BENNET (Harlequin/Atom, 2025), WE, THE DROWNING (Android Press, 2026), and the collaborative anthology AN HONOUR AND A PRIVILEGE (Stanchion, 2025). Her work has been taught in schools, universities, and turned into avant-garde opera. She is a full member of the SFWA, the club president of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club, and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.