Writers Salon | Salt and Heat: Writing Sex with Melissa Wan

Come and join Connect through Creativity's CRIPtic x Spread the Word Salon with Melissa Wan and sign up for the Salon open mic if you'd like to share your work.

Whether you are new to writing or are a seasoned and published poet, gain inspiration and start a new ongoing adventure in creativity.

Sex is everywhere in our society: in our advertisements, in the lyrics of pop songs and – in the words of comic book author Alan Moore – ‘used to sell everything from chocolate bars to insurance’. But sex is still not easily discussed or written about and when it is it often remains entwined in normative mythologies around youth, virility and privacy. There is a lack of representation of lived experiences of sex, something especially true when considering disability as ‘rarely are disabled people seen as desiring subjects or objects of desire.’ (McRuer and Mollow 2012).

In this session I will discuss strategies employed by authors to represent sex in literature before providing participants with a series of writing prompts that encourage them to write intimacy – whether lived or imagined – and to value what is off-centre, liminal or unseen, culminating in a final collaborative poem.

Read your work at the sharing spot

There are five sharing spot slots available at the Salon and if you'd like to share your work please complete the following form by 11am on Friday 31 October 2025: https://forms.gle/oF3Egsjeh8j8ugVZ6

You'll be asked to provide your contact details and a short bio and the reading you will be doing which should be no longer than 5 minutes. This is so we can send the work to our BSL interpreters in advance of the session. You can submit these in written English, video or audio file format.

About Melissa

Melissa Wan is a writer based in Manchester. She was awarded the Crowdfunded Writers’ Scholarship to study Creative Writing at UEA and her short fiction has been published by independent presses, including Bluemoose Books, Dead Ink Books, Salt and Cōnfingō Publishing. Her most recent published story is ‘Dear Doctor’, published by Extra Teeth (2025). She was recently writer-in-residence at EX LIBRIS, an English-language bookshop in Rīga, Latvia, and is taking a practice research PhD at the University of Leeds looking at the writing (or not writing) of sex and its intersection with disability.

Access Information

• Auto-captions
• Self Descriptions
• BSL Interpretation
• Comfort Breaks

About CRIPtic Arts

CRIPtic Arts exists to ignite disabled excellence across the arts. We provide active disabled leadership which advances world-class arts work with disabled creatives. From high-quality community activities to showcasing breakthrough performers; we’re blazing a revolution in accessibility.

About Spread the Word

Spread the Word is London's literature development agency. We have have a national and international reputation for change-making research and developing programmes for writers that have equity and social justice at their heart.

With thanks to the City Bridge Foundation for supporting the CRIPtic x Spread the Word Salon and Connect through Connectivity.