WRITING AND EDITING

Wordsmithing & lyricizing.  all things print & media, personal & professional.

Crafting you, your ideas, business, or organization to convey all you are. mentor & coach for writers.

UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, WRITING, THEORY, GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES

Research interests: modern & contemporary literature, poetry & memoir.  gender, sexuality, queer, identity & cultural studies. feminist theory & deconstruction.

Specializations: sexuality, gender, feminist & queer theory and literature.  modern, contemporary, and post-colonial literature and theory. deconstruction.  memoir and life-writing.  visual culture.  subculture.  interdisciplinary studies & approaches.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT / ADMINISTRATIVE LEADERSHIP

I work with companies, organizations, non-profits, and higher learning institutions to facilitate and build on the achievement of your visions, projects, and mandates.  I provide the space of keen listening, laser clarity, clear and innovative direction, integrity, impeccability, and velocity.  My consulting often includes: vision planning, designing & managing projects, building teams & company culture, creative direction, ensuring company time-lines, writing, editing, event-planning, budgeting, executive & cross-team communications, leading meetings and workshops, ensuring inclusivity & diversity, and raising engagement levels within the organization and community.

 

ONE-ON-ONE INDIVIDUAL, COUPLES, AND BUSINESS COACHING 

I facilitate individuals experiencing empowering, lasting breakthroughs.  I use possibility-driven and solution-based methods to allow for new results to show up in what’s important to you.  I provide intuitive, compassionate listening, knowledge, and experience to foster your own growth, awareness, and power for you to align with your biggest, brightest, and most powerful self.   I offer laser clarity, new tools & practices, accountability structures, and the empowered framework needed for my clients to manifest their personal and professional goals and objectives.  Do you want more confidence, self-esteem, self-expression, aliveness, or fulfillment?  Do you seek clarity with your goals and manifesting your visions?  Would you like to be free of a recurring behaviour or pattern that is sabotaging / interfering with your success and happiness?  Do you want to heal from a nagging issue or negative belief about yourself that you can’t seem to shake ?  Or perhaps you’d like to ignite your love and intimate connection and communication with yourself or your partner?  Experience relationships differently?  Whatever you want to create or have in your life, working with me will have you empowered to get what you want: you will experience both yourself and your life newly and powerfully.

Specialties include: empowering you to embody and manifest your personal or professional best: clarity & resolve in any life issue, building solid foundations of self-esteem & self-love, goal setting & accountability structures, producing new results that transform your life, connection with your higher source.

Specialty topics include: gender, gender variancy, identity, sex, sexuality, desires, roles, relationship building & authentic connection, self love & esteem building, effective, non-violent communication.

Sessions are in person, via skype, telephone, and/or email.  All sessions are confidential.

if you are ready to produce some new results please don’t be shy: contact me!

 

LEAD & FACILITATE WORKSHOPS / SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

Engaging people, groups & organizations with writing and ideas that inspire, educate & enliven.

Some popular workshop topics have included:

Over 18:  

  • playing with identity: celebrating gender variancy
  • switching: gender, sexuality, desires & roles
  • loving the goddess & g-spot: how to have your lady see stars
  • celebrating the divine: tantric sex & cosmic connections
  • the art of verbal play: communicating your sexual desires & fantasies
  • effective communication: how to meet your relationship needs & wants
  • the dance of partnership: embracing your masculine / feminine energy
  • choosing, committing & communicating: practices for building a life of love & partnership
  • the languages of love: how to have you and your partner win at the game of love
  • in times of breakdown: feeling, healing & building intimacy with your partner
  • good, giving, and game: willingness and meeting our partners needs
  • a safe place to explore desires: dominance and submission
  • safe sex & making safe sex fun

 

For women:

  • menstruation & our moon cycles: empowering new views & practices
  • modern women embracing our divine feminine & inner goddess
  • empowered women know their bodies: from g-spots to g-love
  • how to be wonder woman and still let your man lead
  • balancing the many roles of motherhood

For young people and teens:

  • let’s talk about sex: what you need & want to know
  • grrrls get smart: from periods to parents
  • empowered teens: how to communicate & powerfully deal with parents & adults

For parents:

  • when your child becomes a teen: embracing teen-hood & how to empower your teen
  • work/life balance: rekindling your sex & intimate life after kids

 

On writing:

  • writing poetry: grade 1 – university level
  • erotic writing – over 18
  • memoir writing
  • writing as healing: the path to self-love and discovery
  • novel writing and finding your authorial voice
  • writing academic / scholarly papers

General: 

  • making your goals happen: from intentions to accomplishing new results
  • bridging diversity & differences: a workshop on connecting & collaborating
  • addiction/recovery: hitting bottom: willingness, responsibility, integrity, connection, action
  • pushing through fear: the path of courage and taking risks

Political/Social:

  • women’s spaces & trans inclusion
  • sexism, racism, ableism, and homophobia: building bridges and creating solutions
  • the F word: everything you want to know about feminism and were afraid to ask (a workshop for women & men)

 

TESTIMONIALS 

Lesley is a very dynamic and engaging speaker. She has the ability to assist folks in looking at complicated, difficult and personal issues in a way that expands their comfort zone (without inciting any level of upset) but instead stretched their realm of what was possible. Lesley got them to engage in the difficult discussions and consider expanding their entrenched thoughts. Lesley’s workshop was a welcome opportunity to expand my thinking. Treat

Workshop Participant , Colorado, USA

My experience working with Lesley has brought such amazing changes to my life, and as well to my partner Chris’s. She helped us ignite our love and appreciation for each other again. I found Lesley to be very knowledgeable. By little practices and new ideas she pointed out just how special and lucky we are to have a partner that cares so much about us. She brought a fresh perspective to how we can be in our relationship and in our individual lives. She provided great recommendations for general well-being and practices to incorporate into our daily lives.

Her approach is gentle, open-hearted, and non-judgemental; while still talking about the serious matters and addressing them head on and asking us the difficult questions. I found it very helpful when my partner and I were in a session together, speaking to each other or explaining our thoughts, she would stop and coach us if we said something in a hurtful manner, and show us how we could explain what was going on for us in a more compassionate and constructive way. She never took sides and was not afraid to stop and realign  us when weren’t being supportive. I never realised how helpful it would be to have a mediator in my relationship, that guides me through, and makes me feel both feel empowered and valued. After every session, we would leave feeling open, understood, and happy. I remember saying once “let’s just go see Lesley, she always helps and we feel so great after seeing her.”

Lesley definitely was an essential part of us getting our life, and our love, back on track. The positivity that she brings when you sit down with her flows into your life. You can’t help it. I will be forever grateful to her for the advice, compassion, and positivity that she brought into my life. Hailey

Client, Vancouver, BC

Lesley organized and publicized our series of professional development workshops for a diverse faculty at NYCT, City University of New York. She did this extraordinarily well, while performing with equal aplomb her primary function as communication consultant to professors in various academic departments. Her enthusiasm, energy and efficiency helped our program attract more and more workshop participants over time, and improved relations with, among others, the Career Education and African American Studies departments. During her time as a Writing Fellow, Lesley also wrote for Writing Across the Curriculum publications while producing other critical and creative work.

Lesley’s best quality, however, is her boundless compassion and generosity. As both a colleague and a friend, I know how deeply committed to the work of social justice and consciousness-raising she is; how constantly willing she is to assume extra work for the good of her co-workers, program, and community. She is simply a hard worker, a fine thinker, and wonderful human being.

If you hire or work with her, you will add a star. I cannot recommend Lesley more highly. George Guida

Colleague and Professor in English, Director of Coordinated Undergraduate Education, New York City College of Technology, City University of New York, NY

In a word, Lesley’s performance is outstanding. Dr. Graydon is, first and foremost, an excellent writing teacher, who is also conscientious, well-prepared, and assiduous. She provides outstanding contribution and instruction in the craft of writing. Her workshops are marked by clear, effective, and highly interesting content. Lesley makes writing interesting and imparts a sense of urgency and importance to the critically important academic skill of writing. She uses humor, topical references, and sharp insights to make her points. All students and participants have responded most positively to her instruction and have expressed their appreciation for her significant efforts on their behalf. The feedback that Lesley provides, both in writing and in oral conferences, is most valuable to people’s development. Lesley strives to make each student better according to their needs and is always successful. Lesley makes herself available in a generous manner with her time and support. With Lesley’s excellent command of good writing content, she has, in her positive, professional, and interesting manner, not only made each student better but also developed an appreciation within the students for what outstanding writing is.

As a colleague, Lesley is first rate. She is energetic, personable, and relates very well with all levels of our organization. It is clear to me that Lesley’s greatest gift, among her many gifts, is that of a true teacher, in every sense of the word. She is a first rate contributor to the success of any organization that she belongs to. Her significant academic achievements, coupled with her truly excellent teaching and interpersonal skills, make her an outstanding contribution. Thomas Wilkin

Colleague and Assistant Professor, Career and Technology Teacher Education Department, City University of New York, NY

Through Lesley’s loving, compassionate, and understanding nature she has listened and created the space to really help me understand and love myself for all that I am (and all that I’m not). Prior to speaking with Lesley, for years, I was having difficulties in accepting my sexuality. This created a lot of resentment and loathing for myself. After speaking to Lesley over a period of time, I really got that I can begin to heal and accept myself for who I am.

This has positively impacted many areas of my life: my confidence, my relationships with family and friends, and my experience of myself. I no longer have to hide, I can just be free. I really got that there is nothing wrong with me or who I am. I am embracing my sexuality and who I am. G.L.

Client, Vancouver, BC