Nancy Strider was born and grew up in Calgary. She attended the University of Toronto from 1968 – 1971 and that city became the place of her heart. She spent happy years as a self-taught, free-lance artist while she paid the rent by caring for plants in offices. In 1986, she and her husband (who she met while she was caring for the plant in his office) moved to Vancouver with their four-year-old son, so that her husband could start his own business. For a decade and a half she worked mainly in accounting, and was the family breadwinner. Somewhere in those early years, she sold her art books and materials at a garage sale to buy her son a bike. When her husband came out as a gay man, they amicably split into two households and shared parenting. Even before the word “asexuality” came into her vocabulary, she knew she did not want another partner.
In 2003, at the age of 52, and with her son almost launched, she felt safe enough to leave her stressful job as the controller of a charity to “run away to art school”. She had the most fun in her entire life as full-time student at Emily Carr, focused on community-engaged art. In 2006, as an intern with Vancouver’s Arts & Health Program, she found herself at Quirk-e’s first public event and immediately felt at home. After her graduation in 2008, she was hired to assist Claire Robson as an artist facilitator. Her work with Quirk-e helped her identify as an asexual, and also to realize that she’d prefer to be making her own creative work within the Quirk-e framework. In 2011, she handed her facilitator job at Quirk-e to another artist, and sat down at the table as a member. She now feels great gratitude for the safe spaces in her life that give her the context to flourish—family, housing co-op, part-time job, friends . . . and Quirk-e.
