Meet Flora

We recently connected with Flora and have shared our conversation below.

Flora, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Our resilience comes from our shared experiences and identities that allow us to form deep, found-family bonds with each other. As transgender women, we face countless challenges every day, from simply getting misgendered to hearing news stories about our rights getting stripped away. But through the power of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (plus) community, we find the strength to keep on rocking in this not-quite-free world.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I started writing songs under the name Flora & The Fauna in 2019, recording demos in my apartment with a laptop. I had been writing songs since I was 12 years old, but having just come out as a trans woman, I felt it was time for a reinvention of my music too. After moving to Richmond, I continued writing and recording home demos through COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Once things began opening back up, I met Valerie, Alex, and Leeah at Babes of Carytown, a historic Lesbian bar, and we became immediate friends.

In 2023, I released a demo of “Kiss Your Friends” on Bandcamp, which caught the attention of a local music magazine called The Auricular. Encouraged by the press coverage, I started playing at open mics again, and eventually started playing solo sets opening for local Richmond bands. After one of these sets, I was approached by someone who wanted to play with me, so I reached out to Valerie and Leeah right away to put together a band. Our first drummer, Molly, was Valerie’s roommate at the time. But Molly moved to New York and the other guitarist dropped out to focus on her own music, so Valerie, Leeah and I started looking for a new drummer and eventually found one in Valerie’s ex-girlfriend Alex. We played our first show together in April 2024, and in April 2025 we’re on our first-ever tour.

Our music is sugary, synth-soaked jangle pop with a punk rock edge. Our next single, “Disappear,” is hitting streaming on May 10th.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

First, when writing songs, don’t get too attached to your initial vision. When collaborating with others, you have to remain open to their creative urges as well as your own. A song could start life as a slow-jam ballad and end up a guitar-shredding rock anthem once everyone gets a hand on it.

Second, look for people who enjoy and play different styles of music than you. Flora & The Fauna is a rock band, but our members have backgrounds in jazz, math rock, hyperpop, noise, funk, R&B, anarcho-hardcore, afropop, folk, and more. If you want to make something new, you won’t do it with people who only like your favorite bands.

Third, get silly. Taking yourself seriously is good when you’re trying to do business, but when you’re trying to make music or art or really anything creative, you have to be willing to fool around with it. Make fun of yourself.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

While we’ve certainly grown in terms of our musicianship, our biggest improvement has been our professionalism and the quality of our live performance as a whole. After a year’s worth of gigging, we’ve nearly perfected the logistics of choosing our equipment, loading in and out, managing live sound, and other technical aspects. As well, we’ve learned how to craft a live set such that it becomes a work of art in its own right, instead of just a collection of smaller works.

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Image Credits

Elyza Reinhart

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