This event takes place on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. Register here.
"Meet Me There" is a monthly intergenerational poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction experience curated by trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist Samuel Ace. Each month Samuel pairs an established or mid-career artist with an up and coming writer for a reading by each artist and a discussion of the resonances between their works. Writers exploring genre and gender boundaries will be a special focus of this series. This event takes place on the second Thursday of each month at 7:30pm ET. Some months our readings will take place at Charis Books with an option to watch virtually, and some months the event will be fully virtual, so be sure to check the listing!
Featured Writer
October's featured writer is Emerson Whitney in celebration of Daddy Boy. In 2017, Emerson Whitney was divorcing the woman they'd been with for ten years--a dominatrix they called Daddy. Living in a tent in the backyard of their marital home, Emerson was startled to realize they didn't know what it meant to be an adult. "We often look to our gender roles as a sort of map for aging," they write. "I wanted to know what the process looked like without that: not man-ness, not-woman-ness." Dizzied by this realization, they turned to an activity steeped in stereotypical masculinity: storm chasing.
Daddy Boy follows Emerson as they pack into a van with a rag-tag group of storm chasers and drive up and down tornado ally--from Texas to North Dakota--staying in motels and eating at gas stations and hunting down storms like so many white whales.
Emerson Whitney is the author of the critically acclaimed titles, HEAVEN (McSweeney’s, 2020) and DADDY BOY (McSweeney’s 2023). Emerson’s work appears in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New York Magazine and elsewhere. He teaches in the BFA in creative writing program at Goddard College.
Opening Poet
Billie Sainwood is a poet and writer from Atlanta. Her work has been featured in the 100 Word Horror series by Ghost Orchid Press and on the NoSleep podcast. You can find more from Billie on her website, https://billiewritespoems.com/.
Host Poet
Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. His most recent books are Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet MeThere: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and the chapbook What started / this mess (above/ground press). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in ex-Puritan, POETRY, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. A book-length poetic essay, I Want to Start by Saying, is forthcoming from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2024).
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.
By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.
In 2017, Emerson Whitney was divorcing the woman they'd been with for ten years--a dominatrix they called Daddy. Living in a tent in the backyard of their marital home, Emerson was startled to realize they didn't know what it meant to be an adult. "We often look to our gender roles as a sort of map for aging," they write.
A finalist for the Believer Book Award
Emerson Whitney writes, "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess-electrifying, gorgeous, defiant.
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Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. MEET ME THERE is a paired republication of Normal Sex (Firebrand Books, 1994) and Home in three days. Don't wash. (Hard Press, 1996). In the present edition, the texts are accompanied by a new introduction and poem by Samuel Ace, and by a collection of short essays and reflections on Ace and Smukler's poetics.