I’m starting to write this somewhere high in the air inside a robotic pterodactyl on my way home to Brooklyn after being lucky enough to spend the weekend in Atlanta as part of the literary programming at Charis Bookstore connected to this years Atlanta Pride Festival. I had the chance to go to Charis with Kicked Out when it released about three years ago, and without a doubt it’s one of my favorite bookstores. I got my start as a zinester at a feminist bookstore, and they have always felt like my most important literary homes. I get really excited anytime I have the opportunity to visit one, especially a dear friend like Charis.
While I was sitting at the airport on my way from NYC to Atlanta on Friday morning, I got word that Charis had been vandalized the night before. Thursday night had been the kickoff pride literary event an amazing evening of 20 local Atlanta writers and sometime after the store closed that night some homophobes decided to leave some vulgar graffiti on the bookstore. It was ugly and hateful and made me so excited for Saturday night because I believe one of the best ways to respond to that kind of homophobia is to stand firm in queerness, and to not let the bigots win. Additionally it highlighted for me all over again the importance of queer and feminist bookstores, how people feel threatened by them, and why in the year 2013 they are still so needed by our community.
Click here to learn more about Charis, and if you can please donate to them – they are working on painting a beautiful mural on the wall that was vandalized and your donation will help them not only with that mural but all the incredible programming and events they have.
I had an amazing and super busy weekend in Atlanta hanging out with queer literary buddies. Alysia Angel and I have been
friends online for a really longtime and collaborated on several different projects (don’t miss her fantastic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in Leather Ever After!) but had never actually met in person! We went to Elizabeth’s gay softball game right after I got into town. It was so much fun being queerleaders for all the dykes out on the field and Alysia
and I bonded over our matching sandals.After that was delicious dinner – which involved a detour when we were turned away and refused service at a restaurant for being queers!!!!!
feel so lucky to have an incredible literary community but it’s not that often that my people and I are in the same place, at the same time. Getting to spend time with some of my writer buddies is definitely part of what made the weekend so special. Saturday morning Elizabeth, Alysia and her partner Dante picked me up at my hotel bright and early and we spent the whole day having fun! We started with a delicious breakfast at Ria’s Bluebird omg veggie sausage!!! (where we got a Riot Gurrrrrl 
discount written onto the receipt by the ADORABLE waitress) and then spent the afternoon exploring thrift stores all over the city and even checked out a lakeside neighborhood art festival full of dogs which you know made me super happy! Having a queer literary community physically together (aka off the internet) isn’t something I experience very often so it was incredibly delightful to get to talk shop with folks but also just have some silly fun together. We spent the whole day playing all over Atlanta (HUGE thanks to Elizabeth who drove us around all day) and then it was time to get ready to head to the bookstore!
Alysia and I were reading with Julie Marie Wade a great author based in Florida. The event was called “The Tears On Her Face Are From Laughter” a reference to a tattoo on Alysia’s for an evening of storytelling, poetry, and tales of queer triumph.
It was so fun to get to bring Roving Pack to Atlanta – and I was especially excited that I found a passage of the book that included a (brief) reference to Atlanta and it was so fun to read from the book at Charis next to these other fun and fierce authors. We closed the event with a really great Q&A facilitated by Elizabeth who asked us some really smart and challenging questions about craft, form, and identity as queer writers and activists. After that was a big group dinner with new friends from the audience. Writing is such a solitary art form, and I’m really introverted so the solitary aspect of writing works really well for me, yet, there is something extremely special about the chances I have to spend in the company of queer writers who inspire and challenge me.
I’ve talked carefully before here on my blog about how editing Kicked Out was an incredible and utterly life changing experience for me as a writer, as an activist, and as an individual. Editing that anthology was some of the most important work I have ever done, and at the same time, it was also personally challenging and limiting in some ways. There were times where when I was touring Kicked Out I felt like I was only being seen as part of myself. I was the formerly homeless youth, the survivor, community builder and trauma writer, and I saw my role as being responsible to hold that space. Those characteristics are part of me, but they aren’t the full pictures of who I am, or a complete view of how I want to be seen and understood in the world. With the release of Roving Pack and then Leather Ever After it feels like I’ve really turned a corner with my work, where my writing and I are seen more fully with all the paradox and complication. Every time I’m on the road now, it sinks in a little bit deeper how lucky I feel to have grown as a writer, and to have the opportunity to be fully seen and present.
This was such an amazingly FUN weekend and definitely not an experience that I’m going to forget anytime soon! HUGE thanks to Atlanta Pride and Charis for making my visit possible!!!
RWAR!!!!!! this was Sunday morning very very very early at the airport