This event takes place on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. 

Charis welcomes Julia Cohen (Freak Lip: Essays of the Unsaid), Chloé Caldwell (Trying: A Memoir & The Red Zone), Heather Christle (The Crying Book), and Lidia Yuknavitch (Reading the Waves & The Chronology of Water) for Between the Thinking-Island & the Saying-Shore: Women Writing Against Taboo. This panel will be moderated by McKenzie Watson-Fore and will center taboos around women’s bodies and behavior, identity and recognition, and faith and infidelity.

Freak Lip: Essays of the Unsaid by Julia Cohen

Why are some sentences impossible to speak aloud? When they become snared inside us, unsaid, how do they have such an impact on our relationships with others—and with ourselves? In Freak Lip, these sentences often relate to firsts: first period, first serious medical diagnosis, first sexual experience, first love. Cohen explores the often-isolating divide between what we easily express to ourselves internally and what’s unbearable to articulate to another person. Finally expelling Cohen’s own long-kept secret sentences in lyric essays that pair critical thought with everyday accumulations—dialogues with literary voices like Gertrude Stein, break-up emails, AirBnB reviews, and text-message threads—Freak Lip does more than document how the act of withholding jeopardizes our connection to others and ourselves. Refusing shame, it spills forth all that’s unspeakable—our blood, our sex, our bodies, our truths.

Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.

Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page . . . until she extracted a confession from her husband.

Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candor, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell’s work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming—and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.

Chloe Caldwell’s period has often felt inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even painful. It’s only once she’s in her thirties, as she’s falling in love with Tony, a musician and single dad, that its effects on her mood start to dominate her life. Spurred by the intensity and seriousness of her new relationship, it strikes her: her outbursts of anxiety and rage match her hormonal cycle.
 
Compelled to understand the truth of what’s happening to her, Chloe documents attitudes toward menstruation among her peers and family, reads Reddit threads about PMS, attends a conference called Break the Cycle, and learns about premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, which helps her name what she’s been going through. For Chloe, healing isn’t about finding a single cure. It means reflecting on underlying patterns in her life: her feelings about her queer identity and writing persona in the context of a heterosexual relationship; how her parents’ divorce contributed to her issues with trust; and what it means to blend a family.
 
The Red Zone is a candid, revelatory memoir for anyone grappling with controversial medical diagnoses and labels of all kinds. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that—along with proper treatment—self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame are the ultimate keys to relief. It’s also about love: how challenging it can be, how it reveals your weaknesses and wounds, and how, if you allow it, it will push you to grow and change.

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Reading the Waves: A Memoir 

Drawing on her background -- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women -- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul. 

By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process  can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.

In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful, escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose.

What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, as Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.

Julia Cohen is the author of I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), a collection of lyric essays, which was translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She’s also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, The New England Review, Fugue, Heavy Feather Review, Boston Review, and BOMB. She is the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition. Her new book, Freak Lip: Essays of the Unsaid, came out in September (TRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2026).

Chloé Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller, Women. She is also the author of the memoir Trying (Graywolf, 2025), I’ll Tell You In Person, The Red Zone, and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, MSNBC, Vogue, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Vice, The Believer, Nylon, The Rumpus, The Sun, and half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC, Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, and Sluts. She offers writing support at www.scrappyliterary.com. Her substack is at chloecaldwell.substack.com. She lives in Hudson, NY.

Heather Christle is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Paper Crown. She has also published two works of nonfiction: The Crying Book which won the Georgia Book Award for memoir, and In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf. In 2021 she was the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction, and in 2026 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for poetry. Her writing has appeared in venues including Elle, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Statesman, The New Yorker, and Poetry. Christle has taught at UT Austin, Wittenberg University, Antioch College, Sarah Lawrence College and Emory University, where she is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English & Creative Writing.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the national bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader's Choice Award. She has also published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025. Lidia has had writing appear in publications including Guernica, Ms., The Rumpus, The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, and TANK, and in several anthologies. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon.

McKenzie Watson-Fore serves as the arts and culture editor for Boulder Reporting Lab, the executive editor of sneaker wave magazine, and the inaugural critic-in-residence for Mayday Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Zona Motel, Christian Century, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, Full Stop, and elsewhere. She is based in Boulder, Colorado, where she founded and hosts the Thunderdome Conference.

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Between the Thinking-Island & the Saying-Shore: Women Writing Against Taboo (Author Panel)