Q&A with E.R. Anderson / Charis Books & More
Originally published in Nectar’s newsletter on March 26, 2021.
Each month we highlight an indie bookstore in our newsletter. Read on for a Q&A with E.R. Anderson, Executive Director of Charis Circle.
Tell us a bit about Charis Books & More:
E.R. Anderson: We are one of the world’s oldest continuously operating independent feminist bookstores. We were founded in 1974 in Atlanta, in 1995 we added our non-profit programming arm, Charis Circle, and in April of 2019 we partnered with Agnes Scott College to add a new school store arm to our business and to move to a new, larger building in Decatur, GA. Because we are a mission driven feminist bookstore, the growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement across the U.S. and greater consciousness around things like #MeToo, trans rights, and reproductive justice, as well as a huge awakening by formerly apolitical people after the rise of Trump, have all coalesced to mean an increased interest in the work we do and the kinds of books that we (and Nectar) have always valued and championed. So it’s a weird moment for us to see so many of the books and authors we have fought for for decades suddenly go mainstream, but it’s a good and necessary thing and we are happy it is happening.
Our store has been closed for in-person browsing since March 13th, 2020 because of COVID. COVID forced us to think quickly and critically about what aspects of our business and mission we could do safely and sustainably while keeping our doors closed to the public. We made a very fast transition to virtual events, partnering with Crowdcast in April 2020 and went all in with them and really never looked back. We amped up our online sales infrastructure, and like most stores we know, became basically an order fulfillment warehouse for most of the last year. I joke that no one goes into bookselling because they like answering email but here we are. It’s a lot of email these days, but the virtual events platform has allowed us to connect with authors and viewers from around the world in ways we could not have when we only hosted physical events.
Can you talk more about the non-profit arm of the organization, Charis Circle?
E.R. Anderson: Sure, so Charis Circle is a 501c3, founded in 1995. Our mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. I am the Executive Director and in 2019 we hired Dartricia Rollins, a former board member, as the Assistant Director. We have a working board of activists, writers, and all around great people who help us steer the ship and I am fortunate in that they let me pursue weird ideas with a lot of freedom. We are primarily individually donor funded and are supported by thousands of feminists all over the world who fund our work in small gifts—usually $5-$10 at a time.
You consistently offer many rad author events and book groups each month. Has the move to virtual shifted how you think about your event programming and how you interact with the community?
E.R. Anderson: Our strength has always been that our events feel like coming home—coming home to a place that is maybe even more accepting or loving than your biologically home. Especially for a lot of queer and trans folks, Charis has been that place of connection and of relatively safety.
We put a lot of energy into making it feel warm, making it feel as safe as possible, making it feel accessible. I never want people to look at our offerings and feel like they have to have a gender studies degree or critical race theory background to fit in at Charis, and yet I also want Charis to be a place where folks who are tired, exhausted really, of having to explain their intersections to people who do not share them, can come and relax for a little while in a place where complex identities are assumed and cherished but also just one part of a person’s humanity.
I was very worried that we would lose that when we switched to virtual events, but I have been pleasantly surprised. It turns out hosting virtual events is not so different than hosting in person events—you still have to host people, you still have to welcome them and give them the vibe and set the expectations. I am careful to let our attendees know we want them to clap and clap back, we want them to quote, to laugh, to talk to each other and to ask questions. We want people to feel like they are engaging with the author, even though they are not on screen or on mic. And that’s been great. It feels very Charis-y and I have been proud of that.
We also host our support groups online in zoom—and that has translated better than I expected. We host two parenting support groups—the Race Conscious Parenting Collective and the Gender Creative Parenting Collective, a trans teen support group called trans and friends, a general feminist consciousness raising group called The Feminist Vent, and then a number of Book Clubs. They have all been far more successful on zoom than I expected and we have many people calling in who left the South and miss Charis. Sometimes they now live in Mexico or India, but they call in because they miss the community that Charis provides. That makes me feel like we are doing something really special. We have a little something for everyone so I hope folks might take the time to check out our full calendar of events.
Has the way you think about books and the publishing industry changed over the past year?
E.R. Anderson: It has. The publishing industry is a behemoth that in many ways was still stuck in a time before the internet. It has a lot of waste—literal waste, a lot of unnecessary paper and swag, but also a lot of wasteful habits that evolved in the 60’s-mid 90s and have not shifted and changed with the times. The pandemic has made the big houses realize what they were doing more out of habit and what could be excised without major losses. For better and for worse. I have been in this business since I was a teenager—since 1998—and some of the fun stuff, the huge publishing dinners, the three martini lunches, the extravagant tours and swag, that stuff was already mostly gone a long time ago, but some of the ghosts remained and I will be interested to see what will come back.
Going forward, my hope is that the publishers will listen more to independent booksellers. We have always been the scrapiest and most innovative part of the industry, in part because we are the most buffeted by the bad winds of the economy, and we often come up with creative solutions to problems long before the big houses do. If they listened to us a bit more they might do better :).
What are you reading right now?
E.R. Anderson: I am currently reading (in paper) The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (June 1, Simon and Schuster), (on my phone) A Night At the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Disco, and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution by Martin Padgett (June, W.W. Norton) and on audio from Libro.fm: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne. I always have to have books going in different formats depending on where I am in my day. I switch between them based on what I am doing.
What’s your favorite book to handsell?
E.R. Anderson: One of the things I like about being a bookseller is that you get to develop relationships with customers and friends who will just trust your judgement on a book. Every one of our booksellers at Charis has “their” customers, and are good at picking out books for their tastes. So “my” customers know I like big, messy, realist, character driven sagas. Usually occurring over multiple generations. I am not the one to come to for experimental fiction or sparse stuff. I am not esoteric. I like big, long-ass, heavy books with lots of feelings and pretty sentences that you can live in for weeks at a time. The book that I probably have hand sold the most that was the most polarizing was Hanya Yanagahara’s A Little Life. I LOVED that book. I read it twice back to back. I went on the local public radio and recommended it. I had friends and customers who I had gifted or sold it to calling me up and either saying “I love you so much for putting this book into my hands, I cried my eyes out,” OR “F-you I can’t believe you gave me this book, I cried my eyes out.” But in all cases, they read the book and felt something, which to me is the marker of a great book.