BLOODTIDE book talk with Author Eli Nixon: Holiday Actiivation on behalf of Great Salt Lake

An evening with Eli Nixon, author and illustrator of  BLOODTIDE- A New Holiday in Homage To Horseshoe Crabs

Join Eli for a suitcase theater holiday proposal show, a few tunes from brilliant local highschool band 'Shapes Named Soap', a chance to singalong to some crabaoke (altered lyric power ballads about crabs) and engage in low-stakes drawing prompts and Q & A (or Q and more Q!) about how we can fortify local efforts to protect Great Salt Lake as inspired by DIY homage to our ancient coastal ancestor. All ages and abilities welcome with an especially vigorous invitation to those in the LGBTQ+ community and anyone organizing for racial/climate justice.

Sunday, October 15th. From 6:00-8:00 pm in the studio behind Survivor Wellness House at 59 S 1100 E in Salt Lake City (Parking is available across the street in the diagonal parking on the west side of 1100 E, or in Holy Cross Hospital’s parking lot. Please note: the street parking directly in front of the houses requires a parking permit.)
Free, no registration required.  Everyone is welcome! This event is made possible in partnership with Utah Humanities as part of the annual Utah Humanities Book Festival.

About Eli Nixon: 
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of drawings, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They're a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.

Eli is a parent of a teen, an organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI, and a member of Direct Action for Rights and Equality, The Public's Devised Theater Working Group, The New Georges Jam, and brotherdykes unlimited. Eli and 300 Modern Humans (ages 0.3-83) recently "finished" a 450-million-year timeline of flora and fauna (mostly out of recyclables) in 9 months of asynchronous but collaborative organism building workshops. Now Eli is basking in intertidal naturedrag, flotilla scheming and amatuer flag dancing/ engaging in the legislative season... 

About the book:
"Bloodtide gifts us a river to wander down where we can drift away from the bullshit... a holiday that rewilds us towards a life-affirming way of being in the world. And more than a holiday, Bloodtide extends us a glitch to enter that predates the trauma of all that clouds our imaginations."  - brontë velez, Creative Director, Lead to Life

"It's hard to write about Eli Nixon's book because it's a book about fumbling into embodied relation and words are just a jump-off to living. It's about what you can do in a weekend with geologic time. It's a tender score for beautifully imperfect -- and transformative -- work... in the form of a series of proposals, invitations, and field notes... There is a crinkly poetry to Bloodtide, repurposed poetry, the poetry of wild rebirth snatched from the recycling bin. Words I thought I knew cast shadows that turn them into other beings entirely. Humble is an important word in this book, and so is impossible, and so is cardboard. ..It's a box full of wild objects, and the wild space between them. It's might-y -- might like "could be" not like brute force. It expands, has expanded me. I gasped a few times and my nose twitches with the smell -- the "rutty musk of the freer beasts within us." It is radical, it is wise, it is alive."  -Agnes Borinsky, writer & theater-maker, author of Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 and Sasha Masha