The Assay Interview Project: Samuel Ace
April 1, 2026

Samuel Ace is a trans & genderqueer writer and the author, most recently, of I want to start by saying (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2024), Portals, a collaboration with the late poet Maureen Seaton (Ravenna Press 2025), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish 2019), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex and Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts 2019). He is also the author of several chapbooks. Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely published and recent work can be found in The Georgia Review, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most (Copper Canyon), The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He curates and hosts Meet Me There @ Charis, a monthly reading series that features trans and queer writers, at Charis Books in Decatur, GA
About I want to start by saying:  Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying is a constellation of memory, personal and place-based histories, dailiness, repetition, art-making, and desire. Ace’s insistent titular phrase acts as drone and anchor—invocation and prayer—propelling the peripatetic narrator from Cleveland to New York to Tucson, western Massachusetts to Atlanta and back again, line by line. Part essay, part memoir, and part collage, Ace explores the difficulties of romance, childhood, betrayal, and writing, establishing each sentence as a location to begin anew; to utter, accrete, and break again.
I love the books published by the Cleveland State University Press Poetry Center, and I’ve been particularly drawn to the lyric essay collections that have won the CSU Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Prize, including James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well and Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary. When Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying was published as part of this series in 2024, I couldn’t wait to read the debut work of nonfiction by a long-established poet whose work I have admired for years. And once I read the book, as often happens, I knew I would want to teach it. This semester, my thinking about I want to start by saying and my questions, including those posed here, were informed by a rich dialogue I had with my students in the Graduate Lyric Essay Seminar at Florida International University in Miami. Those students are named here in gratitude: Bryane Alfonso, Amelia Badri, Elisa Baena, Zabrina Barbian, Brittany Crosse, Michael Cuervo, Charlotte Kaplan, Joyce Englander Levy, Carlos Martin, Ian Perez, Christopher Pineiro, and Yvonne Sadinsky.
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-Julie Marie Wade
Julie Marie Wade: Sam, I’ve been a fan of your work as a poet for many years as well as a fan of your collaborations with the late (and truly great) Maureen Seaton. I want to start by saying is something different but no less wondrous to me than your previous work.[i] It feels like a genre turn or even a genre swerve from what you’ve written before. 

When I first began reading the book, I thought immediately of Joe Brainard, whose iconic I Remember is, as you likely know, a book-length lyric essay (that’s how I would describe it anyway) anchored in the anaphoric refrain “I remember” and first published in 1970. Your collection uses “I want to start by saying” throughout, also as an anaphoric refrain, and in some places online, your collection is also referred to as a long poem or an experimental poem, the way Brainard’s is.

How do you think about I want to start by saying in terms of genre? How important is genre classification to you before and during the process of writing anything, and did that importance shift for you after you completed this book? In other words, did you see it as something different after it was completed than how you imagined it when you first began? As a reader, I sense a special kind of urgency--this needs to be written now and in this way--that I associate with lyric essays, but I want to know how you think about the work. What would you like to start by saying here?

Samuel Ace: First to say, Julie, that I love being in conversation with you about I want to start by saying, and everything and anything else. Your continual sense of wonder about writing, the writing process, and its relation to our lives is an inspiration to me always. 

I want to start by saying began as a prompt I gave to myself in an effort to undercut some of my habitual impulses. The challenge to myself was to start with that phrase, then continue by adding the very next thing that came to mind. No filter, no censor, no lyric, no attempt at music. As a poet, I have always been led more by sound, by music, than content or meaning. At the time of writing I want to start by saying, those old instincts felt like a kind of escape. Using the phrase was an effort toward honesty and directness, without the aid of my usual helpmates. It was a means to ask myself what needed to be said first before writing anything more. Was there something that I needed to get out of the way before proceeding? Was there a preface or context to what I might write if I stopped for a second? What were my thoughts before I put down the first word? What was really going on in my mind? The phrase became a kind of off-ramp. It felt like taking a deep breath before doing something scary and gave me the courage and permission to cut through my fear of exposure. I found it exhilarating. It was so unlike how I went about my earlier work that I didn’t recognize it as something that could be a book until later in the writing process, when I began to share what I was doing with trusted readers, like those in my writing group at the time. Maureen was one of the first readers of the text, and her response and encouragement allowed me to see that there was something there that could in fact be a book.

As you know, in much of my previous and even current work, I have separated phrases using blank space rather than any other kind of punctuation or lineation. This comes, in part, from a desire to be as non-directive as possible to the reader, wanting each reader to find their own breath and rhythm in reading the work. This is what happens anyway, no matter how many directives the poet gives. But in I want to start by saying, the language seemed to form itself into discreet sentences. I don’t entirely know why. Whether a single line or a paragraph, both seemed to demand an end stop. So, I obeyed. 

I find genre categories, like gender categories, impossibly narrow. They cannot reflect exactly what is happening in an individual piece of writing any more than gender labels describe the reality and specificity of an individual’s experience of gender. Although some pieces of writing fall more easily into the generalized descriptions of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, many do not. However, the institutions of publishing, marketing, and classification (i.e., the Library of Congress), demand those categories. I do mostly think of I want to start by saying as a book-length poem, as it is built in non-linear layers, and relies so heavily on the rhythm of the anaphora. When my wonderful editor at Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Caryl Pagel, asked if I might consider publishing the book as part of their new non-fiction series, I thought about it for a moment, and agreed. After all, it was written in sentences. I also hoped that the book shared attributes (non-linearity, life-writing, fragmentation, juxtaposition) with other books that I take inspiration from that are classified as non-fiction—Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, Hervé Guibert, and so many others. I am not attached to genre and ultimately wish we didn’t need to assign one.

JMW: We love so many of the same writers, Sam, and we also share Caryl Pagel as a wonderful editor (as well as Hilary Plum) at Cleveland State University Press Poetry Center!  I think there’s something special about putting a book of nonfiction into the world via a poetry center—to me, it’s like having my literary cake and eating it, too! Poetry and prose, both at once.

What you write here about genre and gender (they share a root, don’t they, in the word kind—the kind of writing, the kind of embodiment) reminds me of one of my heart passages from I want to start by saying. I ask my students to choose heart passages that they find personally resonant from a book and that might also speak to the heart or essence of that book. I’ll say, “Choose a passage that you would give to someone who didn’t have a chance to read the whole book as an exemplar of what the book does, how it means.”

One of my heart passages from I want to start by saying appears on page 120: “I want to start by saying he is a gender of his own. I want to start by saying that everyone has a gender of their own.” I spent some time wondering how you made the distinction between “is a gender” in the first sentence and “has a gender” in the second. Both ways of regarding gender compelled me.

So, let’s say we don’t assign a genre to your book, and someone (me!) asks you to describe what kind of book it is, how would you answer? (For instance, Kazim Ali describes his collection, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities, as sculpture, which gives me a whole new way of seeing that body of text and its dimensions.)
Also, if someone (me!) asked you to identify a heart passage from your book, which passage would you choose to exemplify the project and why?

SA: I think I love this question about what kind of book I wrote. I say I think because it made me reflect on something I hadn’t considered before. The best kind of question! So, I’ll say the first thing that comes to mind. I want to start by saying a painting. Or the process of making a painting — which might begin with a thin layer of gesso, perhaps with areas of canvas uncovered. Then a brush stroke and another brush stroke, and another. Something is being built, but what is being built is not clear until the end. There are always layers beneath. Sometimes they show up, giving depth and resonance to the surface and the whole. 

But I want to start by saying I’m not completely satisfied with this analogy. What next comes to mind is something more 3-dimensional — a chorale. As if I’m sitting in a concert hall listening to the orchestra and the chorus, while layers of instruments, voices, and language come to the surface and retreat. Meaning arises in real time from the relationships and interactions between the parts. I can only aspire to this!

The heart passage that speaks to me today (it might be different tomorrow) starts on page 125: “I want to start by saying I have monocular vision.” I didn’t fully recognize or understand how the ways in which I visually see the world differed from others until I read Oliver Sack’s essay “Stereo Sue.” For perhaps the first time, that essay explained to me how my lack of depth perception caused me to flatten landscapes into two-dimensional compositions, to see the world as a painting. Sound always had three or more dimensions, but not vision. (This also circles back to your first question!) Perhaps I chose this passage today because I will be having eye surgery to correct a cataract in a couple of weeks. I’m anxious, not so much about the procedure (well maybe a little), but about the changes, even if they are for the better, to the eyesight I’ve accommodated to and lived with my entire life. Will this affect my writing? Probably! The surgery won’t result in binocular vision, but it will change some things. I have fairly severe myopia in my right eye, corrected by glasses. When I remove my glasses, anything farther out than an arm’s length is a blur. However, things within an inch or two are extraordinarily clear. Without glasses, I’m able to see microscopically with my right eye, almost on the cellular level, not unlike using a macro lens on a camera. Although the upcoming surgery will allow me to see with greater clarity and light, my natural and long cherished close-up ability will disappear. I think I will miss it. 

JMW: I think you will miss it, too. We miss so much, don’t we? In class, a student mentioned that she felt a deep longing in your book, missing things and people and places from the past, despite the fact that the past wasn’t perfect—it never is. And it suddenly dawned on me that “miss” is one of those words that contains its opposite: when we say we miss something, we can mean we long for it and feel tenderness toward its absence, but we can also mean we’ve overlooked something, not noticing it at all. Our language never fails to astonish me.

We’ve now met as a class to discuss I want to start by saying, and I invited my students to share questions they have for you as the author. They know you’re an avid collaborator, as am I, and I love being able to collaborate with them on this interview.

Several of my students’ questions touched on the decision to retain your anaphoric refrain throughout the book rather than letting it fall away/evolve over time or removing it all together the way scaffolding is sometimes removed after a building is complete. How did you decide that the refrain was essential to the final structure of the book, and how did you approach revision, including line-level editing, within a project that feels so organic and singular—like one long exhale?

SA: I did think about, and experimented with, taking out refrain. I even say on p. 16:  

I want to start by asking if I should delete the first six words. They are probably unnecessary.
I want to start by saying that I’d like to hold onto them for a while. They are lucky.

It’s one of the few times in the text that I change “saying” to something else — in this case to “asking.”

In the end, my experiments didn’t work. The rhythm of the piece seemed to depend on that phrase. It’s how I wrote it, how I was able to write it, and intimately connected to my process. Ultimately it became something like a metronome, a timekeeper, a clock, a structure, a pause and an intake of breath before the exhale of what needed to be revealed. In revision, there were a few moments when the rhythm of what was being said required the phrase to be dropped—where a thought wanted to carry over into a paragraph rather than a pause followed by the phrase again. My editor suggested several of these. I agreed with some and disagreed with others. I would read those passages out loud, over and over, until it felt right either to leave the phrase out or to retain it. It came down to breath and the music. 

JMW: Yes! We also talked at some length in class about the way you include your reader in the text, especially in moments like the one you cite—where you “go meta” about the process of writing the book itself and the choices you’ve made. The result, at least for me, is a feeling of heightened intimacy—a writer not only sharing his lived experiences but also sharing his process of recollecting and culling forth those experiences.

On the first day of our new semester, we spent time with two flash lyric essays that use anaphoric refrains, but the writers only had to sustain their refrain for fewer than 500 words. Leslie Jamison’s “Goodbye to the Home Lost in the Palisades Fire” and Nels P. Highberg’s “This is the Room Where” use compelling compression, but your work with anaphora demonstrates a different kind of literary stamina. It’s expansive and self-sustaining at 15,000+ words, which is very inspiring to fellow writers.

Something we often alight on in discussions of the lyric essay and other experimental forms is the tyranny and/or liberation of “aboutness.” People so often ask “What’s it about?” when they see me reading a book or when I reference a book I’m writing, and this strikes me as the wrong question or at least not completely the right question. However, I’m not in the business of wrong questions but rather in the business of refining questions to make them as door-opening (rather than door-slamming!) as possible. I believe you can help me here.

When you think about I want to start by saying and its relationship to “aboutness,” what comes to mind for you? What is this book “about” (multiplicities welcome), in your own mind, and how did that sense of its aboutness evolve as you were writing it? Is there anything you ended up including in the book that you didn’t expect to find there (“aboutness,” of course, also sneaks up), and is there anything that you decided to excise from the text that you felt didn’t belong or was simply too vulnerable to share? (You don’t have to answer the excision part if it’s not something you want to talk about with a wider audience, but I often find that a future project is embedded in a current project somewhere, and the challenge is realizing that it’s pointing toward what comes next. Maybe writing I want to start by saying has also illuminated in some ways what your next collection will be?)

SA: In all honesty, I hadn’t thought much about “aboutness” and had to laugh, because my first association was that you were asking for a “pitch”—the awful thing one has to do to summarize one’s book to an agent or a publisher, or the wrap-up one has to write when drafting teaching statements or any academic or grant application. Of course, your and your students’ questions are much more than that—and I again thank you as they force me to go beyond my reactions and what I think I know. 

My goal with writing was to push myself to a deeper level of honesty (and exposure?). As I was writing, I wasn’t thinking about publishing. It was pretty much absent from my mind. The whole reason for the anaphoric phrase was to cut through my resistance to saying. At the time of writing, I wasn’t thinking about what the book was about. I only wanted to be transparent with my wanderings (that left eye!), to let them be, and to remove my hands as much as possible from controlling the steering wheel. I had some faith that the layers of my realities, memories, and thoughts (even the parts of the book that are more researched), would eventually cohere. That faith did get stronger the more I wrote. There were things I didn’t expect—yes. I didn’t expect to write about the process of writing. I didn’t expect to reveal my OCD around counting. I didn’t expect to write about desire. Mostly I didn’t expect (or have expectations about) what was to come as I wrote. So, it’s only in hindsight that I can say that I tried to write a book about the movement of my mind across experience in the present and the past. As far as the future goes, I would still like to go deeper, to reveal more. I don’t think the quest has an endpoint!

JMW: I dread “pitches,” too, but I have to say, Sam, “a book about the movement of my mind across experience, in the present and the past” is the precise description of the kind of books I want to read, write, and teach! I think I’ve been looking for a language to describe what my favorite lyric essay collections do, and this is it!

I’m also glad that you mentioned including your relationship to numbers and counting in the book—in part because I also have a complex relationship with numbers, and I’ve only recently become more transparent about it in my own work. I count everything I care about, so, naturally, I counted the number of sections that appear in your book. There are 62, as you may well know, and at one point, you explicitly mention being 61 at the time you were writing that passage. This led me to hypothesize that you completed I want to start by saying at age 62 and arranged the sections to reflect your own complex relationship to numbers as well as the thematic thread of aging (which is really just the bridge our lives build between the past and present, isn’t it?) that also emerges in this book.

Whether this was intentional or not—I’d love to know!—could you share a bit about your decision to include section breaks in the book and your considerations regarding section length in relation to the content of those sections? Most are a page or a few pages at, but twice in the book, I was struck by the realization that I had been reading a sustained section for 9–10 pages, almost holding my breath as I read.

The first time it happens is in section 12, which begins on page 25 and continues through page 34: “I want to start by saying we are eating lunch with my sisters.” I might liken this experience to maintaining eye contact with your readers longer than we have been primed to expect, and as a consequence, the intensity of the section is already heightened, even before we take the subject matter into account. Later, in section 35, you begin on page 86, with “I want to start by saying the large rooms of the apartment building on East Boulevard,” and then continue through page 96.

Anything you’d care to share about pacing and spacing, segmenting, and sustaining, would be welcome and instructive.

SA: Honestly—I didn’t count the number of sections, but the serendipity of the total is perhaps an indication of some higher force at work. Thank you for noticing! My counting fixation exists on a more molecular level. How many words, how many characters. Superstitions about certain numbers coming less from science or cultural influence than the slow accumulation of disparate experience. The act of counting as a kind of meditation or noticing. I do wonder how the random assignment of numbers, say on license plates ordered from a DMV, might have anything to do with luck or outcomes, or the fates associated with living a life. 

I settled on section breaks to give the myself and the reader a longer breath. I love thinking about breath in written and spoken language. The end of a sentence or phrase and the space after—before the next gives one a breath. A longer rest happens between sections, like the break between movements in a sonata or a symphony. There’s also a change of pace. The longer sections you point out reside more in the realm of historical document or memory and hold narrative together in a different way than the sections before and after. Ultimately the divisions are more instinctual and rhythmic than anything else. 

JMW: I think about “the slow accumulation of disparate experience” so often, though I don’t think I’ve had words to quite describe what I mean until you gave them to me just now. Also, each number (and letter) seems to hold its own energy and kind of—what to call it--magnetism, I guess. I love in particular the bold red energy of the number 6, something about those bubble tests that are typically a list of 5, and then there’s 6 peeking around the corner, impish and rebellious, the option beyond the options.

Maybe I also love 6 because one of my first poetry professors and enduring mentors, Bruce Beasley, said once in class: “You’re only going to write about six things your whole life.” He wanted us to be conscious of form and style, innovating with how we wrote since what we wrote might have been decided for us based on the lives we had lived, our obsessions and fears and abiding questions. It was one of the most profound and oracular moments of my young life, and years later, I actually wrote a poetry collection called SIX, comprised of six very long poems (plus a bonus short seventh as epilogue!) which, I’m realizing now, as some people have suggested to me, are lyric essays.

But maybe that’s really the ultimate question I want to ask: what would you say your “six things” are? There could be five or seven, of course, but in that ballpark: what are the subjects, the themes, the guiding topics that you suspect you’ll always be writing from and toward?

SA: Beasley’s thoughts about “innovating with how we wrote since what we wrote might have been decided for us based on the lives we had lived…” seems exactly right to me. I do believe there are a few core things I keep coming back to, even when I think I want to write differently. These are more questions than anything else, and the act of writing, the how I write, is the vehicle through which I travel. Even more than the desire to describe, observe, tell a story, the devotion to craft, I believe that the act, the actual physical and mental act of writing, the process itself, has the power to reveal something about the questions I’ve always had. Writing is an act of uncovering, of listening to something beyond what I know, or to something that already exists but is buried within me. The ability of language to reveal the unconscious is a kind of digging, something that happens in the dark, often through an address to someone, friend or lover, that exists beyond the self and self-consciousness. It’s often a reaching toward connection and understanding. Like now, in the act of writing to you, I feel that reach in my fingers. It’s physical, as if you are sitting across the table from me, and I am talking, through my fingers on the keyboard, being honest with all that I’m feeling, and hopefully, doing so in a way that allows you to physically feel and hear what I’m saying. Can I write so you experience not only the meaning of what I’m saying, but the physical current of it? Can the residue left after the act of writing, the mere words, speak (and elicit) grief, fear, joy, desire, music, love, family, connection (or the lack of)?  I don’t know much until my fingers are on the keyboard. But I trust that the act of my fingers moving over the keys, in concert with what I hear (or remember, or listen to), that strange duet, will lead me somewhere, maybe even to some answers. And if I’m lucky, they will come out singing.
Julie Marie Wade's recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest memoir, Other People's Mothers, was published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida

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