Get to know Level Ground's newest staff member, Reneice Charles!
We’re very excited to announce the newest addition to the Level Ground staff team, Reneice Charles. In her role as Level Ground’s Community Manager, Reneice will be overseeing our social media platforms and helping us hone our external voice and messaging. Outside of her role at Level Ground, Reneice also works as a life coach, writer, plus-size model, and vocalist. Reneice is perhaps best known for Femme Brûlée, her popular baking column published by Autostraddle, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg: she’s modeled for Torrid, Tomboy X, and the Plus Bus; performed with queer music icon Mary Lambert; worked on staff at Autostraddle’s queer adult summer camp, A-Camp; and more.
This diversity of experience, ranging across such a wide variety of industries, informs Reneice’s resourceful, outside-the-box approach to creative problem-solving and artistic collaboration. She’s already seriously upped our communications game at Level Ground, and we can’t wait to see what she has in store. We recently sat down with Reneice (virtually) to ask a few questions and get a fuller picture of her various creative endeavors.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Reneice! It might honestly be impossible for us to overstate just how excited we are to have you on the Level Ground team. As our Community Manager, you’ve already brought so much to the table. However, we want to get to know you beyond the job description, so let’s talk about our favorite topic here at Level Ground: making art! What kind of artistic practices do you keep up?
I work as a writer, life coach, and plus-size model (and now, I’m working at Level Ground, of course!). I suppose I’m a full-time artist, in the sense that each of these jobs feeds and inspires my other artistic practices. My conversations with friends inspire recipe ideas, and then I'm singing the whole time I cook, and that will spark an idea for what to write, and then those experiences help me relate to my clients. It all just flows together.
So singing, modeling, coaching, cooking, writing… you’re a quintuple threat! Is that even a thing? I want to know more about all of these, but let’s start from the beginning. Which of these artistic spheres have you kept up the longest?
I really believe that I have been making art since I took my first breath! However, in terms of devoting myself to a practice and calling it “art,” I've been singing since I was about four years old. I started in church and then moved on to choirs, musicals, and solo performances over the years. In terms of genre, I love soul and classical equally, but regardless of that, I just feel unstoppable after a good choir rehearsal. I love singing with others; it really is a kind of magic to create these sounds, sync your breath, and match your heartbeat with other people like that.
Maybe you can treat us to a performance sometime! So if singing is your oldest artistic venture, what’s your newest?
I only began modeling professionally a few years ago. For far too long, I didn’t believe it when people in my life would tell me that I could do modeling, so I just never attempted it. Turns out, though, all those people were right because, clearly, I can be a model! Because of my own journey, I want my modeling to be all about glorifying and uplifting the beauty and bounty of fat bodies like mine, bodies that manage to move through this world even as the world works embarrassingly hard to eradicate us.
You mentioned earlier how a lot of these art forms intersect and inspire one another. Have you seen these themes from your modeling play into your writing or your cooking?
Definitely. I started writing seriously around the age of 11, at first just for myself. However, I eventually started a blog—way before anyone else my age was really doing that. I was 14 when I started the blog, and I continued blogging through college. In my writing, I explore race, queerness, fatness, mental health and how those topics intertwine. Those themes also influence my recipe creation and food writing, most notably in my baking column at Autostraddle, Femme Brûlée.
“My main artistic aspiration is to help others—especially Black, fat, queer folks—find freedom and courage to live and love authentically”
Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we haven’t talked about that column yet!
Honestly, it's my greatest artistic accomplishment so far, and I still have these moments where I find myself just in complete awe of what I created there. It helped me see how much I’m capable of achieving. For Femme Brûlée, I wrote every recipe, did all the food photography & styling (which was a huge learning curve), and then drew connections between each recipe and a larger issue in my life and our society.
That’s so fascinating. Honestly, you can learn so much about a person just by watching them in the kitchen, seeing how they cook and what they eat. What’s your own background with cooking?
Well, I started cooking at about 13. During holiday gatherings, I used to watch my family members working together in the kitchen. As a teen, I got really into reading cookbooks, and I watched Food Network constantly. My family suffered through some really horrible meals at the beginning, but by the time I finished college, I was pretty damn good. In fact, my friends teased me for keeping a full pantry’s worth of spices in my dorm’s kitchen.
Reneice’s Tahini Swirled Brownies, featured in Femme Brûlée.
Wow! With all of that expertise, how soon until your first cookbook comes out?
Actually, I'm working on my first cookbook right now!
Really?! Can you say more?
Well, I’ll admit it’s coming along very slowly. I'm not ready to share all the details just yet, but essentially, it's a food memoir that centers on fat positivity, our cultural norms regarding food, and my journey to self-love through cooking.
Well, as soon as that book goes on pre-sale, I’m there. So, to wrap things up, I guess I want to know if there’s a larger mission you sense for yourself amidst all this art. What’s your goal, broadly speaking, as an artist?
My main artistic aspiration is to help others—especially Black, fat, queer folks—find freedom and courage to live and love authentically. If anything that I do inspires someone to turn down the volume of those societal norms and expectations that we've all internalized, and to turn up their own voice of truth instead, that brings me so much joy. That’s what inspires me to keep growing and creating for myself.