Parisian Phoenix Publishing

People often come in and out of other people’s lives. Good friendships can be fluid, picking up where they left off or drifting apart only to reconnect later. Good friendships can form over mistakes, and my connection with Darnell Davis, the co-founder of ASPIRE to Autonomy and host of the Friends of Pete networking mixer, happened during one tumultuous period of my professional life.

I reconnected with Friends of Pete last week, after a three-plus year hiatus. Friends of Pete is a networking/social event designed to bring business people from throughout the Lehigh Valley together.

As someone hoping to build this Parisian Phoenix business into more than just a hobby for me, my staff and my authors, I need to make sure more people know we exist.

So I donned my Parisian Phoenix t-shirt and heading to the brewery. The event was a joint-venture with Lehigh Valley Traffic Club at Boser Geist Brewing at the Silk Mill about a mile from my house. I happen to enjoy Boser Geist’s brews, especially their stouts.

Here I am enjoying a cinnamon bun stout. It was thick and sweet and heavy. I am laughing in the photo, looking silly, in part because of the humor of the photographer, Ed White, who has quite the background in journalism, sales and magic (as in sleight of hand, not hocus pocus). He found my carting around my satchel of books amusing, so much so that he needed to document it.

And it turns out, Ed was technically my employee in 2006. He was a sports writer as part of my newsroom at Lehigh Valley News Group, a group of weekly newspapers owned by the Journal Register Company that didn’t survive long. I served as managing editor for most of the paper’s run– but that’s another story. (Here’s some of the pages I wrote for that entity, and we did all of our own pagination as well. Give me a template and I can pretend I’m a graphic designer.)

I met someone else who has a part-time position open in his office, and several people who recently moved to the area. I gave out cards to people who read, and some who think they have a book in them, and someone who wants to start a school! (I told her about Parisian Phoenix’s fundraising book idea.)

I also chit-chatted with a travel agent, attracted by her sassy triangular purse, which, it turns out, was a souvenir from a trip to Dubai. And her business is Phoenix Ivy Oasis, which gave us another instant connection.

And don’t let this quiet little photo fool you– the place was packed and loud! My AppleWatch really wanted me to get out of the noise!