Parisian Phoenix Publishing

This week has been a delightful split between two of our favorite pastimes here at Parisian Phoenix Publishing– disability advocacy and dirty words.

Today (as I write this it is 6 a.m.) is the first Lehigh Valley Disability Pride, hosted by Disability Pride PA and the Lehigh Valley Arts and Cultural Alliance. I have crafted signs and copies of books scattered around my house and Tupperware totes I told myself I didn’t need to load into my car until at least 7 a.m.

As probably the only publisher at the event, I feel like a badass. I have Braille and someone who knows sign language. And I am cognizant of the fact that this is a first-time event, so it’s important to see it as an opportunity to network.

I wonder who the audience for this event really is. Is it the disabled community? Families? An educational opportunity for the wider world? The location makes me wonder as it is off-the-beaten path at the Lehigh Valley campus of Penn State in Center Valley (which might be housed in a building where our friend William Prystauk started his teaching career when it was a very different entity).

First time events are hard for everyone. This whole year has been full of first time events for our publishing company, so we’re proud and excited to participate in another organization’s event.

At the same time, I sent Ralph Greco Jr.’s book Writing Dirty Words to press this week and it had a soft launch yesterday. Ralph has already spread some of his seed across the internet, including this post from the blog that accompanies his podcast Licking Non-Vanilla. Buy it from Amazon here. Barnes & Noble here.

If you don’t quite get the title of the podcast or think it refers to ice cream, it may not be a podcast to add to your list. But this blog entry talks about his feelings about publishing his book with Parisian Phoenix Publishing and more specifically how I made him look at his own manuscript in a new light.

All of this kept me afloat during a difficult week in my home life and while dealing with my first hateful internet commentator on Instagram. A rather random person with the a very basic name and a photoshopped headshot of a white man attacked the title of our book, Not an Able-Bodied White Man with Money claiming that our company was racist, sexist and all sorts of other horrible things to publish a book with such a title.

I asked him to please explain his thoughts and he continued to spout empty but vitriolic words based clearly on my word choices, so I did not engage further. Eventually I had to block him, and then I went so far as to take the whole post down.

Because it is rather ridiculous to think that by excluding white men with money from contributing to an anthology about experiences outside what is considered mainstream–with the underlying theme that everyone probably has a story that fits those conditions (you could be white but poor, or have money but have a different race, etc.) — that I, as a publisher, have further divided society by excluding the 1%. Yeah.

Because those white men with money own the major newspapers, television stations and book publishers, but I have taken away their voice and broken society.

When I was still writing for newspapers, I had a column and one of those columns generated hate mail. It broke my heart. I was in my late twenties and I don’t know how it happened, but the columnist from our “mother paper” (we were the weekly division of the prestigious local daily, as opposed to the more sensational local daily) told me that hate mail meant people were listening.

In this case, I think it was just an internet troll. But I just don’t understand what undermining others, especially on small social media posts, achieves for anyone.

So when I tell you that sometimes erotic fiction and Ralph’s quirky memoir style somehow balance out the emotional drain of disability advocacy, believe me. This is hard work. On every front. I might need a second cup of coffee.

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