Parisian Phoenix Publishing

I have a lot on my plate these days– as a publisher, as an editor, as an unemployed person and a mom. I try to live my life with honesty and transparency because we, as American citizens, hide too many of our struggles and our fears.

Being a creative person is hard. Sharing your artwork is hard. Writing is hard. Selling is hard. Perpetual confidence, hope and disappointment is hard.

That’s why I share as I do. If you only made $25 in royalties this month, know I feel your pain. Did your new book launch without any sales? Yeah, that happens. Did you find a typo in a freshly printed book or maybe Amazon only shows the back cover of your release? Yes, we’ve been there, too.

And maybe today I ate too many Sour Patch Kids and wolfed down a cupcake I did not need.

The Book Club

The Mary Meuser Memorial Library book club read Chanel Cleeton’s Last Train to Key West for its October selection. On Tuesday afternoon, they held their regular meeting at the library.

The director of the library mentioned the book club at one of our recent board of trustee meetings. He thought it might be a good fit for me and perhaps someday they would be interested in one of my books.

Now I believe in public libraries. Someone in my family– either Darrell Parry or myself– has served as a trustee of our local library since 2008ish. The pandemic caused a few gaps, but for the most part, we have 15 years of service to our local library.

So, of course, I read the book and went to book club.

Chanel Cleeton’s Last Train to Key West blended historical fiction and romance, and it sounded like the entire book club believed that the romance was fast and far-fetched and the women in the book displayed strong characteristics but remained fairly flat. I loved looking back into the hardships of the Great Depression and considering how the unpredictability of a hurricane had such dramatic impact in 1935.

Next month, the club will tackle The Light in Hidden Places, a novel of World War II, by Sharon Cameron.

What was really fun about book club was seeing all the interlibrary loan copies of the book from all of our area libraries: Bangor, Easton, Wilson…

The Beer

After book club, I had the invitation and the honor of meeting a local celebrity and almost nonagenarian for a beer to network with one of her writer friends. We met at Porter’s Pub, a fantastic local spot with terrific ambience (original stone walls from the early half of the nineteenth century). They keep 60 craft beers available and if you enroll in their mug club, once you try every beer, they give you a pewter mug and hang it from the ceiling. More about the mug club.

Swill 60 brews and we’ll award you a pewter mug with your own personalized engraving. Hang it from our ceiling and use it whenever you come in!

— Porters’ Pub, Easton, Pa. (website)

Begin by drinking any beer from our Brew Guide and ask your server or bartender to enroll you (it’s free). 

We’ll keep track of your progress and once you’ve completed the list, award your mug. You may store and use it here or take it home as a souvenir of the experience!

— Porters’ Pub, Easton, Pa. (website)

And once upon a time, this pub had a cheese platter that you would trade a kidney to eat. I had the Black Butte Porter and we all shared the cheese platter, the meditterranean plate and the crab dip.

I received this invitation because my host had visited Maryann Ignatz, who wrote an essay about her family’s tavern in our own , Not an Able-Bodied White Man with Money. The tavern, Steve’s Café, in Phillipsburg, N.J., made an appearance on the cover of Larry Sceurman’s debut nostalgic novella, The Death of Big Butch.