Parisian Phoenix Publishing

As one of the publishers involved in the Fifth Annual Easton Book Festival, I spend much of the event chaperoning my authors and doing what I need to do as I’ve been asked to do it.

This year, I’m making more of an effort to attend more events that I’m not connected to, to learn more about the book festival community and the people and artists who support it.

I attended the speculative fiction workshop hosted by Darrell Parry and E. Lynn Alexander (of Collapse Press). There was a handful of us in the Zoom session, where we started with a brief exercise of imagining a creature somewhere he absolutely did not belong, an exercise Darrell attributed to our critique group days almost twenty years ago and a conversation with the admirable and brilliant Katherine Ramsland.

(And to anyone who might want to argue with my timeline, and deny how old we’ve all become– the critique group met in my house because the only way Darrell and I could discuss fiction craft with friends was to do it in the evening when the baby was sleeping. And the baby will turn 20 in June.)

So somehow, in the spec fiction workshop, we were to have these creatures teach a high school biology class and lead the class in dissecting a worm. I had the image of a scuba-diving cat in my brain, so the idea of a cat using its own claws to open the worm came to mind.

Then using some random numbers found in book pages, we were encouraged to jot down traits from a spreadsheet that match those numbers and design a creature to fit them. But I looked at my traits– excess body hair, odor, ability to jump– and I thought maybe I do, indeed, have a cat on my hands.

Our poet in the group wrote short poem to summarize his creature.

The final phase of the evening was world-building.

Darrell facilitated this with a mad lib.

The point of the exercises was to jostle our creative minds and bring fresh twists to old ideas.

Kicking the dust off the mind is a great way to prepare for tomorrow’s in-person events at the book festival. Parisian Phoenix will be hosting a launch party, reading and discussion panel around erotica and Juicy Bits: Erotic Stories of BDSM, Fetish and Kink. (10 p.m., Book & Puppet Company)