Parisian Phoenix Publishing

I have been working on a new resource for my paid subscribers of my Substack newsletter. It’s a page of writing craft books and my reviews of them. The list is available free here, but here you can taste what some of these books mean to me.

BOOK: Shaughnessy, Susan. Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers.

I have never been a “let’s go buy books” person. And I am not a “Let’s run over to Barnes & Noble” person. Books came from the school library, and occasionally from the small public library in the town that my school district was named after which was a 20-minute drive away. As a teenager, at the mall about 30 minutes away, there was a Waldenbooks so if I saved any money I might buy the next book in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series.

That was my introduction to browsing in bookstores.

In college, I spent four years living in downtown Bethlehem at Moravian University’s South Campus. I would often grow impatient waiting for the shuttle on North Campus and would walk the mile to the dorm. I would walk along Monocacy Creek or I would stay on Main Street and walk through Moravian Book Shop, which was then an independent book store— the oldest in the world or in the United States or something, but somewhere in the last decade Moravian University bought it and reduced it to the longest running bookstore, note the lack of independent.

Anyway, the Bookshop spanned three to four storefronts (it expanded during that time) and had so many Christmas-y Moravian ornaments and gifts, gourmet chocolate, and a deli which at that time served the fanciest sandwiches I had ever seen. You could enter the front door and snake through the shop and then exit at the end of the block by the church, a magical way to finish the walk.

And Alligators was a book I discovered sitting on a display table that at that time cost $9.99 and somehow I had received a crisp $10 bill.

I believe this book is out of print now, but it’s organized as a devotional for writing. Each entry has a quote from a working writer, a philosophical discussion from the author, and a challenge for the reader to pursue that day.