Category creative writing

The bee, the blues, the books and the… pizza?

Angel Ackerman 2 Comments

I will be telling parts of this story on my Substack newsletter that I plan to post tomorrow morning. I write about my publishing company, Parisian Phoenix Publishing; books, the ones we publish, books for writers and fun books to read; and writing. You can subscribe here.

I had booked a table at Books and Booze 2 at Madness Distillery in the Country Junction Plaza in Lehighton, Pa. (With a name like Madness Distillery, how could I stay away?)

I had packed the books earlier this week but left decisions about signs and other marketing materials until today, and despite sleeping decently last night, my brain would not kick in. So it took all my focus to get out the door on time.

And I had to drop Eva off at her dad’s so she could borrow his car for the afternoon.

About a mile from the house, a bee flew onto my windshield at a stoplight. I pointed him out to Eva. About four more blocks down the road, he was still sitting there. I said to Eva, “If we take him all the way to your dad’s, he’ll be more than a mile away from his hive. How will he find his way home? Will he have food? Will he be warm? How is he just sitting on that windshield?”

And then I added a final thought: “If we leave him at your dad’s, that’s like someone dropping you off in England and telling you to swim home.”

We stopped. I said my goodbyes. I waited for my daughter to cross the street. The bee had not gone. So I resumed my drive.

About 4 miles later, I got onto the highway. Little bee did not fare well as my speeds increased. He slid across the windshield (toward the top), putting one foot down and another up, trying to get his grip.

I had to speed up even more, and now we’re about 12 miles away from home. The bee is starting to curl into himself and press down into the glass. I wonder: Would it be kinder to turn on my windshield wipers and smoosh him?

I can’t stop watching him, but I have to, because I’m driving 70 miles an hour on the highway. I’m getting upset, and fighting tears as my nerves fray. I ponder exiting the road because of this bee. I call Eva. I tell her everything.

“Mom, it’s a bee.”

“He doesn’t deserve to suffer. Nothing deserves to suffer.”

“Mom, life is hard.”

I cackle. I hang up. I get one more mile, and the bee rolls into a tight marble and disappears. He was on my windshield for about 15 miles.

About this time, I realize my mother married my father 50 years ago today. My father died three years and eleven months ago. My wedding anniversary was Thursday. My husband and I married 26 years ago. We splint up six years ago. And my mother’s 71st birthday was also Thursday.

The GPS took me past the site of the dirt track where my father raced micro-stock when Eva was a toddler. Past the post office where my father got his mail. Past one road to his house. Past the diner where he ate most of his meals. Past the gas station where he bought his cigarettes. Past the other road to his house. Past the funeral home where we had his services.

My parents divorced when I was 15. But my mom always loved my dad. And I think he never got over her. So I texted her when I arrived at my destination– which was alongside the lake where my dad would drive his boat.

“You married Dad 50 years ago today. I miss him soooo much.”

I set up my table, met some of my fellow authors, and tried to shake off my nerves.

Photo by author Shannon Delaney, a family member of my dear friend Mitzi from Pocono Lehigh Romance Writers and Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group

I counted about 20 people who attended the event– not including anyone with the other vendors at the event. I sold three books: two hardcover copies of Larry Sceurman‘s Bookworm’s Magical Journey and one advance copy of Geraldine Donaher‘s young adult Mouth Shut Head Down, which doesn’t officially launch until January.

The distillery had a sign in the window. It read “Adult Book Fair Today.” I think what they meant was “Book Fair for Adults today” or because it was a distillery, “Book Fair today. Adults only!”

But it immediately made me think I should have brought more erotica. The only erotica title I brought was Juicy Bits. Most of the authors for Booze and Books 2 were romance authors, and it looked like the most popular offerings were romances-with-shirtless-men-on-the-cover. It looked like most vendors sold 2-4 books, though I later learned that some vendors sold none. (To be fair, tables cost $10, so no one had huge expectations of kicking off a bestselling book tour at this event.)

The event is between coal country and the Poconos, so I thought my spicy horror novels would do well. I also brought our romances, Trapped: What if Skunks Were Matchmakers? and Any Landing You Walk Away From… (the author of the latter, Dawn O’Harra, is from the Poconos). I made a Halloween section on the other side of my novels, with Hugo Yelagin‘s Lovecraftian Deadlights and Eva Parry‘s tarot journal. Any Landing served as a transiton into non-fiction, and I brought Motorhome Gypsies and Coach of the Building (as the author of Coach teaches public school in the area) and then Larry Sceurman‘s fiction to appeal to any men accompanying wives and his children’s book because many romance readers are moms. And Geraldine’s book? Not even sure why I tossed that in.

Two hours into the event, my mother returned my text. “Hadn’t even given it a thought.”

When I left the event, I was hungry and pining for pizza. The GPS took me a different way home, perhaps recognizing my emotional distress from the previous route. It took me home the route I had anticipated on the way up– it took me through Palmerton, Pa., one of my favorite places. I celebrated my 49th birthday in Palmerton. Read about that here.

As I was driving away from the venue, I thought to myself: That looks like I’m heading toward Palmerton. Maybe I can find that awesome little pizza shop in Palmerton. I looked at the GPS. It told me my next turn was onto Delaware Avenue, which, if I remembered correctly, was the main street in Palmerton. And the pizza shop was on it.

Sure enough, I entered Palmerton. Pulled up right in front of the pizza shop. Went in, ordered two slices dine in, grabbed a boxed iced tea, and paid the employee $8.64 (which is roughly the price of one Grilled Club Chick-Fil-A sandwich).

15 minutes later I was back in the car.

That little detour changed my mood. Perhaps a gentle reminder that we find our own destinies and don’t have to conform to outside expectations.

Journaling as a reset

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

A good portion of what I am going to write today will probably reappear in a smoother format over on the Parisian Phoenix Publishing page. (ParisianPhoenix.com) My brain is swirling. My frustration tolerance is low. Anxiety is taking advantage of point one and point two to paralyze my concentration.

These are growing pains. These are the realities that accompany change and even more so, success.

Cocktail contemplations

Last night, I really would have loved a cold beer to sit and sip while I pondered the events of the last few days– but my frugal self would not justify spending money on something so frivolous nor did I want to put on shoes. So I opted to make a cocktail of whatever we had in the house. We had grenadine (the kind with alcohol), creme de menthe and creme de cacoa, because a few weeks ago I had a craving for a grasshopper. That was short-lived. Since then, my occasional cocktail has been a creme de cacao and Coke Zero, because who doesn’t appreciate a chocolate Coke?

Last night I opted to skip the mixer and head toward “Dirty Girl Scout” territory, but I didn’t measure so my pour led to slightly chocolatey mint drink.

Why did I desire a cocktail last night? Because…

Sex Down South Atlanta

I was sitting in my reading chair, hoping to capitalize on the cool evening breeze and spend some time with my cats and my naughty Goffin’s cockatoo. I need to proofread McKenna Graf’s upcoming poetry book, review Larry Sceurman’s new middle-grade dragon story, and somehow manage to not only score some time for my ghostwriting client, but also prepare for the upcoming comic con in Phillipsburg and finish my workshop for Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group.

Let’s be honest. Comic con is a Friday problem, and this was Wednesday. GLVWG is a Sunday problem, and again this is Wednesday. But the other stuff was/is yesterday/today problems.

I receive an email from the organizers of Sex Down South Atlanta. It talked about the 200+ presenters that proposed workshops and they were sorry they could not accept them all. They told us all we could have a discount code to come to the conference and shared the list of accepted workshops.

Now, a friend of mine had proposed a workshop and I was her accountability partner for getting the proposal in. At the last minute she told me to enter a proposal and I laughed– because what do I have to offer at a big sex conference? She said they had a category for writing and erotica.

So, I entered a proposal.

I opened the file attached to the email last night to see if my friend’s workshop was selected. I did not see it. I scroll through the list and reach #31 and see: Explore Your Fantasies and Write Your Own Erotica, and I think, that sounds like a nice offering. As I finish the sentence, my jaw drops to the floor. It reads: Explore Your Fantasies and Write Your Own Erotica with Angel.

My workshop description

Which means the acceptances and the rejections went out in the same email. My proposal was accepted.

I went through my files looking for the proposal and sighed with relief that 1. I have it and 2. It’s reasonable. I spent the rest of the evening talking with friends. Because I’m shocked. And excited. And wondering how the heck I am going to pull off traveling to Atlanta. But that’s a future problem.

So that’s why I needed a cocktail and why my brain is even more overextended and fried than usual.

Almost like a vacation

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

This year’s Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group THE WRITE STUFF Conference came and went in a flurry of excitement and camaraderie (in the middle of Mercury retrograde to boot). I gave myself Sunday off–and swore I would stay in bed all day watching Grey’s Anatomy, which didn’t happen, in part because I started reading books and talking to my authors and associates at Parisian Phoenix Publishing about the conference.

I attended all three days of the conference, as I am president of the group, and I treated myself to a hotel room at the venue Friday night so I could stay and enjoy the social. My friend William Prystauk and I keep saying we’re going to book a hotel room and sit at our laptops all weekend, so I invited him to join me. I figured we could have a nice dinner between events and catch up.

Yes, you read that correctly. We are writers, after all, so we want to book a hotel room and hide from the world at our keyboards.

Some history… and notes for memoir.

Anyway… last year’s GLVWG conference happened not long after I was released from the hospital after the scariest series of falls in my life. (If you’d like to read more about that, you can read it here. I have to say, I was reviewing it this morning, 13 months later, and my sense of humor amazes me. This was the second fall I had last March, the first of which happened at work on the first day of Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month. That fall is memorialized here.)

(One of the sessions I attended at this year’s conference was Jordan Sonnenblick’s session on memoir writing. I have known Jordan for 20 years and I did not know he wrote memoirs, but it turns out this is a recent turn of events so then I felt better. What I find fascinating about Jordan’s memoirs is that he writes them like his middle-grade fiction, but with his as a protagonist. I bring this up because one of his techniques for recreating his past was to map the scars on his body. I finished The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell last night, and I reviewed it on Goodreads. Some people classified the book as historical fiction and slammed Jordan for “promoting toxic masculinity” — as if in 1978 there was a universe without toxic masculinity.)

Joan & Bill at work

Last year, the conference occurred during the same weekend as The Lehigh Valley Book Festival, where I had volunteered, but I was nervous to attend the event, alone, after so many medical incidents. Joan asked me to be her photography assistant and so I did. This year, Bill ended up working as her assistant since he was in the building anyway. Joan provides author headshots at the event for a $40 charge. It’s a bargain, and the photos have many versatile uses that I don’t think writers consider.

So this year’s conference had not only a great conference line-up, but many of my friends milling about as extras. And I had the naive idea that I might have time to connect with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a while and connect with some new folks. That did not happen.

A hotel with history

Bill left work a little before 5 p.m. to meet me at the hotel. My daughter had stopped by at 4 p.m. at the end of the workshop with Jonathan Maberry to have him sign her battered copy of Rot and Ruin. We are slowly collecting the whole series, as the last books of the series seem to be harder to find. We currently have books one through three of the series, and I have ordered four and five, but I’m not sure I have the Texas bits…

The Teenager with Jonathan Maberry

A bunch of conference attendees and presenters were meeting at the hotel restaurant for a light dinner before the evening events and the social. I encouraged as many as possible to line up in a big, long table that we kept adding squares to the bottom. Bill arrived in time to join us.

Now, here’s where things get very interesting from a writer’s perspective. More than a decade ago, during one of my previous incarnations as the group’s president, we used to flip-flop between the current hotel and the one by the airport. Both were mid-range hotels with plenty of space for a large keynote and enough smaller rooms for break-out sessions. As prices would go up, we would pit the two hotels against each other and the venue that gave us the best deal won.

I’ve been away from the group for almost a dozen years, and a pandemic happened which made the conference virtual only for a while, and now we are building up the GLVWG conference game again, last year with Maria V. Snyder and this year with Maberry.

The hotel though has seen better days, in part because for more than a year now the owner of the land has submitted a proposal to the township to knock down the hotel and build a warehouse. As a consequence, the maintenance on this octopus of a hotel (the floor plan has arms jutting out everywhere) has been minimal.

Jordan Sonnenblick said his wedding used the venue in 1994, and nothing has changed since then. Well, except the name. I think that hotel changes names every other year. The toilets run and/or have low water pressure. Some areas of the hotel smell like “weed and old people” as The Teenager puts it. The restaurant is small. The food is limited. The coffee is terrible. And while the staff is delightful and they keep the place clean and functioning, there were a lot of small but important mishaps probably due to being understaffed. The parking lot is always full of trucks and there’s what appears to be a much nicer Hampton Inn right next door.

But amidst all of this– Bill knew the bartender from earlier in the hotel’s history and apparently she makes good drinks. So after dinner, we stayed for a beverage and heard from a staff member that they have been told the hotel is closing for good in December 2024. We shall see.

The Social

William Prystauk, Marie Lamba, Dianna Sinovic, Jonathan Maberry, & Jordan Sonnenblick

From there, we moved down to the social. Mark Twain was kind enough to visit and I noticed a lot of people in literary cosplay.

I had a lovely time surrounded by friends and some of my favorite writers.

Jonathan Maberry at his table at the keynote luncheon

[I had intended this blog entry to be about my personal life, but I didn’t quite get there. I wanted to at least mention my OVR planning session yesterday. Better luck next time I guess.

PS–I still don’t like Grey’s Anatomy, and with every episode that passes I like Meredith Grey less and less. And I was so excited to get to Derek Shepherd’s death. But man– the whole arc of Meredith disappearing for a year to have another baby. So dumb.

And I cannot believe how you never see the kids, and Meredith never has any paid help, but yet she’s raising three kids as a single mom. And Alex just sells her her house back because it’s important to her to be at home and not in her family house.

Meredith is a spoiled, entitled brat who thanks to her past traumas believes she can behave however she wants and rules don’t apply to her.]

My brain hurts

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

For the last week or so I’ve been struggling with some congestion– nothing serious, but my head and now my throat are swimming with phlegm regardless of whether I take my allergy meds, or cold medicine, until I hit the Sudafed. I’ve been working hard. I’m always working and sometimes I don’t know what counts as work. Do only billable hours count? Do marketing and networking hours count? How much time should I commit to my traditional publishing authors vs how much time am I “allowed” to work on my own creative projects?

I’ve been applying for jobs and working to build my business at Parisian Phoenix Publishing since I lost my job at Stitch Fix. I have not found a job, though I have substantially increased my business. Enough to live on? I don’t know. Unemployment will run out in a few weeks so I will find out. I guess.

I had the opportunity to visit with the woman who loved to ring the gong earlier this week. She arrived wearing my favorite Stitch Fix sweatshirt, the Midnight Society alumni hoodie. I also visited with Nancy Scott and filed another story with Armchair Lehigh Valley. Today “the dentist’s book” arrived in ARC format. (And the UPS driver opened the door to my house not realizing that the dog had access to the porch. Luckily, he was fast.)

My own novel has gone into design, so it looks like an April launch will be happening (official release date my birthday, May 20).

And The Teenager, who will only be the Teenager for about three months, built me an office space.

A lot of life is a leap of faith. I’m exhausted from the jump– speaking of which my fitness coach Andrew at Apex Training has been brutal in my workouts later– but sometimes you have to keep going.

I want to improve my web site, add more pages, keep content fresher. I want to gain more Substack readers. I want to make a business plan, somehow fund a larger marketing plan, write and promote more of my own books, continue my career as a journalist and transition into a memoirist and disability advocate as well.

24 hours later…

I meant to write something cohesive and intelligent and wrap this all up but it didn’t happen so here it goes as is.

Pregaming Thanksgiving

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

If you miss my ridiculous banter, you may want to visit ParisianPhoenix.com because most of my activities now relate to the publishing company because I’m trying to develop enough business to make a living now that Stitch Fix has closed its Bethlehem warehouse.

Speaking of Stitch Fix, one of my friends who has gotten fixes religiously since I started with the company got an email today that whatever warehouse shipped her fix instead of ours did not scan the package as it left the facility so neither Stitch Fix nor the carrier has a record of it. Therefore, if she does not receive a fix today or tomorrow, she is to let them know as then they have reason to believe it is lost.

Yup. Did I ever mention that we were the most efficient, safest working warehouse in the network?

Random Cat Photo:
Touch of Gray

Anyway, back to my day. I started my day assisting the Teenager with course registration at her college. She is studying BS psychology and had a good plan. She had courses and backup courses and I planned on catching up with my NaNoWriMo word count (if you don’t know what NaNo is or you have opinions about the NaNo controversary, my take is here) before meeting Nan and a poet friend.

She could not get into ANY of her classes, nor ANY of her backups, nor ANY classes at all in her department. With my help, we found Intro to Women’s/Gender/Sexuality studies, Theory of Religion and Intro to Sociology. She’s also hoping– but probably doesn’t have a chance–to get into astronomy. The professor was on of her pet-sitting clients.

With this new course load, I think she should apply for an interdisciplinary major of her own design, the new BA in Cult Leadership.

I managed to pull 500 words for my novel before heading out to get Nan.

I decided to give Nan her “Christmas present” early. I put that in quotes because I would have gotten it for her regardless of the season. It kept popping up on the available Amazon Vine items that I can review. If you’ve heard about Nan enough, I probably don’t have to tell you she LOVES NASA. She has followed the space program since before man landed on the moon.

Nan won’t go out for the day if there’s a NASA event going on. She has cable simply so she can watch NASA TV.

I got her a decorative desk piece that has an astronaut on the moon with some sort of moon lander or rover. And the space suit has a ledge where you can place your cell phone and the lander thing is a pencil can. The most impractical gift for a blind person. It’s a sculpture you can’t see, with features for items you don’t use.

I’m relieved to say– she loved it. She loves that she can put her two pens that she keeps for sighted friends on her desk. She loves that the sculpture has enough detail that she can look at it. And she loves that for the first time, she has something space-themed she can display.

We took it up to her room and arranged it on her desk and headed to our appointment. We had made arrangements to meet a new friend, we’ll call her the Italian Poet. We were workshopping some of her poems.

Now here’s some motivation/inertia for you: If you write, paint, photograph, whatever, you must find others who share your artistic sensibilities and draw from their energy. Sometimes you share feedback, sometimes you seek inspiration together. Sometimes you learn, sometimes you teach. But the union of people in a space can build spirits and keep you going.

And after Italian Poet encouraged me to pursue my educational goals and I prodded her to finish her Ph.D., Nan and I embarked on our annual tradition: Gobbler bowls at Wawa.

We live a simple existence. Then we taste-tested a peppermint watermelon sparkling water. Nan did not approve. I did. But, as Nan says, I do seek out the weird stuff.

The Teenager used Nan and I for a photography project.

I went to the gym for leg day where I squat 120 pounds on the barbell for eight solid reps. Definitely liking that!’

A reset? The NaNo Dilemma, a podcast/YouTube interview, and some disability philosophy

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

I signed up for NaNoWriMo 2022, in part because deadlines and challenges and what feels impossible sometimes motivates me. But between foster cats with diarrhea, work shift changes, health issues and mood in general, I’m losing my focus and drive. I need a reset and an evaluation of my goals more than I need a push.

I have learned in the last five years or so as I’ve “come out” of the disability “closet,” is that when you have a disability or a chronic condition you have a choice: you either withdraw from life or you become tenacious and stubborn and adaptive. I think the majority of those of us with congenital issues, especially when our parents didn’t make our physical difference the center of our existence, tend to be the latter to the point of ridiculousness. We want to do things, whatever they are, and we don’t want our bodies to hinder us.

I think people who came to body differences later in life might be more prone to accept “well I just won’t do that anymore” while younger people with catastrophic injuries have the will to keep on going, and those with issues since birth learn that if they want to experience certain things they have to work harder but in reality we need to work creatively. So the 20-year-old proclaimed paralyzed as the result of a sporting accident will be more motivated to walk again than the 60-year-old who had a car accident.

But these are really complex topics to ponder and very personalized to the emotional and financial resources a person has to support them.

If you read my personal blog, you know I have diplegic spastic cerebral palsy. If you get tired of hearing me day that, I don’t care. I’m 47-years-old and like many Generation Xers out there I’m wondering how the hell that has happened so quickly. But more importantly, and I write this without judgment, I had no real medical treatment between the ages of five and twenty.

I realized– because of my job working in the warehouse at Stitch Fix of all places– that not only do I know nothing about cerebral palsy, but my medical team might not know much either. So no wonder I have a lot of unanswered questions. This week I celebrate my two year anniversary with Stitch Fix and my journey to understand my own body will be forever tied with my warehouse job with them.

Up until December 2021, I had never seen a neurologist. Until that late December visit with a neurologist, I never even had a diagnosis on my file.

And to think, now I have TWO neurologists. I guess I just want to remind everyone, and this is why writing a cerebral palsy memoir will be one of my next projects, that we tend to view our doctors as people in a hierarchy above us and we approach them for answers and with hope of relief. Instead, we need to approach them as peers with education and insight and it’s our responsibility as patients to ferry information between them and do what we can for ourselves.

I had a fall Friday night, after a week long battle with nerve pain in my foot and leg. I agreed to cortisone shots in my foot to see if that would curb the pain in my foot (and it did) but the resulting change in sensation and muscle responsiveness has made this leg (which happens to be my good one) less reliable. Throw in lack of sleep, not enough food and a cocktail and down I went. As someone with cerebral palsy, I need to remember that normal side effects for people who have proper muscle control may manifest differently in me.

So, Saturday morning, I nestled under my new Dad blanket (if you need to hear more detail on any of this about Friday click here) and planned to work on my NaNoWriMo project. Even though I had the time, and the healthy start needed to get a flow going on the project, I didn’t write a word. And I’m wondering if, already having one novel underway and past deadline, if starting another is merely destroying any chance of focus I have.

I have 4,000 words on the NaNo project, which if you don’t know is National Novel Writing Month, and I should be at 12,000 words by now. I had hoped the new project, a new idea which is nothing like anything I’ve ever written, would shake off the bad habits of an editor/publisher debating every word and allow me to write freely. That impetus would revive my ability to write quickly and without overthinking.

And strengthen writing habits.

The jury is out.

I may abandon official NaNo in favor of sticking with a strict writing schedule of rising at 4 a.m. daily before my warehouse shift and writing from 4:15 to 5:15 a.m.

The Teenager has had two overnight clients and I think at last count it had been 16 days since she slept in her own bed. When she arrived home yesterday morning, she looked at me on the couch and her dog lazily dozing and decided we both needed fresh air. So she mentioned key words: “walk,” “ride” and “window.” The dog lost her mind.

The Teenager knows how to bribe both of us.

She recently bought a new harness and long line for the dog. So we went to a small park to try it out. The park outlaws tobacco, alcohol, fireworks, drugs and golf. But dogs are okay.

There’s a cute video on YouTube of F. Bean Barker enjoying the outdoors.

And then we went to “the Window.” Which in this case meant Dunkin as it was still early and we sampled their new Cookie Butter offerings, the cold brew and the doughnut. Both were dangerously decadent. The doughnut is 370 calories so I’m hoping it sells out to the extent where I can’t get my hands on it.

I went to the park and the window in my pajamas, because it was a gloomy Saturday and I didn’t see the point of fancying myself just to hang out with the dog.

I spent a good portion of the day doing dishes and laundry and watching “Wheeler Dealer Dream Car” on Motor Trend’s streaming channel. I subscribed to Motor Trend last month so I could binge watch the Dax Shepard redo of “Top Gear America” and I may hang on to the subscription as I enjoy the content. The Teenager finds this perplexing as she knows I have no mechanical aptitude.

She classifies my car knowledge as “it looks pretty” and “it goes fast,” but I suppose my interest is similar to my fascination with haute couture sewing. I have read my haute couture sewing guide cover to cover (and yes there is such a thing) and I can’t sew to save my life.

I suppose I am a true academic. Reading and obsessing over knowledge of things I will never have the skill to do.

Then, the Teenager found “her box” on the doorstep, her third fix from Stitch Fix!!!! So we opened that bad boy.

I think The Teenager is disappointed that her box doesn’t have more flare, but the staples she receives is really improving her day to day look. As a dog walker, I am now seeing her in these Stitch Fix selections as a way that she can maintain comfort and still look put together.

If you watch the YouTube review, you’ll see more of The Teenager in what she calls her new “math teacher sweater.” It’s a keeper. It’s about 16 hours after she received it and she’s still wearing it. Stay tuned to see if I steal her shoes and keep them.

Later in the day, I had an interview with David Figueroa of David’s Cerebral Palsy and Fitness Channel. I have explored his YouTube content and I listen to his podcast. I am working hard to take charge of my aging process and I hope my message of the importance of strength training and my approach to medical advocacy resonate with people.

We talked for an hour and a half. I’ve included a link to his YouTube channel below. Let’s hope the chaos of my house wasn’t too distracting! But one disruption I welcomed was the motorcycle that passed by while I was talking about my father.

I ended up sleeping more than nine hours last night, and woke up this morning covered in cats. I hope your time-change-hour served you as well as mine did. Here’s a photo of me with the fosters, and it’s blurry because I took it without my glasses.

A successful romp at Easton Book Festival: Sex in the Text

Angel Ackerman 4 Comments

**author’s note: I’m sorry, not sorry, that this piece has become rather long and a tad historical. I will divide the piece with subheadings so that readers seeking particular topics can scan quickly. But for those who love historical context and rambling storytelling combined with my unique chaos, have at it.

It’s a quiet October morning, before the sun rises, and I am sharing my thoughts with you regarding our experience last night at the 4th Annual Easton Book Festival (2022). I’m posting in my personal blog, as I don’t know if I have fully formed thoughts (other than I had my concerns that the grassroots chaos of the festival, part of its charm, might drive my organized self to lose my mind and LO! and BEHOLD! I had a great time. Perhaps the cusp Taurus in me is mellowing into a new calmer self, my Gemini side).

I appeared briefly in the original Easton Book Festival “trailer,” look for me on YouTube with my salmon dress which looks rather orange and my trademark scarf. I join a lot of local celebrities so that tickles me.

The pandemic appeared in the festival’s youth and the city has decided to renovate (and in my humble opinion destroy) Centre Square, where the Book & Puppet Company bookstore is located. They have reduced the circle from two lanes of traffic to one and eliminated all the parking in front of businesses. They have also been toying with the traffic patterns, often closing main streets and making the traditional heart of the downtown one way. As someone who has lived in this community for more than a quarter of a century, I’m annoyed.

My history with downtown Easton

The city has two main parking decks currently in the same basic vicinity, which is good, but they have destroyed one convenient central parking lot and pocket park to build a new deck, which is not open yet. The oldest of the parking structures will soon be eliminated, as are on-street parking permits for residents. As more upscale apartments and multi-story structures join the historic downtown, the footprint of the city is changing. Or perhaps gentrifying.

My first apartment, with poet Darrell Parry, who is on the board of the festival, was an absolute dump but so much fun. We were two recently out of college, engaged kids with a pile of student loan debt and cars that barely ran. I worked at Lafayette College in the Public Information Office and Darrell worked at Caldor, a department store that, like many, no longer exists. It started his career as a shipper/receiver and honed his skill as the master of packing boxes.

Our rent for our strange one-bedroom started at $450 a month, with off-street parking and basic utilities included. We couldn’t afford cable and dial-up internet so we chose internet as we had television our entire lives and the World Wide Web was new. We would often scrape our change together and walk to Coffee and Tea Time Café, which also no longer exists, and I believe the structure is now part of the freshly-reconstructed Hearst Magazine offices that have moved to Easton from New York City. And on spaghetti nights we would order garlic bread from Colonial Pizza, which does still exist, since the restaurant was practically across the street. When we would call to order, they would often say, “Is this the neighbor?”

And then after spaghetti and garlic bread, we would go down to The Purple Cow Creamery, which later had to change it’s name to Bank Street Creamery, but you can still go there for ice cream. It’s not the same owners as it was in my day, but it has remained a hot spot of the downtown.

And since I’m already aging myself, I might as well add that Book & Puppet stands pretty much next to a place called The Crayola Factory. When I was an intern at Binney & Smith (now rebranded as Crayola since that’s the name everyone knows), I was tasked with writing and pitching a then under-construction, exciting new attraction in the former Orr’s building, another defunct local department store, called Two Rivers Landing. It would contain The Crayola Factory and the National Canal Museum.

(And I happen to be a Crayola junkie and a canal aficionado.)

You see, in my day, you could actually walk through the real Crayola factory in Forks Township and follow this blue line through all the stages of crayon and marker production. When you arrived at corporate offices in the morning, if they were making crayons, the air would carry that trademark warm aroma of wax, and if they were making markers, it smelled like burnt plastic.

I can remember sitting in my cubicle in corporate communications pitching my press release about this new family attraction to national magazines. My small, unattributed contribution to history. I did a lot of fun things at Crayola. Including dressing professional dancers in phallic crayon costumes at New York City’s Rainbow Room.

Okay, so now you see why I did not start this in the Parisian Phoenix Publishing professional blog. Because I’ve transformed into an old woman telling you the way it was in my day. And if I want to throw it back another generation, whenever I get off topic, I like to reference Arlo Guthrie‘s “Alice’s Restaurant.” If you don’t know the song, you’re young enough to find it on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music. “This is a song about Alice. Remember Alice?” the lyrics say, even though the song seems to have nothing to do with Alice for most of the 18-or-so minutes the song goes on.

This is a song about the Easton Book Festival and “Sex in the Text.” Remember the Easton Book Festival?

This is a song about Alice. Remember Alice?

Arlo Guthrie

Darrell hates that song.

Opening Act: Poetry galore

I will not make a James Bond reference off of that title to relate it back to “Sex in the Text.”

Darrell Parry
Nancy Scott and Eva Parry (“the Teenager”)
Reading Braille
Joan Zachary

Lynn Alexander opened the poetry segment reading from her collection, Find Me in the Iris. Followed by our own Nancy Scott, then Darrell and Rebecca Reynolds. Nancy read from newer work, including a poem about her recent move. Darrell read from his book, Twists: Gathered Ephemera, with a rather stunning introduction delivered by Lafayette English professor and festival board president, Chris Phillips. Rebecca read from each of her books (Daughter of the Hangnail and The Bovine Two-Step) and her work in progress.

And if you ever wanted to watch someone read Braille, here’s your chance.

Sex in the Text: Making Love Between the Pages

So, for some reason GLVWG (Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group) and our (Darrell, the festival board, myself and Book & Puppet) connections did not yield more panelists for this discussion. So, Darrell and I talked about making the panel into a talk show type format where questions could be placed on index cards and William Prystauk, author of the Kink Noir series, and I could ask the questions of each other Oprah-style and discuss.

We had a fantastic time and the questions were thoughtful not only from a literary perspective but also from a societal values perspective.

It was a refreshing night, and I hope the spectators enjoyed it as much as Bill and I did.

Updates, announcements and anecdotes

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

It’s just about to turn 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning. The last 48 hours have been emotionally difficult, and those are internal challenges I have resolved within myself but now I need to “make right” in the world.

My good friend Joan (the talented photographer) had quipped that the moon is in “Frustrato” phase and perhaps that is accurate.

Sometimes it’s nice to blame the universe instead of accepting our part in the mayhem. Because even good intentions spark fires.

I heard a podcast yesterday; I believe it was an economic one, that asked if one host was “a glass half empty or a glass half full kind of guy.” He replied, “it’s just half.”

That’s too much enigma and philosophy for pre-dawn hours. Blame the fact that my trusty espresso machine only filled half my mug.

Mug from Purr Haus in Emmaus

The teenager and I had 14 kittens in the house Saturday, Sunday and Monday offering temporary lodging for these babies whose official Feline Urban Rescue and Rehab foster families have gone on summer vacation.

They were so much fun to have around, but 11 went home last night. This led the Teenager’s officially adopted foster fail Mars of the Roman Pride distraught that his friends had gone. He screamed until the Teenager released him into “gen pop” where he plopped himself down in front of the remaining visitors.

On Friday, I had a rather grueling session at Apex Training with my coach Andrew. We did some intense work on balance and single leg muscle stability. On Saturday, the communication between my brain and my lower body felt rickety (for lack of a better description) and it was challenging to move. By Sunday, the movement felt smoother but my phone was registering spikes in walking asymmetry. But something very interesting happened Monday— I could not only stand on one leg, but I could also hold my leg in a few seconds of a quad stretch.

Yesterday, I visited the Stitch Fix employee store, which resulted in a good news/bad news scenario. I bought myself jewelry on an impulse and discovered my second holes could still accept earrings. As someone who really grew up in the 80s and graduated high schools in the 1990s, I have three sets of holes in my ears.

I bought the Teenager some new things, including some warm hiking style boots for fall and her dog walks. I bought myself an adorable pair of shorts, and I picked one size up from my pre-existing Stitch Fix clothes and they were too small.

Obviously my efforts to reduce my recent (as in pandemic era) weight gain have been not sincere enough. Sigh. I’m trying to eat better and move more without falling into a strict/restrictive mindset.

But I did eat an entire medium pizza from Domino’s the other night. It was a medium hand-tossed crust, light on the cheese, light on the garlic Alfredo sauce with red peppers and pineapple.

On the way home from work last night, I noticed that the furniture store looked abandoned— and that the sign merely said urn.

In the background of all of this, the ‘cat book’ from Parisian Phoenix has hit some unexpected difficulties prompting a delay in its production. But my quick thinking, after a few hours of pondering, have inspired an interim release of a mini cat book featuring advice and stories about the care of cats. The larger book will come later, perhaps in early 2023.

In the meantime, I am very puzzled why my sweet tripod foster Louise has decided to crate herself.

And the most surprising item of the day was receiving my first catalog for Parisian Phoenix Publishing— Uline junk mail!

I suppose the last update is that the people at Susquehanna Service Dogs have cashed my check for the application fee. I’m anxiously awaiting contact.

To say life has been hectic feels like an understatement.

Here Kitty Kitty

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Yes, that is a kitten. Yes that is a photo by the amazing Joan Zachary. Yes, that is the teenager.

Please check out this blog post about the upcoming book to benefit Feline Urban Rescue and Rehab. Yes, I am helping to write it, putting my journalism skills to work. And I am offering cat wisdom and reprinting a flash fiction I wrote in high school.

As The FURR Flies, an anthology of cat stories, heart-warming tales from cat rescuers, cat resources and cat advice has gone from in the pipeline to …

Here Kitty Kitty