We’re still riding high from the amazing energy and enthusiasm we basked in at the Boston Book Festival last Saturday, where Galiot Press shared a booth with Solstice Literary Magazine. Welcome to the many, many new followers of this newsletter who stopped by and shared your smiles and curiosity and enthusiasm. You made our day. The mood was joyous, supportive, fun. A much-needed way to come together around a means of empathy and community.
It was our first public appearance, complete with business cards, a pop-up banner (weirdly called a “barracuda”), games, and prizes. As we don’t yet have our own books, we offered booth visitors other experiences:
We raffled off one 20-page manuscript consultation and one bundle of books that we admire for the way in which their authors break with narrative conventions of style or format: This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; Ghost Of, by Diana Khoi Nguyen; and S., by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (yes, that J.J. Abrams!). Winners have been notified!
We set out a tiddlywinks-like game in which the objective was to project frogs into a bucket to win a notebook with our logo, or a sticker. One passerby seemed to think the frogs themselves were giveaways and pocketed one! (Not the lovely participant in the video.)
We set up a large whiteboard for an “exquisite corpse” game: passers by could take a dry erase marker and add a line to the story. (One participant took a dry erase marker and… walked off with it.)
We talked! Nonstop, for 7 hours, on our feet. We told people about our vision, why we’re starting a press in the first place, how Galiot Press will be different. Lots of wonderful conversations.
And of course we gave out chocolates.
Some observations:
Everyone LOVES a chance to schpoing a frog into a bucket. We had people lining up just for this amphibian game. Young, less young, of all shades, hands with acrylic nails, hands with tattoos, hands smeared in orange Dorito dust, hands with ink stains, hands with gnarled veins, teeny tiny 3-year old hands.
There’s always someone in it just for the chocolate. We’re talking to you, man who interacted not at all except to seek out the dark chocolates by touching many of them until we pointedly said you had to take all the ones you touched. Perhaps that was your strategy all along. A “thank you” would have been nice. We do care about manners.
People were snazzy! What a fabulous parade of excellent outfits. Boston really stepped up its sartorial game!
Writers are sadly hesitant to admit that they write, like it’s a shameful habit that shouldn’t leave the confines of one’s room. We asked people who approached our booth “are you a reader or a writer or both?” and received so many squirrely “oh, well, I guess sometimes I write, kind of…” responses. If you choose to write when no one is asking you to do so, you are a writer!
Some of our favorite interactions were with the young students or recent grads from writing and publishing programs, some of whom asked about employment opportunities; the woman with the fantastic yellow pants; the dapper older gent who promised he’d be in touch; the lovely young woman with pink flowers painted onto her cheeks and an infectious smile; the delightful young mother carrying an infant who went to fetch us coffee.
10% of people’s handwriting is hard to decipher. We did our best with the handwritten email addresses for the raffle and our mailing list. Perhaps next time we need to offer an electronic option, too.
To our new subscribers: thank you for signing up! To new and existing subscribers, thank you to those who have upgraded to a paid subscription. If you’re not already doing that, we hope you’ll consider changing to paid, to help us with our start-up costs.
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Warm wishes as the weather in New England turns cool.
Anjali & Henriette