Tag: Seattle

My Books, Writing

Invisible Violets – How to Get Signed and Personalized Books

Chrys Buckley
Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of her book Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at Portland book fest

Since announcing the release of my debut book, Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays, which releases on March 13, 2026 from Wandering Aengus Press, people have asked me how they can get signed books.

I have answers for you!
And not just signed books, but also personalized!

It’s a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure depending on where you live, and so this post serves as your answers for every scenario. Whether you live near me or far away, I have ways to get signed books to you.

Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of her book Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at the Portland Book Fest

How to Get Signed Books in Portland, Oregon

There are lots of ways to get signed books in the City of Roses:

  • Join me at my launch party on March 13, 7-8:30 p.m. at BOLD Coffee and Books. There will be a conversation about the book. There will be the reading of excerpts from the book. There will be food and drinks available for purchase before and during the event, as is always the case at BOLD. And there will be book signing. You can buy the book at the event and get it signed on the spot. This will be an easy way to get a signed book and it will be a blast!
  • Come to one of my other local events and buy a book and have me sign it! A whole bunch of different events are in the works, and I’m working on creating an Events page to keep it all in one place. Suffice it to say, there will be other opportunities outside of the launch.
  • Pre-order my book (pre-order hub here) and bring your copy to any of my events or coordinate meeting up with me in person outside of events to have me sign it.

How to Get Signed Books on Orcas Island and in Seattle

Along with local events, I’m working on some Orcas and Seattle events as well.

Orcas Island: Plans aren’t definite yet, but I’m working on two separate trips for bookish events on the island. One will be in June 2026 and will be an event with my publisher and other authors at the press, details TBD. Another will be next winter, January 2027 or so, and will be more focused on my book and its many mentions of life on Orcas.

Seattle: This is a bit more ephemeral, but would likely be coupled with the Orcas trips, either on my way there or on my way back. Details TBD. My dream is to do an event at Easy Street Records in West Seattle.

For either of these locations, you could either buy the book at the event or pre-order the book and bring it to the event for me to sign.

How to Get Signed Books if You Live in the United States outside of the Pacific Northwest

Most of my inquiries so far have come from people in this category. This is for you if you:

  • Went to high school with me in New Jersey
  • Went to blind camp (or JKRC or Avalon or Drew) with me in New Jersey
  • Went to Washington College with me for a brief time
  • Went to Northern Arizona University with me for a brief time
  • Know me from a certain internet forum (iykyk)
  • Know me from Camp Orkila and don’t live in the Pacific Northwest
  • Went to medical school with me and went outside the PNW for residency and/or practice
  • Know me from social media or this website/blog
  • Don’t know me at all

To make this available to people in places I’m not likely to travel to in the near future, I’ve partnered with local bookstore Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village, and they will be my hub for signed and personalized books.

Here’s how to get signed books through Annie Bloom’s Books:

  • Order Invisible Violets from them using this direct link to my Signature Page.
  • In your Order Comment at checkout, write these things:
    • You are requesting a signed copy or a personalized copy.
    • What name you want it personalized to.
    • A quick note about how you know me, if you do, so I can write a more personalized note. This is especially helpful if you have changed your name since we knew each other most, or if I know you mostly by a screen name.
    • Your order comment could read something like this. “Requesting personalized copy, addressed to X. This is so-and-so from such-and-where.”
  • Then I’ll go in and sign and personalize and Annie Bloom’s will ship to you.

Note: This is for shipping to US addresses only! Which brings me to…

Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at the Portland Book Fest

How to Get Signed Books at the NOAH Conference (Columbus, OH)

This isn’t a done deal yet, but I’m thinking of going to the NOAH Conference this summer, and will update here with details as plans progress. If I go, I’ll definitely bring books with me to sell and sign!

How to Get Signed Books if You Live Outside the US

If you want a signed copy of my book and you live outside of the US, you can buy the book from me directly, via Venmo or what have you, which will have to include the shipping costs, and I’ll sign or personalize and mail it to you. You can always reach out to me via my Contact Form if you need to set this up.

I think I have covered every earthly possibility for getting signed books to everyone who wants one. If you have questions or need help with any of the methods, reach out to me here!

Chrys

Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at the Portland Book Fest

Image description: four photos of Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at Portland Book Fest.

Writing

A Lollapalooza for Writers – What I Learned at AWP in Seattle

Chrys Buckley

seattleawpimagesI just got home from AWP in Seattle. For those who haven’t heard of it, AWP is this massively huge swarm of writers that descends on a different city each year. This year, AWP took over the Washington State Convention Center, an Annex and the Seattle Sheraton. Someone told me that the total number of people registered was 14,000. Unless you count music festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella, I’ve never been around that many people in such a concentrated space.

There are oodles of writing-related panels. In fact, for every time slot, there are, oh, I don’t know, twenty or more different offerings. And then there are outside events, readings, contest winner announcements, drinking with some vague literary theme in mind, and then more panels. There’s also a bookfair, which is huge. This one was split into two separate rooms, that’s how huge it was. Booths everywhere. Books everywhere. Writers milling around booths and looking at books everywhere.

I was a total AWP virgin, open to all kinds of impression and experience.

So, here are some things I learned over the last three days:

Continue reading “A Lollapalooza for Writers – What I Learned at AWP in Seattle” →

Writing

Help Me Design a Movie Poster!

Chrys Buckley

screenwritingAll right, you awesome, smart and creative readers, I’d love your input!

I’m taking a screenwriting class, and we’re supposed to design a movie poster for the project we’re working on. And I would love some help brainstorming on this!

It has to have:

  • A title
  • An image
  • A tagline (one sentence enticing description of the film, like what you see on a DVD cover)

And for those that don’t know how to use any graphic design programs (like me, visual art is so not my strong suit), we just have to describe it.

The problem? I don’t have a title yet, or an image, or a tagline! Ooops!

Continue reading “Help Me Design a Movie Poster!” →

Samples, Writing

Food Bank

Chrys Buckley

foodbankindexFinally our names are called, one by one, and we get our bags. I peer into mine. “Ice cream, no way!” I never dreamed they’d give us dessert.

When we unpack back at home, I see that’s mostly what they give us. There’s cake and bags full of Christmas cookies. I open it and pop one red-and-green sprinkled cookie in my mouth. “Kinda stale,” I say, “but better than nothing.”

There are chicken poppers, catfish sticks and cans upon cans. At the bottom of all of our bags are onions and potatoes. “Not bad,” I remark as we fold our bags up and close the cabinets. Sadly, this is the most food I’ve had on hand since my grocery shopping spree when I first moved to Seattle, more than two months ago.

Continue reading “Food Bank” →

Samples, Writing

Writing as Time Travel – Blue Alchemy 1

Chrys Buckley

Writing about your own past is surreal. You’re reliving it. You’re at Fox Cabin at blind camp with the blue vinyl couches in the living room and the orange, white and yellow checked curtains in the bedrooms. You’re eight years old, unable to sleep because you’re terrified of your parents because Mom was getting hysterical again today and maybe this time she’ll really lose it or Dad’s smoldering rage will erupt, so you’re reading Nancy Drew by the night of your night light. You’re riding King County Metro after being rejected from both blood plasma donation for cash (your temperature was too low) and staying at the Green Tortoise Hostel for work-trade, knowing you only have three days until you and your roommates get evicted. You stare out the window watching as the bus passes through the hilly streets of downtown Seattle, thinking dark thoughts like maybe homelessness would suit you because you’ve always felt like an orphan anyway. You’re skulking by a payphone outside 7-11 in the outskirts of Seattle while your roommate is across the parking lot buying pot. You’re swimming in Puget Sound, not long after sunset, and the water is so cold that you’ve never felt more alive, and it suddenly, truly, deeply feels like all you’ve been through was somehow worth it to be here now, in the water, your limbs feeling heavier as you get closer to shore, and you’re unable to stop looking back at the cerulean dusk and the fading pink on the western horizon.

You’re all of these places but you’re also sitting on your bed writing in your little room with your books and notebooks stacked in milk crates, your window slightly open to let in the sounds of the Orcas ocean and the slow creak of cedar trees swaying in the wind, trying not to think about the boy who lives down the hall from you or the girl in his room. Or you’re writing in the fluffy brown chair in your apartment, wondering if you should get rid of it because your ex-boyfriend left it when he went to jail and do you really need any more reminders of him? But on the other hand it really fits the color scheme of your room and is really comfortable to write in.

In the story you are writing it might be fall while in reality when you are writing it, it’s summer solstice. And yet, the more you write, the more you swear that the light coming in through your windows is so distinctly autumnnal. You can almost smell the foliage.

There is something haunting about being in more than one experience at once. It’s like how it felt when I first came home from college after months of being away. Walking into the living room with its dark blue patterned furniture and light blue pleated blinds felt almost like an out-of-body experience. Everything was always slightly off from what I remembered, like all the colors or the feelings I associated with them had all made the slightest of wavelength shifts on the electromagnetic spectrum, just a few angstroms, nothing you could quite articulate or measure but sense nonetheless. Writing memoir is like that, I’m in two places in time, two times at once, memory and present tense, and they are so distinct and yet so muddled that it’s hard to tell which one I’m living in more.

~~~

For more samples, look here.

This is an excerpt from my most recent piece of writing, a personal essay called “Blue Alchemy,” about writing memoir, and the slipperiness of writing and memory.

~Chrys

Related articles
TV, Writing

The Killing: Crime Writing, Endings and the Season 2 Finale

Chrys Buckley

The Killing (U.S. TV series)
The Killing (U.S. TV series)

Last week, I wrote about Breaking Bad and endings in this post, and today I’m going to look at another show’s season ending, and discuss some writerly things about endings in general, particularly for crime writing.

Spoiler Alert: If you aren’t caught up and don’t know who did it, go get caught up…then come back.

Sunday, June 17th was the big Season 2 finale of AMC’s The Killing. Like with Breaking Bad, I came to The Killing late in the game and just started watching it this year. There are a lot of things I really like about this show, most notably atmosphere.

Continue reading “The Killing: Crime Writing, Endings and the Season 2 Finale” →

Writing

I Am Going a Little Crazy

Chrys Buckley

Another oldie, from Christmas Eve 2008.

Slowly, but surely.

So, it’s Christmas Eve and I’m awake and wired and have absolutely nothing to do.

It’s been snowing like crazy for the last week and a half. When it started I was in Seattle at a Christmas party with friends, and the next morning we couldn’t get through the road. The next day I came back to Orcas and had a semi (but not terribly exciting)-adventure returning. And then it snowed and snowed and snowed some more. It’s the most snow I’ve seen in the northwest, and it’s my sixth winter here. It’s wild, and awesome.

I’m loving it. It makes me want to go make snow angels and snowmen and build forts and have wild snowball fights. The roads are a mess, I mean solid ice covered in inches of snow. Walking anywhere that’s not a trodden path or shoveled walkway is deliriously fun, I sink in halfway up to my knees.

Continue reading “I Am Going a Little Crazy” →

Writing

Is finished ever really finished?

Chrys Buckley

writing-is-the-artYesterday was my target date. I was supposed to have the next draft of the book totally DONE.

Technically, I made it. Sometime Wednesday morning before work, I finished revising the last paragraph of the last chapter. I want to talk some about the process of writing this book.

It all started the first summer I lived on Orcas Island. I’d just made it out of hell and narrowly escaped homelessness in Seattle. I was offered a kitchen job at the camp that offered housing, which was my own room to myself, and food, and year-round work, sort of. I was staying somewhere, for the first time in years. I wasn’t fully on my feet but for once I didn’t have to worry about basic survival.

Continue reading “Is finished ever really finished?” →