Cricket sits down with Chrys Buckley, a Portland-based author, editor, and book designer whose debut memoir Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays just won the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. Before diving into the book itself, they talk Summer Beam Books — that revelation of a bookstore Iris and Cricket stumbled onto on the way back from Yachats, where the shelves are so thoughtfully stocked with everything from foraging guides to watercolor instruction books to woodworking volumes that Iris jokes you could build an entire town and thrive on nothing but what's in there. (Iris and Cricket even walked out with the same herbal tea recipe book, which felt like serendipity.)

Then the real conversation begins: Chrys talks about her first time at the Willamette Writers Conference and how she picked sessions that mattered to her — a "Funding Your Muse" workshop on grants and fellowships, screenwriting tracks (she's returning to that form), and the people she wanted to support by showing up. She also introduces the term "intuitive plotter," which stuck with her as a way to describe her own process.

On Invisible Violets itself: the book's seven essays are structured as "tracks" (keeping with the mixtape metaphor), and they move between music, relationships, legal blindness, albinism, and navigating complex life experiences — all held together by humor and the lyric essay form, which Chrys first fell in love with in an undergrad nonfiction class at Portland State. She walks Cricket through a couple of standout essays, including "Distant Lights," a braided essay with three interlocking timelines that she came up with in the shower, and "Names," built around given names, screen names, and pen names. The hardest piece to write was "Reasonable Doubt," which required an entire independent study with Professor Susan Reese just to pare down and shape.

Chrys also talks about synesthesia — she sees words and letters as colors while writing, which makes her a "painterly writer," though she always prioritizes precision over visual beauty. And on writing about her own vision: legal blindness for her isn't total blindness, but less detail and resolution. The best way to convey it is through specific, relatable scenarios — walking down a street, looking at the ocean — so readers can picture what she can and can't see.

One big thing: Invisible Violets is currently print-only, which means her disability community can't yet access it. But all three accessible formats — e-book, large print, and audiobook — release together on October 13th (Meet the Blind Month). Chrys is narrating the audiobook herself, because she hears her own voice while writing and revising, and memoir readers want the author's voice anyway.

Looking ahead: she's doing a book conversation with A. Malotkov at Annie Bloom's Books on October 27th, followed by a group reading at Orcas Island Library with other Wandering Aengus authors. She's also working on a second book — expanding those four linked essays that got cut from Invisible Violets into something much more linear, and she's in the early stages of building a live show for the memoir, complete with a B-side essay she's been performing at storytelling events. Her big 2027 goal is a mini tour. Plus she's got two screenplays sitting at about 85% done, waiting to be dusted off.

And Chrys is currently enrolled in a stand-up comedy class with a friend, discovering that she's a storyteller who's sometimes funny — not a comedian — which has its own set of challenges.

Episode 1: The Bookstores We Lost (and the Ones We're Just Discovering)

Cricket and Iris kick off the Prose City Podcast by wandering back through Portland's bookstore history — starting with the Press Club, the Clinton Street wine bar and magazine haven where they once watched Ursula K. Le Guin read, about a month before the place closed for good. From there the conversation drifts through a cluster of beloved spots that didn't make it: Countermedia, Reading Frenzy, Laughing Horse Books and Film Collective, all gone within a couple years of each other back in the mid-2010s.

Along the way: Iris tracking down a copy of Le Guin's The Dispossessed in a Greek translation, in a bookstore in Athens, of all places. Cricket's stint shelving books at a Borders in Beaverton. A tangent about growing up burnt out on reading after grad school, then finding your way back and into science fiction a decade later. The Independent Publishing Resource Center's zine library, one of the largest in the world. And In Other Words, one of the last feminist bookstores then standing from a wave that once numbered over a hundred across the continent.

They also lay out what Prose City actually is — a two-year-old grassroots literary community built out of their own home in Southeast Portland, plus a newly launched Portland Literary Directory listing dozens of the city's still-standing indie bookstores. No velvet rope here: Cricket and Iris are upfront that this isn't a show for people trying to sound impressive about books, it's for anyone who just genuinely loves reading and writing and wants in on a scene that welcomes them exactly as they are.