Day: February 15, 2022

“I know that Los Angeles is—even on its brightest day—temporary,” Brett Grace writes in “Avalanche,” an essay from his forthcoming limited-run zine I HAVEN’T THE SLIGHTEST IDEA. Brett, like many of L.A.’s inhabitants, is a transplant—but he says it’s the same for natives and transplants alike: LA is and always has been a temporary place.

It’s 6:30 AM, and I’m sitting with Brett in the amber glowing lobby of Public, Ian Schrager’s fabulous and accessibly luxurious New York hotel. He’s jet-lagged, fresh off a flight from a friend’s wedding in London, and the coffee shop doesn’t open until 7:00 AM. “I’m always jet-lagged,” Brett says, before bashfully sipping a Red Bull and laughing at his own ridiculousness. This is Brett, in a nut-shell: persistently ridiculous. “I’ve never been good friends with someone who can’t appreciate life’s absurdities. I always like to be rolling with someone who, when someone who’s just beyond ridiculous walks into the room, I can look over to, and they’re looking back at me like ‘That’s f*****g hilarious.’ It can be an out-of-place item of clothing the person is wearing, it can be how they’re behaving, something they’re saying. That one moment will be the call-back; the thing that cracks us up the rest of the night.” Maybe it takes a [self-admitted] ridiculous person to observe and document life’s absurdities. “That’s who I am, and that’s what I do,” Brett says assuredly, “I finally have an answer to that dreadful question ‘What do you do?’”

The barista prepping to open the coffee shop takes pity us and offers us two espresso-shots, to which Brett daintily replies “Oh, you really don’t have to”—and now, the espressos are also on the house. Brett has been writing what he calls a non-existent book: “I’ve been telling people for at least 15 years that I’m writing a book, and it was always going to be a collection of essays—and I’ve got a lot of essays, but it just isn’t a book yet, you know? I’ve never had a blog or anything like that, I just love the art of printing and binding too much—so I thought a zine would be a good compromise; a printed way to share some of my writing… and then my friend Liz Nistico [who performs solo as Revenge Wife, and is the lead singer of duo Holychild] suggested that, in addition to my own writing, I have friends contribute things to the zine as well. And that’s when I knew it’d actually happen, because there’s no question I work best when it’s collaborative. I can let myself down, but I can’t let my friends down.”

So who’s going to be contributing to the zine? “I have at three or four friends who I know will happily contribute,” Brett says that might be the easy part. I’ll just be asking people for anything; a random photograph, a quick sketch, some unused song lyrics. “I know they’ve been around way longer, but there’s something just so inherently 90’s about zines to me—so I’m really just diving in right now, and getting so inspired for the concept, I’m watching things like HI-OCTANE [a short-lived 1994 Comedy Central TV series directed by Sofia Coppola, hosted by Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes]. Like, what was the concept for this?” He shows me a clip on his laptop. “It’s so cleverly illogical, and that’s what I’m going for.”

“Avalanche,” the piece Brett sent me prior to our early morning chat, is an emotionally-charged personal essay likening what attracts people like Brett to L.A., a city always on the brink of disaster, to his attraction to similarly-fated “car crash” relationships. “I don’t think the rest of this first zine, anyway, is going to be that dark, though. I’ve overdosed on darkness, and I’m trying to balance it with what’s clearly my favorite theme: the nonsensical.”

I HAVEN’T THE SLIGHTEST IDEA, “But I might change the title a dozen more times—just now I was thinking, should it be called ‘Merrily We Run Far, Far Away’?,” Brett cautions, will be published later this year in a limited-run by New York’s boutique publishing house Printed Matter Inc.

When her brother vanishes in the night along with all she thought to be true of magic, Parker Pennymore must unmask family secrets, travel far beyond the castle walls, and convince her sisters to break a few laws along the way. The Pennymores delivers on its promise, as a beautifully written, uniquely conceived world of adventure, with twists, turns, and surprises that keep the reader guessing all while putting the magic of writing on full display. An absolutely captivating story and a cast of characters, we couldn’t put down until the end.

The titular character of The Pennymores, Parker Pennymore, simply leaps off the page and into our imaginations much like other fantasy stalwarts Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Lucy Pevensie (Narnia). Parker is an 11-year-old who has an authentic spunky-rebellion perfectly mixed with pre-teen self-consciousness. Readers will want to hug her, help her, and find themselves deeply rooting for her success along the way. She’s got that funny, impulsive, exuberant, and unpredictable nature inside her… and as our hero wants nothing more than to be a writer and a storyteller.

And that’s where the uniqueness of the Pennymores truly takes flight: Parker is forbidden from writing.

The wonder of The Pennymores is built from this key detail: magic isn’t cast with a wand, it’s written with a quill. This dynamic creates the perfect setting for adventure, intrigue, conflict, and whimsy. Centuries ago, a great war caused the ancients to ban all magic writers, but eventually, anti-writing zealots (appropriately named the Illiterates) used mob rule to stop all writing. Except magic writing didn’t truly disappear… it went underground. And the Pennymore family is full of secrets none of these children could have ever realized.

It’s this clever and unique take on a fantasy world that provides a rich setting for the adventures of Parker and her sisters Quinn and Aven. Each of the siblings is unique, funny, quirky, and integral to the story. But it’s the interplay between them that drives the story forward.

Now as tensions spark throughout Fonde and Parker’s home kingdom of Everly, these three sisters and a group of other kid writers (the Plumes) find themselves in a conflict that I’m certain will be able to fill our shelves for years to come in the Pennymores series. As they begin their quest, there are nods to other mystical creatures and worlds, and hints of more to be exposed. Additionally, Koester creates conflict and villains that aren’t the standard “bad guys set out for destruction”, but offers a humanizing look at figures who are in many senses well-intentioned but misguided. It’s this ambiguity and the surprises and twists in the story that will keep the reader guessing as to which sides everyone is on in this book and likely beyond.

The story was created much the way Percy Jackson and The Lord of the Rings began—as oral bedtime stories from a parent to children—and Koester shares how he worked with his daughters (who share first names with the Pennymore sisters) to create the imaginative, creative settings in the book. But perhaps more than the fantasy aspects, it’s the family, parental, and sibling relationships that showed complexity and love that readers will appreciate the most. And any writer, author, or librarian will absolutely love the small details and winks to the craft of writing, storytelling, and authorship.

The Pennymores & the Curse of the Invisible Quill is a supernatural adventure story, filled with atmosphere, twists, the sublime and dripping with heart that fans of classic young adult and middle-grade fantasy stories from Harry Potter to Percy Jackson, and from Narnia to The School of Good & Evil will love. (Fantasy. 8-12)