Talented Artful Person of the month Chrys Buckley

 

FIA presents Talented Artful People

 

TAP into creativity 🎭🎨

This month we’re featuring  debut author and 2025 Friends in Art scholarship recipient, Chrys Buckley. Read on and get to know Chrys and her book Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays.

 

Chrys was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she’s legally blind. Chrys has bachelor’s degrees in arts & Letters, Micro/Molecular

Biology, and Biochemistry. She endured approximately ¾ of medical school before breaking free to focus on writing and disability advocacy.

She is currently in the Book Publishing graduate program at Portland State University, pursuing concentrations in Book Editing and Book Design. Chrys

is the manager of the Digital and Audio departments at Ooligan Press.

Chrys’s nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, Shark Reef, and Aerial. She was a finalist (twice) in MTV’s “I’m from Rolling Stone” writing contest. She has

won the R.L. Gilette Scholarship and the Sophie Kerr Gift in English Literature. Her debut collection Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays is forthcoming

from

Wandering Aengus Press

after winning their nonfiction book award in 2025.

Chrys writes short stories, longer fiction, screenplays, TV scripts, personal essays and memoir. Her public readings include Open Mic nights, live storytelling

events, and “The Best Memoirists Pageant Ever” at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC.

When she’s not writing, doing grad school classwork, or working at Ooligan Press, she’s a part-time chemistry and biology tutor, and has a special fondness

for organic chemistry. She’s also worked as a writing coach, copy-editor, fiction writing teacher, and tarot card reader.

Chrys’s first rule of writing is to be real, raw and “ruthless with truth.”

Chrys lives, works, walks, and writes in Portland, where she spends way too much time rewatching well-loved shows.

We want to congratulate Chrys on  all her accomplishments and wish her  well in all her future endeavors.

1. What is the title of your Book?

CB: Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays

 

1. When you created the title for your book, was it difficult to come up with your title? What was your process and what was your motivation for this title?

CB: Sometimes a title comes to me right away, but for this essay collection it was a bit harder. The first time I thought of putting together an essay collection was probably around 2013, and the working title in my mind was Love Songs for the Invisible. I knew I wanted some reference to music in the title, because I’ve always conceived of my writing in musical terms—an essay or chapter is a song, a full back is an album, and so forth—and I realized the subjects of many of the essays were invisible in different ways. There was the invisibility I sometimes experience as a person with albinism; the power of memory which is visible inside our minds but not in the outside world; synesthesia, a very colorful experience that also has no external visibility; and some essays that touched on organic chemistry, much of which is invisible and detected through inference and lab techniques.

As I assembled my collection in 2023 and 2024, it looked a lot different than the one I’d first dreamt up, with some new essays added, some prior ones pulled out. I wasn’t sure what to do for a title, but the theme of invisibility still felt prominent. The Violets part of my title came from recurring motifs. The name, the color, the flower, and a song named Violet came up over and over. In a way, it feels like the book itself converged on its own title.

 

1. What would you say are the key themes of your book, story, or poem?

CB: Because Invisible Violets is a collection of personal essays, the key themes are also personal. Experiences of albinism, legal blindness, and disability are probably the most prominent themes. Others include music, science and medicine, place, and the power of stories and memory. There’s an overall theme of claiming and reclaiming self and artistic vision and voice.

 

1. What inspired this book, poem, or short fiction piece?

CB: Each essay was inspired differently, but most, in one way or another, came from a thought obsession. A story, idea, or memory I couldn’t stop thinking about and felt I had to put into words.

As one concrete example, one of the essays is titled “Reasonable Doubt” and came about when I was watching the dramatized TV series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. I couldn’t stop reliving the memories of someone I went to high school with who’d been obsessed with the trial. Words and thoughts and scenes filled my head, and I knew it was something I had to write down. It took a while to wrangle and distill those first impulses into one essay that centered on true crime pop culture and the smaller true crimes that happen behind closed doors in everyday life.

 

1. Why was it important to you that this book be shared with the world?

CB: This is the most nerve-wracking part of being an author. Storytelling is in my bones, and I’ve done a fair number of readings of my work and feel okay with public speaking. But releasing the book to the world feels scary. Important but scary. We need more honest voices writing and telling stories about disability from within a disabled perspective. So many stories told about us portray us as helpless, as sad sacks who will never live a fulfilling life, nexuses of fear and pity. Or sources of simple and single-note heartwarming inspiration. The world needs more stories about us as complex and flawed people with all sorts of life stories.

 

1. Were you traditionally published or self-published? Can you share with us what lead you to this decision and how it has worked out for you so far?

CB: This book will be traditionally published by a small press, Wandering Aengus Press (wanderingaenguspress.com). In a way, working with a small press feels a bit in-between working with a Big 5 publisher and self-publishing, in the best way. My book is getting lots of individual attention from my editor and publisher, and we’re working together in such a collaborative way. One fun feature is that I’m designing my own book interior, because I’ve been doing interior book design with Ooligan Press (ooliganpress.com) as part of my graduate program in Book Publishing at Portland State University. As part of that, I’ve created a pop culture index at the end, both to practice my indexing skills, and because I hope it will be fun for readers who like that sort of thing (and easily ignorable by those who don’t).

I chose Wandering Aengus as the press to submit my manuscript to for a few reasons. Essay collections, and especially lyric essays, aren’t the hot commercial genre, so I knew I wanted to work with a literary press. Wandering Aengus had published other essay collections I loved, like In Praise of Inadequate Gifts by Tarn Wilson, and I felt they’d be a good fit for my work as well. After profiling the press for one of my first Book Publishing classes, I was impressed by how collaboratively they worked with their authors. So, when it came time to submit my collection, I actually submitted it only to them. If they hadn’t selected my manuscript, I would’ve branched out to other small presses, but luckily I never had to do that because, though this still doesn’t feel real, they chose my book as their nonfiction prize winner, with the prize being publication of the book.

 

1. If your book, story or poem had a play list, what would it be and why?

CB: Funny you should ask! Because my book features music so heavily, I’m working on creating a playlist pulling together songs, albums, and bands that are mentioned within the pages. When my book publishes, I plan to share the playlist far and wide to accompany the book. It ranges from ’90s rock to modern pop, and it will be epic.

 

1. If there was one person you could pick to say this story, book, or poem was meant to impact who would they be and why?

CB: Can I say a dead person? In some ways, this book is a tribute to Chris Cornell. His music, and the people I met through his music, changed my life at just the right moment. My sense of who I was and who I could be, especially as a person with a disability, expanded in a way that altered my trajectory forevermore. When I first thought of this collection and dedicating it to him, he was still living, but that changed in 2017. Also, this is for all the lonely kids out there who were (or who will be in the future) saved by music and books.

 

1. What was the moment you felt this is really happening and you felt your book was actually becoming a reality?

CB: It still doesn’t entirely feel real! I got the call from my publisher in early March, and it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life, a moment I’d been waiting for– for decades. I recently received my first blurb from another author, and that made it feel more real than anything else so far. Then my publisher and I set our official release date for March 13, 2026 (a Friday the 13^th so hopefully no one’s too superstitious to buy my book when it releases!) and having that concrete date makes it feel realer still. Fully internalizing that this book that’s been incubating for over a decade will one day be real in the world and this is really happening is a process.

1. Give us one fun fact or event that made it all worthwhile: the writing, editing, time, and effort? What made it fun? What was stressful? why is it all worth it in the end?

CB: For the most part, I enjoyed the process. I was nervous about getting my edits back, but when I actually got my edits and read through and saw my editor’s comments and queries, it wasn’t as scary as I’d feared. I ended up really enjoying implementing my edits, and then combing through (probably too many times) to look for any errors I might have introduced while editing. Writing can feel cathartic, creative, and playful, with all the fun of doing the original making, and editing to me feels like it tickles a different part of my brain and feels invigorating in its own way. The most stressful aspect was balancing working on my book with my demanding grad school and work schedules. What kept me going most was listening to music along the way, something that’s always been true for me. It was worth it to get my story out there, and also for the joy of the process.