Join us in celebrating the launch of Walter Basho’s first novel, Old Green World. With readings from Walter Basho, Paige Britt, and Susan Schorn.

Walter Basho grew up in Kentucky and attended Transylvania University in Lexington before moving to Austin, Texas in the 1990s to attend graduate school in English. His master’s thesis focused on queer writers associated with the West Coast “New Narrative” movement, while his dissertation, Fiction Networks, explored the structures of story universes from DC Comics to Star Wars. Like his scholarly work, Basho’s fiction sits between popular genre fiction and literary exploration, and uses story as a vehicle to work through larger questions of culture, narrative theory, perception, sexuality and gender. He has practiced Buddhism for nearly ten years, and his fiction is strongly influenced by the day-to-day experiences of his practice. Inspired by the new access to publication and distribution available to self-publishers, Basho set a goal to self-publish fiction at a level of quality on par with commercial presses, and assembled a talented team of editors and designers to contribute to the production of Old Green World. While in graduate school, he was swept up in the first of many Austin technology booms, and took on work as a software engineer for an education start-up. He continues to develop educational software today, and lives in Austin with his husband.

Paige Britt grew up in a small town in Texas with her nose in a book and her head in the clouds moodling. She studied journalism in college and theology in graduate school, but never stopped reading children’s books for life’s most important lessons. She now lives in a slightly larger town but can often still be found either reading or staring out the window, making up stories about things that aren’t there. Her first book, The Lost Track of Time, was released in 2015 from Scholastic Press.

Susan Schorn is a writer, martial artist, and self defense advocate. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two children, and trains and teaches at Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense. She writes “Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting” for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her first book, Smile at Strangers: Lessons in the Art of Living Fearlessly, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May 2013. (Photo at right by Larissa Rogers.)