The path to FrizzLit Editions began in the fraught days of March 2020. Christopher Frizzelle, then an editor at the Stranger, was searching for new ways to reach readers in a city that had all but shut down. “My brilliant idea is, we’ll do a book club,” he remembers.

That first book club—a quarantine edition focused on Albert Camus’ The Plague and administered via blog posts—didn’t feel quite right. But friends told Frizzelle not to abandon the concept. A subsequent club, focused on Muriel Spark’s quietly devastating The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and held via Zoom, was more successful. When Frizzelle lost his Stranger job later in 2020, he pivoted to running the book clubs full-time. The name came courtesy of Stranger publisher Tim Keck: FrizzLit.

The clubs flourished, as did the popular Silent Reading Parties at the Sorrento Hotel that Frizzelle has hosted since 2009. The idea for FrizzLit Editions—an independent publishing venture—emerged from conversations with that growing community, and from frustrations with traditional publishing’s bestseller-or-bust model.

Unlike the Big Apple-focused Big 5, FrizzLit is proudly homegrown: The writing, editing, artwork, printing, and distribution all come from Seattle. Even the funding is grassroots: A July 2025 Kickstarter smashed through its goals, raising nearly $40,000 to launch the press.

So far, FrizzLit editions has released Trisha Ready’s Nobuko and Rebecca Brown’s My Animal Kingdom, with more on the way.

For Frizzelle, working on creative projects in and for the community is the definition of the good life. He recalls standing at the packed Elliott Bay Books launch for Nobuko and feeling the electricity in the room. “It just felt like, wow, we can create our own reality together. We can create the institutions and the creative environments we’ve always dreamed of having in our lives,” he says. “And we can make them ourselves, with each other.”