Introducing Parea

Parea: (Gr.) Parea is a venue for the growth of the human spirit, the development of friendships and the exploration of ideas to enrich our quality of life.

The world is not lacking in stories.

The world is lacking in connection.

—

I’m obsessed with books. Technically I had a TV when I was growing up, but it was tiny and we didn’t have cable and we lived off of an unnamed gravel road in North Carolina, so suffice it to say the programming I had access to wasn’t exactly rich and engaging. Instead of watching cartoons, I read books. Instead of going to the movies, I wrote short stories in my Lisa Frank notebooks. Instead of playing video games, I read novels for my dolls (they were always a rapt audience). I remember going to my friend’s house when I was 9 and watching MTV’s Spring Break. It was a culture shock.

What I’ve always loved about books is their ability to plunge you into an entirely new world, one for which they’ve created the rules of engagement but you, the reader, are free to fill in the blanks with your imagination. They’re never prescriptive about how you see or experience things, they give you the permission to make the world your own. And by bringing you into their world, they teach you that other realities exist and are possible—significantly expanding your understanding of the people and ideas that are different, but often complementary, to you and yours.

What I’ve always wanted more from books is the ability to share the experience with people I care about. 

I had a life-changing (book-changing?) experience in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia a few years ago. One of my closest friends and I take at least two big trips together each year, and we’re as obsessed with reading as we are with traveling. Once, in Cuba, we started a vacation book club where we’d read the same books at the same time so that we could discuss them while we were exploring Havana. This time, I brought Anatomy of the Spirit, a decidedly “woo-woo” book with me to Malaysia. I had recently broken off an engagement, started dabbling in alternative forms of healing, and someone I trusted recommended this one to me. The first half of the book talks about the author’s experience with intuitive healing, and the second half goes chakra-by-chakra and explains what each chakra is responsible for, and what it looks like when our energy is misaligned in that specific chakra. Most importantly, at the end of each chapter there are 10 self-reflection questions—things like, “Are you critical of others? Do you need to blame others as a way of protecting yourself?”, or “Are you strong enough to master your fears concerning finances and physical survival, or do they control you and your attitudes?” A bit confronting.

I suggested an activity: each day of vacation, we read one of the chakra chapters, and then we carve out an hour to do the questions. After we write our answers, we share with each other. 

I’d known this friend since I was 18. We had traveled to 20+ countries together, gone through jobs, grad programs, break-ups, friendship break-ups, and more together. But we had never been this open with each other. Perhaps we just never asked the right questions. As she shared memories from her childhood, her perspective on how past behavior informs future behavior, her relationship with her family, and how she thought about her relationship to her own self, I understood her in a way that I never had. I will never, ever forget this experience, and it will forever be one of the most transformative things I’ve done. 

But this almost never happens with books. You usually don’t read them with someone else. They usually don’t have self-reflection questions. You don’t typically find yourself halfway around the world, baring your soul to your friend as you uncover the truth about your belief systems, chapter by chapter.

After leaving my last job and starting to more seriously toy around with the idea for a new book company, I knew I wanted to bring all of the best practices I had learned in direct-to-consumer startups to publishing: an unrelenting prioritization of the customer experience, leveraging the savings found by cutting out the distributors, wholesalers, and retailers to better compensate authors and invest in innovative marketing strategies, and using the direct connection with customers to inform future product decisions. I ran through a multitude of ideas—I wanted to publish in every single genre, then I wanted to create a revolutionary new way of publishing digital books, then I wanted to make books available on a chapter basis, and then I started exploring the relationship between Web3 and authors. I will likely do all of these things; in fact, they are all on the roadmap for Parea.

But what value could I truly create for readers? I kept coming back to my experience in Asia.

Here’s what I realized: Parea isn’t about books. It’s about transformation.

Transformation through sharing soul-expanding experiences with others. Transformation through learning things from other people who think differently than you do. Transformation through actively creating a new world, one you’re excited to live in. 

It’s about creating culture that lasts for decades, hopefully centuries. 

The word parea is Greek, and it means a group of people who come together to discuss life, art, values, philosophy, and culture. It’s a venue for the growth of the human spirit, the development of friendships and the exploration of ideas to enrich our quality of life.

We don’t suffer from a shortage of books. What we need is a global parea. 

Welcome.