All She Wrote Books
Tenacity Tales: Christina Pascucci Ciampa’s intersectional feminist queer bookstore
Our August Tenacity Tale is Christina Pascucci Ciampa, owner and founder of All She Wrote Books, an intersectional feminist queer bookstore located at 451 Artisan Way in the Assembly Square section of Somerville, MA.
Christina Pascucci Ciampa may be the owner of the only intersectional feminist queer bookstore in the Boston area, but she didn’t grow up with a burning desire to found a pioneering bookstore—in fact, she was working a full-time communications job when the idea for All She Wrote Books occurred to her—but she did grow up with a healthy understanding that books can build a sense of community, because in books she found hers.
“I would go down reading rabbit holes and discover perspectives I didn’t know about,” Pascucci Ciampa said. “Other people. Other places. Other types of joy and sadness. I learned about queerness through reading the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. All that exploring helped me understand who I was as a person, and I like thinking I can be a resource for other explorers.”
In fact, one particular book planted the idea of All She Wrote Books in Pascucci Ciampa’s book-loving heart. After reading about the history of the rise and fall of North American feminist books stores from the seventies through the nineties in Kristen Hogen’s The Feminist Bookstore Movement, Pascucci Ciampa wondered why Boston didn’t have a feminist bookstore.
“There was New Words in Cambridge that folded in the early 2000s, but this was 2018, and I found myself wondering why something like that couldn’t exist,” Pascucci Ciampa said. “Especially because when I was looking for these kinds of books in bookstores, I was finding the same five titles under the gender studies and feminism sections.”
Pascucci Ciampa understood it was tough for stores to take a chance on titles that didn’t sell, but she thought there should be at least one bookstore focused on underrepresented content, so—ignoring the fact that she had no experience selling books and could in no way afford to leave her full-time job in communications—Pascucci Ciampa decided to start All She Wrote Books as a pop-up bookstore.
“I believed it was doable, and I believed it was needed,” Pascucci Ciampa said. “As a queer person, I knew there were a ton of groups available but not a ton of physical spaces dedicated to queer people, so I decided to experiment as a pop-up bookstore to see if there was an interest.”
So, Pascucci Ciampa filled a three-tier Ikea rolling cart with the kind of feminist and queer titles that were important to her and scheduled pop-up bookstores in breweries and markets throughout the greater Boston area.
“If I sold one book at that first event, I’d be happy that even one person wanted to even talk to me, but I sold five books,” Pascucci Ciampa said. “At my next event I sold seven. I asked for help from friends and scheduled a pop-up at the Winter Hill Brewery and sold seventy-five percent of the books on my cart that day and realized there was something here.”
But would that “something” translate into a storefront?
Pascucci Ciampa thought so, but reading what it cost Emma Straub to open Books Are Magic in 2017 gave her pause.
“When I saw $70,000 was the minimum to open a bookstore, I thought, well, that’s not happening, but there was no reason I couldn’t keep doing pop-ups at night and on weekends,” Pascucci Ciampa said. “The conversations alone were worth my time—they were filling a cup that just wasn’t getting filled at my day job.”
So, Pascucci Ciampa ramped up her pop-up events around the greater Boston area.
By using her second bedroom as a de facto warehouse and her cart as a mobile shop, Pascucci Ciampa had so little overhead she could funnel most of the profits into funding more pop-ups. All She Wrote Books expanded into wine bars, and the press started to take notice that this small pop-up bookstore was quickly becoming a valued part of the community. When Pascucci Ciampa was laid off from her full-time job in 2019, she focused all her energy into making much of the holiday pop-up season—meaningful books make excellent gifts, after all!—and following the success of All She Wrote Books’ 2019 holiday season, a real estate agent friend convinced Pascucci Ciampa to look at a storefront in Assembly Square.
As Pascucci Ciampa tells this story on a Friday afternoon in August 2023, a customer approaches the register and introduces herself. She’s a teacher from Sweden looking for books on race and gender to deepen her curriculum for her students.1 She’s learned about All She Wrote Books through a desperate internet search after a bookstore on the other side of the city yielded a disappointingly tiny selection, and she wondered if she might have more luck here.
Pascucci Ciampa lights up, steps away from the register, and takes this woman on a sweeping tour of her shelves, their conversation ranging from details about this teacher’s curriculum to how much better the world would be if everyone read Judith Butler.2
Once the teacher is happily browsing, Pascucci Ciampa returns to tell me the rest of All She Wrote Books’ origin story—to recap, following a successful 2019 holiday season, a friend in real estate convinced Pascucci Ciampa to look at a storefront in Assembly Square, but then, of course, the store collided with Covid-19.
“We got our keys in March, 2020, and three days later, Governor Baker3 shut us down.”
But Pascucci Ciampa had a lot of practice operating her business in creative ways—All She Wrote Books did spend its infancy as a book cart rolled into a rotating list of venues, remember—so with the shop shuttered before it even opened, she bolstered the e-commerce portion of the shop’s website—a website Pascucci Ciampa herself built, in fact—until she could finally open the shop by appointment only in July, 2020.
By July 2021, All She Wrote Books was open for walk ins.
And this fall, All She Wrote Books has an events calendar that Pascucci Ciampa describes as “jammed packed with goodness”—to give you just one example, by request of the author herself, Mercury Stardust (aka The Trans Handy Ma’am) is doing the Boston-area meet and greet for her debut book Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair.4
It’s exactly the thriving community Pascucci Ciampa hoped it would be when she first imagined opening the store, and she hopes it will continue to thrive for years to come.
“This place has to exist in the world,” Pascucci Ciampa as she gestures at the shop around her. “It’s a personal mission. It has to exist.”
And what of our browsing Swedish teacher?
A few minutes later, she approaches the register with a stack of books she’d crossed an ocean to find, glances around the shop, and grins.
“This is an amazing store,” she says and Pascucci Ciampa thanks her.
Once the teacher pushes back through the door to the sidewalk, I marvel about how perfectly her gushing offered a snapshot of the All She Wrote Books community, and Pascucci Ciampa smiles.
“I get that a lot, actually, and it feels really good. Like we’re doing something right. Like we’ve built something the community really, really needed.”
FIVE WAYS TO SUPPORT ALL SHE WROTE BOOKS
Visit All She Wrote Books in person at 451 Artisan Way in Somerville, MA (garage parking requires a credit card for entry and exit but is free for the first 3 hours).
Visit All She Wrote Books online at https://www.allshewrotebooks.com/bookstore.
If you’re a teacher assigning books for a college class, ask your students to buy their titles through All She Wrote Books (though please call and warn her first!)
Audiobook fan? You can buy audiobooks from all she wrote books through libro.fm.
Get the word out about the store by sharing this article.
Link your bookshop.org home page to All She Wrote Books so the store gets credit for your online sale!
Tenacity Tales is HIBOU’s monthly celebration of all the tiny tenacities in a writerly life. If you have a tenacity tale you’d like to share, comment below or send me your pitch at hibou@substack.com. To learn more about what we’re looking for, read the original Tenacity Tale here.
Footnote for Ron DeSantis: This is what education should look like.
Judith Butler is a Berkeley professor, philosopher, and prolific gender students writer, perhaps best known for developing the theory of gender performativity in their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.
Charlie Baker, then governor of Massachusetts.
Proceeds to benefit the Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts. Click here https://www.allshewrotebooks.com/events-1/safe-and-sound-a-meet-greet-with-mercury-stardust
What a great story! And a great piece of journalism.
Loved your original research, storytelling, and uplifting edition of Tenacity Tales! Thanks for making me aware of this amazing shop.