miércoles, 29 de septiembre de 2010
Knight, Brenda
Brenda Knight is Associate Publisher of Cleis Press and founding editor of Viva Editions, acquiring over 50 books a year. Knight teaches a course on publishing for women at Book Passage University. An published poet and author, she won a national book award for Women of the Beat Generation.
Howlapalooza
Wowsers. Any doubt in my mind about the legitimacy of my enthusiasm was quelled yesterday when I experienced the one-two punch of Howl and Pitchapalooza.
I grant that Howl is not technically an official Litquake event (not one at all, actually), but there were flyers for the film all over the sign-in tables. More to the point, the contrast between these consecutive events is indicative of Litquake’s diverse programming and many-headedness. It is often possible to find inspiration between programs, for while each panel, reading, or seminar is informative, it takes the big picture to truly make use of any specialist's advice.
Many people are giving Howl lukewarm and even scathing reviews. The film is certainly not without its faults, but I thought it was a sexy film — sexy in that Henry Miller way that imbues in you a lust for life. Of course, I feel that way every time I hear the poem “Howl” and, though criticisms that Franco does the poem and the poet injustice may be apropos, I certainly did not go into the screening expecting anyone to enhance the damn thing, and am surprised that some people did expect this. The main problem is fusion of various forms of film — animation, drama based on court script, historical re-creation, and the curious documentary-style choice of interview with, instead of the subject in question, an actor (Franco) pretending to be the subject (Ginsberg). Much of the film's value consists of verbatim transcription from actual interviews with Ginsberg; that the directors conveyed this through faux-interviews, for example, seems not only to belittle the content but to render it suspect.
But as I don’t review films and know little about them, I won’t attempt that here. Instead I will focus on a few of the powerful moments in the film, such as the juxtaposition of the poet and the prosecutor reading the same lines of “Howl” in Six Gallery and the courtroom, respectively, as Ginsberg's peers and those in the courtroom had quite different reactions. Focus not on the poor choice to have the audience members look the camera in the eye (as though — as Mick LaSalle says in The Chronicle — they have the consciousness of someone living in 2010), but on our responsibility as civilians to weigh the purport of words and how we interact with them: to read books as though on a jury charged with the high task of deciding the future. What makes sense in that gallery may indeed not make sense in the courtroom. Is that true?
Present is that righteous recognition that there are books with enough power to change the way we see the world. When the attorney defending Saturday night’s (sold out) Barbary Coast Award recipient Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, in his closing statement, “Let there be light. Let there be honesty,” you will get the good chills up and down your spine! The gods' work, people. Ginsberg expounds on this freedom of expression:
“We say anything we want to — we talk about assholes. We talk about cock. We talk about what kind of relationships we’re in.” He went on to talk about the distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse — and that one should eliminate this distinction, if possible — that that was his goal: “To write the same way … that you are.” He spoke a lot about falling into a “fear trap” in which people are afraid to express who they really are, to talk how they talk no matter how strange that expression might be.
This was of course one of the main topics in the courtroom: in the crucial discussion regarding the poem’s literary merit, one of the principal debates was on form, and an expert witness testifying against Ginsberg (I mean Ferlinghetti) made the argument that “Howl” imitated the form of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and therefore was not original, and that no imitation can be a great expression. Ginsberg talked a lot about the development of his poetry and how it formed from attempts to express himself honestly when he wasn’t able to do so on a personal level. He said he was writing for Kerouac, that he was forced to try to enchant Jack to keep his attention because Jack didn’t want to hear Ginsberg's self-pity or pathetic attempts to cleverly mask his sexuality. Also, he wrote things he could and would never tell his father. “I assumed it wouldn’t be published, therefore I could write whatever I wanted to,” he said.
That particular quote gave me plenty to think about as I walked down Post Street from the Kabuki directly to the Hobart Building, where I went to catch Pitchapalooza — the complete other end of the spectrum in which authors pitch book ideas to industry specialists (agents, publishers, and authors) to hone the fine (and debatably necessary) art of selling one’s idea before it is even written. The contrast in these events had me quite excited as I walked down what seemed less a street than a path between relevant discussions.
Hosts and Book Doctors David Henry Sterry and Arielle Eckstut teamed up with Author Enablers Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark for the event, which was introduced by Litquake co-founder/director Jack Boulware:
The thing is that in today’s world, when so many people are trying to publish books — and when it’s possible and actually quite simple to publish your own — when the major publishing houses are facing a transition the likes of which has debatably not happened since the printing press … there is a very fine science that may be (and arguably must be) employed in order to travel that grandiose path. As Arielle says (and I do encourage you to watch the full videos here), there are professionals in every corner of the industry for whom these issues comprise the daily struggle. To have access to these experts is an invaluable resource, one that can take a work of art and turn it into a conversation. For it is one thing to create a work of art and quite another to disseminate it.
When asked about the potential lasting effects of “Howl” — another criteria used to establish the book’s literary value — one expert witness responded with the excellent explanation that the court case could itself help establish the poem as a turning point for — and allowance of — poems of its type. The significance of the poem, in his opinion, was its potential to pave the way for a broader conversation. As the defense won, of course, ‘poems of its type’ have flourished, and a freedom of form and of ideas runs rampant throughout contemporary poetry. Damn Bukowski. But so now one must really take both aspects seriously: the creation and the distribution.
I always thought I would sit in my room alone and create fictions and poetry that I would never even try to get published; I would let them accumulate in notebooks and trust in providence to publish them when the world was ready for their vast wisdom and unparalleled humanity. The validity of publication seemed to me then an unnecessary stamp, and the pursuit thereof pedantic and somehow completely beside the point.
But this is um the information age, when we can speak directly with people who occupy every niche of the book industry — from editors to publishers, agents, and even the authors themselves — we can communicate with the entire spectrum of humanity in real time. Why would we wait and hide our poetry in dusty books and drawers? The art today, ladies and gentlemen, is a balance between creation and one’s ability to share that creation. There's no reason to pretend people aren't around.
I’m not trying to denigrate all the underground artists who are starving for their ideas and so sensitive they could break with a single thought (cheers to you, my bread and water friends), but one could argue that those who do not attempt to communicate directly with the world are turning away from it. It was with that attitude that I approached Pitchapalooza last night, that I entered the room with a perspective far from the one I used to have as a budding young Ginsberg aspirant. It surprised me.
Let's reiterate: Ginsberg required a sense of freedom, depended on the notion that essentially no one would read his writing, to express himself honestly and openly. Yet one should develop a pitch with the same artistry with which he or she creates, should have exactly the world (read: market) in mind. How is this conflict to be resolved? Is it possible to be honest of self both to ministers of money and to the public at large?
Watch these various takes on the pitch and the reactions of Litquake’s friends, the experts. I have selected these due to their disparities in content and in style (again, you can watch (nearly) all of them on my channel). See the creativity behind each “sales pitch.” If you believe in what you have to say, world, then you better know how to dress it up and walk it out of the house. Or …
I missed the last few readers because my camera died, but Mr. Sterry said he probably got footage, so check back later for that. As a result, I missed one of the two winners of the pitchapalooza (apologies to winner and reader alike)! Chris Cole, who I am proud to have published here here and here (!) was one of the two:
As Sam points out near the end, in one of the more poignant moments of the night: "this is what we're dealing with." Excellent pitch after excellent pitch, each very strong and creative. You need to know these things.
In a nutshell, these are the elements of a good pitch (in no particular order):
Have presence and take your time.
Present any relevant expertise you have at the beginning of your pitch. If you don't have the credibility, find an expert to write your preface or an endorsement.
Make clear what your genre is: it will be confusing if the agent doesn't know whether your book is memoir or fiction, for instance, and the agent wants immediately to categorize you.
If you have a platform, mention it. Publishers want to know that you can get your book out into the world, especially as marketing budgets evaporate.
Present a strong title up front.
Don't get bogged down in description or plot summary — it's better to start with the strongest image you have and fill in the details as you go.
Capture the voice of your book so the agent knows what to expect.
Performance can absolutely make or break your pitch. Therefore, make it dramatic (no monotone).
You can learn a lot more about the process of getting your book out there by checking out Write That Book Already!, written by Kamen Goldmark and Barry, and Putting Your Passion into Print: Get Your Book Published Successfully, by Eckstut and Sterry.
I hope that has you psyched some. When people ask me what I’m going to during Litquake, I tell them that I never completely decide until things are happening; it’s important sometimes to follow your instincts. Attending Howl was a last minute decision, but as you can see, it turned out to be perfectly timed.
See you at 111 Minna on Friday night for the opening reception. It’s free!
— yours, Evan
I grant that Howl is not technically an official Litquake event (not one at all, actually), but there were flyers for the film all over the sign-in tables. More to the point, the contrast between these consecutive events is indicative of Litquake’s diverse programming and many-headedness. It is often possible to find inspiration between programs, for while each panel, reading, or seminar is informative, it takes the big picture to truly make use of any specialist's advice.
Many people are giving Howl lukewarm and even scathing reviews. The film is certainly not without its faults, but I thought it was a sexy film — sexy in that Henry Miller way that imbues in you a lust for life. Of course, I feel that way every time I hear the poem “Howl” and, though criticisms that Franco does the poem and the poet injustice may be apropos, I certainly did not go into the screening expecting anyone to enhance the damn thing, and am surprised that some people did expect this. The main problem is fusion of various forms of film — animation, drama based on court script, historical re-creation, and the curious documentary-style choice of interview with, instead of the subject in question, an actor (Franco) pretending to be the subject (Ginsberg). Much of the film's value consists of verbatim transcription from actual interviews with Ginsberg; that the directors conveyed this through faux-interviews, for example, seems not only to belittle the content but to render it suspect.
But as I don’t review films and know little about them, I won’t attempt that here. Instead I will focus on a few of the powerful moments in the film, such as the juxtaposition of the poet and the prosecutor reading the same lines of “Howl” in Six Gallery and the courtroom, respectively, as Ginsberg's peers and those in the courtroom had quite different reactions. Focus not on the poor choice to have the audience members look the camera in the eye (as though — as Mick LaSalle says in The Chronicle — they have the consciousness of someone living in 2010), but on our responsibility as civilians to weigh the purport of words and how we interact with them: to read books as though on a jury charged with the high task of deciding the future. What makes sense in that gallery may indeed not make sense in the courtroom. Is that true?
Present is that righteous recognition that there are books with enough power to change the way we see the world. When the attorney defending Saturday night’s (sold out) Barbary Coast Award recipient Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, in his closing statement, “Let there be light. Let there be honesty,” you will get the good chills up and down your spine! The gods' work, people. Ginsberg expounds on this freedom of expression:
“We say anything we want to — we talk about assholes. We talk about cock. We talk about what kind of relationships we’re in.” He went on to talk about the distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse — and that one should eliminate this distinction, if possible — that that was his goal: “To write the same way … that you are.” He spoke a lot about falling into a “fear trap” in which people are afraid to express who they really are, to talk how they talk no matter how strange that expression might be.
This was of course one of the main topics in the courtroom: in the crucial discussion regarding the poem’s literary merit, one of the principal debates was on form, and an expert witness testifying against Ginsberg (I mean Ferlinghetti) made the argument that “Howl” imitated the form of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and therefore was not original, and that no imitation can be a great expression. Ginsberg talked a lot about the development of his poetry and how it formed from attempts to express himself honestly when he wasn’t able to do so on a personal level. He said he was writing for Kerouac, that he was forced to try to enchant Jack to keep his attention because Jack didn’t want to hear Ginsberg's self-pity or pathetic attempts to cleverly mask his sexuality. Also, he wrote things he could and would never tell his father. “I assumed it wouldn’t be published, therefore I could write whatever I wanted to,” he said.
That particular quote gave me plenty to think about as I walked down Post Street from the Kabuki directly to the Hobart Building, where I went to catch Pitchapalooza — the complete other end of the spectrum in which authors pitch book ideas to industry specialists (agents, publishers, and authors) to hone the fine (and debatably necessary) art of selling one’s idea before it is even written. The contrast in these events had me quite excited as I walked down what seemed less a street than a path between relevant discussions.
Hosts and Book Doctors David Henry Sterry and Arielle Eckstut teamed up with Author Enablers Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark for the event, which was introduced by Litquake co-founder/director Jack Boulware:
The thing is that in today’s world, when so many people are trying to publish books — and when it’s possible and actually quite simple to publish your own — when the major publishing houses are facing a transition the likes of which has debatably not happened since the printing press … there is a very fine science that may be (and arguably must be) employed in order to travel that grandiose path. As Arielle says (and I do encourage you to watch the full videos here), there are professionals in every corner of the industry for whom these issues comprise the daily struggle. To have access to these experts is an invaluable resource, one that can take a work of art and turn it into a conversation. For it is one thing to create a work of art and quite another to disseminate it.
When asked about the potential lasting effects of “Howl” — another criteria used to establish the book’s literary value — one expert witness responded with the excellent explanation that the court case could itself help establish the poem as a turning point for — and allowance of — poems of its type. The significance of the poem, in his opinion, was its potential to pave the way for a broader conversation. As the defense won, of course, ‘poems of its type’ have flourished, and a freedom of form and of ideas runs rampant throughout contemporary poetry. Damn Bukowski. But so now one must really take both aspects seriously: the creation and the distribution.
I always thought I would sit in my room alone and create fictions and poetry that I would never even try to get published; I would let them accumulate in notebooks and trust in providence to publish them when the world was ready for their vast wisdom and unparalleled humanity. The validity of publication seemed to me then an unnecessary stamp, and the pursuit thereof pedantic and somehow completely beside the point.
But this is um the information age, when we can speak directly with people who occupy every niche of the book industry — from editors to publishers, agents, and even the authors themselves — we can communicate with the entire spectrum of humanity in real time. Why would we wait and hide our poetry in dusty books and drawers? The art today, ladies and gentlemen, is a balance between creation and one’s ability to share that creation. There's no reason to pretend people aren't around.
I’m not trying to denigrate all the underground artists who are starving for their ideas and so sensitive they could break with a single thought (cheers to you, my bread and water friends), but one could argue that those who do not attempt to communicate directly with the world are turning away from it. It was with that attitude that I approached Pitchapalooza last night, that I entered the room with a perspective far from the one I used to have as a budding young Ginsberg aspirant. It surprised me.
Let's reiterate: Ginsberg required a sense of freedom, depended on the notion that essentially no one would read his writing, to express himself honestly and openly. Yet one should develop a pitch with the same artistry with which he or she creates, should have exactly the world (read: market) in mind. How is this conflict to be resolved? Is it possible to be honest of self both to ministers of money and to the public at large?
Watch these various takes on the pitch and the reactions of Litquake’s friends, the experts. I have selected these due to their disparities in content and in style (again, you can watch (nearly) all of them on my channel). See the creativity behind each “sales pitch.” If you believe in what you have to say, world, then you better know how to dress it up and walk it out of the house. Or …
I missed the last few readers because my camera died, but Mr. Sterry said he probably got footage, so check back later for that. As a result, I missed one of the two winners of the pitchapalooza (apologies to winner and reader alike)! Chris Cole, who I am proud to have published here here and here (!) was one of the two:
As Sam points out near the end, in one of the more poignant moments of the night: "this is what we're dealing with." Excellent pitch after excellent pitch, each very strong and creative. You need to know these things.
In a nutshell, these are the elements of a good pitch (in no particular order):
Have presence and take your time.
Present any relevant expertise you have at the beginning of your pitch. If you don't have the credibility, find an expert to write your preface or an endorsement.
Make clear what your genre is: it will be confusing if the agent doesn't know whether your book is memoir or fiction, for instance, and the agent wants immediately to categorize you.
If you have a platform, mention it. Publishers want to know that you can get your book out into the world, especially as marketing budgets evaporate.
Present a strong title up front.
Don't get bogged down in description or plot summary — it's better to start with the strongest image you have and fill in the details as you go.
Capture the voice of your book so the agent knows what to expect.
Performance can absolutely make or break your pitch. Therefore, make it dramatic (no monotone).
You can learn a lot more about the process of getting your book out there by checking out Write That Book Already!, written by Kamen Goldmark and Barry, and Putting Your Passion into Print: Get Your Book Published Successfully, by Eckstut and Sterry.
I hope that has you psyched some. When people ask me what I’m going to during Litquake, I tell them that I never completely decide until things are happening; it’s important sometimes to follow your instincts. Attending Howl was a last minute decision, but as you can see, it turned out to be perfectly timed.
See you at 111 Minna on Friday night for the opening reception. It’s free!
— yours, Evan
martes, 28 de septiembre de 2010
Menard, Michele
Michele Menard is an interdisciplinary artist with over 25 years of experience and education in theater, puppetry, maskmaking, visual art, music, and directing.
Johnson, Evan
Evan Johnson is an actor/creator who recently presented a full-length solo performance DON’T FEEL: The Death of Dahmer, based on the afterlife of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Saffran, Ken
Ken Saffran wrote Strange Animal and has poems in Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and online at Mystic Babylon podcast.
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Machado, Trena
Trena Machado’s main interest is the art of the written word and writing about the written word. Visit her press @ rawartpress.com.
Lookingbill, Colleen
Colleen Lookingbill co-edits Etherdome Press’s chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares and New American Writing. Her new book, A Forgetting Of, will be published in 2010.
lewis, erica
erica lewis has work appearing in P-QUEUE, New American Writing, and Parthenon West Review. Her books include camera obscura and the precipice of jupiter.
Kennedy, Kit
Kit Kennedy publishes in Bombay Gin, Van Gogh’s Ear, RUNES, and CLWN WR; two books forthcoming fall 2010; host of the Gallery Cafe Reading Series.
Hayes, Jonathan
Jonathan Hayes is editor and publisher of the San Francisco underground magazine, Over the Transom. His new book, T(HERE), is available from Silenced Press.
Grafton, Grace Marie
Grace Marie Grafton’s new book of prose poems, Other Clues, came out in May 2010, Latitude Press. She has published widely in literary magazines and reviews.
Elsner, Ana
Ana Elsner: International poet with work published in seven countries. Her most recent work: Ciphers of Uncommon Origin, InstaPLANET Press.
Baedeker, Rob
Rob Baedeker is a member of the Kasper Hauser comedy group, author of SkyMaul, Obama’s Blackberry, and Weddings of the Times.
Muller, Eddie
A two-time Edgar Award nominee, Eddie Muller is founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation and has twice been named San Francisco Literary Laureate.
Luce, Kelly
Kelly Luce’s story collection received the San Francisco Foundation’s Jackson Award. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals.
Gold, Herb
Widely regarded as “one of the last Beats,” Herb Gold is among San Francisco’s favorite sons. His most recent work is Still Alive! A Temporary Condition.
Clifford, Joe
Joe Clifford is the producer of Lip Service West. His work can be found at joeclifford.com. He has been to jail but never prison.
Benke, Karen
The author of Rip the Page and Sister, Karen Benke is on the editorial board of Memoir (and). She also blogs for The Huffington Post.
Pyne, Daniel
Daniel Pyne is the screenwriter of Pacific Heights, Fracture, and The Manchurian Candidate. Twentynine Palms is his first novel.
Thompson, Renee
Renee Thompson, wildlife biologist, has traversed the United States. Her first novel is The Bridge at Valentine. She lives in Folsom with her family.
Quinn, Bridget
Bridget Quinn’s essay “One-On-One” appeared in Narrative. Former teacher at San Francisco Waldorf High School, she lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.
Horack, Skip
Skip Horack, author of The Southern Cross and The Eden Hunter and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, lives in San Francisco with his wife.
Ehrhardt, Pia Z.
Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of Famous Fathers & Other Stories, winner of the Narrative Prize, is writer-in-residence at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
Boast, Will
Will Boast, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, moonlights as a musician around the Bay Area. He earned his MFA from the University of Virginia.
Ryan, M.J.
M.J. Ryan is a creator of the Random Acts of Kindness series and author of AdaptAbility and This Year I Will…How to Finally Change a Habit.
McLaughlin, Corinne
Corinne McLaughlin is co-author of The Practical Visionary, Spiritual Politics, and Builders of the Dawn, and co-founder of The Center for Visionary Leadership.
Lattin, Don
Don Lattin covered religion and spirituality for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of four books, including The Harvard Psychedelic Club.
Klein, Allen
Allen Klein is an award-winning professional speaker and author of 16 books including Change Your Life!, The Healing Power of Humor, and The Courage to Laugh.
Jensen, Todd Aaron
Todd Aaron Jensen, author of On Gratitude: 50 Celebrities on the Power of Giving Thanks, is an award-winning entertainment journalist, yoga instructor, and father of six.
Vernier, Stephanie
Stephanie Vernier has just completed an adapted screenplay, blogs infrequently at whatiamdoingallday.blogspot.com, and is an editorial assistant at a San Francisco magazine.
Taugher, Mary
Mary Taugher, an MFA candidate in creative writing at SFSU, has works in Transfer, 580 Split, Instant City, and forthcoming works in The Gettysburg Review.
McLaughlin, Rob
Rob McLaughlin’s short fiction has appeared in Facets, Kitchen Sink, Velvet Mafia, Instant City, and The Cimarron Review.
Shapiro, Elena Mauli
Elena Mauli Shapiro amassed literature and writing degrees in and around the Bay Area (Stanford, Mills, Davis). Her novel 13 rue Thérèse is forthcoming in 2011.
Choi, Angela S.
Angela S. Choi is author of Hello Kitty Must Die. Born in Hong Kong, she is proficient in the art of profanity in both Cantonese and English.
lawrence, ali
ali lawrence has a book, anatomic, on SDP and poems in Big Bell. She lives in Oakland, she writes and works and works with writers.
Acker, Lizzy
Lizzy Acker’s first book, Monster Party, a collection of stories about boys, aliens, and violence, is forthcoming from Small Desk Press in 2010.
lunes, 27 de septiembre de 2010
Roddan, Brooks
Brooks Roddan’s most recent collection of poems is The Days by Themselves (Blue Earth). He is the editor/publisher of If Publications.
Lizárraga, Willy
Willy Lizárraga, born in Peru, moved to San Francisco as a teenager. His novel, Mientras Elena en su lecho, is published by University of Miami Press.
Cushing, Drew
Drew Cushing, the bastard son of New Narrative and Language Poetry, also makes BentBoyBooks.
Junker, Howard
Howard Junker retires as editor of ZYZZYVA at the end of the year. His first novel, Onward a novel of ideas, appeared this summer.
Wolf, Bryan
Professor of American art and culture Bryan Wolf focuses on 19th-century art and literature and re-conceptualizations of race and ethnicity in contemporary American art.
Palumbo-Liu, David
David Palumbo-Liu, professor of comparative literature, is finishing a book that explains why literature is ethically indispensable today.
Majumdar, Saikat
Assistant professor of English Saikat Majumdar is author of a novel and a forthcoming critical study of English as a global literary language.
Elam, Michele
Associate professor of English Michele Elam’s new book The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics & Aesthetics will be published in late 2010.
Roberts, Jason
Jason Roberts is author of the prize-winning book A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler.
Miner, Valerie
Valerie Miner is author of 13 books including After Eden, Abundant Light, and The Low Road. She is an artist-in-residence and professor at Stanford.
Lovett, Li Miao
Li Miao Lovett’s forthcoming novel, In the Lap of the Gods, is a tale of love, loss, and rebellion against China’s Three Gorges Dam.
LaPlante, Alice
Alice LaPlante teaches at SFSU and Stanford. Her latest book, Turn of Mind, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in 2011.
Brady, Catherine
Author of three story collections and Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, Catherine Brady teaches in the MFA Program at University of San Francisco.
Wolpert, John
John Wolpert, author of The Hidden Stage, is a business and fiction author and the CEO of UpStart Mobile, maker of Cabulous.com.
Novak, Laura
Laura Novak reported extensively for The New York Times. Her debut novel, Finding Clarity, is set in Berkeley. She is currently working on a mystery series.
Happy New Year!
As this blog will be more than information, we’ll begin with a proposition: The year starts with Litquake.
If you want an exciting preview of all of the many events the festival will feature over its 9 days, taken directly off this website and compressed into a pithy fever of enthusiasm like the first article I ever wrote … check back tomorrow.
Because this first post is the story of how I became the Literary Culture Examiner for San Francisco only 2 weeks before Litquake last year, how I had never posted any kind of journalistic report or blogged about anything other than myself before the evening of Oct 9 2009, when I put a mask of Rob Brezsny on my face and walked into the Herbst Theater with a video camera, high hopes, and no expectations. I had never been to a reading in my entire life. This is the story of what Litquake can do to you.
I won’t go on about what happened last year, as you can read all about it here, and when you have a spare moment I suggest you do: you will get an excellent idea of how the festival can take over your life and, if you keep showing up, how the effects are compound. This is about the aftermath of the great Quake. This is the tremors’ story.
Sometime during or after Litquake X I decided I wanted to document a full year of literary readings in the Bay Area. There was no reading too small, too far away, or too arbitrary. If the record was to be accurate then the experience would have to be extreme: I would have to record the entire spectrum. This pursuit took me to free monthly non-profit readings presented by the library; to series sprouting out of magazines; open mics in laundromats, on the street corner, in a basement, to city hall; one-time-only readings in bookstores, with themes, recited on one foot while the pets play poker (just kidding — maybe you want to start this?); readings with musical accompaniment, in arthouses, free speech zones, with food. I found myself in the East Bay, in Marin and even Davis, actually, without a car …
Litquake so galvanized me I haven’t stopped—not for peace of mind, not for poetry, and certainly not for paychecks. I booked the first installment of my own reading series only 8 days after the festival ended and before I had a name for it … I just knew what I wanted to do. My excitement was too large to be merely relegated to filming events and writing about them! You see, you can’t be a part of any culture merely by observing. And I didn’t move across the country to be a fly on another wall but to find the type of life I could thrive in. I had to change a few things and I’m not who I was when you met me. So let’s reintroduce ourselves to who we want to be and see if we can’t help one another get there, because I think we can and I think you think we can too or else why are you reading this and why do you write what you do? (Not a writer? Click here.)
I’m excited about Litquake XI because I’m ready to find myself again. For me, during Litquake nothing else matters but Litquake. It’s like the annual literary Sabbath. Here, we congregate no matter what our series is, our predilections for spoken word or our venue. Members of The Writers Grotto and The Sanchez Grotto Annex will be here, participants in The San Francisco Writers Workshop will be here, all the open mics will be represented, the monthly reading series, the street corner, the new underground poets and what we think we are or want to be will all be reflected and digested here … We congregate because we love words, love writing, and have an innate need to express ourselves. This whole vast world I have spent the last year exploring, infiltrating, and documenting will come together between Oct 1—Oct 9.
This is a huge neighborhood, and though we are clearly doing better than alright it is as if now, as if not until now have we been able to communicate, to be aware of and in touch with like-minded people who are doing what we are doing right now and have the experience to help propel us into greater beings than we ever had the ability to imagine. We have righteous but accessible Neighborhood Heroes. The people we look up to are willing to play with us!
And yet there are people here who don’t know anyone — just last year I was one of them! There are so many things going on here that there are literary events every night of Litquake that aren’t even associated with the festival. That deserves an exclamatory sentence! I swear every time I think I know what’s going on I’m completely humbled by another micro-universe and its stellar constellations. How much more do you have to show me, San Francisco?
But maybe we should talk about what the festival means on a larger scale. Like Dave Eggers + Vendela Vida said recently, over the next few years we will likely see Litquake evolve into something even more comprehensive. This year alone there are over 100 volunteers. For the first time, 2010 marked a full year of Litquake-hosted events. What was once an annual afternoon is now a nonprofit and a fulcrum for Bay Area literature. When I moved to SF a friend sent me one link: litquake.org. From there I followed all the literary links and did some research, sent my resume in; as a result I spent a year working at North Atlantic Books, worked for Mr. Brezsny and met Lenore Kandel. Trust me: you can move to SF only knowing one word and make your way just fine. Last year I knew literally nothing and no one, and this year I’m writing for and hosting an event and reading during Litquake. What more could one want? (I accept donations!)
So as October 1 approaches I come to terms: my year is over. The magical first ring around the poets is over. Hear ye! Hear ye! Let the cymbals crash and poets preach for the earth again is atrembling with our various verses and the festival is our harvest moon. If this is the party then we will return to our flats with voices like moonlight on silent tree leaves rippling through us and into a different kind of tree leaves called books. Like the hiss of liquor over ice. And we will meet in bars and in coffeehouses and bookstores and museums and alleys and auditoriums wearing various clothings and various facial expressions and we will wonder, sometimes but not always, where our voices came from and why we don’t wear more masks. And we will remember in the still of night when the leaves whisper me, remember, and images we never classified resurface; in those moments our eyes will flash and when they blink it will seal a promise to keep writing and to share our writing because without it we are each just a hole made out of light on the floor of a forest that no one can see. And we want to burn. So this week we dance like the freaks that we are. Freaks who see this light and want to dance around it, who need more light, more voices, and more revolutions. We are going in circles and though some of us will not collect $200 we will keep our eyes on the best properties and sing whatever comes out of our hearts, for we know that the only prize anyone has ever had to win is the gift they were given to give to the world. If that sounds obtuse then you heard me correctly. For the truth is seldom perceived directly (and that’s why we rhyme).
I have spent so many nights this year thinking about what other people have said and how they have chosen to say it that I hardly have a thing left to say. I have become a journalist, videographer, book reviewer, reading series host, editor, publisher, marketing consultant, and things I’ve forgotten since we first met this time last year, and I have no idea what to expect now or what comes next anymore than I did then. I’m tired; it’s been a long year. And though I have a strong penchant for sentimentality and the urge to indulge it at this one-year mark there is an even stronger force I am wrestling with today — one that attempts to prevent me from looking back at all. Forward! (it says). Forget your doubts and hesitations. Let go of your shames and your accomplishments and your shortcomings. Open your ears, your eyes, your minds and hearts. Open your old journals (it’s got nothing to do with looking back)! Be kind to the spirit that wants to read poems to your friends. Invoke it! We are listening.
Let the festival festoon you with cadences, let the cadences determine the time you take you take the time you take between showers and meals. We welcome your unorthodox rituals and say amen to your innermost prayers. Speak! We are screaming to hear what you have to say.
…
I love Litquake because it’s a series of open doors, and if you hang out enough it will turn you into one (that's why the logo is a monkey, if you ask me). I accepted so many invitations this year and most all of them led me to friends. Everyone in my life right now I met either during Litquake last year or as a direct result. I wonder: who will I meet this year and what roles will they have in my life?
I look forward to serendipitous handshakes and loud intuitions, to hearing the right words at the right time and following, following wherever they lead. You can go anywhere from here (this is the best place to start). If you’re determined to find your own voice you will know where to go because you will have just seen and heard so many reflections thereof. Here is a carnival of maskless soul-bearers; some hold mirrors before you, and others paintings. Take a good long look, Litquake. Gawk! For if you are not reading in this festival this year, you could be next year. Maybe you’ll have your own series or publication and your whispers will be the mighty roar you understand them to be. Speak! Write bad poetry until you find the joy that makes all good things good, even sorrow. It can happen. You know it, and I felt the same feeling you feel now when I wrote this. Happy Litquake, everyone. Happy New Year!
— love and literature, Evan Karp
ps. this is all a condensed way of saying i'm excited. condensed!
pps. what are you thinking about? what are you feeling?
pps. do you have tickets to this? if you can't afford one, i suggest you call in whatever favors you can claim. (tell them to click here.)
If you want an exciting preview of all of the many events the festival will feature over its 9 days, taken directly off this website and compressed into a pithy fever of enthusiasm like the first article I ever wrote … check back tomorrow.
Because this first post is the story of how I became the Literary Culture Examiner for San Francisco only 2 weeks before Litquake last year, how I had never posted any kind of journalistic report or blogged about anything other than myself before the evening of Oct 9 2009, when I put a mask of Rob Brezsny on my face and walked into the Herbst Theater with a video camera, high hopes, and no expectations. I had never been to a reading in my entire life. This is the story of what Litquake can do to you.
I won’t go on about what happened last year, as you can read all about it here, and when you have a spare moment I suggest you do: you will get an excellent idea of how the festival can take over your life and, if you keep showing up, how the effects are compound. This is about the aftermath of the great Quake. This is the tremors’ story.
Sometime during or after Litquake X I decided I wanted to document a full year of literary readings in the Bay Area. There was no reading too small, too far away, or too arbitrary. If the record was to be accurate then the experience would have to be extreme: I would have to record the entire spectrum. This pursuit took me to free monthly non-profit readings presented by the library; to series sprouting out of magazines; open mics in laundromats, on the street corner, in a basement, to city hall; one-time-only readings in bookstores, with themes, recited on one foot while the pets play poker (just kidding — maybe you want to start this?); readings with musical accompaniment, in arthouses, free speech zones, with food. I found myself in the East Bay, in Marin and even Davis, actually, without a car …
Litquake so galvanized me I haven’t stopped—not for peace of mind, not for poetry, and certainly not for paychecks. I booked the first installment of my own reading series only 8 days after the festival ended and before I had a name for it … I just knew what I wanted to do. My excitement was too large to be merely relegated to filming events and writing about them! You see, you can’t be a part of any culture merely by observing. And I didn’t move across the country to be a fly on another wall but to find the type of life I could thrive in. I had to change a few things and I’m not who I was when you met me. So let’s reintroduce ourselves to who we want to be and see if we can’t help one another get there, because I think we can and I think you think we can too or else why are you reading this and why do you write what you do? (Not a writer? Click here.)
I’m excited about Litquake XI because I’m ready to find myself again. For me, during Litquake nothing else matters but Litquake. It’s like the annual literary Sabbath. Here, we congregate no matter what our series is, our predilections for spoken word or our venue. Members of The Writers Grotto and The Sanchez Grotto Annex will be here, participants in The San Francisco Writers Workshop will be here, all the open mics will be represented, the monthly reading series, the street corner, the new underground poets and what we think we are or want to be will all be reflected and digested here … We congregate because we love words, love writing, and have an innate need to express ourselves. This whole vast world I have spent the last year exploring, infiltrating, and documenting will come together between Oct 1—Oct 9.
This is a huge neighborhood, and though we are clearly doing better than alright it is as if now, as if not until now have we been able to communicate, to be aware of and in touch with like-minded people who are doing what we are doing right now and have the experience to help propel us into greater beings than we ever had the ability to imagine. We have righteous but accessible Neighborhood Heroes. The people we look up to are willing to play with us!
And yet there are people here who don’t know anyone — just last year I was one of them! There are so many things going on here that there are literary events every night of Litquake that aren’t even associated with the festival. That deserves an exclamatory sentence! I swear every time I think I know what’s going on I’m completely humbled by another micro-universe and its stellar constellations. How much more do you have to show me, San Francisco?
But maybe we should talk about what the festival means on a larger scale. Like Dave Eggers + Vendela Vida said recently, over the next few years we will likely see Litquake evolve into something even more comprehensive. This year alone there are over 100 volunteers. For the first time, 2010 marked a full year of Litquake-hosted events. What was once an annual afternoon is now a nonprofit and a fulcrum for Bay Area literature. When I moved to SF a friend sent me one link: litquake.org. From there I followed all the literary links and did some research, sent my resume in; as a result I spent a year working at North Atlantic Books, worked for Mr. Brezsny and met Lenore Kandel. Trust me: you can move to SF only knowing one word and make your way just fine. Last year I knew literally nothing and no one, and this year I’m writing for and hosting an event and reading during Litquake. What more could one want? (I accept donations!)
So as October 1 approaches I come to terms: my year is over. The magical first ring around the poets is over. Hear ye! Hear ye! Let the cymbals crash and poets preach for the earth again is atrembling with our various verses and the festival is our harvest moon. If this is the party then we will return to our flats with voices like moonlight on silent tree leaves rippling through us and into a different kind of tree leaves called books. Like the hiss of liquor over ice. And we will meet in bars and in coffeehouses and bookstores and museums and alleys and auditoriums wearing various clothings and various facial expressions and we will wonder, sometimes but not always, where our voices came from and why we don’t wear more masks. And we will remember in the still of night when the leaves whisper me, remember, and images we never classified resurface; in those moments our eyes will flash and when they blink it will seal a promise to keep writing and to share our writing because without it we are each just a hole made out of light on the floor of a forest that no one can see. And we want to burn. So this week we dance like the freaks that we are. Freaks who see this light and want to dance around it, who need more light, more voices, and more revolutions. We are going in circles and though some of us will not collect $200 we will keep our eyes on the best properties and sing whatever comes out of our hearts, for we know that the only prize anyone has ever had to win is the gift they were given to give to the world. If that sounds obtuse then you heard me correctly. For the truth is seldom perceived directly (and that’s why we rhyme).
I have spent so many nights this year thinking about what other people have said and how they have chosen to say it that I hardly have a thing left to say. I have become a journalist, videographer, book reviewer, reading series host, editor, publisher, marketing consultant, and things I’ve forgotten since we first met this time last year, and I have no idea what to expect now or what comes next anymore than I did then. I’m tired; it’s been a long year. And though I have a strong penchant for sentimentality and the urge to indulge it at this one-year mark there is an even stronger force I am wrestling with today — one that attempts to prevent me from looking back at all. Forward! (it says). Forget your doubts and hesitations. Let go of your shames and your accomplishments and your shortcomings. Open your ears, your eyes, your minds and hearts. Open your old journals (it’s got nothing to do with looking back)! Be kind to the spirit that wants to read poems to your friends. Invoke it! We are listening.
Let the festival festoon you with cadences, let the cadences determine the time you take you take the time you take between showers and meals. We welcome your unorthodox rituals and say amen to your innermost prayers. Speak! We are screaming to hear what you have to say.
…
I love Litquake because it’s a series of open doors, and if you hang out enough it will turn you into one (that's why the logo is a monkey, if you ask me). I accepted so many invitations this year and most all of them led me to friends. Everyone in my life right now I met either during Litquake last year or as a direct result. I wonder: who will I meet this year and what roles will they have in my life?
I look forward to serendipitous handshakes and loud intuitions, to hearing the right words at the right time and following, following wherever they lead. You can go anywhere from here (this is the best place to start). If you’re determined to find your own voice you will know where to go because you will have just seen and heard so many reflections thereof. Here is a carnival of maskless soul-bearers; some hold mirrors before you, and others paintings. Take a good long look, Litquake. Gawk! For if you are not reading in this festival this year, you could be next year. Maybe you’ll have your own series or publication and your whispers will be the mighty roar you understand them to be. Speak! Write bad poetry until you find the joy that makes all good things good, even sorrow. It can happen. You know it, and I felt the same feeling you feel now when I wrote this. Happy Litquake, everyone. Happy New Year!
— love and literature, Evan Karp
ps. this is all a condensed way of saying i'm excited. condensed!
pps. what are you thinking about? what are you feeling?
pps. do you have tickets to this? if you can't afford one, i suggest you call in whatever favors you can claim. (tell them to click here.)
Humphries, Richard
Richard W. Humphries lives and writes in the Mission District. His memoir One Sentence at a Time comes out this fall. Recent essays are at scribd.com/RichardHumphries.
Garmey, Kate
Kate Garmey has been writing since the first grade. Today, her work can be found on Disasteronheels.com. She still dots her “i”s with hearts.
Black, Helen
Helen Black, author of Seven Blackbirds and mother of five, pens the humor column “Mother’s Day Out” on Scribd, where she’s the top-subscribed female author.
Wyner, Zach
Zach Wyner is a teacher and graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at University of San Francisco.
Sheehy, Peter
Peter Sheehy’s work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Madison Review, Inkwell, and elsewhere, but he is no good at writing bios.
Patterson, Arthur
Arthur Patterson reports by day and at night writes fiction and nonfiction that focus on believable situations that get a bit out of hand.
Kornfeld, Hannah
Hannah Kornfeld was a finalist for the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange Award.
Rosen, Rob
Rob Rosen is author of the critically acclaimed Sparkle: The Queerest Book You’ll Ever Love, Divas Las Vegas, and 100-plus stories in anthologies and erotica.
Read, Kirk
Kirk Read is a performer, event-maker, and author of memoir How I Learned to Snap and This Is the Thing, a collection of his performance essays.
Provenzano, Jim
Jim Provenzano is author of PINS, Monkey Suits, Cyclizen; writer for LGBT media for two decades; and assistant arts editor for BARtab.
Piechota, Jim
Jim Piechota, San Francisco resident for 20 years, writes for Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the Bay Area Reporter. His novel, Forgetful, is seeking representation.
Picano, Felice
Prolific Felice Picano has been everywhere and done everything, but seldom looks it, thanks to a Genii he freed from a KY jar in 1975.
Emch, Cindy
Queer Oakland poet Cindy Emch is trying to take over the world with poetry and gypsy punk bands Vagabondage, Rhubarb Whiskey, etc.
viernes, 24 de septiembre de 2010
Earle, Steve
Steve Earle is an American singer-songwriter, author, actor, and political activist. He still believes it is possible to create songs that could be “literature that you consume while driving in your car.”
jueves, 23 de septiembre de 2010
Travelstead, Ted
Ted Travelstead is an actor and writer working at Vanity Fair. He has written for VH1, and has been published in Esquire, Radar, Premiere, Maxim, and McSweeney’s.
miércoles, 22 de septiembre de 2010
Woo, Cameron
Cameron Woo is publisher of The Bark, the magazine of dog culture, author of Photobooth Dogs, and editor of two anthologies: Dog Is My Co-Pilot and Howl.
McNichol, Tom
Tom McNichol is author of Barking at Prozac and AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War. He considers himself man’s second-best friend.
Levine, Nancy
Nancy Levine is author of a bestselling book series beginning with The Tao of Pug (Penguin). Her commentaries have been broadcast on NPR affiliates.
Corwin, Tom
Tom Corwin is a musician, filmmaker, and author of two books: the memoir Mostly Bob and the illustrated fable, Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim.
Carreiro, Suzanne
Suzanne Carreiro lived in Umbria for one and a half years, where she wrote The Dog Who Ate the Truffle: A Memoir of Stories and Recipes from Umbria.
Novesky, Amy
Amy Novesky is the author of the picture books, Elephant Prince and Me, Frida illustrated by David Diaz. Georgia In Hawaii will arrive in 2011 and Mister And Lady Day will follow in 2012.
Gonzalez, Maya Christina
Maya Christina Gonzalez is an acclaimed fine artist, educator, and award-winning children’s book illustrator. She has created artwork for twenty children’s books and has written two of her own. She lives in San Francisco.
martes, 21 de septiembre de 2010
Khan, Uzma Aslam
Born in Lahore, Uzma Aslam Khan wrote The Story of Noble Rot (Penguin India/Rupa & Co.), Trespassing (Picador), and The Geometry of God (Clockroot Books).
O’Briant, Erin Quinn
Erin Quinn O’Briant wrote the novel Glitter Girl, set mostly in queer San Francisco. A former glitter salesgirl, she now teaches at CCSF.
Popular, Doctor
Doctor Popular is neither a doctor nor popular. After ten years as a professional yo-yoer, he now makes video games and music on his iPhone.
Nelson, Jim
Jim Nelson’s work has been published in We Still Like, North American Review, Instant City, and other fine literary venues.
lunes, 20 de septiembre de 2010
Moniz, Tomas
Tomas Moniz is the editor of the radical parenting publication Rad Dad, Utne’s Independent Media Award winner for Best Zine of 2009.
Love, Katie
Katie Love is a comedian, screenwriter, and former columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She is working on her first play, Lingering, and a novel, Eavesdrop Café.
Logic, Sean
Sean Logic is the editor of Ashcan Magazine. His writing has been featured in such publications as Razorcake, Thrasher Magazine, and The Contra Costa Times. DIY or die!
Allen, Justin
Justin Allen is the art director of Ashcan Magazine and a contributing writer. He has been published in the Sacramento News & Review, SF Public Press, and other places.
Litquake Bites
Two favorite pastimes converge in this delicious and informative lunchtime event. Book Passage joins forces with Litquake in a celebration of local food and books. Join us for presentations and tastings by four innovative food purveyors and authors.
Sarah Billingsley, Gordon Edgar, Steve Sando, and Amy Treadwell
Sarah Billingsley, Gordon Edgar, Steve Sando, and Amy Treadwell
miércoles, 15 de septiembre de 2010
San José, Sean
Sean San José works for Intersection for the Arts and resident theatre company Campo Santo. He has helped develop first plays by writers Jimmy Santiago Baca, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Denis Johnson, Vendela Vida, and others. This October Campo Santo premieres Habibi, the first play by Sharif Abu-Hamdeh.
Myer, Caitlin
Caitlin Myer writes novels and short stories, and is currently shopping her first novel, Hoodoo. She is the founder of Portuguese Artists Colony, a writers’ collective/monthly reading series. Ms. Myer is not Portuguese.
Lan Samantha Chang: A Litquake South Bay Event
Litquake and Center for Literary Arts present Lan Samantha Chang, author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance.
Kupperman, Michael
Michael Kupperman is a comic artist and writer whose work has appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Saturday Night Live. His books include Snake 'N' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret and Tales Designed To Thrizzle, Volume 1.
jueves, 9 de septiembre de 2010
Lit Crawl, Phase 3: 8:30-9:30 pm
Go to Phase I: 6-7 pm
Go to Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Download a Lit Crawl 2010 Map (pdf)
Bawdy in the Alley: Real People Share Their Bona Fide Sexual Exploits in Ten Minutes or less. BawdyStorytelling.com
Clarion Alley, Between 17th & 18th
Dixie De La Tour (curator & hostess): Sporting both Southern charm and a sailor’s mouth, Dixie founded San Francisco’s “blue personal narrative” movement. A former sex party promoter/hostess, she writes for SheLovesSex.com.
Imagine duck liver pâté in rainbow Jell-O, under glass. It looks funny, but you can’t exactly put your finger on what’s wrong: that’s Froghole the Clown.
JDelicious: This lifelong pleasure activist and sex-educator extraordinaire is a warehouse of convivial facts. Her extensive “field research” ensures a butt-ton of unusual escapades.
Leo Petropoulos: Part reformed stand-up comedian, part Greek tragedy, part horny straight guy with gay monster truck. And he doesn’t make any of it up.
Cherry Zonkowski, self-identified attention whore, recently performed her first solo show, Reading My Dad’s Porn and French Kissing the Dog, to sold-out houses at The Marsh.
Debut Lit presents Backstage Pass: A Reading of Original Flash Fiction by New Authors
Viracocha, 998 Valencia St.
Rebekah Anderson (host) is the co-founder of literary event series Debut Lit. She has an MFA from NYU and is working on her first novel.
Audra Marie Dewitt is a photographer whose book We Are All Together: Portraits & Interviews with Women in Music will be available next summer.
Tony DuShane is author of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, a dark comedy loosely based on his experience growing up a Jehovah’s Witness.
Laurie Frankel lives in Seattle with her husband and two-year-old, who believes only the weak sleep. She teaches college and is writing her second novel.
Peg Kingman’s new novel Original Sins is about a young woman’s journey into the slave-holding South to discover the fate of a lost child.
With two acclaimed albums, Rykarda Parasol is noted for her dark, cinematic, and poetic songwriting. Her portrait/interview will appear in We Are All Together.
Shannan Rouss is a third-generation Angeleño and magazine writer whose debut story collection, Easy for You, was published in April by Simon & Schuster.
San Quentin, You’ve Been Living Hell to Me
Ritual Coffee Roasters, 1026 Valencia St.
Many know San Quentin State Prison as a worldwide icon of crime and punishment. However, how many view it as a beacon of literary inspiration? Authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman take you on a “literary tour” of San Quentin State Prison through the writings done for their class, “Finding Your Voice on the Page,” one of the prison’s most popular weekly education classes. Inmate alumni will appear to discuss their writings and feelings regarding this Bay Area icon. San Quentin representatives will also be on hand to discuss not only the prison’s standing in the community, but the effect education and writing is having on the inmate population.
Keith and Kent Zimmerman write on a variety of subjects from music to crime to popular culture, and have taught writing at San Quentin State Prison for seven years.
Indie Fiction Extravaganza: Two Dollar Radio, Manic D Press new!, and Emergency Press
Casa Bonampak, 1051 Valencia St.
Tom Hansen is author of the memoir American Junkie, published by Emergency Press. He lives in Seattle and is working on a novel.
Grace Krilanovich’s first novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, was a finalist for the Starcherone Prize and has been excerpted twice in Black Clock.
Jon Longhi has published four books, including Wake Up and Smell the
Beer (Manic D) and The Rise and Fall of Third Leg (Manic D). His
writing appears often at nbcbayarea.com. new!
Alvin Orloff has published two novels, I Married An Earthling and
Gutterboys (both Manic D). His writing appears often in lit journals
and anthologies. new!
Larry-bob Roberts’ The International Homosexual Conspiracy (Manic D) offers insight into the absurdities of modern life with a viewpoint
that’s not only raging but also engaging. new!
Joshua Mohr is author of the novels Some Things that Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade. He lives in San Francisco.
A Genre Goodie Bag: Readings from a Novelist, a Poet, a Memoirist, and a Short Story Writer
Gravel & Gold, 3266 21st St.
Erica Ehrenberg’s poems have appeared in Slate and The New Republic. She was a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a Stegner fellow at Stanford.
Justin St. Germain grew up in Tombstone, Arizona, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His memoir is forthcoming from Random House.
Stephanie Soileau is from Louisiana and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other places.
Abigail Ulman is from Melbourne, Australia. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her debut story collection is forthcoming from Penguin Australia.
Portuguese Artists’ Colony Presents: Fake ID
Laszlo Bar, 2526 Mission St.
Daniel Heath is a San Francisco playwright. His new rock musical, The Man of Rock, premieres in San Francisco in December. themanofrock.com
When Leslie Ingham was eight, she discovered a short story manuscript hidden in her dad’s Playboy. This led directly to the literary life.
Caitlin Myer (Emcee) writes novels and short stories, and is currently shopping her first novel, HOODOO. She is the founder of Portuguese Artists Colony.
Cary Tennis writes the “Since You Asked” advice column for Salon.com. His writing career includes publications such as Spin, Details, and Creem.
Benjamin Wachs is a journalist who covers Truth and Beauty. His work has appeared in Playboy.com, NPR, the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Seeing Ear Theatre,” etc.
Litquake Goes International: Writers from Ireland
The Liberties Bar And Restaurant, 998 Guerrero St.
Patrick Cotter’s poems and short fiction can be found in numerous journals and anthologies, and his collection of poems, Perplexed Skin, was published in 2008.
Gerry Murphy is a champion swimmer, lifeguard, and swimming pool manager who began publishing in the mid-‘80s.
Leanne O’Sullivan is completing her Bachelor’s degree, and her first collection of poetry, Waiting for my Clothes, was published when she was 21.
Billy Ramsell’s collection Complicated Pleasures was nominated for an Eithne Strong Award and he has also been shortlisted for the Hennessy Award.
Beyond the Stacks: The International Poetry Library of San Francisco hosts Five Local Poets
Café Que Tal, 1005 Guerrero St.
Mahnaz Badihian is a poet and translator with five publications. She is editor-in-chief of MahMag.org and currently working on translations of protest poems from Iran.
Tianna Cohen-Paul is a Jamaican spoken-word poet who has performed on numerous stages including the Apollo, the Blue Note, the Green Mill, and Yoshi’s.
Keetje Kuipers is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Prize and was published by BOA.
Kenji C. Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey. His writing arises from his work as an activist, educator, and cultural worker.
Truong Tran is a poet, teacher, and visual artist. His most recent book, Four Letter Words (2008) was published by Apogee Press.
InsideStorytime Show and Tell: An Elementary School Ritual Reinvented by Cutting-Edge Local Literati
Lone Palm Bar, 3394 22nd St.
Emceed by James Warner
Judy Budnitz is author of the story collections Flying Leap and Nice Big American Baby, and a novel, If I Told You Once.
Colby Buzzell is author of My War: Killing Time In Iraq. His next book, Off the Road, will be published by HarperCollins.
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, fabulist, and critic. His next exhibition will be at Modernism Gallery and his newest book is Virtual Words.
Regina Louise is author of Somebody’s Someone, a memoir of a girl growing up in the foster care system.
Linda Robertson writes silly songs, some of which appear in her book What Rhymes with Bastard? She has a cross-eyed cat and super-bendable thumbs.
Sidebrow
Fabric8, 3318 22nd St.
John Cleary lives and writes in San Francisco.
Matt Hart is author of Who’s Who Vivid and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety.
Heather Hazuka’s work can be found in Transfer, Cipactli, and Fourteen Hills. She is an editor of Multicultural Education magazine and associate publisher of Caddo Gap Press.
Jason Morris’ work has appeared in The Tsatsawassans, Eleven Eleven, Forklift Ohio, Ping Pong, and other journals. His chapbook Spirits & Anchors was published in 2010.
Eireene Nealand’s short stories have been published in Sidebrow, Fourteen Hills, Vagabond, Transfer, and ZYZZYVA.
The Rumpus: Readings and Music by Michael Mullen of The Size Queens
Latin American Club, 3286 22nd St.
Isaac Fitzgerald (Emcee) has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, been given a sword by a king, and is managing editor of The Rumpus.
Justin Cronin is the author of Mary And O'Neil which won the Pen/Hemingway award, and the international bestseller The Passage.
Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including What He's Poised To Do (which the Los Angeles Times called "astonishing"), Please Step Back, and Superbad. He lives in Brooklyn.
Lorelei Lee is a student, writer, and porn performer. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals. She writes for guesswhatideservethis.wordpress.com
Bucky Sinister is a poet, comedian, and author of Get Up: 12 Step Recovery for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos. He appears at the Dark Room as part of the comedy troupe The Business.
Canteen Magazine presents: Narrative on the Edge—Three Novelists Who Take Storytelling to New Places
The Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St.
Sean Finney (emcee) is editor-in-chief of Canteen magazine, author of The Obedient Door, and the rebel angel of the Mission.
Mia Lipman (emcee) is executive editor of Canteen and the reviews editor at San Francisco magazine. She contributes writing and photographs to savory and unsavory publications.
Ghita Schwarz’ novel, Displaced Persons, was published in 2010. Her essays and fiction have appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Susan Steinberg is author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Boulevard, and elsewhere. She teaches at USF.
Malena Watrous is author of If You Follow Me. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, TriQuarterly, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Emptiness in Bloom: Buddhist writers on sex, death, one-night stands, and life, on and off the cushion
San Francisco Buddhist Center, 37 Bartlett St.
Compiling a book about celibacy and Buddhism is the hottest thing that’s happened to Suvanna Cullen in ages. More excitement at 2golden.blogspot.com.
A San Francisco–based writer, Ethan Davidson published work in Daughters of Nyx, Widdershins, Green Egg, and the Living in the Land of the Dead anthologies.
Lisa Kee-Hamasaki has read her work in the finest libraries, courthouse restrooms, auto dealerships, cheese shops, bingo games, and zendos of North America.
Patrick Letellier has won three national writing awards for essays on gay politics, poverty, and prisons. He’s now writing My Obituaries, a memoir about AIDS.
Fiction by Tony Press (aka Acarasiddhi) appears in Rio Grande Review, Foundling Review, Menda City Review, Shine Journal, Temenos, MacGuffin, and Lichen; poetry elsewhere.
Mary Salome is an Arab- and Irish-American media activist and writer who lives in San Francisco with her little dog Frito.
A (Harper)One Night Stand
The Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St.
HarperOne and the authors of The MultiOrgasmic Couple in a Q & A moderated by Good Vibrations staff sexologist, Dr. Carol Queen. Drink tickets will be given away. Enter to win a goodie bag!
Rachel Carlton Abrams, M.D., co-author of The Multi-Orgasmic Couple and The Multi-Orgasmic Woman, lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and three children.
Douglas Abrams, co-author of The Multi-Orgasmic Couple and The Multi-Orgasmic Man, lives in Santa Cruz with his wife and three children.
Tenderloin Reading Series
Doc’s Clock, 2575 Mission St.
Jonathan Hirsch is host of the Tenderloin Reading Series, the weekly soul party Black Gold, and singer in the band Passenger & Pilot. He lives in the Tenderloin.
Joel Landfield is a DJ and poet. He is a regular contributor to the Tenderloin Reading Series and has recently been featured at The Portuguese Artist Colony.
Joanna Lioce is an author, bartender, and one-half of the band David & Joanna. She lives in San Francisco.
Chris Moore is an author whose work is largely informed by his experiences working in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
Anna Seregina is a performer, DJ, and professional heckler. She lives in San Francisco.
Carl Brandon Society: “Color Your Worlds! Speculative Fiction and Neo-Benshi from Writers of Color
Artillery Apparel Gallery, 2751 Mission St.
Jaime Cortez is a writer and visual artist. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen anthologies, and his visual art has been exhibited in venues across the Bay Area.
Rona Fernandez is a writer, fundraiser, and activist. Her writing has appeared in the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, Philippine News, Instant City, and Are We Born Racist?
Claire Light is a freelance writer and nonprofit hack. She co-founded Hyphen magazine, and has a story collection, Slightly Behind and to the Left, with Aqueduct Press.
Shweta Narayan lived in India, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California. She writes speculative fiction from and about liminal spaces.
Na’amen Tilahun is a writer based in Oakland who is currently working on a Dashiell Hammett-inspired collection of paranormal detective stories.
Anuj Vaidya works in the cusp between film and performance. His video works include Chingari Chumma (2000) and Bad Girl with a Heart of Gold (2005).
Richard Wright is a Jamaican New Yorker who loves living in Oakland. He is also a DJ, community organizer, blogger, and writer of speculative fiction.
Anthemion: Writers Respond to the Antique Object
Gypsy Honeymoon, 1266 Valencia St.
Gabrielle Ekedal is the owner of Gypsy Honeymoon and writes poems by candlelight while the sun is out.
Gravity Goldberg is co-founder and editor of Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco. She has attended a Black Mass but not the Junior League.
Dominic Martinelli’s passion is storytelling. He is an actor, model, artist, designer, stylist, and writer. He dreams of sharing his art and novels with the world.
Christian Nagler is a writer, translator, and performer. His writing has appeared in Encyclopedia and Digital Artifact, and he is a lecturer in art and social practice at SFSU.
Matt Sussman’s writing about film and visual art has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Art in America, and sf360. He occasionally performs drag as Dirty Hairy.
Hiya Swanhuyser is a writer by trade or inclination. The difference is made by either having permission or not having it.
The Believer magazine and McSweeney’s present poets Troy Jollimore, Sandra Simonds, and Matthew Zapruder
Heart, 1270 Valencia St.
Troy Jollimore wrote Tom Thomson in Purgatory. His new collection, At Lake Scugog, is forthcoming from the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.
Sandra Simonds has a Ph.D. in Literature from Florida State University, where she teaches creative writing. Her book, Warsaw Bikini, was published by Bloof Books.
Matthew Zapruder’s third book of poems is Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon 2010). An editor for Wave Books, he lives in San Francisco.
Fourteen Hills Press and Eleven Eleven Present: Voices That Carry
Muddy’s Coffee House, 1304 Valencia St.
**Readers for Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review**
Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books) and the upcoming She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books).
Lauren Hamlin’s work has appeared in Zero Ducats, Fourteen Hills, and Poets & Writers. She recently completed a residency in Spain and is at work on her first novel.
San Francisco poet Zara Raab recently published The Book of Gretel. Swimming the Eel is due out next year. Her poems appear in West Branch, Nimrod, Spoon River, and Fourteen Hills.
**Readers for Eleven Eleven**
Aurora Brackett graduated with an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University. She lives and teaches in Oakland.
Catherine Meng is the author of Tonight’s the Night and three chapbooks, 15 Poems in Sets of 5, Dokument, and Lost Notebook w/ Letters to Deer.
For ten years, Loren Rhoads edited the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. She’s collected her cemetery travel essays in the book Wish You Were Here.
Kearny Street Workshop: Younger Than the Buddha
Cafe La Boheme, 3318 24th St.
Hear from writers younger than Gautama Siddhartha Gautama was when he achieved enlightenment.
Noelle de la Paz sneezes loudly, laughs daily, plays with her DSLR, and spends much of her time thinking about things to write.
mai doan uses poetry to disrupt and expand understandings of what it means to be queer, mixed, woman.
Cathlin Goulding has been involved with Kearny Street Workshop since 2003. She lives in New York City, where she studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Vanessa Huang practices poetry to feed resilience and movement building from the margins. Her manuscript was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange.
Adrien Salazar is an artist, warrior of light, and lover. Do not be fooled by his appearance. He is actually a lion.
Jonathan Yang writes novels for young adults, mainly about celebrities and shopping. And um, hopefully deeper stuff too. He lives online here: jonyang.org.
Sausages and Similes
Rosamunde Sausage, 2832 Mission St.
Susan Browne is the author of Buddha’s Dogs, winner of the Four Way Books Prize, and Zephyr, winner of Steel Toe Books Editor’s Prize 2010. She teaches at Diablo Valley College.
Twilight Greenaway is a journalist and poet with an MFA from Warren Wilson. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Caketrain, Ninth Letter, and Terrain.
L.J. Moore’s 2008 book, F-Stein, tangles science, family, pop culture, and the paranormal into the structure of a replicating strand of DNA.
Jacqueline Berger’s third book, The Gift That Arrives Broken, won the
2010 Autumn House Award. She directs the graduate English program at
Notre Dame de Namur University. new!
Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the
prestigious T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize for 2010. He’s a professor at the
University of San Francisco. new!
SFMOMA presents: Lost Tribes of San Francisco, a Rebecca Solnit Infinite Cities Event Mission Cultural Center For Latino Arts, 2868 Mission St.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (emcee), is the artistic director of La Pocha
Nostra and has pioneering work in performance, installation, poetry,
journalism, cultural theory, and radical pedagogy. new!
Adriana Camarena: Born in Mexico City, raised in the Americas, Mission resident. Doctor of the science of law, Stanford. International legal consultant; law and society researcher.
Jaime Cortez’s short stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen anthologies. His visual art has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a doctoral student in geography at U.C. Berkeley. He writes for The Believer, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books.
Aaron Shurin is the author of a dozen books, including poetry and essay collections. He is a professor in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
Rebecca Solnit, author of Infinite City, has written 12 books, many of which deal with San Francisco, California, landscape, and/or geography, but much terra incognita remains.
Lights! Poetry! Action! A Caveat Lector Mashup
Mission Pie, 2901 Mission St.
Christopher Bernard, co-founder of Caveat Lector, has published widely in the U.S. and U.K. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was featured in Litquake 2005.
Melissa Culross is the lead singer for the San Francisco pop cover band Sober Nixon and works as a broadcast journalist.
Nara Denning, named SF Weekly’s “Best New Silent Filmmaker 2009,” creates neo-silent shorts, using surreal imagery and verse.
Singer/songwriter Jeff Desira has performed in San Francisco and New York, and has been a founding member, bassist, guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist for numerous bands.
Adelle Foley is a financial analyst, arts activist, and writer of haiku. Along the Bloodline is her first book-length collection.
Jack Foley has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. His radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard every Wednesday on KPFA.
Joan Gelfand has published several poetry collections, including A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, and, with Marty Castleberg, a CD of poetry and music, Transported.
Full Crawl Schedule:
Phase I: 6-7 pm
Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Phase III: 8:30-9:30 pm
Go to Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Download a Lit Crawl 2010 Map (pdf)
Bawdy in the Alley: Real People Share Their Bona Fide Sexual Exploits in Ten Minutes or less. BawdyStorytelling.com
Clarion Alley, Between 17th & 18th
Dixie De La Tour (curator & hostess): Sporting both Southern charm and a sailor’s mouth, Dixie founded San Francisco’s “blue personal narrative” movement. A former sex party promoter/hostess, she writes for SheLovesSex.com.
Imagine duck liver pâté in rainbow Jell-O, under glass. It looks funny, but you can’t exactly put your finger on what’s wrong: that’s Froghole the Clown.
JDelicious: This lifelong pleasure activist and sex-educator extraordinaire is a warehouse of convivial facts. Her extensive “field research” ensures a butt-ton of unusual escapades.
Leo Petropoulos: Part reformed stand-up comedian, part Greek tragedy, part horny straight guy with gay monster truck. And he doesn’t make any of it up.
Cherry Zonkowski, self-identified attention whore, recently performed her first solo show, Reading My Dad’s Porn and French Kissing the Dog, to sold-out houses at The Marsh.
Debut Lit presents Backstage Pass: A Reading of Original Flash Fiction by New Authors
Viracocha, 998 Valencia St.
Rebekah Anderson (host) is the co-founder of literary event series Debut Lit. She has an MFA from NYU and is working on her first novel.
Audra Marie Dewitt is a photographer whose book We Are All Together: Portraits & Interviews with Women in Music will be available next summer.
Tony DuShane is author of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, a dark comedy loosely based on his experience growing up a Jehovah’s Witness.
Laurie Frankel lives in Seattle with her husband and two-year-old, who believes only the weak sleep. She teaches college and is writing her second novel.
Peg Kingman’s new novel Original Sins is about a young woman’s journey into the slave-holding South to discover the fate of a lost child.
With two acclaimed albums, Rykarda Parasol is noted for her dark, cinematic, and poetic songwriting. Her portrait/interview will appear in We Are All Together.
Shannan Rouss is a third-generation Angeleño and magazine writer whose debut story collection, Easy for You, was published in April by Simon & Schuster.
San Quentin, You’ve Been Living Hell to Me
Ritual Coffee Roasters, 1026 Valencia St.
Many know San Quentin State Prison as a worldwide icon of crime and punishment. However, how many view it as a beacon of literary inspiration? Authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman take you on a “literary tour” of San Quentin State Prison through the writings done for their class, “Finding Your Voice on the Page,” one of the prison’s most popular weekly education classes. Inmate alumni will appear to discuss their writings and feelings regarding this Bay Area icon. San Quentin representatives will also be on hand to discuss not only the prison’s standing in the community, but the effect education and writing is having on the inmate population.
Keith and Kent Zimmerman write on a variety of subjects from music to crime to popular culture, and have taught writing at San Quentin State Prison for seven years.
Indie Fiction Extravaganza: Two Dollar Radio, Manic D Press new!, and Emergency Press
Casa Bonampak, 1051 Valencia St.
Tom Hansen is author of the memoir American Junkie, published by Emergency Press. He lives in Seattle and is working on a novel.
Grace Krilanovich’s first novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, was a finalist for the Starcherone Prize and has been excerpted twice in Black Clock.
Jon Longhi has published four books, including Wake Up and Smell the
Beer (Manic D) and The Rise and Fall of Third Leg (Manic D). His
writing appears often at nbcbayarea.com. new!
Alvin Orloff has published two novels, I Married An Earthling and
Gutterboys (both Manic D). His writing appears often in lit journals
and anthologies. new!
Larry-bob Roberts’ The International Homosexual Conspiracy (Manic D) offers insight into the absurdities of modern life with a viewpoint
that’s not only raging but also engaging. new!
Joshua Mohr is author of the novels Some Things that Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade. He lives in San Francisco.
A Genre Goodie Bag: Readings from a Novelist, a Poet, a Memoirist, and a Short Story Writer
Gravel & Gold, 3266 21st St.
Erica Ehrenberg’s poems have appeared in Slate and The New Republic. She was a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a Stegner fellow at Stanford.
Justin St. Germain grew up in Tombstone, Arizona, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His memoir is forthcoming from Random House.
Stephanie Soileau is from Louisiana and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other places.
Abigail Ulman is from Melbourne, Australia. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her debut story collection is forthcoming from Penguin Australia.
Portuguese Artists’ Colony Presents: Fake ID
Laszlo Bar, 2526 Mission St.
Daniel Heath is a San Francisco playwright. His new rock musical, The Man of Rock, premieres in San Francisco in December. themanofrock.com
When Leslie Ingham was eight, she discovered a short story manuscript hidden in her dad’s Playboy. This led directly to the literary life.
Caitlin Myer (Emcee) writes novels and short stories, and is currently shopping her first novel, HOODOO. She is the founder of Portuguese Artists Colony.
Cary Tennis writes the “Since You Asked” advice column for Salon.com. His writing career includes publications such as Spin, Details, and Creem.
Benjamin Wachs is a journalist who covers Truth and Beauty. His work has appeared in Playboy.com, NPR, the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Seeing Ear Theatre,” etc.
Litquake Goes International: Writers from Ireland
The Liberties Bar And Restaurant, 998 Guerrero St.
Patrick Cotter’s poems and short fiction can be found in numerous journals and anthologies, and his collection of poems, Perplexed Skin, was published in 2008.
Gerry Murphy is a champion swimmer, lifeguard, and swimming pool manager who began publishing in the mid-‘80s.
Leanne O’Sullivan is completing her Bachelor’s degree, and her first collection of poetry, Waiting for my Clothes, was published when she was 21.
Billy Ramsell’s collection Complicated Pleasures was nominated for an Eithne Strong Award and he has also been shortlisted for the Hennessy Award.
Beyond the Stacks: The International Poetry Library of San Francisco hosts Five Local Poets
Café Que Tal, 1005 Guerrero St.
Mahnaz Badihian is a poet and translator with five publications. She is editor-in-chief of MahMag.org and currently working on translations of protest poems from Iran.
Tianna Cohen-Paul is a Jamaican spoken-word poet who has performed on numerous stages including the Apollo, the Blue Note, the Green Mill, and Yoshi’s.
Keetje Kuipers is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Prize and was published by BOA.
Kenji C. Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey. His writing arises from his work as an activist, educator, and cultural worker.
Truong Tran is a poet, teacher, and visual artist. His most recent book, Four Letter Words (2008) was published by Apogee Press.
InsideStorytime Show and Tell: An Elementary School Ritual Reinvented by Cutting-Edge Local Literati
Lone Palm Bar, 3394 22nd St.
Emceed by James Warner
Judy Budnitz is author of the story collections Flying Leap and Nice Big American Baby, and a novel, If I Told You Once.
Colby Buzzell is author of My War: Killing Time In Iraq. His next book, Off the Road, will be published by HarperCollins.
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, fabulist, and critic. His next exhibition will be at Modernism Gallery and his newest book is Virtual Words.
Regina Louise is author of Somebody’s Someone, a memoir of a girl growing up in the foster care system.
Linda Robertson writes silly songs, some of which appear in her book What Rhymes with Bastard? She has a cross-eyed cat and super-bendable thumbs.
Sidebrow
Fabric8, 3318 22nd St.
John Cleary lives and writes in San Francisco.
Matt Hart is author of Who’s Who Vivid and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety.
Heather Hazuka’s work can be found in Transfer, Cipactli, and Fourteen Hills. She is an editor of Multicultural Education magazine and associate publisher of Caddo Gap Press.
Jason Morris’ work has appeared in The Tsatsawassans, Eleven Eleven, Forklift Ohio, Ping Pong, and other journals. His chapbook Spirits & Anchors was published in 2010.
Eireene Nealand’s short stories have been published in Sidebrow, Fourteen Hills, Vagabond, Transfer, and ZYZZYVA.
The Rumpus: Readings and Music by Michael Mullen of The Size Queens
Latin American Club, 3286 22nd St.
Isaac Fitzgerald (Emcee) has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, been given a sword by a king, and is managing editor of The Rumpus.
Justin Cronin is the author of Mary And O'Neil which won the Pen/Hemingway award, and the international bestseller The Passage.
Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including What He's Poised To Do (which the Los Angeles Times called "astonishing"), Please Step Back, and Superbad. He lives in Brooklyn.
Lorelei Lee is a student, writer, and porn performer. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals. She writes for guesswhatideservethis.wordpress.com
Bucky Sinister is a poet, comedian, and author of Get Up: 12 Step Recovery for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos. He appears at the Dark Room as part of the comedy troupe The Business.
Canteen Magazine presents: Narrative on the Edge—Three Novelists Who Take Storytelling to New Places
The Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St.
Sean Finney (emcee) is editor-in-chief of Canteen magazine, author of The Obedient Door, and the rebel angel of the Mission.
Mia Lipman (emcee) is executive editor of Canteen and the reviews editor at San Francisco magazine. She contributes writing and photographs to savory and unsavory publications.
Ghita Schwarz’ novel, Displaced Persons, was published in 2010. Her essays and fiction have appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Susan Steinberg is author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Boulevard, and elsewhere. She teaches at USF.
Malena Watrous is author of If You Follow Me. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, TriQuarterly, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Emptiness in Bloom: Buddhist writers on sex, death, one-night stands, and life, on and off the cushion
San Francisco Buddhist Center, 37 Bartlett St.
Compiling a book about celibacy and Buddhism is the hottest thing that’s happened to Suvanna Cullen in ages. More excitement at 2golden.blogspot.com.
A San Francisco–based writer, Ethan Davidson published work in Daughters of Nyx, Widdershins, Green Egg, and the Living in the Land of the Dead anthologies.
Lisa Kee-Hamasaki has read her work in the finest libraries, courthouse restrooms, auto dealerships, cheese shops, bingo games, and zendos of North America.
Patrick Letellier has won three national writing awards for essays on gay politics, poverty, and prisons. He’s now writing My Obituaries, a memoir about AIDS.
Fiction by Tony Press (aka Acarasiddhi) appears in Rio Grande Review, Foundling Review, Menda City Review, Shine Journal, Temenos, MacGuffin, and Lichen; poetry elsewhere.
Mary Salome is an Arab- and Irish-American media activist and writer who lives in San Francisco with her little dog Frito.
A (Harper)One Night Stand
The Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St.
HarperOne and the authors of The MultiOrgasmic Couple in a Q & A moderated by Good Vibrations staff sexologist, Dr. Carol Queen. Drink tickets will be given away. Enter to win a goodie bag!
Rachel Carlton Abrams, M.D., co-author of The Multi-Orgasmic Couple and The Multi-Orgasmic Woman, lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and three children.
Douglas Abrams, co-author of The Multi-Orgasmic Couple and The Multi-Orgasmic Man, lives in Santa Cruz with his wife and three children.
Tenderloin Reading Series
Doc’s Clock, 2575 Mission St.
Jonathan Hirsch is host of the Tenderloin Reading Series, the weekly soul party Black Gold, and singer in the band Passenger & Pilot. He lives in the Tenderloin.
Joel Landfield is a DJ and poet. He is a regular contributor to the Tenderloin Reading Series and has recently been featured at The Portuguese Artist Colony.
Joanna Lioce is an author, bartender, and one-half of the band David & Joanna. She lives in San Francisco.
Chris Moore is an author whose work is largely informed by his experiences working in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
Anna Seregina is a performer, DJ, and professional heckler. She lives in San Francisco.
Carl Brandon Society: “Color Your Worlds! Speculative Fiction and Neo-Benshi from Writers of Color
Artillery Apparel Gallery, 2751 Mission St.
Jaime Cortez is a writer and visual artist. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen anthologies, and his visual art has been exhibited in venues across the Bay Area.
Rona Fernandez is a writer, fundraiser, and activist. Her writing has appeared in the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, Philippine News, Instant City, and Are We Born Racist?
Claire Light is a freelance writer and nonprofit hack. She co-founded Hyphen magazine, and has a story collection, Slightly Behind and to the Left, with Aqueduct Press.
Shweta Narayan lived in India, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California. She writes speculative fiction from and about liminal spaces.
Na’amen Tilahun is a writer based in Oakland who is currently working on a Dashiell Hammett-inspired collection of paranormal detective stories.
Anuj Vaidya works in the cusp between film and performance. His video works include Chingari Chumma (2000) and Bad Girl with a Heart of Gold (2005).
Richard Wright is a Jamaican New Yorker who loves living in Oakland. He is also a DJ, community organizer, blogger, and writer of speculative fiction.
Anthemion: Writers Respond to the Antique Object
Gypsy Honeymoon, 1266 Valencia St.
Gabrielle Ekedal is the owner of Gypsy Honeymoon and writes poems by candlelight while the sun is out.
Gravity Goldberg is co-founder and editor of Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco. She has attended a Black Mass but not the Junior League.
Dominic Martinelli’s passion is storytelling. He is an actor, model, artist, designer, stylist, and writer. He dreams of sharing his art and novels with the world.
Christian Nagler is a writer, translator, and performer. His writing has appeared in Encyclopedia and Digital Artifact, and he is a lecturer in art and social practice at SFSU.
Matt Sussman’s writing about film and visual art has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Art in America, and sf360. He occasionally performs drag as Dirty Hairy.
Hiya Swanhuyser is a writer by trade or inclination. The difference is made by either having permission or not having it.
The Believer magazine and McSweeney’s present poets Troy Jollimore, Sandra Simonds, and Matthew Zapruder
Heart, 1270 Valencia St.
Troy Jollimore wrote Tom Thomson in Purgatory. His new collection, At Lake Scugog, is forthcoming from the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011.
Sandra Simonds has a Ph.D. in Literature from Florida State University, where she teaches creative writing. Her book, Warsaw Bikini, was published by Bloof Books.
Matthew Zapruder’s third book of poems is Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon 2010). An editor for Wave Books, he lives in San Francisco.
Fourteen Hills Press and Eleven Eleven Present: Voices That Carry
Muddy’s Coffee House, 1304 Valencia St.
**Readers for Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review**
Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books) and the upcoming She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books).
Lauren Hamlin’s work has appeared in Zero Ducats, Fourteen Hills, and Poets & Writers. She recently completed a residency in Spain and is at work on her first novel.
San Francisco poet Zara Raab recently published The Book of Gretel. Swimming the Eel is due out next year. Her poems appear in West Branch, Nimrod, Spoon River, and Fourteen Hills.
**Readers for Eleven Eleven**
Aurora Brackett graduated with an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University. She lives and teaches in Oakland.
Catherine Meng is the author of Tonight’s the Night and three chapbooks, 15 Poems in Sets of 5, Dokument, and Lost Notebook w/ Letters to Deer.
For ten years, Loren Rhoads edited the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. She’s collected her cemetery travel essays in the book Wish You Were Here.
Kearny Street Workshop: Younger Than the Buddha
Cafe La Boheme, 3318 24th St.
Hear from writers younger than Gautama Siddhartha Gautama was when he achieved enlightenment.
Noelle de la Paz sneezes loudly, laughs daily, plays with her DSLR, and spends much of her time thinking about things to write.
mai doan uses poetry to disrupt and expand understandings of what it means to be queer, mixed, woman.
Cathlin Goulding has been involved with Kearny Street Workshop since 2003. She lives in New York City, where she studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Vanessa Huang practices poetry to feed resilience and movement building from the margins. Her manuscript was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange.
Adrien Salazar is an artist, warrior of light, and lover. Do not be fooled by his appearance. He is actually a lion.
Jonathan Yang writes novels for young adults, mainly about celebrities and shopping. And um, hopefully deeper stuff too. He lives online here: jonyang.org.
Sausages and Similes
Rosamunde Sausage, 2832 Mission St.
Susan Browne is the author of Buddha’s Dogs, winner of the Four Way Books Prize, and Zephyr, winner of Steel Toe Books Editor’s Prize 2010. She teaches at Diablo Valley College.
Twilight Greenaway is a journalist and poet with an MFA from Warren Wilson. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Caketrain, Ninth Letter, and Terrain.
L.J. Moore’s 2008 book, F-Stein, tangles science, family, pop culture, and the paranormal into the structure of a replicating strand of DNA.
Jacqueline Berger’s third book, The Gift That Arrives Broken, won the
2010 Autumn House Award. She directs the graduate English program at
Notre Dame de Namur University. new!
Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the
prestigious T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize for 2010. He’s a professor at the
University of San Francisco. new!
SFMOMA presents: Lost Tribes of San Francisco, a Rebecca Solnit Infinite Cities Event Mission Cultural Center For Latino Arts, 2868 Mission St.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (emcee), is the artistic director of La Pocha
Nostra and has pioneering work in performance, installation, poetry,
journalism, cultural theory, and radical pedagogy. new!
Adriana Camarena: Born in Mexico City, raised in the Americas, Mission resident. Doctor of the science of law, Stanford. International legal consultant; law and society researcher.
Jaime Cortez’s short stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen anthologies. His visual art has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a doctoral student in geography at U.C. Berkeley. He writes for The Believer, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books.
Aaron Shurin is the author of a dozen books, including poetry and essay collections. He is a professor in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
Rebecca Solnit, author of Infinite City, has written 12 books, many of which deal with San Francisco, California, landscape, and/or geography, but much terra incognita remains.
Lights! Poetry! Action! A Caveat Lector Mashup
Mission Pie, 2901 Mission St.
Christopher Bernard, co-founder of Caveat Lector, has published widely in the U.S. and U.K. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was featured in Litquake 2005.
Melissa Culross is the lead singer for the San Francisco pop cover band Sober Nixon and works as a broadcast journalist.
Nara Denning, named SF Weekly’s “Best New Silent Filmmaker 2009,” creates neo-silent shorts, using surreal imagery and verse.
Singer/songwriter Jeff Desira has performed in San Francisco and New York, and has been a founding member, bassist, guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist for numerous bands.
Adelle Foley is a financial analyst, arts activist, and writer of haiku. Along the Bloodline is her first book-length collection.
Jack Foley has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. His radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard every Wednesday on KPFA.
Joan Gelfand has published several poetry collections, including A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, and, with Marty Castleberg, a CD of poetry and music, Transported.
Full Crawl Schedule:
Phase I: 6-7 pm
Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Phase III: 8:30-9:30 pm
Lit Crawl, Phase 2: 7:15-8:15 pm
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miércoles, 8 de septiembre de 2010
Lit Crawl Phase 1: 6-7 pm
Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Phase III: 8:30-9:30 pm
Downloadable Lit Crawl 2010 Map (pdf)
Aural in the Alley: Ashcan Magazine Presents Write in the Streets
Clarion Alley, Between 17th & 18th
Justin Allen, Sean Logic, Katie Love, Tomas Moniz, Jim Nelson, Doctor Popular, Erin Quinn O’Briant
Dog Is Our Co-Pilot
The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St. @ Gough
Suzanne Carreiro, Tom Corwin, Nancy Levine, Tom McNichol, Cameron Woo
BARtab Presents: Bar Pick-Ups Gone Terribly Wrong (or Right)
Martuni’s, 4 Valencia St.
Meliza Banales, Cindy Emch, Felice Picano, Jim Piechota, Jim Provenzano (Moderator), Kirk Read, Rob Rosen
Babylon Salon Spotlight Reading
Mina Dresden Gallery, 312 Valencia St.
Hannah Kornfeld, Peter Orner, Arthur Patterson, Peter Sheehy, Zach Wyner
Scribd: Where the World Comes to Read
Four Barrel Coffee, 375 Valencia St.
Helen Black, Kate Garmey, Richard W. Humphries, Laura Novak, John Wolpert
Why There Are Words Presents
Artzone 461 Gallery, 461 Valencia St.
Tom Barbash, Catherine Brady, Alice LaPlante, Li Miao Lovett, Valerie Miner, Jason Roberts
Stanford Humanities Panel: Representations of Race and Ethnicity
Creativity Explored, 3245 16th St.
Michele Elam, Saikat Majumdar, David Palumbo-Liu, Bryan Wolf
ZYZZYVA presents LitQuiz,
A literary quiz show in which a panel of writers competes with the audience at large
Elixir, 3200 16th St.
Emcee Howard Junker, Karen Carissimo, Laura Cogan, Drew Cushing, Willy Lizárraga, M.G. Martin, Brooks Roddan
BANG OUT Volume IX - Greatest Hits: Celebrating BANG OUT Reading Series’ Two-Year Anniversary
Double Dutch, 3192 16th St.
Readers: Meg Day, Michelle Puckett, Ami Sheth, Arisa White, and Lindsey Wolkin
Small Desk Press Festival 2
Adobe Books, 3166 16th St.
Lizzy Acker, Dustin Heron, ali lawrence, Sarah Fran Wisby
Quiet Lightning
Gestalt Haus, 3159 16th St.
Quiet Lightning is a monthly submission-based reading series that features an unpredictable mash-up of performance poetry, academic fiction, inspiring rant dreams, and original combinations thereof. We print it all in a zine called sPARKLE & bLINK, available at the show!
New Authors
Morac Restaurant & Lounge, 3122 16th St.
Angela S. Choi, Shilpi Somaya Gowda (canceled), Jason Headley, Vanitha Sankaran, Elena Mauli Shapiro
Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco Presents: Questionable Behavior
Dalva, 3121 16th St.
joshua citrak, Andrew Dugas, Rob McLaughlin, Mary Taugher, Stephanie Vernier
The Courage to Seek Change: Cultivating Inner Strength in Order to Tackle Social Change
Forest Books, 3080 16th St.
Todd Aaron Jensen, Allen Klein, Don Lattin, Nina Lesowitz, Corinne McLaughlin, M.J. Ryan
Narrative Magazine: Five Great Authors Whose Work Has Helped Narrative Become the Gold Standard in Online Literary Magazines
The Lab, 2948 16th St.
Carol Edgarian (Emcee), Will Boast, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Skip Horack, Bridget Quinn, Renee Thompson
San Francisco on Assignment: Counterpoint Press Spins Tales of Television, Religion, Murder, and Revolution from the Bay area and Beyond
Muddy Waters, 521 Valencia St.
Andrew Altschul, Sue Dunlap, Cornelia Nixon, Daniel Pyne, Michael Sledge, Jane Vandenburgh
San Pablo Arts District Presents Lip Service West: True Stories
Casanova Lounge, 527 Valencia St.
Karen Benke, Joe Clifford, Herb Gold, Kelly Luce, Eddie Muller
Significant Objects Presents: Remarkable Stories about Unremarkable Things. PLUS: Attendees square off in the fiercely competitive Object Slam!
Root Division, 3175 17th St.
Rob Baedeker, Chris Colin, Beth Lisick, Miranda Mellis, Katie Williams
Ambush Review Launch Party hosted by Co-Editors Bob Booker & Patrick Cahill. Ambush Review: Poems for the 21st Century
18 Reasons, 593 Guerrero St.
Ana Elsner, Grace Marie Grafton, Jonathan Hayes, Kit Kennedy, erica lewis, Colleen Lookingbill, Trena Machado, Ken Saffran
Live Performance/Reading of Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales
Paxton Gate’s Curiosities For Kids Conference Room, 766 Valencia St.
Evan Johnson, Michele Menard
Full Crawl Schedules:
Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Phase III: 8:30-9:30 pm
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litquake.org/authors-crawl/kornfeld-hannah
Phase III: 8:30-9:30 pm
Downloadable Lit Crawl 2010 Map (pdf)
Aural in the Alley: Ashcan Magazine Presents Write in the Streets
Clarion Alley, Between 17th & 18th
Justin Allen, Sean Logic, Katie Love, Tomas Moniz, Jim Nelson, Doctor Popular, Erin Quinn O’Briant
Dog Is Our Co-Pilot
The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St. @ Gough
Suzanne Carreiro, Tom Corwin, Nancy Levine, Tom McNichol, Cameron Woo
BARtab Presents: Bar Pick-Ups Gone Terribly Wrong (or Right)
Martuni’s, 4 Valencia St.
Meliza Banales, Cindy Emch, Felice Picano, Jim Piechota, Jim Provenzano (Moderator), Kirk Read, Rob Rosen
Babylon Salon Spotlight Reading
Mina Dresden Gallery, 312 Valencia St.
Hannah Kornfeld, Peter Orner, Arthur Patterson, Peter Sheehy, Zach Wyner
Scribd: Where the World Comes to Read
Four Barrel Coffee, 375 Valencia St.
Helen Black, Kate Garmey, Richard W. Humphries, Laura Novak, John Wolpert
Why There Are Words Presents
Artzone 461 Gallery, 461 Valencia St.
Tom Barbash, Catherine Brady, Alice LaPlante, Li Miao Lovett, Valerie Miner, Jason Roberts
Stanford Humanities Panel: Representations of Race and Ethnicity
Creativity Explored, 3245 16th St.
Michele Elam, Saikat Majumdar, David Palumbo-Liu, Bryan Wolf
ZYZZYVA presents LitQuiz,
A literary quiz show in which a panel of writers competes with the audience at large
Elixir, 3200 16th St.
Emcee Howard Junker, Karen Carissimo, Laura Cogan, Drew Cushing, Willy Lizárraga, M.G. Martin, Brooks Roddan
BANG OUT Volume IX - Greatest Hits: Celebrating BANG OUT Reading Series’ Two-Year Anniversary
Double Dutch, 3192 16th St.
Readers: Meg Day, Michelle Puckett, Ami Sheth, Arisa White, and Lindsey Wolkin
Small Desk Press Festival 2
Adobe Books, 3166 16th St.
Lizzy Acker, Dustin Heron, ali lawrence, Sarah Fran Wisby
Quiet Lightning
Gestalt Haus, 3159 16th St.
Quiet Lightning is a monthly submission-based reading series that features an unpredictable mash-up of performance poetry, academic fiction, inspiring rant dreams, and original combinations thereof. We print it all in a zine called sPARKLE & bLINK, available at the show!
New Authors
Morac Restaurant & Lounge, 3122 16th St.
Angela S. Choi, Shilpi Somaya Gowda (canceled), Jason Headley, Vanitha Sankaran, Elena Mauli Shapiro
Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco Presents: Questionable Behavior
Dalva, 3121 16th St.
joshua citrak, Andrew Dugas, Rob McLaughlin, Mary Taugher, Stephanie Vernier
The Courage to Seek Change: Cultivating Inner Strength in Order to Tackle Social Change
Forest Books, 3080 16th St.
Todd Aaron Jensen, Allen Klein, Don Lattin, Nina Lesowitz, Corinne McLaughlin, M.J. Ryan
Narrative Magazine: Five Great Authors Whose Work Has Helped Narrative Become the Gold Standard in Online Literary Magazines
The Lab, 2948 16th St.
Carol Edgarian (Emcee), Will Boast, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Skip Horack, Bridget Quinn, Renee Thompson
San Francisco on Assignment: Counterpoint Press Spins Tales of Television, Religion, Murder, and Revolution from the Bay area and Beyond
Muddy Waters, 521 Valencia St.
Andrew Altschul, Sue Dunlap, Cornelia Nixon, Daniel Pyne, Michael Sledge, Jane Vandenburgh
San Pablo Arts District Presents Lip Service West: True Stories
Casanova Lounge, 527 Valencia St.
Karen Benke, Joe Clifford, Herb Gold, Kelly Luce, Eddie Muller
Significant Objects Presents: Remarkable Stories about Unremarkable Things. PLUS: Attendees square off in the fiercely competitive Object Slam!
Root Division, 3175 17th St.
Rob Baedeker, Chris Colin, Beth Lisick, Miranda Mellis, Katie Williams
Ambush Review Launch Party hosted by Co-Editors Bob Booker & Patrick Cahill. Ambush Review: Poems for the 21st Century
18 Reasons, 593 Guerrero St.
Ana Elsner, Grace Marie Grafton, Jonathan Hayes, Kit Kennedy, erica lewis, Colleen Lookingbill, Trena Machado, Ken Saffran
Live Performance/Reading of Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales
Paxton Gate’s Curiosities For Kids Conference Room, 766 Valencia St.
Evan Johnson, Michele Menard
Full Crawl Schedules:
Phase II: 7:15-8:15 pm
Phase III: 8:30-9:30 pm
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
litquake.org/authors-crawl/kornfeld-hannah
The Expert’s Mind: Across Bodies
Litquake partners with the San Francisco Zen Center for a special edition of their ongoing lecture and performance series, The Expert’s Mind: Across Bodies.
More info at sfzc.org.
More info at sfzc.org.
Tonight! Authors on Sports
Writers hold court on the world of sports, from the infinite variations of major-league baseball to the international phenomenon of the World Cup. Special multimedia presentation by Bay Area sports photographer Michael “Z Man” Zagaris. Book sales and signing to follow. Emceed by Litquake co-director Jack Boulware.
Doors open at 6:30 pm
Admission: $10 in advance at brownpapertickets.com
Alan Black, Howard Bryant, Dan Epstein, Dan Fost, David Henry Sterry, Jason Turbow, and Michael Zagaris
Doors open at 6:30 pm
Admission: $10 in advance at brownpapertickets.com
Alan Black, Howard Bryant, Dan Epstein, Dan Fost, David Henry Sterry, Jason Turbow, and Michael Zagaris
Tonight! All-Memoir Women's Night
There's an excellent reason why so many more memoirs are written by women than men: women are fearless when it comes to exploring life and its myriad joys and challenges. From finding love in foreign lands to struggling with poverty, from being in the sandwich generation to making the perfect brownie, these authors turn inward to provide us with stories that delight, dismay, and always entertain. Emceed by Litquake co-director Jane Ganahl.
No host bar; cash drinks only. 21 and over.
Zoe FitzGerald Carter, Katherine Ellison, Laura Fraser, Frances Lefkowitz, Meredith Maran, Kate Moses, Janice Cooke Newman (new!), and Joan Ryan (canceled)
No host bar; cash drinks only. 21 and over.
Zoe FitzGerald Carter, Katherine Ellison, Laura Fraser, Frances Lefkowitz, Meredith Maran, Kate Moses, Janice Cooke Newman (new!), and Joan Ryan (canceled)
Tuttle, Cameron
Cameron Tuttle is the author of Paisley Hanover Acts Out, an IndieBound 2009 Next List selection, and the bestselling series The Bad Girls Guides. She lives in San Francisco.
Teen Crawl
Litquake presents our first-ever literary crawl for teens. Phase 1 features young authors, Phase 2 features writing workshops for teens, and Phase 3 includes a teen book club.
Download Teen Crawl Flyer (8.5x11)
Download Teen Crawl Poster (16x24)
Phase 1: Teen Authors (1-3 pm)
Join Litquake for readings and discussion with a panel of teen authors who have already realized the dream of seeing their writing published.
San Francisco Public Library’s Koret Auditorium, Main Branch, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco
School groups only—teachers must sign their classes up in advance by emailing teenquake@litquake.org
Phase 2: Writing Workshops (3-5 pm)
Tell your own story. Attend workshops led by some of the organizations working with Bay Area youth to encourage their literary pursuits, including WritersCorps, Streetside Stories, and contributors from the recently published 826 Valencia Young Authors’ Book Project, We the Dreamers.
Zine Workshop: Zines are handmade, self-published magazines that focus on topics from travel to comics. Bring your creativity and express yourself in a zinemaking workshop with Annie Yu, collage artist, poet, and a voracious reader who lives in San Francisco in an attic bedroom with too many books and paper and art supplies. curbside-treasure.blogspot.com
Poetry Workshop: Find your poet’s muse in a workshop with Dawn Marie Knopf, As a writer-in-residence, Dawn has taught poetry at Mission High through Calif. Poets in the Schools and to Harlem high school students through Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Bomb, Black Warrior Review, and Verse.
Inspiration Walk: Join a walking tour of the City Hall area to inspire your writing. Led by Marcella Ortiz, a poet and visual artist who has worked with Writerscorps for two years, this creative writing trek will began at the main library and journey to Opera Plaza where a group poem will be constructed. sfartscommission.org/WC
Shakespeare Mini-Performance: Arriving with scripts, costumes (helmets, swords, shields, and Shakespeare stuff), and various props Gwen Minor, author of Read Aloud Plays: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, will direct a group in their own short performance of death scenes from Shakespeare.
San Francisco Public Library’s Teen Center, Main Branch, 100 Larkin St., 3rd Floor, San Francisco
Phase 3: Not Your Mother’s Book Club (5-7 pm)
A panel discussion and book signing by authors writing fiction for teens co-presented with Not Your Mother’s Book Club™, a monthly literary salon for teenagers in the Bay Area that also offers weekly online author interview, online contests, and in-school author events. For more information check out notyourmothersbookclub.com.
Kristen Tracy, Cameron Tuttle, Katie Williams
Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
Download Teen Crawl Flyer (8.5x11)
Download Teen Crawl Poster (16x24)
Phase 1: Teen Authors (1-3 pm)
Join Litquake for readings and discussion with a panel of teen authors who have already realized the dream of seeing their writing published.
San Francisco Public Library’s Koret Auditorium, Main Branch, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco
School groups only—teachers must sign their classes up in advance by emailing teenquake@litquake.org
Phase 2: Writing Workshops (3-5 pm)
Tell your own story. Attend workshops led by some of the organizations working with Bay Area youth to encourage their literary pursuits, including WritersCorps, Streetside Stories, and contributors from the recently published 826 Valencia Young Authors’ Book Project, We the Dreamers.
Zine Workshop: Zines are handmade, self-published magazines that focus on topics from travel to comics. Bring your creativity and express yourself in a zinemaking workshop with Annie Yu, collage artist, poet, and a voracious reader who lives in San Francisco in an attic bedroom with too many books and paper and art supplies. curbside-treasure.blogspot.com
Poetry Workshop: Find your poet’s muse in a workshop with Dawn Marie Knopf, As a writer-in-residence, Dawn has taught poetry at Mission High through Calif. Poets in the Schools and to Harlem high school students through Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Bomb, Black Warrior Review, and Verse.
Inspiration Walk: Join a walking tour of the City Hall area to inspire your writing. Led by Marcella Ortiz, a poet and visual artist who has worked with Writerscorps for two years, this creative writing trek will began at the main library and journey to Opera Plaza where a group poem will be constructed. sfartscommission.org/WC
Shakespeare Mini-Performance: Arriving with scripts, costumes (helmets, swords, shields, and Shakespeare stuff), and various props Gwen Minor, author of Read Aloud Plays: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, will direct a group in their own short performance of death scenes from Shakespeare.
San Francisco Public Library’s Teen Center, Main Branch, 100 Larkin St., 3rd Floor, San Francisco
Phase 3: Not Your Mother’s Book Club (5-7 pm)
A panel discussion and book signing by authors writing fiction for teens co-presented with Not Your Mother’s Book Club™, a monthly literary salon for teenagers in the Bay Area that also offers weekly online author interview, online contests, and in-school author events. For more information check out notyourmothersbookclub.com.
Kristen Tracy, Cameron Tuttle, Katie Williams
Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
Jonathan Lethem on Chronic City
Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Jonathan Lethem returns to the Bay Area to discuss the paperback edition of his latest novel, Chronic City, which he has described as concerning “a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghostwriter of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange.” Co-presented by San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center.
Admission: $20 general public, $17 JCC members, $10 students, available only through subscription at jccsf.org.
Admission: $20 general public, $17 JCC members, $10 students, available only through subscription at jccsf.org.
Stories on Stage
New to Litquake this year, Stories on Stage brings short fiction from the Bay Area’s brightest literary stars to life on the stage. Stories by Daniel Handler, Daniel Alarcón, and Yiyun Li (the last two on The New Yorker's list of 20 best fiction writers under 40) all circle on love—love lost, love never found, love perpetually out of touch. Directed by Sean San José, co-founder of Campo Santo, the award-winning resident theater company of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts.
Admission: $22.50 in advance (at brownpapertickets.com or by phone 800-838-3006); $25 at the door
Daniel Alarcón, Daniel Handler, Yiyun Li and Sean San José
Admission: $22.50 in advance (at brownpapertickets.com or by phone 800-838-3006); $25 at the door
Daniel Alarcón, Daniel Handler, Yiyun Li and Sean San José
Feminine Wiles
Litquake comes to Noe Valley to present a stellar collection of witty women reading from their most recent books.
Elif Batuman, Marisa Crawford, Katie Crouch, Thaisa Frank, Joyce Maynard, Kaya Oakes, and Shawna Yang Ryan
Elif Batuman, Marisa Crawford, Katie Crouch, Thaisa Frank, Joyce Maynard, Kaya Oakes, and Shawna Yang Ryan
Spiritual Journeys at Marin Osher JCC
Litquake and the Marin Osher JCC present Spiritual Journeys, a conversation between renowned authors that investigates the existential, philosophical and spiritual issues of the 21st century. These leading thinkers will examine the search for a higher spiritual truth and sense of belonging. Moderated by Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club and former religion and spirituality editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Admission: $12 for members of Litquake and Osher Marin JCC, $15 general public; tickets (415) 444-8000 or marinjcc.org
Sylvia Boorstein, Michael Krasny, and Dani Shapiro
Admission: $12 for members of Litquake and Osher Marin JCC, $15 general public; tickets (415) 444-8000 or marinjcc.org
Sylvia Boorstein, Michael Krasny, and Dani Shapiro
Poets 11 2010 Showcase
Litquake is pleased to present the Poets 11 2010 Showcase, featuring a selection of talented and upcoming poets from all over San Francisco’s 11 districts, published in this year’s Poets 11 collection.
Presented in partnership with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. For more info visit FriendsSFPL.org.
Poets include: Lyzette Wanzer, Georgia Gero, Karisma Rodriguez, Miguel Robles, Virginia Barrett, Kathleen McClung, Toshi Washizu, Jose Luis Gutierrez, Pam Benjamin
Presented in partnership with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. For more info visit FriendsSFPL.org.
Poets include: Lyzette Wanzer, Georgia Gero, Karisma Rodriguez, Miguel Robles, Virginia Barrett, Kathleen McClung, Toshi Washizu, Jose Luis Gutierrez, Pam Benjamin
Kidquake: Grades 3-5
SESSIONS ARE FULL
Join acclaimed children’s book authors, illustrators, poets, and workshop leaders for a morning of readings, discussion, and special workshops designed to help fuel the imagination of kids from 3rd to 5th grade.
Assembly, 10-11 am: Mac Barnett, Brandi Dougherty, Jennifer L. Holm, and Douglas Rees
Workshops, 11:15 am-noon: Mac Barnett and Gwen Minor
Join acclaimed children’s book authors, illustrators, poets, and workshop leaders for a morning of readings, discussion, and special workshops designed to help fuel the imagination of kids from 3rd to 5th grade.
Assembly, 10-11 am: Mac Barnett, Brandi Dougherty, Jennifer L. Holm, and Douglas Rees
Workshops, 11:15 am-noon: Mac Barnett and Gwen Minor
Jacobson, Scott
Scott Jacobson is winner of four Emmys for contributions to The Daily Show, and has also written for TV Funhouse and the Adult Swim show Squidbillies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he cares for the borough’s only llama ranch.
SF in SF presents The Maltese Omelette
A live presentation of an old-time radio drama written by Michael Kurland especially for today's audiences, The Maltese Omelette is an homage to Dashiell Hammett and Mother Goose, in the popular "fairy tale noir" genre. Most of the cast have contributed to Kurland's Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. Book sales and signing to follow.
Location is adjacent to Montgomery Street Muni/BART station. We strongly recommend that you attend using public transportation.
Peter S. Beagle, Cara Black, Lori Leigh Gieleghem, Michael Kurland, Pat and Richard Lupoff, Gregory Tiede
Location is adjacent to Montgomery Street Muni/BART station. We strongly recommend that you attend using public transportation.
Peter S. Beagle, Cara Black, Lori Leigh Gieleghem, Michael Kurland, Pat and Richard Lupoff, Gregory Tiede
Kristen Schaal and Friends
Join Daily Show correspondent Kristen Schaal as she celebrates her first book, The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex, along with Scott Jacobson, co-author of the new book Sex: Our Bodies Our Junk; illustrator Michael Kupperman; and actor/writer Ted Travelstead. This evening of live and uncensored humor-sex—or sex-humor—unfolds at San Francisco’s legendary Cobb’s Comedy Club. Book sales and signings to follow. Co-sponsored by Chronicle Books.
Tickets are available online at Live Nation ($15 + service charge)
Tickets are available online at Live Nation ($15 + service charge)
LDM100: San Francisco Celebrates the 100th Literary Death Match
Four years and 99 episodes in the making, we welcome you to celebrate the kickoff of a worldwide Literary Death Match tour, celebrating the 100th-ever episode. Judges will pass centurial judgment on a must-see lineup featuring home-run hitters. Join hosts Todd Zuniga, Elissa Bassist, Alia Volz, and M.G. Martin for a historic night, with a historical finale you'll never forget.
Doors open 6:30 pm
Advance tickets available at LiteraryDeathMatch.com.
Readers: Jason Bayani, David Corbett, Kari Kiernan, and Joel Selvin
Judges: W. Kamau Bell, Mark Fiore, and Jane Smiley
Doors open 6:30 pm
Advance tickets available at LiteraryDeathMatch.com.
Readers: Jason Bayani, David Corbett, Kari Kiernan, and Joel Selvin
Judges: W. Kamau Bell, Mark Fiore, and Jane Smiley
The Complex Societies of Ants and Honeybees
Can human beings really improve our group decision-making by imitating the democracy of honeybees? Are ants truly the highest form of insect evolution? Join Litquake and the California Academy of Sciences as we present two leading experts for a fascinating and thrilling discussion of our planet’s smallest and most complex social organizations. Co-sponsored by KQED, and moderated by KQED’s QUEST TV Series producer Amy Miller.
Mark W. Moffett and Dr. Thomas D. Seeley
Admission: $15 adults, $12 seniors and Academy members; Reservations: (800)794-7576 or calacademy.org/lectures
Mark W. Moffett and Dr. Thomas D. Seeley
Admission: $15 adults, $12 seniors and Academy members; Reservations: (800)794-7576 or calacademy.org/lectures
The RADAR Reading Series: Litquake Edition
The monthly literary series throws a Litquake shindig, featuring totally awesome readings by first-time novelists, radical playwrights, shoplifting poets, and riot girl historians, and followed by a Q&A hosted by Michelle Tea, who will hand out homemade cookies to all who participate. Promise.
Chinaka Hodge, Tao Lin, Sara Marcus, and Beth Pickens
Chinaka Hodge, Tao Lin, Sara Marcus, and Beth Pickens
Lit on the Lake—Celebrating East Bay Writers
Litquake travels east—to Oakland—to celebrate the East Bay’s concentration of literary eminence. This event features six acclaimed novelists at the Lake Chalet Seafood Bar & Grill on the shores of Lake Merritt. So come hear some brilliant literary readings and save the toll fare.
Melanie Abrams, Elaine Beale, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Jacqueline Luckett, Lisa Braver Moss, and Kristin McCloy
Admission: $5-$10 donation to Litquake entitles you to order from the restaurant’s low-price happy hour menu all night long
Melanie Abrams, Elaine Beale, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Jacqueline Luckett, Lisa Braver Moss, and Kristin McCloy
Admission: $5-$10 donation to Litquake entitles you to order from the restaurant’s low-price happy hour menu all night long
The Art of Narrative Nonfiction
Much is made of the artistry required to write a masterly novel. But what of nonfiction? What are the techniques for turning a garden-variety biography into one that wins both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize? Tonight's panel, featuring award-winning nonfiction authors, will explore that question and more. Moderated by David Ewing Duncan, bestselling author of seven books, including the recent Experimental Man: What One Man’s Body Reveals About His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World.
Tamim Ansary, Frances Dinkelspiel, Richard Rhodes, and T.J. Stiles
Tamim Ansary, Frances Dinkelspiel, Richard Rhodes, and T.J. Stiles
Kidquake: Grades 6-8
SESSIONS ARE FULL
Join acclaimed children’s book authors, illustrators, poets, and workshop leaders for a morning of readings, discussion, and special workshops designed to help fuel the imagination of kids from 6th to 8th grade.
Assembly, 10-11 am: N. H. Senzai, Jon Voelkel, Pamela Craik Voelkel, and three students from the Creative Writing Department at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (SOTA)
Workshops, 11:15 am-noon: D. Scot Miller and students from the Creative Writing program at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts
Join acclaimed children’s book authors, illustrators, poets, and workshop leaders for a morning of readings, discussion, and special workshops designed to help fuel the imagination of kids from 6th to 8th grade.
Assembly, 10-11 am: N. H. Senzai, Jon Voelkel, Pamela Craik Voelkel, and three students from the Creative Writing Department at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (SOTA)
Workshops, 11:15 am-noon: D. Scot Miller and students from the Creative Writing program at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts
McSweeney's Fall Harvest
McSweeney's yields its fall harvest. Join authors as they read from their respective new books out this fall from the San Francisco-based publisher. The authors will also have a conversation with McSweeney's longtime editor (and author himself) Eli Horowitz and answer questions from the audience.
Hilton Als, Adam Levin, Peter Orner, and Darin Strauss
Hilton Als, Adam Levin, Peter Orner, and Darin Strauss
Virtual Reality: The Effect of Fiction on Your Mind
What do you really know about the characters you meet on the page? Are you sure it’s healthy to visit imaginary worlds—even if they come from someone else’s imagination? And how well do authors know the characters they invent? These questions and yours will be addressed by our panel: a neurologist-novelist and expert on how we know what we know, the most prolific reader in the Northern Hemisphere, a novelist famous for the intensity of her characters, an authority on the cognitive aspects of fiction, and a memoirist who has experienced mental illness and whose father was a great American writer.
Admission: $12 general public, free to members of Mechanics Institute; reservations at (415) 393-0100 or rsvp@milibrary.org
Robert Burton, Elaine Petrocelli, Michelle Richmond, Blakey Vermeule, and Mark Vonnegut
Admission: $12 general public, free to members of Mechanics Institute; reservations at (415) 393-0100 or rsvp@milibrary.org
Robert Burton, Elaine Petrocelli, Michelle Richmond, Blakey Vermeule, and Mark Vonnegut
Flight of Poets
Wine and poetry have always made a delicious duet. At this reading, curated by Tess Taylor and Hollie Hardy, internationally renowned sommelier Christopher Sawyer pairs six talented local poets with six great wines carefully selected to illuminate their work.
Doors open 6:30 pm; tickets available at the door only.
21 and over
Camille T. Dungy, Robin Ekiss, Paul Hoover, Ada Limón, Zachary Mason, Christopher Sawyer, and Matthew Siegel
Doors open 6:30 pm; tickets available at the door only.
21 and over
Camille T. Dungy, Robin Ekiss, Paul Hoover, Ada Limón, Zachary Mason, Christopher Sawyer, and Matthew Siegel
Lit & Lunch: Carolina de Robertis presented by Center for the Art of Translation
The Center for the Art of Translation hosts Carolina De Robertis in the opening reading of their annual Lit & Lunch series at 111 Minna. De Robertis will discuss translating the contemporary Chilean novella, Bonsai, which was named one of the Ten Best Translated Books of 2008 by Three Percent.
Kidquake: K-2
SESSIONS ARE FULL
Join acclaimed children’s book authors, illustrators, poets, and workshop leaders for a morning of readings, discussion, and special workshops designed to help fuel the imagination of kids from kindergarten to 2nd grade.
Assembly, 10-11 am: Jon Agee, Lisa Brown, Maya Christina Gonzalez, Laura Regan, and Belle Yang
Workshops, 10-10:45 am: Peter Lilenthal, and Dawn Marie Knopf
Assembly, 11:15 am-12:15 pm: Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, Nadia Krilanovich, Truong Tran (canceled), Amy Novesky, and Deborah Underwood
Workshops, 11:15-noon: Jon Agee and Laura Regan
Join acclaimed children’s book authors, illustrators, poets, and workshop leaders for a morning of readings, discussion, and special workshops designed to help fuel the imagination of kids from kindergarten to 2nd grade.
Assembly, 10-11 am: Jon Agee, Lisa Brown, Maya Christina Gonzalez, Laura Regan, and Belle Yang
Workshops, 10-10:45 am: Peter Lilenthal, and Dawn Marie Knopf
Assembly, 11:15 am-12:15 pm: Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, Nadia Krilanovich, Truong Tran (canceled), Amy Novesky, and Deborah Underwood
Workshops, 11:15-noon: Jon Agee and Laura Regan
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