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.)