In October, 2007, I moved to San Francisco and discovered, in my neighborhood, a local literary festival called Litquake.  The event I stumbled on was the litcrawl where, in over two dozen venues along Valencia, Guerrero in the mission, poets, memoirists, playwrights, journalists and novelists hung out reading their work in bars, bookshops, libraries and restaurants. The pace was quick enough that if you found anything not to your taste you only had to walk a few doors down to the next venue. The writers were mostly newly published, a little edgy, sometimes ragged around the edges, but good. “Home,” I thought, glass of wine in hand, “I’m home.”

The next year I meant to go again, but was instead swept up in volunteering for the Obama campaign, and obsessing over the biggest election of my lifetime.  But this year, to be sure I didn’t miss it again, I volunteered to help out behind the scenes.  And obviously I’m spilling the inside scoop here and now.

Black, White and Red: Litquake’s Book Ball. 

Friday night.  Two other women and I are carrying trays of sushi out to the party and circling the gothic interior of the Herbst Theatre’s Green Room.  Neither  has worked as a server before so they’re surprised by the lack of eye contact.  “No one looks at me.” 

“That’s normal, I think,” I tell them, having worked for six months on a cruise ship once, and having worked for two weeks at a spagetti factory in Seattle.  And compared to cruise passengers (or spagetti patrons) San Francisco’s literati are a relatively mellow and low maintenance bunch.  “Thank-you,” many say. One man asks if I’m volunteering and when I say yes, he says, “bless you!”

I forgot to wear black to this ball so I’m the only person in the room wearing bright blue.

The musical billing has a little bit of everything for everyone.  It begins with a jazz ensemble, and later there are opera singers, and then a hip hop deejay.  It takes until the third act anyway for San Francisco’s people of letters to imbibe enough Roshambo to forget their inhibitions and venture out on the dance floor.  At 5’3’, I’m at eye level with a lot of low cut dresses and moving cleavage.

“Sushi, anyone?’

I speak to one guy who just moved here from Sacramento.  When he says he’s a writer I ask him who his favorite writers are he says Dickens, Mark Twain, and a few other male writers.  When he asks me who I read I say I like Dickens too, and Margaret Atwood.  I don’t get much further.  “Oh, you like chick lit,” he says.

       “Chick lit?  Margaret Atwood?”

Since I worked as a teacher for four or five years, this lust to instruct is still hidden in my bones and has an unpleasant tendency to surface at parties.

I proceed to sketch out the basic plotline of a Handmaid’s Tale and ask if it sounds more like “chicklit” or a horror novel. He seems impressed, but I have to finish busing tables. I swallow the last of my free litquake beer and gather cups.  But the coals of my feminist outrage have been fanned and I wonder what the rest of the week will hold.

Note: I know I’m breaking Lea’s rules for OS by posting iphone photos, but it’s the camera that best fits under in the pocket of my waitressing skirt.  I’m an embedded reporter after all...Please excuse the blur.

Off the Richter Scale: Memoir, Poetry, Science Fiction

Saturday.  I’m not a volunteer but I’ve come to listen.  I arrive at the Koret auditorium of San Francisco’s main library too late for most of the memoirists but catch all of the poets, all of whom are amazing.  A woman in the front keeps wildly waving a sign every time the writer has only one minute to go.  It’s distracting. They have only between six and eight minutes to share their work and somehow this doesn’t seem like enough.  I’m hungry for more, but for a poetry reading, this is a good thing.

Since I recently  read a biography of the science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr, aka  Alice Sheldon, I’m interested to note that all of the science fiction writers are men.  One of the first people who reads chooses one of those passages where a male writer describes a female that he has withering contempt for, but he does so with sexually aggressive/suggestive language.  This style of writing, in general, makes me cringe, but especially when he gets to the part about wanting to crawl into her pantsuit, I have flashes of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and I for an instant want to jump out of my skin and out of the room.  I look around, and people aren’t laughing.  It’s possible that a noirish tone was intended but hard to convey in context.  Or, sometimes six to eight minutes is pretty long, and maybe I’m not the only one to wish the woman would wave her one minute sign a little more distractingly. Peter S. Beagle also reads and S.G. Browne after him, and both are rich with irony, romanticism and humor.  Relief.

Be afraid! Evil Queens, Menacing Dykes, and Secret Gay Agendas

Saturday night.  At Joe’s Barbershop in the Castro I’m carrying chairs up from the basement and setting them up around the barber chairs.  Joe’s was recently voted the best barbershop in San Francisco and Joe in person is salt-of-the-earth friendly and warm.

My fellow volunteer, a high school English teacher is also fun.  He can begin sentences like this, “one night I was doing ecstasy with the guy who is now Armistead Maupin’s husband,” and when I tell him that would make a great first line of a short story, he says, “oh I’ve got more where that came from...'One night I was walking along the beach naked with the guy who is now Armistead Maupin’s husband'…”  I love him immediately, even after he tells me that he’s in a reading group and can’t bear it when the people in his group pick books written by women about relationships.

“I’m here to hand out programs,” I tell myself, “not to advance my secret feminist agenda.” 

The writers are as outrageous as you could hope for, and more. My favorite is Marcus Ewart who reads an essay published in 1966 by Time Magazine called “The Homosexual” with a hand puppet.  Yet despite the puppet’s best efforts the essay isn’t quite as funny as it could be, perhaps because 1966 isn’t that long ago, and the anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death lingers in the air.  Fortunately or unfortunately, the poet Justin Chin reads a piece that is so scatological and outrageous at the end, that the somber points lingering from the Time essay are left behind in the audience’s hollow gasps of collective astonishment.

Poets in the Pews

Monday night.  It’s possible that I’m getting event fatigue already.  I arrive at Grace Cathedral hungry, having forgotten to eat dinner. It’s also cold. My friend from the Secret Gay Agendas night is there and still has his terrible toothache, and I give him advil from my purse. It’s stormy outside and everyone complains about how hard it is to find parking. I walked there from work, so the only thing I need to park is myself.

I’m sitting at the table to hawk books of poetry.  For some reason I don’t watch the poets. I listen to them.  I see the poets as being in competition with the venue.  Will the mood be set by the poet’s words or reading, or by the cathedral?  For the most part the cathedral sets the tone. It’s hard to win over those stone cold walls.  The poetry is good, but I can’t hear all of it.  No one is flashing the one minute card for these readers who are, for the most part, younger and more male than the group of poets who read at the library. But the group is diverse. One African American poet reads, and another poet is deaf and grew up in St. Petersberg, Russia. 

Many people leave early to get back to their cars.

We sell four books of poetry by one poet, Jericho Brown. He says, “did I win?” Because we told him we’d made it into a competition.

“You did.”

When we give him his money he says, “oh good. this should almost cover the cost of my parking.”

Litquake’s Barbary Coast Award: An Evening Honoring Amy Tan

Wednesday night.  It's fun to receive a free ticket (for volunteers) to sit in the Herbst Theatre and see Tan win an award amid so much love and appreciation. There isn’t a lot to say except that Amy Tan is the cutest author I’ve ever seen.  She keeps her little dog under her arm throughout the program, even at the end when she gets on the stage to play the tambourine with the band to Mr. Tambourine Man.  The dog looks a little scared with the tambourine slapping her side so close to his head, but not unused to such events.

Original Shorts: Survival of the Fittest

Thursday night.  On my way there I got a text message from a friend that said, “r you busy? Hope you're not wasting time reading books by women about relationships!”

I  grew up in a house full of brothers. Two of them and one of me. I used to tease them because their music collections were nearly entirely made of up of men and male bands. If women write only to women and men write to both men and women (“universal”) then no wonder books by women have trouble being recognized or staying in print.  Maybe it’s not just about feminism as a grand concept, but feminism on a small scale as in, is there a place for me in this world?  If men I know, even many who are writers, won’t even read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, why bother to write to write for anything more than a female audience?

A friend recently found a list a publishing house had printed a list of the 100 best books published in the 20^th century.  How many were written by women?  One.  Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.  (And I have to say here that Mrs. Dalloway irks me as a book that’s good but more womanish than Orlando. Woolf was a major influence on Kafka and Latin American magical realism, yet in America we still caricature her as that big nosed depressed womanly intellectual.  She’s more than that.)

She also noted that on the same publisher’s list of 100 greatest novels not one was written by a person of color, of either gender.

And for decades, conservative writers like John Leo have been assuring us that multiculturalism was dismantling all that was true, universal, eternal, white and male about literature.  Maybe not so fast as he feared.

Still, I enjoy this event at the Varnish Fine Art Center.  I’m passing out programs again.  Hungry again.  Five out of the six writers reading are white.  Also, five out of the six writers reading are women.

People arrive late because of the traffic.  Four blocks away President Obama’s cavalcade has arrived in town. Someone will be arrested that night for planning to hurt him, but we don't know this then.  Streets have been blocked off.

It’s muggy outside so we leave the door open.

Maybe because the event is made of short short stories, they’re more concise, fast paced and gripping. Each holds my attention.

The last reader, Chelsea Martin, a 23 year old from Oakland, in her story, keeps repeating, “but I don’t want to talk about relationships.”  She reads that when she tells someone what she has eaten for breakfast they reply “so how are things going with your boyfriend?”

It makes me laugh because she’s smart and sees what’s coming.

A few years ago at a party a friend of mine from school came up to me and said, “laura, it’s so cool that you write for nothing.”

It made me laugh, but I’ve remembered that.  People attend events like Litquake for various purposes.  Mine is to find reasons to believe good writing has an end, an audience, a place in the world, and that it isn't always for nothing that writers write.