Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the cofounder of 100 Word Story, leads a literary tour of San Francisco, a city of rollicking rogues and home of the Beats.
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Grant Faulkner likes big stories and small stories. He lives in the Bay Area and is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including the Southwest Review, Green Mountains Review, and PANK. His essays on creativity have been published in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and the Writer. He recently published a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures (Press 53, 2015), two of which are included in The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queens Ferry Press, 2016). His book of essays on creativity, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Prompts to Boost Your Creative Mojo, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books in the fall of 2017.
When I first came to San Francisco as a young English major during my spring break in 1987, I knew nothing of the Bay Area’s literary history. I didn’t know that the young bootstrapping Jack London had determinedly chiseled himself into a writer in nearby Oakland, or that Allen Ginsberg’s famous “Howl” reading had riled the literary world (and its censors) in San Francisco in the 1950s. I hadn’t yet read Dashiell Hammett’s noir novels, nor Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (Ramparts Press, 1968), nor Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (Harper & Row, 1978). And I had no idea that Gertrude Stein had said, “There’s no there there,” about Oakland (if only she could see the “there there” now).
I didn’t know that so many writers had lived out their insurrectionary impulses and beliefs in San Francisco—that for many authors the Bay Area served as a place of refuge, escape, and even salvation from the rest of America.
I had only one thing on my list. A friend told me that if I did just one thing in San Francisco, I had to go to City Lights (261 Columbus Avenue), a bookstore and publishing house owned by the doyen of the Beats, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
I’d never be quite the same again. When I walked through the doorway, I didn’t just see rows of bookshelves; I felt drawn in, seduced, by the exotic call of the ideas and stories that seemed as if they were part of the air itself. The wooden floors were creaky and uneven, each room a mysterious cavern, a haven. I picked up books published by presses I’d never heard of, books that felt alluring and dangerous, as if they’d prick me with new thoughts. I greedily bought as many as I could afford, and then went to Vesuvio Cafe, the bar across the alley from City Lights where the Beats themselves had thrashed through ideas over too many drinks, and I immersed myself in the lawless careening of their words, enthralled by an edgy, searching, incandescent expression I didn’t know was possible.
Thus began my love affair with the roguish spirit of the Bay Area and its literary tribes of misfits, dropouts, and seekers. If you haven’t been to San Francisco, ban the popular notion of it as a bastion of tie-dyed hippies with streets full of cute cable cars and postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s much more than that. It’s a place spawned by the raucous boom-and-bust spirit of the Gold Rush, a place where people have always exuberantly and recklessly searched for different kinds of fortunes. It’s a city that disregards the need for stability, resting precariously on a restless fault line, inviting gate crashers who strive to push the limits of being and shake up all forms poetry and prosody.
“It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco,” said Oscar Wilde. It’s a city for those who feel “other,” who feel lost, and then find themselves in the Bay Area.
Literature Born in the Streets
Silicon Valley has moved into San Francisco in many ways—“invaded” or “encroached,” some might say, driving up rents and driving out bohemians—but the rollicking energy of former days is alive and well in literary festivals like Litquake, an annual orgy of readings and discussions that sends literary tremors throughout the city for nine days each October. Events take place in unlikely spaces—chapels, bars, and hair salons—and everything culminates in a bacchanalia called Lit Crawl, a pub crawl of readings that wends through the teeming streets of the Mission District on the final Saturday night.
What’s nice about Litquake is that while it includes a healthy lineup of big-name authors, its fundamentally a celebration of local authors and the maverick spirit of the city. Founded in 1999 by San Francisco writers Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl, Litquake is now the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast, and it’s grown to Austin, Seattle, New York City, Iowa City, Los Angeles, Portland, London, and Helsinki.
Similarly, Oakland has spawned the Oakland Book Festival, a festival that captures the unique character of the quickly evolving East Bay, which has in some ways become the Bay Area’s version of Brooklyn, a haven for artists priced out of San Francisco. It’s not a festival designed around book tours, as many festivals can be, but serves as an exploration of ideas on topics related to Oakland’s past, present, and future, with the goal of encouraging debate. Each year’s festival, which takes place in Oakland’s City Hall in May, has a different theme. This year’s theme is “Equality and Inequality,” following “Labor” and “Cities.”
The Bay Area offers so many literary events and festivals that I can’t list them all. Beast Crawl, a version of Lit Crawl for the East Bay, takes over Uptown Oakland for one night every July with more than one hundred and fifty writers who have roots in the East Bay. The San Francisco Writers Conference brings together best-selling authors, literary agents, editors, and publishers from major publishing houses every President’s Day weekend to help emerging writers launch their professional writing career. And then the Bay Area Book Festival, now in its third year, features notable authors from across the country for a two-day festival in early June in downtown Berkeley. Of note, each year the festival constructs Lacuna, an outdoor library that is assembled with fifty thousand books, all available to take for free, and always empty by the end.
Redefining Readings
You might say the Bay Area itself is an ongoing literary festival, though. Bookstores are crowded with authors on book tours, and there’s a farrago of ongoing series that break the boundaries of conventional readings and invoke a communal spirit that transcends them.
Quiet Lightning, a submission-based reading series, has produced more than a hundred shows over the last seven years—in locations as varied as night clubs, a greenhouse, a mansion, a sporting goods store, and a cave. The series is named Quiet Lightning because it aspires to create “that feeling of what was in the room when someone has stopped talking, but everyone has been listening and paying close attention,” says Evan Karp, founder of the series. Quiet Lightning readings are always bursting with people, yet exist in a hush of focused attention. One person reads, and then the next, with no banter or introductions in between, creating a focus on just the work itself and a feeling that the entire evening is an experience of a single continuous piece of art. Of special note, Quiet Lightning publishes a corresponding book of writings from each show.
Other reading series are less quiet, but pack their own definition of lightning. Porchlight, a monthly storytelling series that takes place at the fabulous Verdi Club (2424 Mariposa Street), features six people telling ten-minute stories without using notes. Like Quiet Lightning, cofounders Beth Lisick and Arline Klatte don’t invite just famous storytellers, but strive to create a space for the voices of all sorts of characters of the city. Storytellers have included school bus drivers, mushroom hunters, politicians, socialites, sex workers, social workers, and even me.
Then there’s the ribald, bawdy Shipwreck, which is billed as “San Francisco’s premier literary erotic fanfiction event,” and takes place on the first Thursday of every month in the Booksmith (1644 Haight Street), one of San Francisco’s best bookstores. Shipwreck thumbs its nose at the sanctimony of conventional literary events by “destroying” classic works. A few weeks before each event, six local authors are selected and assigned to write an erotic story from the point of view of a character from a classic novel. Their pieces are then read aloud to the audience while the authors watch from the stage, trying to show no signs of which piece is theirs before voting begins. In December, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was erotically plumbed, and this January, Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Little House on the Prairie will be undressed.
Writers With Drinks is a monthly literary variety show with a raucous cross-genre approach held each month at the Make Out Room (3225 22nd Street) in the Mission, which hosts many literary events. Writers With Drinks features six readers from six different genres, but the show isn’t just about readings—it’s one part stand-up comedy, one part erotica, one part rant, and one part something else. I go just to hear the hilarious host, Charlie Jane Anders, spin fictitious biographies of the authors. And then there’s plenty of drinking, of course.
I sometimes sneak out of work for the Lunch Poems series that former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass started at the University of California in Berkeley’s sumptuous Morrison Library (101 Doe Library). When I first heard that the Mechanics’ Institute Library (57 Post Street) was a private library, I imagined it as an elite bibliophile’s country club, but it’s anything but that. It hosts a diverse range of cultural events including author readings and conversations, the CinemaLit Film Series, and the oldest continuously operating chess club in the United States (its plump leather chairs are also perfect for afternoon naps, as I learned when I worked nearby). The San Francisco Poetry Center (1600 Holloway Avenue) was founded in 1954 with a small donation by W. H. Auden, and it now puts on thirty public readings, performances, and lectures each year on the San Francisco State University campus and at various off-campus venues. If you can’t go to a reading, dive into its American Poetry Archives, a collection of five thousand hours of original audio and video recordings documenting its reading series.
Other engaging series include Why There Are Words, a monthly reading series put on by Peg Alford Pursell that fills the Studio 333 gallery in Sausalito every second Thursday. And then I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the series I cohost with Jane Ciabatarri, Kirstin Chen, and Meg Pokrass, the Flash Fiction Collective series, which showcases writers in San Francisco’s bustling flash fiction scene at the funky Alley Cat Books (3036 24th Street). Many call San Francisco the hub of flash fiction because so many writers in the Bay Area have found a literary home in the shorter side of stories.
San Francisco Bay Area City Guide
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A City of Bookstores
If you can tell who a person is by their shoes, then you can tell what kind of city you’re in by its bookstores. The big box bookstores were never welcome in the Bay Area, and even though the advent of online book sales and high rents plunged a dagger into some of my favorite indie bookstores, the Bay Area is still a flowering garden of bookstores with distinct personalities.
There’s the ragamuffin artiness of Dog Eared Books (900 Valencia Street) in the Mission, a bookstore that represents the “old Mission” to me, before the Internet swooped in with its shiny sheen in the late nineties. It’s the type of bookstore where you never know what you’re going to find. I’m as likely to leave with a new small press collection of poetry as I am the latest novel featured in the New York Times Book Review. Borderlands (866 Valencia Street), which is just down Valencia Street, specializes exclusively in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Its adjoining café is my favorite place in the Mission to dally over a book or scribble in my journal, and you’ll often see a group of people writing assiduously in a Shut Up & Write meetup there.
Green Apple (506 Clement Street) looks upon the Richmond district like an avidly curious and beloved kooky professor. Its floors creak with each step, and if a whiff of dust rises when you take a book off its shelves, it seems like magical reading fairy dust. The Booksmith (1644 Haight Street) offers comfy browsing in the Haight, where I love to thumb my way through the breadth of its magazine rack, and the old San Francisco anarchist spirit is alive and well in the stacks of radical literature at Bound Together Bookstore (1369 Haight Street) right down the street.
I now live in Berkeley, though, so I spend many hours combing the shelves for biblio surprises as my kids roam the children’s section at one of the Pegasus (2349 Shattuck Avenue) stores in the East Bay. Moe’s Books (2476 Telegraph Avenue) has been a venerable indie institution since 1959 on Telegraph Avenue, just down the street from UC Berkeley. Moe’s possesses all of the labyrinthine jumble of the best used bookstores, yet the stacks feel carefully curated.
It’s impossible to name all of my favorites. There’s Mrs. Dalloway’s (2904 College Avenue), a bookstore that could be cast as the charming community bookstore in a movie, in Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood. Books Inc. (601 Van Ness) opened in the Gold Rush days, and now has eleven stores throughout the Bay Area and hosts an overflowing calendar of readings and a number of cool programs for kids. If I’m in Marin, I like swinging by the famous Book Passage (51 Tamal Vista Boulevard), which probably hosts the most author events and classes in the Bay Area. If I’m south of San Francisco, I make a point to dip into Kepler’s (1010 El Camino Real) in Menlo Park. I often go on mini writing retreats in Petaluma, and take breaks to peruse the books in Copperfield’s (140 Kentucky Street) and chat with its dedicated staff of book lovers.
And then my favorite place for sumptuous journals and whimsical, fantasy writing supplies—such as wax seals for my letters or ink for my quill pen—is Castle in the Air on Berkeley’s Fourth Street. Someday I hope to take a calligraphy class there.
Landmarks and History
In its early days San Francisco was the scene of fierce newspaper competition, and some of its earliest chroniclers were writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. Twain is attributed with coining the famous line, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” It is cold because of the city’s fog, which is so prominent it even has its own Twitter account, the humorous @KarlTheFog.
The East Bay is home to much Jack London lore, including Heinold’s First and Last Chance (48 Webster Street), a favorite hangout of London’s, appropriately located in the Jack London Square shopping complex in Oakland. London studied there as a teenager and sketched out two of his most acclaimed novels, The Call of the Wild (Macmillan, 1903) and The Sea-Wolf (Macmillan, 1904). Next to Heinold’s is London’s Cabin, where London lived during the nineteenth century Klondike Gold Rush.
Dashiell Hammett came to San Francisco soon after London died and created the classic sleuthing detective, Sam Spade, the protagonist of The Maltese Falcon (Knopf, 1929), which Hammett dreamed up while working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. San Francisco looms large in much of Hammett’s work, where he paints the city as a paradise for drifters and grifters. Today, you can take a walking tour devoted to Hammett’s time in San Francisco, and visitors can stroll by the apartment building located at 891 Post where the fictional Spade—as well as Hammett himself—lived.
John Steinbeck grew up in nearby Salinas, which houses the National Steinbeck Center (1 Main Street) and is just seventeen miles from Monterey, where Cannery Row (Viking Press, 1945) is set. Eugene O'Neill, the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, ended the meanderings of his restless life when he chose to live on a 158-acre ranch called Tao House near Danville (now the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site at 1000 Kuss Road), where he wrote The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.
If you’re a Beat aficionado, traipse up to the Beat Museum, which is easy to make out in San Francisco’s North Beach with its huge black-and-white painting of Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Part store, part shrine, you can peruse hard-to-find Beat titles by everyone from Kerouac to Hunter S. Thompson to Charles Bukowski.
The Beats existed alongside other hippie writers, such as Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, and a shifting group of merry pranksters. Brautigan handed out poetry on the streets when he first moved to San Francisco and later became involved in its sixties countercultural scene. He gave away a poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” to the Diggers, a group of radical anarchists that included Peter Coyote, a Bay Area author and actor, who distributed it throughout the city. The poem predicts a time when “mammals and computers live together in mutual programming harmony,” presciently illustrating the tech and mammal culture that flourishes in the city today.
Armistead Maupin’s celebrated series Tales of the City captured the eighties, and his stories were among the first popular books to deal with AIDS. Nan Boyd’s Wide-Open Town (University of California Press, 2003) charts the history of gay San Francisco, and is a good complement to Randy Shilts’s arresting history of AIDS, And the Band Played On (St. Martin's Press, 1987). Michelle Tea’s Valencia (Perseus Books Group, 2000) is a lively chronicle of lesbian life in the early nineties of the Mission District.
Several Bay Area poets have served as U.S. poets laureate, including Robert Hass and Kay Ryan. To celebrate the region’s heritage of poets, Downtown Berkeley features a “poetry walk,” a series of “stepping stone” plaques engraved with lines of one hundred and twenty-eight poems by poets who lived, worked or influenced the area, including poems from Ohlone Indians, Mexican rancho era song/poets, poems from Japanese and Chinese internment camps, and contemporary wordsmiths. If you’re in Oakland, you can pause to ponder longtime Oakland writer Ishmael Reed’s famed poem, “Let Oakland Be a City of Civility,” which was written for Jerry Brown’s 1999 Oakland mayoral inauguration and is emblazoned on a mural on the side of General Liquors in Reed’s neighborhood.
Many other landmarks—such as Gertrude Stein’s residence, the location of the “Howl” reading, and Philip K. Dick’s apartment (Dick graduated from Berkeley High in the same class as Ursula K. Le Guin)—are included in the Literary City, an interactive literary map of the Bay Area created by San Francisco Chronicle book editor John McMurtrie.
Cafés and Watering Holes
San Francisco is a city of cafés, bars, and bookstores. In fact, USA Today once reported that San Francisco has the highest per capita consumption of both alcohol and books. I still make a point of taking occasional pilgrimages to City Lights, located in the North Beach neighborhood, which stretches away from the financial district with festoons of Italian cafés, pastry shops, and fine restaurants. Every time I go, I make sure to spend time reading and writing in the nearby Caffe Trieste (601 Vallejo Street)—the West Coast’s first European-style coffee house—where Francis Ford Coppola wrote much of The Godfather, and where writers such as Alan Watts, Gregory Corso, and Kenneth Rexroth gathered amidst the clutter of photographs that hang on the walls.
After buying my books at City Lights, I dip into Tosca (242 Columbus Avenue), a bar across the street, where writers like Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, and Hunter S. Thompson have sipped martinis to the sounds of legendary opera on the jukebox alongside celebrities like Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage.
Other writerly watering holes include John’s Grill (63 Ellis Street), which Dashiell Hammett immortalized in The Maltese Falcon. It hasn’t changed since then: It’s still a place for a good thick steak and a martini. The Library Bar (562 Sutter Street) inside Hotel Rex hosts the Books and Booze Happy Hour Book Swap, which meets to exchange books over drinks. In true speakeasy fashion, you’re required to knock at Bourbon and Branch’s (501 Jones Street) unmarked wooden door and provide the secret password (“books”). After reciting the correct code, you’re treated to the main library, lined from floor to ceiling with books from the Prohibition era. And then there’s the new Octopus Literary Salon (2101 Webster Street) in Oakland, which is plentiful with book launches, readings, and fine beer.
Every neighborhood in San Francisco is dotted with cafés, if not crowded with them. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1989, I would often spend an entire day traipsing from one café to the next along Valencia from 24th Street to 16th Street—a corridor that now houses fine restaurants and trendy shopping, but still holds the funky artsy textures of yore. Most of the cafés I adored are gone, but I still like meandering through my old hood and stopping to read and write at Ritual (1026 Valencia Street) or making my way among the bookstores and Mexican markets along 24th Street to end up at the famous Philz (3101 24th Street), my go-to coffee shop throughout the Bay Area.
If you’re in Potrero Hill, then you have to go to Farley’s Coffee (1315 18th Street) to indulge in coffee and a plentiful selection of magazines (its tagline “Community in a Cup” says it all). The Blue Danube Coffee House (306 Clement Street) is a great place to hole up with a book in the foggy Inner Richmond. And Café du Soleil (200 Fillmore Street) gives a European vibe to the otherwise gritty Lower Haight.
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Literary Institutions With a Whimsical Flare
The Bay Area has spawned a number of renowned literary organizations that have put their mark on the world by taking a more experimental and playful approach to the written word. Just as Silicon Valley gave birth to Open Source, the Bay Area resists forming itself around literary fortresses and hierarchies, and gravitates more to a spirit of art for art’s sake (which often produces the best art, as it turns out).
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), located in Berkeley, where I serve as executive director, grew from the idea that you don’t need to get an MFA or read how-to books to write a novel—you become a novelist by writing a novel. With that gate-crashing spirit—and an encouraging, whimsical community rooting you on—nearly 500,000 people sign up for our programs each year, including 80,000 kids and teens in our Young Writers Program. It is the biggest literary event in the world, with chapters in approximately 700 locations around the world, and it has given rise to thousands of published novels, including award winners and best-sellers. In fact, more novels have been penned in National Novel Writing Month than in all of the MFA programs in the United States combined.
Likewise, 826 Valencia embraces a DIY whimsicality to make writing fun and demystify the process. Located in the heart of the Mission—at 826 Valencia Street—it was started by Dave Eggers in 1999 and has since grown to have chapters in seven cities across the nation. Its Pirate Supply Store is a true literary landmark, where you can buy a pirate’s hook or eye patch to fund free programming for the kids being tutored in the learning center in the back of the building.
Oakland has its own version of an 826 center, Chapter 510 & the Department of Make Believe—“a made-in-Oakland writing center (and magical bureaucracy)” as they put it. You can purchase official “Permits to Make Believe,” “Licenses to Dream,” and “Creative Manifestation Filing” in the store to support their tutoring and creative writing workshops.
There are newer organizations—and new ways to engage with writing—that continue to blossom across the Bay Area. Left Margin Lit, a literary arts center in Berkeley, opened its doors in 2016, and aspires to be what the Loft is to Minneapolis or Grub Street is to Boston: a literary hub and learning center. Likewise, the Writing Salon has offered creative writing classes in the Bay Area since 1999, and San Francisco’s famous Grotto, a shared workplace for writers, features classes taught by many of its esteemed fellows.
Lit Camp just might be my favorite writing retreat and conference in the world. It offers amazing faculty (think Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners) in the rustic luxury of Mayacamas Ranch in Napa Valley for four days each May. It is affordable, and its warm, inviting casualness inspires an ongoing community of writers to work together afterward. It is more than a writing retreat, though. It hosts the monthly Writing & Drinking Club, a monthly meetup for writers at the Scholar Match/McSweeney's offices in San Francisco, and puts on a reading series (with free beer) every other month.
An Eclectic Mix of Bookmakers and Publishers
I’ve been told that the Bay Area is second only to New York as a publishing center, but that comparison doesn’t do service to the area’s unique range of presses. While it has large publishers such as HarperOne and is the home of titans of educational publishing such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill, the eclectic mix of literary publishers is what distinguishes the Bay Area.
Some say San Francisco is the center of fine printing and bookmaking in the United States. The premier letterpress publisher Arion Press offers weekly tours on Thursdays so that you can witness one of the last bookmaking facilities of its kind. Visitors can see how type is cast from hot metal in its foundry, watch pages being made up in the composition room and printed by letterpress, and learn how a book is bound by hand, from sewing to backing to casing in.
If you want to actually learn the art of making letterpress books hands-on, San Francisco Center for the Book offers four hundred workshops annually, spanning the range of bookbinding and letterpress printing techniques, from traditional methods to cutting-edge printing techniques and experimental book forms.
Manic D Press brings a different kind of artisanal energy to the fore, focusing on works shunned by traditional publishers, ranging from the late Justin Chin’s poetry collections to Beth Lisick’s early story collections to underground pop culture books and children’s books themed around punk rock. As a nostalgist for the upstart punk energy of the San Francisco of yore, Manic D is one of my favorite publishers.
Nomadic Press operates with a similar street sensibility, publishing underground and marginalized voices through an annual journal, seasonal chapbooks, translations, and special issues in print. Nomadic Press is far-ranging, as its name might imply, hosting regular reading events and performances. It’s a small press with a large presence.
Berkeley’s Counterpoint Press includes three imprints—Counterpoint, Shoemaker & Hoard, and Soft Skull Press—and publishes an array of edgy, fresh voices. Seal Press, which publishes “books that inform women’s lives,” is located nearby in the Berkeley office of Perseus Books Group, which also owns the major West Coast-based distribution companies Consortium and Publishers Group West, and is one of the nation’s largest publishers of independent imprints. Cleis Press, located just a few hops away, is the largest independent sexuality publishing company in the United States, focusing on LGBTQ, BDSM, romance, and erotic writing.
Chronicle Books, an indie publisher since San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, publishes some of the most colorfully inviting books on anyone’s bookshelf, with a list that runs from art, design, and pop culture, to children’s books, calendars, and fabulous Moleskine notebooks. Make a point to visit their vibrant, fun store at their offices on San Francisco’s Second Street.
McSweeney’s has been publishing an impressive range of books, journals, and multimedia material since Dave Eggers founded it in 1998. Outpost19 provides “original provocative reading,” as its tagline promises, and publishes the annual anthology, New Writing From the Golden State, featuring short fiction and nonfiction by emerging and established authors. Heyday Books, a nonprofit publisher in Oakland, publishes approximately twenty-five books per year dedicated to celebrating and probing the diverse range of California’s heritage. The aforementioned City Lights publishes everything from poetry collections to literary translations to books on social and political issues. Fiction Advocate, founded by Rumpus books editor Brian Hurley, is an emerging local press that hunts for strange and exciting books that might not get published otherwise.
The hub of all of this exquisite and challenging roguery is Small Press Distribution, a nonprofit in Berkeley that helps offer book distribution, information services, and public advocacy programs to hundreds of small publishers.
Literary Magazines
As you might guess, the Bay Area is an ever-expanding hub of eclectic writing (how many times can I use the word “eclectic” ...but there’s no better word for the Bay Area).
There are highly regarded lit-mag institutions like ZYZZYVA, which has published established authors and new voices with a particular San Francisco bent since 1985, and the Three Penny Review, founded by Wendy Lesser in 1980, but there are also plenty of new, emerging magazines.
Stephen Elliott founded the Rumpus in 2008, with the idea of addressing what’s missing in literary and cultural matters on the Internet, and it’s gone from young upstart days to being viewed as its own type of institution (and sells one of my favorite writing mugs on the Internet emblazoned with advice from a famous Dear Sugar column by Cheryl Strayed—“Write Like a Motherfucker”).
Francis Ford Coppola isn’t just a filmmaker and a vintner, he also publishes Zoetrope: All-Story, a quarterly journal founded in 1997 that is distinguished by a different designer for each issue, including such names as Julian Schnabel, Laurie Anderson, and Wim Wenders. McSweeney’s publishes the highly regarded the Believer, edited by authors Vendela Vida and Heidi Julavits. It is highbrow, unpredictable, yet accessible and fun. Narrative Magazine has built a widespread digital presence through the fine writing it has published since 2003.
There are also several compelling journals published by the creative writing departments at Bay Area colleges and universities. Fourteen Hills is put out by graduate students in San Francisco State University’s creative writing department. Eleven Eleven is published through the MFA Writing program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. 580 Split is the literary magazine published by Mills College in Oakland, and the University of San Francisco publishes Switchback.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my own journal of little stories, 100 Word Story, which I publish with Lynn Mundell and Beret Olsen. And I’ve just become acquainted with Foglifter, a queer journal “that queers our perspectives” with writing that explores the sometimes abject and sometimes shameful—honest, revelatory writing, in other words. And I hope to submit to Zoetic Press’s cool new mag, NonBinary Review, in 2017, which takes a piece of classic literature and invites authors to submit short stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art that interact with the work and extend its meaning.
Bring Your Crayons
The best way to absorb the literary moods and history of the city is to walk through its patchwork of neighborhoods that are nestled in forty-three steep hills. Despite the incline of its hills, it’s a walkable city, and I’ve spent many a day walking from one neighborhood to the next, one bookstore to the next, one café to the next.
"San Francisco itself is art...every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal," said longtime San Francisco writer William Saroyan.
Indeed, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf, 2010), Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (HarperCollins, 2012), Frank Norris’s McTeague (Doubleday, 1899), Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (J. B. Lippincott, 1965), J. T. LeRoy’s Harold’s End (Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2004), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (Harper and Row, 1985), Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions From San Francisco Bay (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1969), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (Knopf, 1976), Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) illustrate the many stories that weave through the Bay Area.
It’s a “viewtiful city” with a “thousand viewpoints,” said Herb Caen, the city’s famous chronicler. Or, as Eggers put it, “There's no logic to San Francisco generally…. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.”
So be sure to bring your box of crayons when you come.