On February 12, I attended a reading and talk at Mills College by the elegant, distinguished Joyce Carol Oates. It was a memorable evening. Oates spoke in…
“We always have to defend the imagination against idiots.” In the cramped auditorium of UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, Ursula K. Le Guin sat…
In May of 1968 there were massive protests in France. They are often characterized as “student” protests in an attempt to limit the wider dimensions…
I walked a couple of miles to a gallery downtown to hear some people read from their memoirs. These are writers with an ink-stained past…
I had the pleasure Tuesday of attending a Litquake event at the legendary Tosca Cafe featuring Rosie Schaap, author of the memoir Drinking With Men,…
Hidden in the depths of the Cesar Chavez Center at San Francisco State University, S.P.E.A.K.’s Open Mic Night finds its home at The Depot, a…
When I first met Major Jackson, it was at an event that I like to call, with the dishonesty of hindsight, the sycophantic shitshow sonnet. We…
Obscene, indecent, and raunchy are all words that come to mind when one describes the meaning of bawdy, and Bawdy Storytelling embraces them all in shocking and…
The independent bookstore was packed, standing room only, with people standing outside the doors and watching from behind glass walls. Another glass wall overlooked the…
I was gliding on a silver monorail through some worn-out neighborhoods in the East Bay. It was like a monolithic form of surveillance. I was…