You are sitting in the children’s section of a bookstore being read to by an enthusiastic man in a Civil War-era costume. You are enraptured by the narrative and giggle when the man does voices. This was children’s story time at one of your favorite bookstores. Or, it was a Thursday night Shipwreck reading at The Booksmith on Haight. There is free booze. And a lot of fucking. Weird fucking.

click to watch Shipwreck: The Great Gatsby

For the last year, Casey Childers and Steven Westdahl (of Write Club acclaim) and Amy Stephenson (from The Booksmith) have been presenting an erotic fan fiction series in which characters from your favorite classic novels do unspeakable things to each other. It’s bawdy and so much more. Six guest writers present six characters in a mélange of heady entanglements. Each piece is read to the audience anonymously by Steven (reader extraordinaire). At the end of the night, the audience votes for their favorite. It’s risqué enough that guest writers often take pseudonyms, and intelligent enough that certain phrases will lodge in your head like a wad of gummy sputum.

This show was the Tournament of Champions, featuring six returning winners from previous bouts. There was Alan Legitt (a five-time Shipwreck winner) raining General Sherman’s seed over Rhett Butler like a bald eagle’s tears. Ivan Hernandez as Aunt Pittypat with an assemblage of pink dicks. Carolyn Ho giving a set of Velvet Drapes sweet Rhett Butler anal kisses. Spencer Bainbridge took third place with Rhett Butler’s alimony deposition and a tongue that writes the letters J-E-F-F-E-R-S-O-N-D-A-V-I-S. Second place went to Mac Barnett with the invention of a sexual act disturbingly called The Cotton Gin. The Champion of Champions was Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who resurrected Margaret Mitchell’s lost chapter portraying Scarlett O-Hara’s tryst with a Tyrannosaurus Rhett, and the subsequent editorial commentary with regard to this bizarre chapter (“Love that he’s from Charleston. Does he have to be a dinosaur…”).

Check out the Litseen Shipwreck archive

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Christopher Patrick Steffen is a bartender in San Francisco. He wrote the short story collection Thank You for Supporting Our Dreams and the novel The End of All Things Planned For.