This week San Francisco’s literary festival, Litquake, is celebrating 20 years of supporting writers, publishers, bookstores and the literary arts here in the Bay Area. The festival’s co-founders, Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl are my kind of people: Journalists by trade, they dared to dream beyond the newsroom and share their love of the writing life with their immediate community. As their cohort of writers grew to include novelists, memoirists, biographers, sexperts, technologists and performance poets, the festival grew and grew, blossoming into its current incarnation as a 10-day event with international offshoots of the culminating night’s promenade, LIt Crawl.
As a frequent participant in the festival, almost since its inception, I can’t thank Jack and Jane enough for sticking their necks out: This is the big week of the year for the Bay Area’s literary community. Litquake and Litcrawl have become starting places for some of our writers but they are also the testing and resting ground for experienced writers needing to recharge their batteries. As a mid to late career writer, I fall into that latter category. Litquake has always been a place for me to try out new ideas and styles of writing. As writers with day jobs and those who do community work know, it’s easy to get drained, out of sorts and out of touch with our practice. Litquake is my time of the year to reset and reclaim my writing life, a time to remind myself (and sometimes others): I’m a writer.
During Litquake past, I’ve read previously published and never-to-be published work; I’ve read biography, memoir and poetry. I’ve also organized and curated readings for causes. This year, I was in a position of supporting writers I worked with during several seasons of Litquake’s The Elder Project, a free community writing program offered to seniors. We worked on polishing their memoirs and talking about tools for developing protected writing time. Also at this festival, I wore my organizer/curator hat, but just for one night only: I hosted a conversation with the author David Talbot who is making his comeback with a new book following a stroke he survived in 2017. We held that event at one of the The City’s best bookstores, Bird & Beckett, which specializes in all kinds of books and regularly presents live jazz. Litquake is also a time when we celebrate the new publications and anniversaries of our friends and colleagues: Congratulations to Alvin Orloff who has a new memoir set in San Francisco and on the queer underground, and to Manic D Press, celebrating its 35th year of publishing great books. As an added bonus, I’ve been invited to read my own work at a gathering of people involved in the trade known as music writing, my oxymoronic paid profession since I was a teenager, though that has been changing as I shift my focus to other subjects. And that’s one of the things I love about Litquake. Jack and Jane have allowed me the space and dignity to grow as a writer, never insisting I stay in my lane. They understand that writing is a fluid vocation. For a writer who doesn’t wish to be categorized or caged, variety has provided not only the spice, but the key to a still-evolving, and if I’m doing it right, revolutionary writing life.
Filed under: Arts and Culture, Book news, Books, Lit Crawl, Litquake, San Francisco, writing, writing life
Denise Sullivan 