Litquake

Bookworm that I am, I’m ashamed to say that this was my first year attending Litquake’s annual festival. Thanks to an email from Goodreads about their Lit Quiz event during the festival, I was reminded that Litquake was coming up. I finally took the time to study their program book which contained 80+ pages of events that spanned a period of 9 days all over the Bay Area. My husband and I went to the following events and had a great time:
Litquake’s «Quinceanera» 15^th Anniversary Party @ Z Space — What a party! You had a Mariachi band serenading partygoers, a DJ playing hits throughout the decades, men and women donning tiaras and dancing to the music, servers passing out Hornitos Tequila cocktails and shots, and people enjoying slices of Bi-​Rite Creamery cake. This was not a free event, but the $ 15 per person admission fee was worth the tequila drinks, music and cake! Bookworms know how to party!
Sausage and Syrah @ 4505 Meats’ Commissary — My husband and I are big fans of 4505 Meats’ sausages, so when I saw that they were hosting a Litquake event at their commissary, I signed up right away. For $ 20, you get the sausage making demo, sausage tastings and a glass of wine. I thought that was a good deal. When we got to the commissary though, we were treated to a feast! Platters of their own house made Mortadella, Sweetbreads Terrine, Winter Sausage, Pork Pâté and Chicharones were waiting for us. They even served a couple of different kinds of wines (Syrah and Pinot Noir) that were donated by a local winery. You could go back for seconds too on the wine! Yay! After people have gotten their fill of the food and wine, Ryan Farr demonstrated sausage making and even had the audience participate in the different steps of sausage making. We tried the sausage he made in two different ways. One as a sausage patty that has been fried and sliced in bite size pieces with a salad of pickled daikon and carrots, and another as smoked. Both were good! I ended up buying his book on sausage making which he tailored for home cooks. The night ended on a sweet note, with a soft and delicious cookie from Dough & Co.
Goodreads Lit Quiz @ McTeague’s Saloon — This event actually fell on my birthday, so my husband and I had my birthday dinner at Zero Zero on SoMa, and then took a taxi to McTeague’s. When we got there, the bar was full of Giants fans. The quiz was supposed to start at 7 pm, but the game was still going on and we had to wait until it was over. The Goodreads organizer kept giving us drink tickets during that time and thanking us for sticking around. The quiz didn’t start until after 9 pm and ended around 11 pm! A little late for me, but we had a lot fun. It was a very challenging quiz, but you get to do it in a group, so you can put your heads together to answer the questions. The questions ran the gamut from children’s literature to sci-​fi to nonfiction. There were prizes for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place winners. Our group did not win as we bet all our points for the final question. :(We had a blast though. Would definitely participate in this again!
I can’t wait to see what Litquake has in store for readers and writers next year! They do have events all year, so I’ll be on the look out for more interesting events in the meantime!

You’ve got to hand it to the enterprising people of San Francisco. For one week each year the founders of this event (Jane Ganahl and Jack Boulware) manage to turn the entire City into a literary salon. Like the French salons of the 17^th and 18^th century this salon aims to both please and educate. Unlike the earlier salons (possibly), it also aims to get people hammered and possibly hooked up. Literary people.
There’s really nothing quite like Litquake (except in the other cities they’ve extended it to). The events program reads like a book in itself, and if you can’t find anything here that you want to participate in perhaps you should reconsider your life. A teeny sampling from the 150+ events featuring 850+ authors in 2011 included «Serving it Forth: A feast of food writing», «Writing in California prisons», and «Words on the waves» which took place on a private houseboat pier. Most events are completely free, many take place in bars, some outside in parks… really, all over the city and a bit beyond.
Litquake culminates in the Litcrawl, a full-​on «Occupy Valencia Street». Almost every establishment is overtaken with an evening of Litquake-​related events and participants hoof it from one event to the next, drinking, and crowding in to catch the «programming» of their choice.
My personal don’t-miss recommendation is the annual pairing of Litquake and Porchlight (not free) which has been held everywhere from the old Mabuhay Gardens (original North beach punk club) to the Herbst Theatre. There’s usually some big names on the marquee and like all Porchlight events, a hell of a lot of hilarious stories. This year, I also caught Chelsea Handler (not free) who donated all proceeds directly to Litquake, officially sealing the deal as my favorite San Francisco-​friendly comedienne.
Amongst that giant of a program, everyone should be able to find something that interests them. Give it a whirl and see if it’s your thing.

It’s better than Christmas. Thank you San Francisco, Litquake is my favorite time of the year. A week long indulgence of finding new writers for me to talk about and admire. It all comes down to Litcrawl, the drunken pub/​authors crawl around the Mission District. I shall not be drinking but dodging my fellow writing comrades.

Litquake, you are amazing! I wish I didn’t discover it last minute and had a chance to explore more. But just the idea is amazing and makes a choir of nerds sing. You led me to more fabulous things like Bawdy Storytelling. And more! Yay literary crawl!

another one of the things that makes san francisco so freaking great. essays and poetry (sure, some good and some bad) in bars and other venues (sure, some good and some bad) all over the city. Kudos to the folks that put this together and the authors that participate.

Litquake is one of the greatest things about San Francisco – having an amazing literary festival is what makes a city civilized if you ask me. Miami has its book fair, and so does LA and New Orleans. Litquake solidifies the bay area, already rich in a writing tradition, on the national scene. There are a lot of heavy hitters in this town – Tobias Wolff, Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, Bharti Mukherjee, Dave Eggers, and so on – yet you’d never see some of them except for events like Litquake.
I’m definitely biased. I’m an unfamous local writer who has been reading at Litquake since it began in 2002, and every year the festival gets bigger, more innovative and more fun. These events are really a who’s who of contemporary writing, and you can feel the creative energy thrum at these events. Writers are so solitary by nature that when you get a room full of them, they feed off on another, delivering beautiful poetry and prose amid fun exchanges and audience participation.
A couple other reviewers here mention attending readings that were less than perfect, and I concede that. But the cool thing about Litquake is that it’s homegrown, grassroots, run almost entirely by volunteers. It’s by and for people who simply love writers and writing. This year, there were 460 readers at over a hundred events, and writers are just the kinds of people to show up late, drink too much and read over the time limit, so some problems are inherent in the system. Remember, this isn’t organized by the LA Times staff or with New Yorker money. This is of, by and for San Francisco, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I hope it lasts forever and that it doesn’t become corporatized. Go to the Litcrawl, if you can attend only one evening, and you’ll be converted.

This year marked my first experience with Litquake and I’m glad I went. A couple friends and I kicked it off on the closing night with Phase II at Bruno’s, to see the SF Chronicle’s «Black, White and Read All Over». While it wasn’t exactly what I expected, I was not disappointed. Part of this could have been the rock star seating we were able to grab (probably because we went straight for the tables and not the bar to get well-​lubricated like most of the aging liberal hippies surrounding us… our secret? Get drunk before hitting the Litcrawl — it saves both dollars and time). But I’m sure most of it was because of Mark Morford, the darling rebel of
, and quite possibly the most amazing man ever. He turned out to be above and beyond what I expected. Intelligent, put-​together, assertive, hilarious, endearing and super sexy, even for being, what, 41?
After quick pictures, it was off to Amnesia for a music/​words kind of fusion as part of Phase III. We arrived some 20 minutes before it even began and were informed that it was at capacity. But we formed a queue and waited, and minutes later they let an additional 10 of us in. Score! I didn’t know what to expect — all I was there for was to see Jesse Michaels (former frontman of the legendary band Operation Ivy). This event ended up featuring a pretty random assortment of writers — some interesting, some not, but all clearly very diverse across topics, which is what I appreciate. Our emcee was the co-​founder of Litquake, which made it seem that much more awesome, like we were at the popular table in the lunchroom. Jesse Michaels and his telling of a ficticiuos hot yoga/​dining experience was great great great (and he delivered it right on). Blag Dahlia (from the Dwarves) was an unexpected speaker, and his delivery was so casual and had us busting up. We met him hours later walking down Mission with a bag from Amoeba, and he was kind enough to talk with us and give away a CD.
Anyway, I couldn’t have had a better first experience. Litquake is good people and incredibly enriching. I love the proximity of the venues and the variety of the talks, and the way it puts faces to names. Also, it’s made such a large city feel a bit more intimate and synergized. Minus one star because I had such a difficult time trying to decide what talks to go see.

my third year in attendance, and always a good time. there’s always a good mix of authors – some that just blow you away, and some that just blow. one thing i realized this year (more so than ever) was how different reading is to listening. the author’s delivery matters ever so much!
anyhow, i adore getting boozed up and literary, so LitQuake = happy roshni. gosh, i love living in a city that can host such an event and pack every bar in a neighborhood for it!

I attended Litquake for the first time this year since engaging an evaluation of the SF-​area lit scene, and it’s pretty much what I thought it’d be: an organic array of authors and topics grown too big for it’s pants, though some sincere pieces can be found in between the chaos of too much content, in too many different places.
The two events I witnessed are perfect examples of this dichotomy: the Feisty Femmes panel at Bubble Lounge on Friday night, and the somewhat infamous festival-​concluding Lit Crawl. I liked the classy and busy-​but-​not-​too-​crowded situation of the Femme panel; while the hectic, overlapping phases of good stuff in the short sprints of the Lit Crawl left me unsatisfied.
If I do it again, I’d attend the opening night, maybe another mid-​week panel, and for the Lit Crawl, pick one place out of the many, get there early and stay late.

Perhaps you could call me a stalker, but I don’t really give a shit. You see, I am mildly obsessed with SF Gate writer Mark Morford and it was because he was moderating a discussion with Dharma Punks author Noah Levine that I decided to attend the discussion at The Roxie.
I was pleasantly suprised at the size of the event, the popcorn and the topics. As always Mark was whitty, dazzlingly and insanely hot (um, but hello, please do not wear such tight clothes, I am afraid it will render you unable to procreate, and I want to have children), and the conversation spanned the realm of George’s Bush’s personal Karma to the integration of celibacy into one’s life to tame the urge to perpetrate evil on others through sexual insensitivity. Um, yeah, I know.
Anyway, three cheers to LitQuake for putting together such a great show, and 17 cheers to Mark Morford for being such a fucking asshole, it’s his profession and I love it. The Noah Levine guy had me going for the first half of the event, but by the end I felt that his arguments were evidencing some holes… so I’m going to hold off on the whole Buddhist conversion thing for at least a few more days…

So I went to a Litquake event tonight. It started 35 minutes late, but none of the organizers seemed to care… and I busted my ass to get there at 8 pm.
When it finally started, the PA system was so loud it was painful. They finally adjusted that slightly. The third reader was… very amusing… so amusing that she continued to amuse her table of friends in the back of the room for most of the next guy’s reading. Yes, she was very funny, but it’s someone else’s turn now… but they all kept talking through the next person’s reading, to the point that it was so distracting that I left.