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Literary Arts
Falling In and Out, Together
Often times, young characters in novels are given one of two voices: the voice of a smart-mouthed comedian or the voice of a wise, pure and enlightened young adult. Either way, these characters usually serve to discredit or make a fool of bad acting grown-ups. Yannick Murphy’s characters in Here They Come thankfully do not fall in either of these traps. This is a tight, fast-moving story, almost wholly devoid of judgmental narration or overtly sensitive treatment of the behavior of children. More
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Literary Arts
Barry Gifford's Do the Blind Dream?
Bay Area writer Barry Gifford has long straddled the line between literature and cinema, writing screenplays as well as fiction that others have turned into film. He's perhaps best known for his association with filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch turned Gifford's characters Sailor and Lulu into the 1990 Palme D'Or winner Wild at Heart. Seven years later the two co-wrote the heavily underrated Lost Highway. More
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Literary Arts
San Francisco-based Morbid Curiosity lets average folks tell their own true twisted tales.
Loren Rhoads, a new mother at 41, doesn't look very morbid. With perky, fifties-era glasses and neat silver hair cut short, Rhoads is publisher and editor of the annual review Morbid Curiosity. Entering its ninth year (and ninth issue), the magazine hews true to its title: anything that's weird, sick, scary, inexplicable or macabre is fair game for its writers, all who tell true first-person tales. More
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Literary Arts
San Francisco's annual lit festival has gotten big, fast. Now a week long, it's filled with sponsors, panels, booze, music, film, and, oh yeah, lots of author readings.
A good friend of mine has on his refrigerator door cartoonist Ted Rall's classic "Everybody's Happy Nowadays," in which young, healthy, cheerful, culturally sensitive San Franciscans browbeat a skeptic until he caves in and says, yes, he also loves The City. Stories about San Francisco's Litquake festival in the local press often remind me of the Rall cartoon, with breathless writers on the verge of exhorting us, too, to say it: "We're literary! We're literary! We're splendidly literary!" More
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Literary Arts
David Ulin's The Myth of Solid Ground
Los Angeles writer David Ulin understands that earthquakes, like hurricanes in the Caribbean and the midnight sun in the Arctic, are not just external phenomena but live deep within the bones of Californians. More
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Literary Arts
Already made up your mind how to vote in next month's election? These titles are still worth reading for the next four years, and beyond.
By the time you read this, all three presidential debates will be history and the 2004 election will be two weeks away. It's probably too late to change your mind about your choice for president, but it's never too late to broaden your political horizons. More
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Literary Arts
Why do so many California kids love poetry? Perhaps it's CPITS, the nation's largest poets-in-the-schools program.
The last twelve months have marked major anniversaries in the Bay Area's poetry community. City Lights Bookstore turned 50 last year, and San Francisco State University's Poetry Center reached that milestone just recently. Nearly as old but less internationally celebrated is California Poets in the Schools, a 40-year-old program that arguably has done more than City Lights and the Poetry Center combined to bring poetry to the people, namely to an estimated half a million California schoolkids. More
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Literary Arts
The main media advocate for San Francisco's homeless and poor has been raising hell and making poetry for 15 years.
San Francisco's Street Sheet, a monthly newspaper about the homeless, often written by the homeless, and available from homeless vendors on street corners, is turning 15 this year.
For a street paper, it's a graybeard that has spawned dozens of imitators. Its message is unfiltered and unflinching: homeless people deserve dignity, civil rights and shelter, and anything or anyone seen working at cross purposes to that agenda suffers the paper's wrath. More
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Literary Arts
California Poetry and City of One
Past and present. Classic and modern. Forgotten and future. For a broad taste of California's poetry of the last 150 years and for the next 50, two books together are essential.
The first is California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, a sweeping compendium of old favorites, lost gems and difficult decisions co-edited by Dana Gioia, Sonoma County resident and chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts. The second, City of One: Young Writers Speak to the World, commemorates the tenth anniversary of WritersCorps, an organization that fosters creative writing, arts and literacy among poor and at-risk youth. More
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Literary Arts
Sure, you have a novel in you, but can you write 50,000 words in thirty days? Join Chris Baty's Nanowrimo project and find out.
For some people November means a slow descent into winter. For others it's turkey and football. For a growing band of giddy writers, November is synonymous with late nights, bad prose and group therapy.
Their guru is 31-year-old Kansas City native Chris Baty, who dreamed up an absurd literary exercise while working for an obscure San Francisco dot-com in the midst of the late-nineties boom. The task Baty and friends set for themselves was to write 50,000 words in 30 days, no matter how embarrassing the result. Now a freelance writer in Oakland, he blames the masochistic project on the era... More
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