Catch Towers of Gold on TV

 After a quiet interlude, I am about to do a bevy of events for Towers of Gold. I will be on CBS’ Mosaic show this Sunday Nov. 15 at 5 am. Yes, you read that right: 5 am.

Mosaic is a weekly show on spirituality. This week the host, Rabbi Eric Weiss, brought in guests to discuss Jewish Book Month. I talk about Towers of Gold and how social networking is changing publishing. Howard Freeman, talks about the programs and resources offered by the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco, and Joel Harris, owner of the wonderful independent bookstore, Clayton Books, in Clayton, CA talks about the bookselling environment.

I will be at Congregation Beth David in Saratoga on Tues. Nov 17 at 7:30 pm

I will be at the Marin Chapter of the California Writers Club on Sunday Nov. 22 from 2 to 4 pm. It is held at Book Passage in Corte Madera. I will be talking about how to make your memoir interesting to people other than just your family.

Then I will rush to the new Books, Inc on Fourth Street in Berkeley. The store is hosting a wine tasting and author meet-and-greet for local book groups. Free wine! Free talk! Lots of my favorite authors will be there, including Meg Waite Clayton, Michelle Richmond, Annie Barrows, and more.

I will be talking about Bay Area Jewish History with Fred Rosenbaum and Stephen Dobbs at the Osher Marin JCC on Wednesday, Dec. 2 at 7 pm.

On Thursday, Dec. 3 at 1 pm, I will do a slide/lecture for the Outdoor Art Club in Mill Valley.

For a complete events listing, look here.

Writers at Work. Or is it Play?

San Francisco Magazine sent out a call Thursday for working writers to show up at the Coffee Bar on Mariposa Street for a photo shoot. The idea was to portray writers during a recession: there aren't any jobs so these people have plenty of time to peck away at their laptops during the day.

There were a few ironies at the photo shoot, including the premise, as many of those who came are bestselling, successful authors. At least one was downright rich. Robert Mailer Anderson, author of Boonville, is married to Nicola Miner, whose father was the co-founder of Oracle.

But the mood was festive and the dedication to the written work sincere.

The above picture was the first shot. I can't identify everyone but I will try. From far left is Carol Edgarian, co-editor of Narrative Magazine and the author of Rise the Euphrates. I don't know the guy next to her but then comes Jane Ganahl, Michelle Richmond and Peter Orner. They look like they are having fun. Then there is the hard-working Stephen Elliot. Is he posting something to his new Rumpus website? The man next to him is the actor Reed Kirk Rahlmann. I have never met him but I admired his decision to have a large goblet of red wine while he wrote.

As we all stood around trying to look casual as the photographers snapped our photos, we exchanged a lot of news. Here are some tidbits:

Mary Pols, the author of Accidentally On Purpose, just out in paperback, will see her book made into a TV series this year. Jenna Elfman is going to play a single mother who hooks up with a man 15 years her junior for a one-night stand. The result: an unexpected pregnacy.

I also met Jaimal Yogis, whose new memoir, Saltwater Buddha, about surfing, looks great. He is about to travel up the Pacific Coast, surf, do readings at local bookstores, and tweet about his travels. Allison Hoover Bartlett is gearing up for the release of her narrative, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. It comes out in September.

Others at the shoot: Andrew Foster Altschul, the books editor of the Rumpus, Peter Plate, Molly Antepol, Janis Cooke Newman, Andy Dugas, Eric Puchner, and more.

Readings, Readings, and More Readings

“A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.”

That will be the theme of a reading tonight at 7 pm Orinda Books, part of a tour of a group of women authors. Michelle Richmond, Susan Freinkel, Brenda Webster, Jessica Barksdale Inclan and I will be reading from our respective books. We will also talk about the power of stories to change, to create self, to shape history and memory.

We are all members of WOM-BA, or Word of Mouth Bay Area. (weird name, I know, and a long and not-particularly interesting story.) It’s a group of women who have all published. We get together monthly and through e-mail to talk about writing.

This tour – and there will be two other segments with different authors May 7 and 14^th at at Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco – was conceived and put together by Elizabeth Stark. She is the author of Shy Girl and energetic organizer who also writes a very entertaining blog.

Please come.

I also want to put in a plug for the Northern California Book Awards, which take place Sunday April 19 at 1 pm at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. The awards nominate authors in various categories, including fiction, creative non fiction, translation, non-fiction, poetry and children’s book. Dozens of authors are coming to celebrate the work of Northern California writers.

Towers of Gold has been nominated in the general non-fiction category.

Wisteria, Poetry and Literary Tidbits

The wisteria outside my door is just coming into bloom

April 1 is the start of National Poetry Month. Norton has put up a fun website where you can listed to poets like Robert Pinsky and Kim Addonizio others read their own poems as wall as other people’s poems.

A lot of Bay Area writers have new books coming out:

Joan Gelfand ‘s newest book of poetry, A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, has just been released.

Catherine Brady’s latest collection of short stories, The Mechanics of Falling, has also just come out. Brady is a San Francisco resident and the stories are set largely in the city.

Jill Wolfson, a former Mercury News reporter who now lives in Santa Cruz, has a new YA novel. It's called Cold Hands, Warm Heart, and it tells the story of two teenage girls, one a fit gymnast who has a terrible accident, and the other a girl born with her heart on the wrong side. When the gymnast's heart is transplanted into the chest of the other girl, interesting things happen.

Brian Eule’s narrative nonfiction book. Match Day, was released in early March to coincide with the day that medical students learn which hospitals have chosen them to be residents. Eule went to Stanford and lives in Northern California.The New York Times wrote about his book and the process.

Michelle Richmond has written a wonderful essay about how both San Francisco and the South feel like home to her, and how those feelings show up in her fiction.

My book, Towers of Gold, is back on the San Francisco Chronicle best seller list at #6.

I have also started to blog at SFGate in a section called "City Brights." The San Francisco Chronicle has asked various members of the community -- artists, politicians, lawyers, sport enthusiasts, etc. to write blogs. (A case of a paper laying off its own reporters and getting content for free. More on that later.) My latest entry is about the grind and glory of the book tour.

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

San Francisco magazine has a great oral history showing how the intersection of Bay Area technology and grass roots politicos united to help Obama win.

The “storytellers” include David Talbot, a founder of Salon, Markos Moulitsas Kuniga, founder of Daily Kos, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org, and many more.

Michelle Richmond, author of No One You Know and The Year of Fog is interviewed at The Rumpus, the new on-line literary magazine conceived by writer Stephen Elliot.

Brenda Webster held a book release party Sunday for The Vienna Triangle, a novel that explores the inner circle of Sigmund Freud. (lots of intrigue and passion, too.) The Chronicle gave it a strong review.

Alan Rinzler reminds authors to be nice to their editors.

Galley Cat interviewed Paul Malmont, whose novel Jack London in Paradise has appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list the last two weeks. He talks about how using Facebook and Twitter helped him draw crowds to his readings.

Speaking of crowds, I hope I draw some when I speak about Towers of Gold tonight (Jan. 27) at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park at 7:30 pm and on Thursday Jan. 29 when I speak at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco at 7 pm. For those of you in the East Bay, I will be speaking at the Stanford Women's Club annual Books on Review around 10 on Thursday. Find more info here.

Dirty Words, more Dirty Words, and Even more Dirty Words

There were a shocking number of women – and men – in red silk corsets at Sunday night’s Litquake fundraiser. The theme was “Dirty Words: An Evening of Smut” and many participants dressed in the spirit of the evening.

The Twilight Vixen Revue – a group of four queer women who dance burlesque – started out the evening by modeling fashions by Stormy Leather, the place to go for all your dominatrix needs. This was sexual titillation at its most refined –beautiful women wearing leather corsets, silk underwear, and high heels. One even wore a mask and carried a whip.

The emcee for the evening, Kirk Read, got into the spirit as well, with black leather pants that showcased a large brass zipper from front to back. His red silk bustier (named the Sergeant Corset, retail price $365.95) had a masculine, military touch – a few rings and buckles that can be put to some other erotic use.

But the real focus of the evening was words – Dirty Words. The organizers got the title for the fundraiser from the new anthology edited by Ellen Sussman, and many of the contributors read their pieces.

The scope of the dirty words were surprising. Did you know James Joyce was a dirty old man? Well, I guess the censors of the time did, since Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1920s. Alan Black, the author of the memoir Kick the Balls, read, in his delightful Scottish burr, a 1909 letter Joyce wrote to his wife and muse, Nora Gallagher Joyce. It can’t be repeated here but I will say that Joyce was remembering certain intimate acts with Nora and encouraged her to be even dirtier. I swear he used that word over and over again.

Michelle Richmond, the author of the newly-released No One You Know, dressed demurely in a blue denim scoop-necked dress. She gave her proclivities away, though, by wearing red, open toe high heel shoes. “Whenever I read about sex I feel compelled to dress like I am on the way to Sunday school,” Michelle told the crowd. “Whatever I know about sex I learned on the Baptist Youth bus in Tennessee.”

Stephen Elliot read an excerpt from his new memoir, The Adderall Diary. While it is definitely a Stephen Elliot book – he read a scene where he went to a bondage spot and was videotaped as a submissive bottom – the book apparently also explores the murders that have tangentially touched Elliot's life. He shared some girlfriends with a man named Sean Sturgeon, the one-time best friend of self-professed wife killer Hans Reiser. Sturgeon at one point confessed to killing eight people – a lie, as it turned out. Unfortunately, Reiser did kill his wife, Nina, who had left her husband for Sturgeon. Elliot touches on all these complicated relationships in an article in Salon, but they didn’t really come into play during his reading, which was characteristically funny and uncomfortable for those into vanilla sexual practices.

The fun went on. Kim Addonizio read her piece from the Dirty Words anthology. I never knew necrophilia could be so funny. Helena Echlin's demure British accent made her lusty words somehow more respectably lusty. Daniel Handler ended the evening by reading from his 2000 novel, Watch Your Mouth. Dressed in a brown suit with white shirt in tie, his brown crew cut graying slightly, Handler’s appearance was incongruent with the descriptions of sex and mirrors and incest coming from his mouth.

There are lots of wonderful writer organizations in the Bay Area – The Grotto, 826 Valencia, Redroom.com. Writing Wild Women, North 24^th Writers (my writing group.) But no organization brings the community together like Litquake. Every year the group puts on a fabulous literary festival, once that is inclusive and daring. It creates an environment that showcases established and up and coming authors. And this year Litquake plans to have an open mike during its LitCrawl, which makes it that much more democratic. See you there in early October.

Year of Fog Makes New York Times Bestseller List

Michelle Richmond’s marvelous Year of Fog is #19 on the New York Times paperback list this week! It hit the San Francisco Chronicle list in hardback when it came out a year ago, and now appears to be becoming a book club favorite. I wrote a review of Year of Fog for a website called Culture Vulture, a one-stop place to find out the latest on books, movies, television shows, dance performances, plays, video games and more. It’s run by Michael Wade Simpson, a writer and former dancer.

Read Michelle’s reaction when she heard the news about the New York Times bestseller list. This is from her blog Sans Serif. (Although she has another blog just for her book, as well.)

“I just received the prettiest bouquet of roses from my publisher, with a note that said, “Dear Michelle, Congratulations on your very first New York Times bestseller.” Well, I would like to be very dignified and nonchalant about this, but I just about peed in my pants, as we say down in Alabama. Granted, they told me about it yesterday–a phone call from Nita Taublib and my editor, Caitlin Alexander, which began with the question, “Michelle, are you sitting down?”, and which resulted in my hurling a joyful expletive at Caitlin, as in, “Are you f-ing kidding me?”–but by this morning I’d kind of convinced myself I was dreaming, so when the flowers arrived it was like, oh, that really did happen, I wasn’t making it up."

Congrats, Michelle.

Michelle writes about a missing child and the love her would-be-stepmother feels for her. Well, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik writes about a different kind of love in her new book, Real Life Romance: Everyday Wisdom on Love, Sex, and Relationships. Leah will be appearing at Berkeley Repertory Theater Monday March 24^th in conversation with her fellow Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll. The two will sort of interview one another. This is a benefit for my daughter’s school, Park Day, a wonderful progressive elementary school in Oakland. Ticket information is here.

I want to highlight another benefit, this one for PACT, an adoption alliance. Susan Ito, blogger extraordinaire, is bringing writer and performance artist Alison Larkin to Oakland on Easter Sunday. Larkin wrote the book The English American, and it is getting great buzz. This benefit will be at 4 pm on Sunday.

The Lit-Blog Coop is disbanding. This was the effort of a small group of litbloggers (not me) to highlight books they thought were overlooked or underappreciated. They nominated a pick every quarter and had on-line conversations about the book and author. I did end up reading Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories as a result of their recommendation so I imagine others were influenced by their selections as well. But most of the bloggers have gone on to other endeavors and I guess they just ran out of steam.

The Donner Party

The story of the Donner Party, which survived a winter in the snowy Sierra through incredible courage, determination, and a touch of cannibalism, has fascinated the American public ever since the ill-fated 1846-47 trip.

Dozens of books and memoirs have been written about the wagon train party that left Missouri in late October 1846, part of a massive migration west that would pick up steam after gold was discovered in California in 1848. The 81-member group made a major miscalculation by taking a time-consuming and improperly named shortcut over the Wasatch Mountains that prevented it from crossing the Sierra before the winter snows set in.

Surprisingly, the best-known non-fiction book on the subject, Ordeal By Hunger, was published by George Rippey in the 1930s. Since then, new documents, diaries and letters have come to light and archeologists have led new expeditions to Donner Lake and Alder Creek, the two sites members of the Donner Party spent the winter.

Now journalist Ethan Rarick has written Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West, drawing from the new documents and new information about what happens to humans as they slowly starve. It got a rave review in the New York Times Book Review. I went to hear him speak last night at Cody’s Books in Berkeley. Even though I thought I knew about the Donner Party (I had read Ordeal by Hunger as well as James Houston’s magnificent novel Snow Mountain Passage) I was moved by Rarick’s descriptions of those who survived.

Rarick believes that the Donner Party continues to fascinate people not because of the cannibalism, but because the story illuminates how regular people survived in extraordinary circumstances. Most survival stories turned into books feature military men or famous explorers like Shakelton or Hilary, not ordinary mothers and fathers.

“There’s much we can learn about regular people in extraordinary circumstances,” Rarick said. “That’s the story of the Donner Party.”

Rarick was one of the last writers to speak from the Cody’s on Fourth Street. The store is moving to Shattuck Street in downtown Berkeley and will reopen on April 1. All the books in the store are 40% off and as Rarick spoke, I saw people with stacks of books walking to the cash register. The store is looking pretty empty but there are still lots of great deals.

I also had a chance to go last week to hear Michelle Richmond read from her book The House of Fog, just released in paperback. Richmond will talk tonight (March 12) at A Great Good Place for Books in Montclair. I stopped in that bookstore yesterday and the owner Kathleen Caldwell said the book was selling briskly. I see that it is #8 on the Chronicle paperback best-seller list. The Chronicle named it one of its ten best books of 2007. I have just started it and can vouch that it is a page turner. Richmond is a beautiful writer who can also craft a compelling plot.

The NBCC Comes to San Francisco

There were drinks and conversation aplenty Friday night in San Francisco when the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors hosted two panels that looked at the state of West Coast and emerging writers.

About a hundred people crowded into a performance space in downtown San Francisco to hear comments from people like David Ulin, the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Oscar Villalon, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Jennifer Reese, a book critic for Entertainment Weekly, David Kipen, the NEA Director of Literature/BIG READ, Sandy Dijkstra, the literary agent, and authors Michelle Richmond, Greg Sarris, and Andrew Sean Greer, among others.

It was an attempt by the NBCC to broaden its reach and become less New York-centric. On Saturday, for the first time in its history, the NBCC will announce the finalists for its awards from City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

The group tried to engage themselves and the audience in the question of whether the West Coast is driving American literature. Presumably, since the West was once the frontier and people still gravitate here to remake themselves, the literature they produce is more forward-looking and innovative than that produced in New York.

As provocative as that notion is, the panelists couldn’t agree on its truth.

Jennifer Reese characterized the West Coast as a “goofy, artsy” place that is not “caught up in the intense noise of the literary community of New York.” David Ulin said West Coast writers had an advantage being “out of the fishbowl.” Living 3,000 miles away from New York gives Los Angeles writers the opportunity to fail or to try things that might not work, far away from the glare and scrutiny of the publishing world. Having this ability to experiment ultimately leads to more exciting writing, he said.

Ellen Heltzel of Bookbabes lives in Portland Oregon. She said the area attracts people interested in working in their own métier, not conforming to the tastes and dictates of the New York publishing scene. An example is the poet Gary Snyder, who pursued his own interests in Buddhism and the landscape of the west, His vision and drive had ultimately brought him international recognition. (and a Pulitzer Prize.)

Andrew Sean Greer, the author of Max Tivoli said writers living in New York can find themselves drawn into the literary scene at the expense of their own writing. While it’s a lot of fun to hang out at bars, go to readings, and mingle at publishing events, all that socializing makes it difficult for a writer to do the most important thing – finish his or her book. (Greer moved from New York to Montana to write and found that state TOO quiet, so he eventually moved to San Francisco.)

Mary Ann Gwinn, the book editor of the Seattle Times, said readers on the West Coast are more adventurous, which means writers are more adventurous.

The panelists tried hard not to reduce the discussion to an “Us versus New York” dialogue, and succeeded for the most part. They also seemed cognizant of not trying to elevate West Coast writing over that of other regions, while acknowledging its strengths.

The evening brought out lots of published and aspiring writers and the networking was intense. Mark Sarvas, the blogger behind The Elegant Variation and the author of the forthcoming novel, Harry, Revised, flew up from Los Angeles for evening. Kevin Smokler, the co creator of BookTour.com and author of Bookmark Now, came, as did Jason Roberts, an NBCC finalist last year for his biography, A Sense of the World.

Kemble Scott, author of Soma and the editor of the SoMa Literary Review came, as did New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar, author of the novel The Sand Café. Daniel Schifrin, the former director of literary programs for the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, showed up. He has just been appointed “writer in residence” for the new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Jane Ganhal, co-founder of LitQuake and the author liaison for the new author website Redroom.com, also made an appearance.

One last note: The participants from the first panel on emerging writers were asked to name some writers to look out for. Here are some of their suggestions:

Suzanne Kleid of City Lights Books recommended Cane Hayward’s memoir of growing up in the 1970s, The Hypocrisy of Disco.

David Kipen pointed out that Berkeley mystery author Cornelia Read had just won an NEA fellowship. (I have read her book, A Field of Darkness, and can highly recommend it.)

Michelle Richmond recommended Meg Waite Clayton’s forthcoming novel, The Wednesday Sisters.

New Releases

Congratulations are in order for Michelle Richmond, who sold the film rights for her new novel, The Year of Fog. Publisher’s Weekly reports how the deal got done:

"It's a good thing P. Jennifer Dana is a magnanimous loser. After Ron Howard's Imagine outbid her for the film rights to Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (Knopf, 2006), the Andrew Lauren Productions president met with Messud's agent Anne Borchardt when she came to New York on business. Over lunch, Borchardt mentioned a book her daughter Valerie Borchardt had sold, Michelle Richmond's The Year of Fog (Delacorte, Mar.). Dana instantly fell in love with the novel—about a photographer's quest to find out how her fiancé's daughter vanished from a San Francisco beach—and showed it to Semi Chellas, the screenwriter she had been eyeing for Emperor. Chellas's take convinced partner Newmarket to pony up a nice five-figure option (small change to the distributor of The Passion of the Christ)."

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Regan McMohan had an excerpt of her new book in Sunday’s magazine. Her initial article on the high cost to families of kids’ sports originally appeared in the magazine and led to a book deal. Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports comes out this week.