LitCrawl Readings and Report

Woke up this morning to a beautiful fogless San Francisco morning (I got a really cheap rate at a downtown hotel, and they put us on the 31st floor in a tiny room with a great view of the Bay and the Golden Gate bridge.)
Yesterday we rolled into the city – after a beautiful drive through harvest-ready vineyards – during the exhibition of the Blue Angels, which means people driving their cars kept swerving into us because they were watching the planes instead of the street. It was Fleet week, so there were crowds of sailors in uniform everywhere as well. (It made me think of my little nephew, Dustin, who is serving in the Navy now down in Florida.) It was a perfect 70-degree-sunshiney day, and the Mission District seemed charming with its restaurants and shops rather than scary (maybe it was the abundance of writers everywhere?)
My first LitCrawl event was the Small Desk Press reading at Adobe books, a really small and dingy but interesting book store. The space was kind of awkward for a reading, but I really enjoyed meeting the folks there, especially Lizzy Acker (who is the namesake for the Monster Poetry contest I won and whose upcoming book I am looking forward to reading) and Marisa Crawford, who happens to be a Switchback Books author (Rock on, Brandi Homan!) And thanks to my friends who came out to see me 🙂
The second event was at Muddy’s Coffee Shop for the Eleven-Eleven/Fourteen Hills reading. I felt pretty good about this reading (unfortunately, Glenn forgot to turn on the video recorder, or I’d have a nice YouTube video for you) and sold a couple of books, which is always reassuring. The space was nice and big and the crowd was friendly and upbeat. (Also, the other readers had a robot-thing going on in their work that dovetailed nicely with some of my new poems.) The Fourteen Hills editor-girls – especially Hollie, Leanne, and Kelly – were really great – I wish I could bring them with me up to Seattle! They really know how to set up readings. I’ve never been to a Fourteen Hills event that wasn’t a lot of fun. And I came away with back issues of Fourteen Hills and Eleven-Eleven.
Then it was on to the After Party at the Blue Macaw, which had a DJ, a hugely crowded bar, and was the first place I’d ever seen people turned away from a lit party (I watched a big crowd of drunk twenty-something guys get told “You’re not readers? Then you can’t come in. And there were bouncers. Bouncers!) I only stayed an hour or so, but got to talk to a lot of fun people, and got some good feedback on the new Robot Scientist’s Daughter poems I had read – one guy even stopped to talk to me about Oak Ridge and tell me a creepy Disney-robot story that is definitely going to make it into a poem. I can’t reveal everything about it, but it involves an animatronic Lincoln and a death waiver.
Today we’re planning to hit Union Square (I want to take a last look at my favorite art gallery, Jenkins Johnson) and the big Impressionist show from the Musee d’Orsay that’s up at the DeYoung in Golden Gate Park. Then home to pack, because we’re starting our ten-day countdown – to Seattle! Which means my brains will probably be mush for the next two weeks.
Goodbye, San Francisco and friends! I’ll miss you!