The annual festival will feature readings from local authors

Stephanie Barrio, The Golden Gate Xpress
Thursday, September 29, 2005
(Read the original article here.)

With the help of more than 250 Bay Area authors, Litquake 2005 will shake up San Francisco’s bars and bookstores for nine days with a slew of literary events.

The annual literary festival is produced by the Litquake Literary project, a California non-profit organization founded by San Francisco writers. The festival will feature readings and panel discussions throughout the city to discuss an eclectic mix of topics in literature, from sex and sports to food and drugs.

Some 10,000 people are expected to attend the festival, which will kick off with a 50th anniversary celebration reading of Allen Ginsberg’s epic beat poem “Howl” on Oct. 7 at Herbst Theatre.

The opening will also include author/celebrity pairings scheduled to read excerpts from influential Bay Area authors.

Litquake director Jane Ganahl said the readers were chosen based on the similarities they had with the authors they were honoring.

“In many cases it’s pretty obvious,” she said. “Mark Twain and Armistead Maupin were both serialized in SF newspapers, Barry Gifford wrote a biography of Jack Kerouac, books by Amy Tan and Iris Chang helped shed light on the Chinese experience, Jerry Brown is mayor of Oakland and Jack London is its most famous citizen - one who ran for mayor himself.”

Other links were not as obvious, such as Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), who chose to read Gertrude Stein simply because he is a fan, according to Ganahl.

Additional pairings include author and playwright Cintra Wilson reading Ambrose Bierce, former San Francisco poet laureate Devorah Major reading Bob Kaufman, and actor Michael Madsen reading John Steinbeck.

According to Peter Plate, author of “Fogtown,” one of the great things about Litquake is its ability to showcase diverse and underrepresented aspects of San Francisco’s literary scene, whether they come from students in the poetry center at SF State or writers from the Mission District.

“These kinds of threads had to be twined together and represented in a public forum in festival terms and it was held at Golden Gate Park on an utterly cold day,” said Plate, remembering Litquake’s original incarnation as a one-day festival in 2002.

Litquake’s alliance with bar venues – in which Plate said everyone can feel comfortable - has allowed it to grow and gain a wide range of fans. Events in Tenderloin-based venues have tended to draw young adventurous hipsters looking for nightlife, said Plate.

Also drawing a young crowd is Lit Crawl, a four-hour long, pub-crawl style event that closes the festival on Oct. 15. Based within bookstores, cafés and bars all along Valencia Street in the Mission, Lit Crawl will feature readings and panel discussions at venues like Casanova Cocktail Lounge, the Elbo Room and Good Vibrations.

“The Crawl came about when we started thinking of how to incorporate more genre-type literature in the festival - science fiction, erotica, gay and lesbian,” said Ganahl. “(We) realized it would be easy to create a stroll down Valencia since there are so many bookstores and book-friendly establishments there,” said Ganahl.

Other areas have featured events dedicated to women’s literature, poetry, storytelling and sports literature for varying fan bases.

“It’s part of the beauty of the festival,” said Plate. “A lot of literature as we know it, in societal terms … is always cloistered in more-parochial settings.

“(We take) the language of everyday life to the places where everyday life is celebrated.”

Litquake’s venues of choice make it possible to bring together people from all different walks of life to appreciate literature, he added.

“This gives a sense of informality and a sense of celebration to writers and readers who get to see and hear and feel it in a place where they’re going to relax,” said Plate.