Writer's Weekend: Literary San Francisco

Check out these SF Bay Area writer-related events for the upcoming weekend. Let me know if you go to to any, and what you learned!

Saturday, Sept. 8, from 1:30-4 PM, the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association will hold a workshop by Amber Starfire on Scrivener: The Do-Everything Tool for Writers and Self-Publishers. According to the class description: "Scrivener is the ultimate writer’s studio and complete project management system. It helps you brainstorm and order ideas, collect and store research, create outlines, shuffle index cards, and make notes and comments along with your writing."

Sunday, Sept. 9, from 3-5 PM, the Redwood Writers (a north bay chapter of the California Writers Club) meet at Santa Rosa's classic Flamingo Hotel. The event will feature Janis Floris, author of 35 books in 36 years, who will discuss her experiences and how the publishing industry has changed along the way.

Also, on Saturday at 7 PM is Babylon Salon, hosted by a couple of successful USF MFA grads:

a community of performers, readers, writers, imbibers (of spirits and spirit), and revelers. From published authors to up and coming writers, from the contemplative to the percussive, from the long-form poet to the chainsaw juggler, from the quiet literary aficionado to the participative audience member, Babylon Salon is a reading and performance series that brings together all of these people and more in a celebration of expression, life, the arts and each other.

 The Salon, located at Cantina SF, will present one of my favorite professors, Stephen Beachy, author of boneyard. According to Stefanie Kalem's East Bay Express article:

Questions of authenticity roil through the pages of boneyard, which Beachy calls a "collaborative" novel, the skeleton of which was supposedly assembled by Amish teen Jake Yoder, whose work Beachy claims to have discovered and then saved from the young man's attempts to burn the stories he had come to deem sinful. Convinced the stories were destined for literary greatness — as a rare example of Amish literature, at the very least — USF professor Beachy hung meat on the text where necessary. Verse Chorus Press then agreed to publish the novel, though Beachy's editor, Judith Owsley Brown, expresses her doubt regarding the existence of Yoder in boneyard's preface, extending that skepticism to Beachy's sanity...

I can attest that the author is quite sane, though quirky, if this hilarious book trailer is any indication: