I'm back in San Francisco for four days, with esposa-escritora Patty who has some readings here and in Chico this week. On Sunday the 24th, we were at the Portuguese Artist Colony on Sutter Street, for a reading and live writing event:
"Live writing" means that audience members voted to select a writing prompt, and then the four invited authors were given ten minutes to write something, which they then read back to the audience, who voted again on which one they liked best.
That last picture shows the four writers writing, while the girl on the right sang some light hip hop songs to keep the audience entertained in the meanwhile. Three of the four drafts were actually pretty good, considering the conditions of writing. Naturally I'm biased, but Patty's was still the best, as I indicated on my voting slip:
Hers didn't win, but it was a fun thing to do. And in the second half of the evening, she read from The Temple of Air, held people spellbound as usual, and sold some books.
I haven't had time to research the history of the Portuguese Artist Colony yet, but there were framed drawings all over the room and the adjacent bar and library by some pretty solid artists from a hundred years ago, such as Ernst Stoltz:
What I do know about Stoltz is that he was born in Augsburg, Germany -- the same town as Bertolt Brecht -- then he immigrated to the US in the twenties. You can tell even in my average looking photos that he was a talented exponent of German expressionism.
"Live writing" means that audience members voted to select a writing prompt, and then the four invited authors were given ten minutes to write something, which they then read back to the audience, who voted again on which one they liked best.
That last picture shows the four writers writing, while the girl on the right sang some light hip hop songs to keep the audience entertained in the meanwhile. Three of the four drafts were actually pretty good, considering the conditions of writing. Naturally I'm biased, but Patty's was still the best, as I indicated on my voting slip:
Hers didn't win, but it was a fun thing to do. And in the second half of the evening, she read from The Temple of Air, held people spellbound as usual, and sold some books.
I haven't had time to research the history of the Portuguese Artist Colony yet, but there were framed drawings all over the room and the adjacent bar and library by some pretty solid artists from a hundred years ago, such as Ernst Stoltz:
What I do know about Stoltz is that he was born in Augsburg, Germany -- the same town as Bertolt Brecht -- then he immigrated to the US in the twenties. You can tell even in my average looking photos that he was a talented exponent of German expressionism.