While Litquake’s been happening since October 10, the weekslong book festival is coming to a close with its most epic aspect on Saturday night: the Lit Crawl. If you haven’t been before, it’s a pub crawl-meets-literary playfulness, with authors stationed at the expected bars, cafés and bookstores—and at unexpected venues too. Imagine a poetry slam in a tattoo parlor or a memoirist reading a chapter in a laundromat, and you’ve got the picture.
Lit Crawl starts at 2:45pm on October 26 with the last events held at 8pm, and an afterparty at the parking lot of the Chapel at 9pm. And then Litquake will be over (sigh) until next year. In all, there are about 60 Lit Crawl events spread between 30 venues, most of them featuring a handful of writers, so there’s roughly 300 authors sharing their work with you as you lift a glass and appreciate it. There’s a nicely frenetic quality to the night, and the Lit Crawl map, downloadable on the website, lets you plan your picks around quick bites also identified on the map.
Author and Litquake boardmember Scott James tells Time Out that his coworking writing space, the Castro Writers’ Cooperative, is presenting “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Donald: A literary relay race.” For this entertainingly zany event, the writers will take on a classic book, dividing it into sections that they each pen in their own styles, ending mid-sentence to hand off to the next writer until it’s done. The writers wear numbers, just like track and field participants.
The photo at the top of this story shows the 2019 literary relay race. “I love this photo because it shows one of the unusual places we do our readings,” says James. “This was from 2019 when we did it in a barbershop… and you can see the guy in the chair getting his hair cut!”
James says that this year his co-op is presenting in an old furniture store converted into an arts space, the Drawing Room Annex. That happens at 6:30pm with authors Katie Burke, Jeanne Carstensen, Vanessa Chang, Andrea Coombes, Nada Djordjevich, Susie Hara, Mercilee Jenkins, Lee Kravetz, Shana Mahaffey, Tina Myers, Janis Cooke Newman, Natacha Ruck, Melina Selverston, Laura Sydell and James himself.
Here’s the link to the full Lit Crawl schedule. All Lit Crawl events are free but donations are encouraged.