At 826 Valencia’s Creative Non-Fiction writing seminar, Beth Lisick talked about her decision to write her new book Helping Me Help Myself, which is a humorous take on trying to live by various self-help books. Of San Francisco, she said:

“You go to the park and there’s like two Wiccan potlucks — the alternative world. So the mainstream world did seem sort of exotic and interesting to me.”

Stephen Elliot introduced Po Bronson by noting that he meets other writers in a clandestine location for an occasional “big literary basketball game.”

Because most writers I know began writing in part to assuage the pain of always being picked last at kickball, my immediate mental image of “literary basketball” is a tangle of flailing arms and pasty middle-age guys yelling, “I’m open! Dude, Beckett! I’m OPEN!”