San Francisco’s is the most fun, the wildest…the weirdest,” Jack Boulware remarks. We’re talking about the global portability of Lit Crawl, a riotous pub crawl through the Mission that each year closes Litquake, San Francisco’s most memorable multiday autumn festival.
Boulware and Jane Ganahl cofounded Litquake in 1999. They conceived it over beers at San Francisco’s Edinburgh Castle pub, and in its first iteration, it was called Litstock. Right away, it was, as Boulware says, “insanely popular.” It went down “almost like a workshop,” but less governable. The founders, both experienced music journalists, had come up during a very different zeitgeist, one shaped by the Merry Pranksters and gonzo journalism—Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe but also Jacqueline Susann, whose advances were big enough for her to fly around in a private jet. Humorous fiction writer Tom Robbins was popular. Boulware noted, too, that “pothead humor was prevalent.”
Similarly, author Daniel Handler—who goes by the moniker Lemony Snicket in children’s-book land—remembers those early days of Litquake as a time and place when “literary hierarchies got smashed up.” He had returned to San Francisco after a few years in New York, where the book world was “dominated by publishing, which had a very strict pecking order,” a reality he found “dull and tiresome, even as—particularly as—my career advanced.” He said it was “a delightful relief to plunge back into the anarchic joy of Lit Crawl.”
Litquake Through the Years
Dave Eggers believes that Litquake is the quintessential San Francisco festival, calling it “anarchic, democratic, unfussy, and unpretentious.” He reminisces, “The first time I was part of Lit Crawl I thought, ‘That is it. This is what it should feel like to be at a literary festival. Not like some grad-school symposium, but instead free, wild, public, open to the street, and even a bit crazed.’” He attributes this feeling to Boulware and Ganahl, describing them as “the least pretentious people alive.” He remarked that “the festival wouldn’t have had that loose, welcoming atmosphere without them. The city owes them a lot.” Unlike other book festivals around the country, the festival stayed steadfastly detached from publishers’ commercial interests. It was about literature, all kinds, and readers who understood literature as invigorating.
During the first event at Edinburgh Castle, Irvine Welsh, the Scottish author, read for Litstock. His event had a line down the block. Three hundred people crammed into the bar together, laughing and having a great time. Boulware recalls the reading as “filthy, dirty, funny…and super entertaining.” The sense of fun seeped into their minds. Nothing could replace the energy of a live reading. During Welsh’s, the audience was rapt, and Boulware remembers that you could hear a beer bottle roll across the floor. And Welsh, for his part, remembers Litquake as “a terrific festival with an amazing vibe. It cemented a love affair I was having with San Francisco, which culminated in me moving to the city.”
Back then, there were only two other book festivals in town, and they were heavily driven by publishers’ interests. Litquake was intended to counter all that—people knew what to do at the fest, the same way they instinctively understood Bay to Breakers or Burning Man.
Boulware and Ganahl worked a handful of days and then went back to their jobs, but they kept their ears to the ground so that they could feature authors, regardless of any corporate push behind those authors’ books; if they thought a book would work, they would include it. In addition to Litcrawl, the festival gave birth to events like Literary Death Match; the Black, White, and Read Ball; and the Barbary Coast Awards.
Notwithstanding the longer and longer hours he and Ganahl began putting into the festival, Boulware, who’d grown up in Montana, worked on his own books, including 2009’s Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day, cowritten with Silke Tudor. Ganahl wrote a memoir about dating in midlife called Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife, which hints at a similar honest, anti-corporate ethos.
And the pair took care to keep a spirit of rebellion even in tiny details. On the posters they put out for each Litquake, for example, “one name doesn’t belong, always.” Boulware recalls that out of maybe 15 author names listed on any given poster, there would be at least one surprising name in a sea of writers. One year, that name was Pig Hunt, a movie about a giant killer pig. Another year, Tom of Finland was featured because it was the 50th anniversary of erotic drawings by the Finnish artist, and a leather bar carried for sale books of his art. Perhaps with the implicit understanding that literature shouldn’t be siloed off from other arts, Boulware and Ganahl invited friends with bands to play the fest. The festival didn’t participate in the usual business practices of festivals; it set up no booths for sales.
Litquake began as an all-volunteer organization—there were no structures in place at first. Nobody would have volunteered to put it on if it weren’t, at base, fun. But in later years, once a nonprofit structure was put in place, people came to volunteer because it continued to feel like a party.
Lit Crawl, in particular, grew, throwing down roots in locations around the world—in Austin, Boston, England, France, Finland, New Zealand—as a franchise. In 2004, one of the stops on the crawl was at the Irish bar the Phoenix on Valencia. When the authors were to take the stage, the bartenders refused to turn off the sports matches playing on the television. But the readers were fiercer than the sports fanatics—barstools were set up outside the vacuum-repair shop next door. Traffic stopped as a large crowd gathered to listen.
Like popular folktales, adapted and adapted again to fit into new homes, new neighborhoods—“Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, is a globe-trotter—Lit Crawl has shape-shifted according to the mores of other communities.
But places founded in a wild cultural conflagration can transform, bit by bit, into more-settled institutions. A festival can get so large that it loses sight of the spirit that gave it momentum. Boulware notes, “We never wanted to be corporate.” In spite of the franchising of Lit Crawl, there has been little danger of that—this is a festival in which author Nayomi Munaweera, who writes lush novels partly set in Sri Lanka and published by the Big 5, could appear alongside Boots Riley, the Oakland-based radical rapper and film director. Still, almost by definition, wildness can’t be bottled. It can’t be replicated, and if you try to contain it, the conundrum quickly emerges—it is no longer itself, no longer the thing that made you want to bottle it.
Over the past two years, Ganahl has wanted to step away from the festival, and Boulware agreed to do so as well. He muses that he’d done the fest for 24 years, and he couldn’t go on with it “until I collapse onstage.” He jokes, at least half in earnest, that it’s the “longest relationship” he’s ever had. On the advice of consultants, Boulware and Ganahl turned over the reins to Norah Piehl this year—her first day is July 1—but will be curating this fall’s lineup for the last time.
Piehl, a personable, lifelong bibliophile, seems an ideal choice for a new era in San Francisco. She’s passionate about books as a way of life: She is the daughter of an academic librarian and grew up in a house filled with stacks of books, and she’s now married to an editor. While in academia to get a PhD in English literature, Piehl concentrated on children’s literature—she now has two kids of her own, one of them a reluctant reader. She agrees that the geographical community in which a Lit Crawl puts down roots makes a difference to the atmosphere; for instance, she observed, Boston’s Lit Crawl has a different feel than San Francisco’s.
Piehl arrived in Berkeley to serve as the Bay Area Book Festival’s director of literary programs almost two years ago. She had previously assumed several other bookish roles with the Boston Book Festival, the MIT Press, and the University of Illinois Press. During our conversation, she reflects on the importance of Litquake to Bay Area communities and the different kind of energy you find at a stellar live performance of literature compared with the solitary experience of reading and writing books. Piehl hopes to preserve what she, in parallel to Handler and Eggers, recognizes as the “cultural anarchy” of San Francisco, which pervades the festival.
Yet, on the other side of that, Piehl no doubt will face the challenges of directing a festival that works for everyone who has a stake in it. There is an assumption among wealthy corporations that San Francisco should be a town for the rich rather than the mottled, erudite countercultural. And simultaneously, book advances have fallen, as low as $1,000—the era of pothead humor and private jets is over. I wonder whether Piehl, coming from the Bay Area Book Festival, which has also had to straddle a difficult-to-bridge divide between a moneymaking corporate ethos and an expressive, artistic one, recognizes that tension in literary San Francisco—she does.
It’s a different era for the city than the one in which Boulware and Ganahl founded the festival, of course, darker, more unequal, but Litquake is the gold at the scrim of all that. Author Handler recognizes the festival’s joyfulness, its counter to New York–centered publishing, and describes it as “well-known and unknown, famous and infamous, behemoth-published newbies and seasoned veterans stapling their stuff together, all reading fiction, nonfiction, verse, and whatever other category you might slap onto their words, aligned to no guiding principle except the engagement of readers.”
He continued, “For writers, such a state is called ‘home,’ and the challenge Litquake faces, now and always, is to keep the anarchic spirit of literature as a through line, even in a city currently determined to stamp it out entirely.”•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hua Hsu will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest José Vadi to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
COLLEGE KIDS
Author Vanessa Hua (Forbidden City) writes about parallels between her personal history and Hua Hsu’s coming-of-age in Stay True. —Alta
WHY READ THIS
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin looks at Stay True, noting that the two young men at its center “are unlikely compatriots, but they are connected by the need to make meaning (mixtapes, private jokes, and other rituals) out of the chaos of experience.” —Alta
DAYBOOK
Ulin reviews Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa and calls it “a book in active contemplation of itself.” —Alta
SUMMER CONFERENCE
Register for workshops at the 2023 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference by June 30. Workshops will be led by Nayomi Munaweera, Ploi Pirapokin, and Rachel Howzell Hall. —Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference
SPEED BUMPS
Memoirist Frances Haugen (The Power of One), a whistleblower and veteran of Silicon Valley, discusses Facebook and misinformation.
—San Francisco Chronicle
“SUMMER OF RAGE”
Rian Dundon’s new photography book, Protest City, features scenes of Portland’s unrest in 2020. —New Yorker
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