Oakland Review of Books calendar of (not just) literary events, September 22–27
This is the time of year when our bent toward maximalism crushes us with the Bay Area’s generosity and enthusiasm, so if you want a more curated experience, you’ve got choices: Azucena’s top five local events at Oaklandside, the Current’s top 5 which are markedly different, and I’m pointedly ignoring the AI-made calendars that have started to pop up recently because there are too many good humans surveying the scene here, there, and even over there.
But whatever, back to all of it everywhere, but mostly here, all at once, the ORB way. One of the reasons I like to make this for you is that I want to show up for everyone all the time and this helps me realize it’s literally impossible because faves are going head to head same time same day, but you ORB readers are my armor against FOMO, because you can go everywhere as our proxies. Go suck out the marrow of life, it’s waiting for you in alleys and libraries, galleries and lakeside. It’s east of the lake and west of it, and a leetle north of it on an occasional Thursday. Show up for each other, we make this place by coming together. It’s awards season and fundraising gala season. It’s publish your riso zine with Bathers Library season. It’s almost Litquake season which means the countdown is on to the best night on earth: Litcrawl. The New Parkway is having Manhattan shorts and Grand Lake Theatre is going silent, ballet at Zellerbach is performing Oscar Wilde’s life all weekend, but we know all the queers and kinksters are Folsom Street Fairing it this weekend and that’s why we love this large and sprawling place and couldn’t cut this calendar down for love or money (unless you buy in at the Absolute Goddamn Filthy Sicko Mode level, then we’ll do whatever you want, daddy). It’s sweaters and leather season and we couldn’t be happier about it all. - MS, XL, AB
Tuesday, September 22
Making Stories, 3:30pm, Rockridge Branch (College Ave). Kids make zines, write stories, tell the kind of good lies that get you a National Book Award some day. Participants will have a chance to share their work in a reading—because you can't start learning how to work a mic too young—and their finished piece goes in the library's collection. [OPL]
Digital Communities: Understanding Your Child's Online Social World, 4pm, West Berkeley Family Wellness Center (West Berkeley). Since the internet is a tool for connection, like every other form of communication, help your kid use it for good and to find their people. Learn the difference between parasocial and reciprocal friendships, what boundaries are and how to hold them, and all the things it's good to learn about online or IRL when it comes to bonding with humans and developing a sense of belonging. [City of Berkeley]
Cecilio M. Cooper: ‘Seeing Hints of a Trans Fella’: Holotypic Black Feminisms, Stereoscopic Transantagonisms, 4pm, Social Sciences Matrix (Cal). This lecture is under the header of Black Critical Theory Initiative and you know what? That's exactly what you're gonna get. Cooper is reading works of art and media that depict Black transmasc people, and I got to encounter a word I'd never read before in the event description: aporetic. Now go look it up and know that you'll learn a lot more than just vocabulary as Cooper’s theory washes over you in a bracing bath of intellectual rigor. [UCB]
A Book is Born: The Pleasure of Texting, 5pm, Geballe Room (Cal). I think the joy of phones is finally having a rebound after the necessary backlash to the existence of hand computers. Evidence I will present: Exhibit A) Bless the Telephone, Exhibit B) Hanif Abdurraqib loves his group chats, and Exhibit Sigma-for-Sappho) Lynne Huffer and Mario Telò, who turned their texts after long time admiration and a single day of meeting in person into a book of riffing and discourse, rhythmic waiting and replying, titled The Pleasure of Texting: Sapphic Writing and Reading at the Edge of the World. Come through to hear them talk with their editor (Duke UP is publishing it, a great, great press for daringly experimental books) about this dual-voiced book, which isn't out anytime soon so super super sneak preview. This is a true you-had-to-be-there book event and Pauline might be one of those Yous obsessing about texting. [UCB]
Mālama Mākua: A Film Screening & Discussion Panel, 5pm, Dwinelle Hall (Cal). Dinner & a movie & #LandBack is how the night is going to go. After watching the documentary about the community demanding the restoration of military-controlled lands to Native Hawaiian stewardship, hear from the filmmaker Mikey Inouye and Summer Kaimalia Mullins-Ibrahim (Kanaka Maoli), Board Member of Mālama Mākua, alongside Corrina Gould (Ohlone) the Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Mark Minch-de Leon (Susanville Indian Rancheria), Associate Professor of Film & Media, and Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka Maoli), Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies. [UCB]
Show & Tell: Creative Courage, 6pm, Untitled vol.2 (Temescal Alley). Show your work (in progress)! What strange sideroads have you taken and where will you go next as you print, write, archive, assemble, map, and otherwise verb your ideas into material reality. [insta]
Meet the Author: Susanna Kwan, 6pm, Montclair Branch OPL (The Hills). Susanna Kwan in discussion of her debut novel Awake in the Floating City, which is the West Bay Library's "One City One Book" selection for 2026 and I guess Oakland is jumping in too, but for one night only, not a whole year. The novel, set in a flooded, damp, fungi-shingled San Francisco of the near future, is a meditative work on the pull of memory and family, why we stay in places that have become hostile to our well being, and the labor of care and of making art. [OPL]
Diane Williams: I LIKED REX, 6:30pm, Womb House Books (Temescal Alley). Diane Williams, editor of little lit mag NOON and master of elliptical microfictions, comes to town to show you her new book I Liked Rex. The type is set so large in this book and it's still only 144 pages. I read a chunk of them this morning from the copy I picked up at the Bathers Library bookstore sale, and they're weirdo vignettes, so if you're into those sorts of things like some of us are, here's a book of them to savor. [eventbrite]
What is Compersion?, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). The polyamory tabling guy's job is done in the East Bay, he has clearly moved on to regions in more desperate need of his message. But we still have all his converts who will teach the rest of us how to be so secure in our relationships that a partner falling in love with or into bed with someone else brings joy instead of panic and jealousy. Relationship coach Dr. Marie Thouin and William Winters whom The Chomicle calls “de facto king of the East Bay polyamory scene” will remind everyone that this is all with the stipulation of ETHICAL non-monogamy, which involves transparency, consent, and lots of logistics, just for starters. [eventbrite]
Fred Noland: "Major Taylor", with JF Frankel, 7pm, Pegasus Books (Downtown Berkeley). Two guys who have comics and bikes in common get together to celebrate the life and achievements of Major Taylor, early Black bicycling star. Hopefully this biography told in pictures won't cause as much kerfuffle as the last one. [Pegasus Books]
[West Bay Bonus Event] TechBros Brew Bubbles: Then and Now, 7:30pm, 518 Valencia (The Mission). Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish has just been reissued, to her seeming simultaneous gratification and befuddlement. She gives good interview: go hear her call Wired a magazine that turned into a propaganda machine for the tech industry after it pivoted away from literary writing about technology (that published her fiction about email adultery and online intimacy) to being a fluffer for the boy kings, and more besides. She'll be in conversation with Jonathan Weber (City on the Edge). But the question that I still have (twenty five years of not reading the book later), is if this diagnosis of libertarian self-interest has less to do with tech and more to do with who chases money and how far they’ll go to get it, and how that attitude flattens their view of other people and the humanity we owe each other. [Shaping SF]
Also: Kōmij Mour Ijin: Our Life is Here Opening Reception at Morrison Reading Room, Doe Library (Cal) / Classic Cinema: West Side Story (1961) at Elmhurst Branch OPL (Deep East) / How Do We Show Up in Conflict? at 6M Community Arts (West Bay) / Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor: End Times Fascism at Sydney Goldstein Theater (West Bay)
Wednesday, September 23
Sappho and Critical Theory: A Symposium, 1pm, Maude Fife Room (Cal). It's a good week for queer theory at Cal. To be sapphic is to be fragmentary, elliptical, in love with women, heartbroken and broken-tongued, pretty gay, in a coitus of philosophy and poetics, definitively Lesbian, and Judith Butler should absolutely be there (They are. They're gonna symposium so hard). Take Sappho, make Sappho, take theory, make theory, find the space to be apopheniac in the erasures, and pick up a date to take to There There later. [UCB]
Geography Colloquia Series: The Futures of Black Internationalism and Global South Solidarity, 3:30pm, McCone Hall (Cal). Always go to the Geography parties even when they're in sly disguise as colloquia! And Gabriel Regalado's project is so Cal Geography I'm gonna melt: he went with groups of LA youth activists to international locations of the Black radical tradition to study and strengthen the connections between oppressed American communities and groups in Cuba, Puerto Rico and South Africa. Always with Marxism as the grounding truth because communism knows no borders except those around the Department of Geography, its home and its hive. [UCB]
mak-'amham/Cafe Ohlone, 3:30pm, Central Library BPL (Downtown Berkeley). Eat brownies and drink tea made with local ingredients to honor Ohlone traditions and join mak-'amham/Cafe Ohlone founders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino for discussion of the new mural in the library celebrating the East Bay's Ohlone history. [BPL]
Hemming & Mending Clothes By Hand, 5:30pm, Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish). Fix your heart, then fix your clothes with artist Bea Byrne, who only is available to help on the latter mission. Hemming, mending, button replacing, and more will be your destiny at the library today. [OPL]
Transit Tales, a storytelling night co-presented by SPUR x Muni Diaries x Local Economy, 6pm, Local Economy (Rockridge). You have three minutes to tell a transit story, which is shorter than the wait between BART trains right now because of the dissolution of suburban-to-urban slingshot that supported the shared transit system that everyone used until oh about 2020 or so. My party trick transit tale is now just always gonna be how Gertrude Stein's brother funded Parisian Modernism by selling a suite of West Bay private streetcar lines to South Pacific Railroad in 1891 but maybe you have a more recent one. Also, ORB has noticed there are some surprising supporters of Measure RTM because your bosses would really like to be narcissists at you in person more often, but also I've been spending so long on the freeway to Marin lately and I hate it, give me a train any day, some light rail, anything but an hour and forty five minutes at four miles an hour with a furious guy honking behind me because I can do something personally about the traffic motherfucker that's right and I just am choosing deliberately not to wave my infrastructure magic wand and fix it for you and you alone. [luma]
An Evening of Conversation with Ellen Barker, 6pm, Book Society (Elmwood). Ellen Barker proves it: there is life after urban planning! And it's writing novels, none of which seem to be about the romance of bike lanes or the bus, bizarrely. [booksociety.social]
Sultry Sessions: Self Love, 6:30pm, Zanzi Oakland (Downtown). Songs, stories, poems, and any form of self-expression are welcome at Sultry Sessions, as long as you keep it very explicit, erotic, and horny. If you are going to deliver a soundbath, make sure it's full of moans; if you are a poet, this is the time to be masturbatory as only a poet can be. [eventbrite]
Liberal vs. Revolutionary Abolitionism with E & M, 6:30pm, Hasta Muerte (Fruitvale). This is a really interesting topic: what do we mean when we say abolition, and leftist factions. Local organizer, legal advocate, and memoirist Dorsey Nunn calls himself a "practical abolitionist," because he will do whatever he can to alleviate people's suffering inside NOW while still holding the vision of full abolition in mind. I think exploring what we mean when we say the word "abolition," whether of police, prisons, camps, or the family, is a very worthwhile discussion, as is feeling out possibilities of compromise without defeat or betrayal. The BAFS site is down as of the writing of this note but hopefully the sabotage of the left will be resolved and it will reboot soon. [BAFS]
Against Tech Oligarchy, 7pm, Clio’s Books (The Lake). Bay Area Current and the Tech Worker Coalition share the work of tech worker organizers and labor scholars JS Tan, Clarissa Redwine, and Wendy Liu tonight, as a reminder that there's more of us than the frightened few at the top hoarding gold and barricading the gates after they've got theirs, to use Borsook's metaphor of the trolls in the mountain for the little kinglets in their suburban fortresses. [eventbrite]
Nosferatu with Live Quarkestra Orchestra, 7pm, Landmark Theatre (Piedmont the Avenue). The Quarkestra Orchestra jamming over F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is not the way anyone used to watch this incredible movie, but it's the way you want to. Get a taste. [landmarktheatres.com]
The Berkeley Slam ft. Jose Cordon, 8pm, The Starry Plough Pub (Berkeley). The poet laureate of Antioch is bringing some Contra Costa County (or CoCoCo as we know her) juice from the exurbs to the stage in Berkeley, get there hella early if you want to sign up to speak out too. Get judged by your peers by which I mean, whoever is drinking beer nearby. [eventbrite]
Also: Discrimination as Exploitation – Talk with Prof. Diana Reddy at Room 141, Berkeley Law (Cal) / Remembering the Future: Nuclear Testing, Rising Seas, and The Marshall Islands; Artist and Curator Led Tour with Mark Klett and William L. Fox at Giannini Hall (Cal) / Partners: How Starbucks Baristas Started a Labor Revolution Film Screening + Discussion at UC Berkeley Labor Center (Cal) / Margaret Levi: Creating a political community of fate in care and caregiving at Social Sciences Building (Cal) / On the Record: John Coltrane Centenary at Central Berkeley Library (Downtown Berkeley) / Living Literature: Roland Barthes, Citation, and the Reading of Everyday Life at Wheeler Hall (Berkeley) / Grown Folks Book Fair at African American Art & Culture Complex (West Bay) / SOLD OUT Colin Kaepernick: The Perilous Fight at Black Repertory Group Inc (Berkeley) / WHB September Book Club: Passing by Nella Larsen at Womb House Books (Temescal Alley) / The "Mythological" Genre: How Hindu Stories Shaped Global Pop Culture at The Faight Collective (West Bay)
Thursday, September 24
World Kiswahili Language Day and Book Launch, 12 noon, Swahili Spot Resturant (West Oakland). A new kitabu being launched, Swahili: Arabic, Islamic, and Other Global Aspects, and you can eat chakula with everyone else who shows up to celebrate at the only East African restaurant in the East Bay. Give me a minute, and I'll remember a few more Swahili words. [UCB]
Raiz de Maiz Workshop, 1pm, Brookfield Branch (Deep East). Poet/chef Kevin Madrigal Galindo told me a story the other day about being a kid visiting his cousins in Mexico and joining them all bright-eyed for a day in the milpita, and coming back at the end of the day realizing to his horror he was a Mexican-American and couldn't hack the hard work his cousins did every weekend. If you would like to reconnect with maiz without breaking your back for it, come to a workshop at the library and touch leaves, learn stories, and then go home to your soft life like your parents wanted. [OPL]
Kevin Washburn (Chickasaw), “Tribal Co-Management, Landback, and Indigenous Cosmology”, 3:30pm, Mulford Hall (Cal). Environmentalists and American tribes sometimes align in their mission, but sometimes really don't, like when it comes to the sovereign right to fish, or public access to tribal lands, or using their environmental resources according to what the tribe decides is best for their people. Prof Washburn speaks to the collaborations of conservation orgs with Native tribes, and the reasons why tensions have lessened in recent years. [UCB]
Julia Nelsen introduces Fausta Cialente, 5pm, 201 Philosophy Hall (Cal). Translator Julia Nelsen will chat with Professor Mairi McLaughlin about her translation of A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente, a Transit Books novel that "exposes how the war evacuated meaning from language, leaving only weak, cold words behind." Get a taste of barely-past-wartime Italy here, and swing through. [UCB]
A Conversation with Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang, 5pm, The Faculty Club (Cal). Join two distinguished men of the theatre to talk about Asian-American storytelling on stage. Also, every bio of Gotanda says he lives in the hills at the "Berkeley Art Plant"—what does that MEAN and how do I get one to live in? It sounds cool. [UCB]
Jasbir K. Puar: This Death is Not One, 5pm, Maud Fife Room (Cal). Puar's writing about disability as biopolitics stretches my capacity for absorbing theory; it's not the kind of work you can digest at a glance, nor should you. But if you've been thinking about states claiming the right to violence, whether through the blinding of protestors with "non-lethal" rubber bullets or shooting at cars driving away from them for a while, Israel's destruction, control, and constraint of Palestine and the people who live there sure seems like the crystalizing instance of state power over bodies, and that's what's under discussion today. Honor the translation of Puar's work into Arabic, and hope it reaches folks for whom it might makes sense of the bodily shocks of power. [UCB]
Ken Light's Soul City book release and exhibit opening, 5:30pm, The J School (Cal). Photojournalist Ken Light found his own archive of Oakland photos from the '70s in a box, and developed them; now they are a book with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and no other text at all. Come look at this neighborhood photo album of West Oakland and discuss it with Light, EBPREC leader Dr Noni Session, and Professor Bill Drummond. And don't forget to scuffle around in your own archives and see what treasures are there to share with the Seventh Street Museum, the Oakland Wiki, and your favorite local publisher. [UCB]
A Callaloo Conversation: The Joys and Perils of Writing Nonfiction & Memoir, 6pm, Local Economy (College Ave). Kyla Kupferstein Torres, editor of Callaloo, which centers authors and artists of the African Diaspora, gathers in conversation with Whiting Award winner and local memoirist Carvell Wallace and novelist/professor Keenan Norris. How does lived experience become story without dishonoring the truths of others in the stories, how can fiction sometimes allow truths to emerge in a new formation. [luma]
Dorothy Lazard's New Book, Behind the Desk at the Main: A Librarian's Memoir, 7pm, Chapel of the Chimes (Piedmont the Avenue not the Ethnic Enclave). A library is a community archive, and a librarian is a caretaker of books and of their readers. Join Dorothy Lazard for a discussion about being a Black librarian in a city full of Black history, at a time of shifting emphases from books to digital information and shifting budget priorities within the library and city, and why she dumped a guy for owning too many books. [humanitix]
Burning for Justice: Film Screening, 7pm, EastSide Arts Alliance (Deep East). Yuridia Ochoa did some sideshow donuts while drunk, hit a scooter rider, and got shot six times by cops who went in hot pursuit in San Jose during the George Floyd protests, then was held in jail for an excessively long time. Since then she has become a firefighter and come back to her community an asset, not a liability, to use the language that Black radicals gave each other to stay focused on serving the movement. Talk with filmmaker Dr. Robert Mossi Alexander & Yuridia Ochoa after the screening [ESAA]
Also: Ikebana Workshop: Japanese Flower Arranging with Native California Plants at Mission Blue Nursery (Brisbane) / Celebrating Hispanic American Heritage Month with the SALALM Librarians at Zoom (The Internet) / Poetry Reading with Zhang Er and Leonard Schwartz at San Francisco State University (West Bay) / Botanicals Art Reception: June Yokell, Kija Lucas, Karen LeGault, and Jules Kobelin at North Berkeley Wealth Management (Berkeley) / THE LAST COHO Opening Reception at Brower Center (Downtown Berkeley) / What Poetry Can Teach Us About Being Human with Dean Rader at The Sycamore (West Bay) / Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR at Clio’s Books (The Lake)
Friday, September 25
Karen Van Dyck | The Greek Alphabet in America, 12 noon, UC Berkeley (Cal). Playing with the Greek language in America, which went through a bit of a cultural shift in the 1970s, just when the Greek Festival started in Oakland. Will there be lamb at this lunchtime linguistic conversation? There better. [UCB]
Poetry! 6pm, Tamarack (Downtown). Krupskaya editors Jocelyn Saidenberg & Brandon Brown are reading, holy SHIT I almost forgot to put Tamarack on the calendar and what an oversight that would have been!! Saidenberg gives you “She submits to her own dominion, inner, forsaking all outer indulgences. She gives it all to the woods and the animals inside.... Unselved, she’s errant in her word wilderness, formed from old catalogs, mortalities, industrial detritus, and ancient lexicons.“ Brown is all, “The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura chainsmokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about it in limping trimeters.” [Poetry in the Bay]
An Evening of Drinks, Dancing & Revolutionary Dialogue!, 6:30pm, Understory (Fruitvale). I hear I Love Boosters is a good and important movie that is also very fun to think about communism with alongside your comrades, so here's what you're gonna do over hella good snacks and drinks: hang out with Boots and his hat, explain dialectical materialism in three minutes or less, compete but not extractively in the market of film trivia, and brainstorm how to party our way out of late capitalism. [insta]
Lo Fi Oyster Co: Tide Tables, Ambient Jazz, and Bay Science, 6:30pm, Local Economy (Rockrich). Musician Marina Aguerre plays music, landscape architect Karen Verpeet, of San Francisco Estuary Institute, offers Bay Science, Lo-Fi Oyster Company offers wine (no oysters will be served, but you can imagine their briny slurp of appreciation that you're learning about tidal flows). [luma]
M. K. Thekkumkattil : The Sexuality of Care, 7pm, Pegasus Books Downtown (Downtown Berkeley). Local ICU nurse, author, and kinkster M. K. Thekkumkattil launches their book of essays from The Feminist Press, in which they explore what it means to love and care by tying people up and down, argue that martyring yourself on the altar of overdone carework is harmful, and acknowledge the pleasure of giving over of one's body to care for others. They will be joined in conversation by fellow East Bay writers Tomas Moniz, Carvell Wallace, Amanda E. Machado, and Nikita. [insta]
Claudia Castro Luna's THE FLOWERS ALONG THE WAY, 7pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Claudia Castro Luna comes back to Oakland to share her memoir of surviving political violence and coming into herself as a poet in Spanish and English. Fleeing El Salvador as a young teen, she considers what it means to be displaced, re-emplaced, for stories to live in the people who live in a place, and then existing between them sharing them. Now here's a bunch of quotes from Luna, who is my new favorite geographer calling herself a poet: "Place is like air, indispensable to our being." "Language is inextricable from geography." "We live in the city and the city lives in us." "Place is both terrain and the relationships that thrive upon it. "We are in relationship with other beings with whom we share this place." "We are not alone: cities are hubs of interdependence and interconnectivity, and what happens to some in one corner of the city will eventually affect us all." [Mrs D's]
Taming the Garden, 7pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). There's a bunch of Georgian movies screening at Bampfa right this week, but this one by Salomé Jashi seemed especially interesting. When gardens become museums for individual plants, treating them as objects rather than interconnected beings, you end up with bizarre scenes, like "a tree as tall as a fifteen-story building floating on a barge across the vast Black Sea" to land in the garden of a man too rich and impatient to wait for a plant to grow. [bampfa]
Also: Friday Nights at OMCA with Los Tranquilos at OMCA campus (The Lake) / East Bay Screening Of "When ICE Melts" On Lessons Of Minneapolis Struggle at EB DSA Office (Lakeside) / Green Movie Night - "Fighting Fire With Fire" at Unity of Walnut Creek (Hot Side of the Hills)
Saturday, September 26
Dimond Shine—Fall Work Party, 9am, CVS (Fruitvale). Plant some plants and get to know your neighbors by doing this together, for each other and for friends you've yet to meet. Community building looks like getting hands on. [google]
ALA Art & Literature Festival 2026: Kerala to the Bay—The Stories That Bind Us, 10am, Castro Valley Center for the Arts (Hot Side of the Hills ). Gathering the Malayalam community to connect more deeply with local Bay Area publishing and writing, this will be a day of literary festivities celebrating voices from Kerala and the Bay, and the empathy and curiosity that exploring the world through books can offer readers of all ages. Come say hi to Marthine and Heyday, who will be in a lightning round of speedy intros to local publishers. [ala.events]
Yard Sale 4 Gaza, 10am, 988 53rd St (Gaskill). Support Palestinians directly! Proceeds from all the ceramics, clothing, vintage jewelry etc for sale go to Belal and his extended family in Gaza. [no link]
Style as Resistance: Fashion, Identity & Black Cultural Storytelling, 11am, IMASALA Collective (Berkeley). Aesthetics are never just surface deep, and neither is style. Ashlin Randolph leads an afternoon of collage and reflection thinking through how clothing expresses the self, holding memories, culture, and the sensuality of the body. [insta]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Earthling, 11am, Golden Gate Park (The Avenues). Listen to music and nature, and bring your own snacks to fuel an experimental music haze with SMARTBOMB from Oakland, Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes and Dream Crease from LA, and The Space Lady from Outer Space. [eventbrite]
The Before Columbus Foundation : 47th Annual American Book Awards, 1:30pm, Alumni House (Berkeley). We are in awards season already, with the Golden Poppy and Northern California Book Awards last week, but the American Book Awards are a very East Bay celebration of books with a radical edge: "There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers." If you want to see books recognized for their contribution to this salad of ideas, cultures, and organic mesclun we call a country, this is the place to go. Juliana Spahr gets an award for Ars Poeticas, which is correct and will look nice next to her Pulitzer on her office shelf, assuming Northeastern lets writing professors have offices anymore. [facebook]
GRIDS part 1 art x writing workshop, 1:30pm, Et Al (West Oakland). Look, some of really like thinking about calendars, and time, and how every day that folds behind us is full of possibility lost but the one opening toward us beckons us to the immanence of the new in a spiral of escalating wisdom or at least experience that rises and disperses like smoke from the hour burning down. Now materialize that with Sun Park and Jess, and find a new ritual. Make a coyote clock. Count in cabbage time. Call your ancestors in and ask them what time it is where they are and what the literary events calendar is like there. First of several workshops exploring different aspects of art, writing, time, and days. [insta]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Three Overlapping Circles, 2pm, Bolinas Point Loop and Old Western Saloon (Deep Northwestyweird Oakland). In the afternoon, while wandering among Marconi radio towers and antennae on the Pacific Plate, experience an installation by artist DJ Meisner who "makes mixed media work about conspiracy theories, spiritual experience, and being online." Follow it up with an evening in a saloon a little farther north. You might run into some ORB folks out there, if our astral planes align. [insta]
The Music of the Word/ La Palabra Musical, 3pm, Fruitvale Branch OPL (Deep East). Bring your quijada (it's SO much fun to play) and join SUSANA PRAVER PEREZ (Poet La Tertulia) JOE NAVARRO (Poeta bilingue) NAZELAH JAMISON (Poet/Performance Artist), ABDUL KENYATTA (Poet, Novelist & Vocalist) & whoever turns out on the Open Mic y mas! English, Spanish, Spanglish and the language of music are all welcome and encouraged. [OPL]
Conversation: Rasha Salti and Natalia Brizuela, 5:30pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). So Chileans are having a good week thinking about disobedience and now Rasha Salti and Natalia Brizuela think out loud about resistance to dictatorship and murder as necessary disobedience in the context of Palestinian–Chilean solidarity among artists. Take notes. [bampfa]
Kevin Powell w/ KWC Complex Jazz Trio x Marcus Books, 6:30pm, Marcus Books (Longfellow). Poetry and jazz and a celebration of a new book that's 32 love letters in verse to his wife Evangeline with her beautiful face on the cover: what could be sweeter and also a gauntlet thrown hard to all the writer dudes out there who are not wife-guying it this hard. Do better, men: Powell it up. [eventbrite]
Ohlone Hillside Test Plot, 7pm, Lawrence Hall of Science-ish (Berkeley Hills). Join Test Plot, Lawrence Hall of Science, Terremoto, mak-’amham, 'ottoy initiative, The Green Initiative Fund, and other volunteers to rematriate the land to native plants. [testplot]
Also: A Tribe Called Queer Book Club: Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby RIvera at Main Oakland Library (The Lake-ish) / Cut Your Own... Anything! at Tool Lending Library (Temescal) / East Bay Sanctuary Annual Fundraising Dinner at St. John’s Presbyterian Church (Berkeley) / Friends of Sausal Creek 30th Anniversary Fall Sunset Soirée at Sausal Creek Native Plant Nursery (Joaquin Miller Park) / Type For All! Ten Years of Type West at Letterform Archive (West Bay) / Wild Alchemy: A fundraiser for Junior Center of Art and Science at Junior Center Of Art & Science (The Lake)
Sunday, September 27
[West Bay Bonus Event] Paulina Borsook: Cyberselfish, 9:30am, Grace Cathedral (Nob Hill). Way back in 2000, Paulina Borsook (who is for some reason repeatedly identified as Paulina Forsook in this event listing) wrote an incendiary critique of the emerging giants in California's tech culture, with what was at the time widely considered an extremely controversial premise: that the Silicon Valley was becoming a cauldron of reactionary and bigoted politics. Huh! For some reason (who can really say, really), her book has recently experienced a renewed surge in interest and critical reappraisal. Hear Borsook reflect upon the prophecy with Grace Cathedral dean and lecture series host Malcolm Clemens Young, a UC Berkeley alum whose unique approach to Christian theology should make this an interesting discussion. [Grace Cathedral]
[North Bay Bonus Event] Workshop: Sculpting Landscapes of Desire with Josephine Devanbu, 11am, Headlands Center For the Arts (Marin Headlands). According to this extremely authoritative-looking website I found, Tamil narrative love poem during the Sangam Era usually ended with the hero riding a horse made of palm fronds and bells through town. Swoon! This workshop picks up where the ancient Tamil love poets left off, except in lieu of palms, attendees will be using "a massive pile of reclaimed upholstry," and instead of wooing your beloved, you will be sculpting "a landscape by our collective belongings." [eventbrite]
[West Bay Bonus Event] Full Queer Wrestling at Folsom Street Fair, 11am, Folsom Street (San Francisco). ORB is an Official Sponsor (\O/) for queer wrestling in the West Bay this year. That's how we roll now. The action will be happening all day, but at 3pm some leftover inessential books from our Eli's party (the winner didn't want them and they're been riding around in our cars all month) will meet their richly deserved fate at the hands of, we're told, "Snake Daddy Brian Joseph, 1/2 of the Gator Boys," and whoever else has the moxie to stand up to Snake Daddy. Pauline will be event librarian so you can hang with her. Free with admission to the fair. IYKYK what else will be going on there. [insta]
16mm Found Footage Phytography Workshop, noon, Shapeshifters Cinema (Jack London). Filmmaker Ellie Vanderlip teaches you how to develop film with plants, the "phytographic method," Play with plants, found footage, printing, transferring, and what exactly a "movie" "is" when you are using actual film but not like, plot or anything. [insta]
September's Revolutionary Poetry Reading Circle—Think of Others, noon, Lake Merritt (The Lake, Obv). Think of Others is a poetry circle for revolutionary queer poets of color, and it's more of an elaborate affair than the average Lake Merritt picnic. Expect refreshments from their "community chef," a "yoga ritual" led by local Poet Yogiate Chasejamison Akilah Manar-Spears, photo documentation by local artist Jada Simone Haynes in addition to the actual poetry. This month's theme is: grief/grace, as in you will feel grief if you miss this, but carry your rue with grace. [insta]
Wrenching News Workshops, 1pm, BAMPFA (Downtown Berkeley). My winning strategy for picking ice cream flavors is to always choose the least intuitive option, because a strange-sounding flavor like Salty Mango-Pumpkin Cheesecake or whatever has to be really good for someone to champion it enough to put it on the menu at all. With that principle in mind, I would like to bring your attention to this workshop on "the process of twisting and knotting newspapers according to [artist Maren] Hassinger's specifications." Guaranteed banger. [bampfa]
LACUNA, 4pm, confloptus (Chinatown). Mary Hill is one of my favorite California geologists, up there with Doris Sloan and Thomas Dibblee, so it brings me great joy to see artists celebrating her legacy. This multi-media show presents Hill's landscape annotations and lagoon research from the archive, a performance from West Bay indie outfit Leeward Sands, and a screening of one of Hill's short films. [insta]
Backyard Poetry, 5pm, avery and Zack's backyard (West Oakland). PIMBY: Poetry in my backyard! Well, maybe not MY backyard (I'm a NPIMBY). But local poets a. avery and Zack Haber will be hosting the backyard lineup the century. In the red corner, with a professional record of at least seventeen chapbooks and four book-length poetry collections, it's reigning whitmanweight champion CARRIEEEE HUNTERRRRR! And in the blue corner comes our challenger, the Troubadour of Totality, reigning cantoweight champion BRIAAAN AAAAAAANG! Email for address. [insta]
Laleh Khadivi's "FEMALE LIFE ON PLANET EARTH", 6pm, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore (Elmwood). Laleh Khadivi says she became a writer after dropping out of med school when she realized she was simply trying to live up to the expectations of her parents, so it is fitting that the Oakland novelist's fourth novel places the relationship between a woman and her seemingly-flawless mother under the microscope. Khadivi will appear in person and be joined in conversation by West Bay poet Preeti Vangan before signing books, you know the deal. [Mrs. Dalloways]
[West Bay Bonus Event] The Empathizer: CA Community Screening & Comedy Showcase, 6:30pm, The Lost Church (North Beach-ish). Not to be confused with The Sympathizer, The Empathizer is a documentary about members of the Vietnamese diaspora ("Việt Kiều") who have chosen to return to Vietnam. This screening, the final community screening in California, will be followed by a Q&A with the director and, interestingly, a comedy show. Director Fred Le has gone on the record saying that “When you lock Vietnamese immigrants in a room together, there’s going to be some heavy stuff that comes out,” so, uh, make sure not to let him close the doors. [insta]
Also: Hamesha Project Natural Dye Party RSVP for location (Oakland or Berkeley, who knows) / Neighborhood Giveaway Day at The Streets of (Temescal & Mosswood) / Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others: A workshop for current and future caregivers at Local Economy (Rockridge) / Picnic and Costume Swap at Edoff Memorial Bandstand (The Lake)