It started during a moment of exasperation in August 2009. Cate Marvin had proposed a panel for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. The topic? Contemporary American women's poetry. The idea was rejected. So she drafted and circulated an e-mail to women authors.
"Why can't we have an organization of female writers (poets, fiction, creative nonfiction writers) that has a conference every year?" she wrote. "Where ... writers of women's lit can get together and talk about issues that affect our work as women?"
The result was VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and it's having a reading event Tuesday night in San Francisco to raise money.
What do most San Franciscans know about Ingleside other than it has its own Muni line? Who even knows where it is? Woody LaBounty knows a lot about Ingleside, which turns 100 this year. He tells you (and shows you pictures) Tuesday night in a talk for the San Francisco History Association called Ingleside Terraces 100: Racetrack to Residence Park.
In Middle Eastern revolutions and uprisings in recent years, we've heard the voice of the region expressed via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in addition to more traditional news media. It's all been pretty serious stuff. But the comics comprising Arabs Gone Wild at Cobb's Comedy Club over the weekend happily reminded us that a vibrant comedy scene exists in the Middle East, and that the best way to understand the personality of the region is with all pretentiousness and assumptions checked at the door.
When you write theater about theater, it's tough to achieve anything beyond hyper-clever self-awareness. The remarkable thing about Lady Grey (in ever lower light), a collection of short pieces by Brooklyn-based playwright Will Eno, is that it's not just clever. It's actually quite moving. The show opens with the title piece, a transfixing monologue delivered by Danielle O'Hare. The monologue establishes the tone and the theme for the whole evening -- namely, Eno's wry interrogation of the meaning of theatrical representation. That sounds awfully self-important, but the playwright's penetrating wit downplays his grander thematic gestures. O'Hare, working under the direction of Rob Melrose, finds exactly the right pitch -- a delicate balance of approachability and irony.
