Tales From Two Cities: LA vs. SF Writing Festival | Main Library

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Tales From Two Cities: LA vs. SF Writing Festival | Main Library

Come to the San Francisco leg of Tales from Two Cities, one of two free conferences examining the literature of Alta, California, north and south — from immigration to innovation, from the desert to the coast, on October 4-5, 2013.

Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, print and digital: It’s all part of how California defines itself, going back to the earliest days. Regional distinctions are important, but most essential is the idea of California as a state with a culture and aesthetic all its own. What is our sensibility? How does the literature of California tell us who we are?

The second leg will take place in Los Angeles on February 21-22, 2013.

Photo credit: Can Balcioglu | Flickr

Saturday, October 5, 2013
Saturday | Tales From Two Cities: LA vs. SF Writing Festival | Main Library

From 9:15 am to 5 pm on Saturday, the conference covers topics of regionality, universities, films and science fiction, and concludes with a panel featuring David Talbot, Phil Bronstein, Gary Kamiy and Michelle Tea.

Conference Schedule | Saturday, October 5, 2013

• 9:15-10:15 am: Regional Voices – Frances Dinkelspiel, Ellen Ullman, Karen Tei Yamashita, Faith Adiele, & Moderator: Anthea Hartig
  Moderated by Anthea Hartig, the Executive Director of the California Historical Society, this panel is a wide-ranging discussion about regional literary production beyond the limits of San Francisco but still Northern Californian. How are the life stories of our distinguished panelists (their own and those they unspool in their fiction and non-fiction) inflected or influenced by Northern California? Can we speak of general Bay Area literary production or does the work of these writers insist that we think in different terms about region? What’s local, what’s regional, what’s Californian, and how do we know?
• 10:15-11:15 am: Films presented by Richard Moore
  Join us for a time-travel excursion to 1965 to see some of the Bay Area’s most celebrated writers and cultural icons — Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan — captured in this rare series of remarkable cinematic biographies.
• 11:30 am-12:30 pm: Universities and Literary Communities – Tobias Wolff, Peter Richardson, Paul Yamazaki, & Laura Cogan
  How do literary communities arise? How are they sustained? What’s the lasting role and influence of single institutions — Stanford’s Stegner program, for example — on the region, the state, the nation? How about bookstores, salons, other ways and places in which writers gather, gain support of one sort or another, and do their work? What are the connections — personal, historical, and otherwise—between such places and programs?
• 1:30-2:30 pm: The Literary Tradition in California – Kevin Starr in conversation with William Deverell
  Kevin Starr’s monumental “Dream Series” is the single most ambitious reckoning of California history ever undertaken. Trained in the American Civilization program at Harvard, Starr is also an astute literary critic and student. This conversation with conference co-organizer William Deverell will explore the meaning, power, and influence of California writers, north and south, then and now, fiction and non.
• 3-4 pm: Science Fiction and Environmental Writing – Dana Gioia, Kim Stanley Robinson, & Ursula Heise
  Moderated by poet and literary scholar Dana Gioia, this panel explores landscapes of fantasy and fact in California science-fiction and environmental writing. Ecotopia brought nature and science fiction famously together, but so too have other writers, thinkers, and scholars, including our panelists Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Heise. This conversation takes up these themes, in past and present, and with particular focus on the current and former work of the panelists themselves.
• 4-5 pm: The City – David Talbot, Phil Bronstein, Gary Kamiya, Michelle Tea; & Moderator: Jane Ganahl
  Moderated by Jane Ganahl, this panel tackles “the city.” What’s the enduring power of San Francisco as literary site, trope, problem, puzzle, mystery, and icon? The City in fiction, The City in fact: where do they crossover, diverge, and collide? Who are the great interpreters of The City then and now? What’s right, what’s wrong about portrayals? And, as this conference is meant to be the first of two, what questions about San Francisco can we bring to Los Angeles in February of 2014?

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.