LitMinds Blog and Interviews

With the cool fall weather comes a flurry of literary activity including new book launches, author tours, and literary happenings. This weekend (October 6th) marks the opening night for San Francisco's popular literary festival: Litquake.  Eight years in the running, this year's Litquake will be spread over eight days, include over fifty events, and will bring over three hundred authors to San Francisco.

LitMinds invited the festival's founders, Jane Ganahl and Jack Boulware, to share this behind-the-scenes look with us covering the origins of Litquake, their journey to keep the festival going and growing, and some of their cherished memories.  We were also able to catch the volunteers  doing god's work for a unique photo-op at the Marsh Cafe in Mission.  Enjoy!

Tell us a little about your personal backgrounds.

Jane: I grew up south of San Francisco - close enough to experience the Summer of Love and be enormously influenced by it as a young person. I was too busy having fun in college to figure out what I wanted to do - until I discovered writing when I was 21. I didn't get a job writing until i was in my early 30s. I worked in daily newspapers for 24 years. And I was a single mother for most of my daughter's life. Those two things impacted me enormously - both for the better.

Jack: I grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana. As a kid I read a lot of books, made radio plays and 8mm movies with my friends. In 1980s San Francisco, I launched two magazines using pirated desktop software, and have been making a living as a writer for the past 15 years.

How and when did you start Litquake? How did the idea originate? What were the initial goals?
The Litquake festival’s first year was 2002. In 1999 and 2000 Jane and I also organized a similar one-day event called Litstock, which was held outdoors. We did it for two years, and then the dot-com crash hit the city. People were depressed and there wasn’t much interest. But throughout the year, we found that people really missed it, and so did we. So we revived the idea with a new group of volunteers, and relaunched with a new name. Coincidentally that year, a study was published that named San Francisco as the number one city in America, for per-capita consumption of both books and alcohol. So we knew we were onto something. Both festivals were conceived at the Edinburgh Castle Literary Pub in the Tenderloin, birthplace of many great (and questionable) ideas.

From the beginning, we wanted to celebrate the written word, and make it more of an event rather than just another reading with 10 people sitting in chairs. Every author has done those readings and they’re not very much fun. There were lots of small reading series springing up around the city, and our festival was an opportunity to present several of them to a larger audience. We kept the readings fairly short, to keep the pace moving, with live music in between, and this also meant there would be more room to include more authors. The concept has not changed -- a writer reads a short excerpt of their own work, enough to give the audience a flavor. And if people like what they hear, they can seek out more and buy the books. We did not want to have any sort of trade show element. At the time, there were other events in San Francisco that catered to the publishing industry. We envisioned it as something that could grow and rank on par with the city’s other festivals devoted to jazz and film and blues. And we didn’t want it to be boring. Have you ever watched BookTV? It’s like taking Vicodin.

What has been the most satisfying part about being the founders and organizers of Litquake for eight years? What have been some of the challenges?
One of the big challenges is obviously money to keep it going. San Francisco boasts an insane number of nonprofit organizations, all competing for the same benefactors and grants. We are a city of givers, but there’s only so much to spread around. The literary arts never receives as much assistance as the other disciplines. And despite our wealth, America is traditionally not as generous with funding the arts as other countries, especially in Europe. So we’ve been really lucky to receive some key grants and financial donations that have kept us afloat. And sheer determination from so many volunteers have helped plan and produce the events since the beginning.

It’s always cool to see so many people come out and support the written word, because there’s so much competition for the public’s imagination these days. Reading and writing is a solitary occupation, and when you make it social, it’s an opportunity to see just how many people still value words and language. It’s really wonderful in particular, to watch people running down the street during the Lit Crawl. Imagine, people running to see a literary reading! One year of the Lit Crawl, a certain pub refused at the last minute to turn down the music for our reading, so everyone moved out onto the sidewalk, somebody set up a chair, and one by one the authors stood on top of the chair and did their readings. People were standing around listening with beers, cars were slowing down to see what was going on. It was like a scene out of 19th century London, with the ranters in Hyde Park.

Tell us about any particular Litquake event that was memorable for you?
Every single event has some great moments, it’s hard to remember all of them. The first Lit Crawl. Irvine Welsh’s reading at the first Litquake was electric. Ishmael Reed bravely doing his reading in a stiff wind to close the 99 fest at the Golden Gate Park Bandshell. The entire opening night of 2005 devoted to the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL.” Seeing Winona Ryder in the audience, scribbling in a notebook. Hearing Ferlinghetti read his poem “Lit.Quake” which was all about our festival, it was really moving; he allowed us to post it up on our website. At the 2002 closing party at the Phoenix Hotel, poet and novelist Kim Addonizio suddenly stripped down to her underwear and jumped in the swimming pool, and she was helped out by a group of sailors, who were in town for Fleet Week. That was nice to see.

How do you think Litquake has impacted the literary life of San Francisco?
It’s difficult to say. Since we’ve been doing the festival, more bookstores have closed their doors. But there are also a lot more events and writers’ groups than I’ve seen in a long time. At the very least, people know there’s a big festival every October, where they can see and hear literature for free, or very little money.

What new things can people expect this year from Litquake?
The Literary Death Match, more youth poetry, more long-form events that feature one or two authors in an extended conversation. And more authors and events than ever before!

What advice or tips would you have for people who want to organize similar literary festivals elsewhere?

Jack: Be resourceful and don’t make it boring.

Jane: Draft excellent volunteers. Hire a publicist as soon as you get a little money. Start local and build from there. Know your audience. And don't make it boring.

The Dream Team of volunteers at their last big meeting before the show begins...

You can find out more about this year's Litquake happenings here, buy tickets to the opening night honoring Armistead Maupin here.