Best Writing Classes San Francisco
Mon, 05/03/2010 - 12:30pm | Matthew Clark D...
April 2010 Blog Update:
Happy End-of-April everyone. Thank You to all of you who’ve referred people to The Lab and to my 1-on-1 services for writers. Everyone knows the overall state of Arts Education these days, and I’ve been blessed to have work. I couldn’t do it without you!
It’s such a great time of year to be a teacher. Especially one at SF State. We have two Pulitzer Prize winners this year, which is almost as great as hearing from current/former students are busy preparing to take off to various places: one to New York after getting hired by Teach for America, others to grad school: one to University of Hawaii at Manoa on a full teaching scholarship, another to The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and another to San Diego State. I’m going to miss this year’s graduates very much. There is no place on earth where a more interesting mix of people exists than in an undergraduate creative writing class at SFSU. Congratulations to all of the undergrad graduates and to all of the folks on their amazing achievements.
And the grad students? How proud could I possibly be of the Fourteen Hills editors and staff? This Spring alone, they’ve produced a fundraiser and a big fiction reading all while sifting through hundreds and hundreds of literary and art submissions to make a magazine. These are students who, despite endless-seeming funding cutbacks and tuition increases in the State of California, know how to make their own education. 82 people have RSVP’d for our next event, The 16.2 Release Party, happening on May 21st at The San Francisco Motorcycle Club. (You should join us. It’s so much fun, it’s really not to be missed). By the way, Fourteen Hills is easy to follow. They're everywhere. On a blog, on Facebook, on Twitter. Sign up!
People have been asking about the manuscript I recently got off to my agent. Why isn’t the hardest part of writing a novel writing a novel? This is my second time finishing that task, and it seems relatively easy when compared to the waiting to see if an editor and publishing house will pick it up. My agent is confident, as are the people who’ve read it, but meanwhile, it’s nerve wracking, to say the least. About a month ago, I was having a conversation with a former SFSU student who has become a good friend. She asked me if I were writing. We were both surprised by my answer, I said, “Honestly I don’t know if I have what it takes to write another novel unless I get a book deal on this one.”
Both my novels took five years to write. In retrospect, I’m glad my first one never sold. It came close a couple times. Two editors wrote letters saying they brought it to the table at their publishing house to fight for it. Both times it lost when it came to discussions on marketing/audience. This feedback was more painful to me than feedback like, “It’s not ready. Get back to work.” I like “It’s not ready. Get back to work.” I’m a writer. I’m a worker. I like writing. I like working.
But marketing? Is that an excuse? Do they mean it? Does that really matter? Can’t the right person market anything? It’s impossible to tell. Some say it’s a polite blow off. Others say that people don’t have time to write extensive letters (one was two pages, single-spaced, by and editor at Crown) unless they believe in your skill.
Somehow, my actions are defying my statement. Suddenly I find myself exploring a new character in the few moments when I’m not teaching or at Trader Joe’s replenishing my food supply. He’s starting to hang out with me more, whisper in my ear, and share his opinions. I’m filling up a handwritten notebook, which is in the pocket of my motorcycle jacket. I find myself pulling it out when I shouldn’t, which is always a good sign.
Michelle Carter, one of the best creative writing teachers on earth, has a yet-to-be-published book on fiction writing. It’s unlike anything else out there. One of the things she asks her readers to consider at the beginning of the book is writing a list of things they’re afraid to write about for fear of getting “wrong.”
Number one on my list is the particular complexity it is for me to have siblings. I’m the middle of three male children. We split up when my older brother was 17 years old and my younger 10, and none of us have lived in the same state since. They’re both fathers, and married to women.
There’s nothing more charged or complicated to me—how I feel about them, the dynamics of being one of three boys. How it is to be the gay one, the unmarried one, the one who is not a father.
To complicate it, there are aspects of our pasts, years gone by with little-to-no-contact, gaps that cannot be bridged. We didn’t live together through adolescence, didn’t spend a moment together in high school, never played on the same sports team. There are so many experiences we each celebrated and endured alone, separately, even though the other two were out there in the world somewhere doing something like same thing. Why? Why did we not stay in better touch? Why are those bonds so strong that we can’t just stay out of each other’s business? Why does it feel so good to be together, even when it doesn’t? Why do their struggles or sadness make me feel so helpless in ways that my own struggles and sadness do not? What is it about the intensity and trust that they once held their tiny babies out to me, wanting me to hold them?
All of my fictional characters have been only children.
In relatively recent years, my family has become the most important thing in my life. I relish the time I get with my parents and brothers, their children, their wives. I’m fascinated by our similarities, our defenses, the ways our parents succeeded in passing down the vices and predilections of generations of Clarks and Davisons and the nuanced and glaring differences in how they manifest.
Perhaps it will not be a novel. I haven’t written a short story in over a decade and I want to spend the summer working on the short stories I wrote and started in grad school. Lots of them got published and I think I could put together a collection.
So apparently I can write while waiting to hear about another novel. I got caught in a moment of fear. I froze because my ambition and desire to be a part of the kinds of conversations one gets to when one has a book--my ambition and desire to take my teaching to the levels one can when one has a book--are sometimes overwhelming.
More good news? Apparently I can, while riding the waves of desire and ambition, even start writing about the thing I fear the most I’ll get wrong.
All of this is subject to change, but James, my new character, is a middle child. One of three brothers. He’s unmarried and childless. His brothers are not. So far that’s an exhausted list of the ways James and I are similar. Still, it's charged as if much more personal. The other day I wrote at Café Flore for a couple hours and the whole time my heartbeat felt a bit too fast for a person sitting still. I kept looking up, afraid the person next to me might see.
Who knows what, if anything, will come of it, but I'm so glad to have the teachers and students in my life who keep me pushing forward. People who've always emphasized the artist process over the product without being afraid to pursuit the product. People who have not made success bad or wrong just because of its challenges and elusiveness.
Thanks for reading my update.
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Creative Writing San Francisco
Wed, 03/31/2010 - 1:07pm | Matthew Clark D...
March 2010 Update
It has not been easy. Luckily I don’t like easy. But this challenge went beyond. With what very much seemed like a complete lack of results in most of the classes, I wondered if there was any purpose in what I do at all. I nearly gave up, and now I’m so glad I stuck it out. Just three weeks ago the residency took a turn. After listening to suggestions from both the site teachers and my colleagues at Performing Arts Workshop, I rethought my approach. More than anything, I got over myself. Stopped being so attached to the outcome. Relaxed a bit and concentrated more on establishing relationships than imparting craft tools. (At one point I started laughing, realizing I was trying to get forth graders to write their autobiographies).
Suddenly students are happy to see me. (A couple of my students and two of my colleagues can be seen in this great video) Notebooks are out when I arrive at the classes. And kids who usually don’t speak or participate are suddenly opening up, writing stories.
It makes sense. One hour per week in the classroom isn’t very much time to established trust with anyone, never mind kids who have good reason not to trust many adults. I’m so glad I didn’t resign. Now Wednesdays are my favorite day of the week.
The thing I’ve learned this year about being a University teacher with furloughs is you’re still responsible to impart the same amount of information to the students. I scheduled my Hawaii getaway on a furlough week, which resulted in one less class but twice the reading and writing (and therefore preparation). In fact, I logged at least 20 hours of work in those four days. It turned out to be a strange kind of blessing for me to be trapped in the hotel the day of the tsunami warning. I was able to knock out eight hours of work after calling my mom and telling her I love her and if I get wiped out to tell everyone I died happy. In a penthouse. In a fancy hotel. In Hawaii.
When I lived, I was so grateful to have done so much work because I came back to full-throttle teaching and a flurry of events.
In the late 90s, I began volunteering at Glide, starting off with stuffing envelopes in their office and manning the phones in the volunteer center. Then, a couple years later, I got to work with on one the big fundraisers. I asked Cecil Williams how he and Janice Mirikitani kept people coming back for 30 years. He said, “Matthew, it’s important to leave people wanting more, not less.”
I’ve never forgotten that he said that to me, although at different moments of my teaching career you might think I had. Lately I’ve been really trying to live it. Not only with the kids, but at the adult literary events I’m a part of organizing. The 8th 8-week session of The Douglass Street Lab just had its final reading. We decided host a small benefit for ATA in exchange for their space.
The Lab attracts people interested in words who’re at every level—published writers, journalists, those with BAs and MFAs in writing—along with people who sign up for it as their first-ever creative writing class. One audience member left saying the material was so good he had no idea who was new.
I certainly had a blast. There’s something to be said about taking creative writing outside of the normal MFA academic setting (a setting, by the way, that I most-often love). Since, at The Lab, we don’t talk about our publications or where we went to “undergrad,” it lets people be. Instead of getting caught up in the nomenclature of the “fiction workshop,” we talk like regular people, trading in jargon for clear and direct feedback on what scenes are working to pull us into the world of the story or memoir, and why.
And then there’s Fourteen Hills. The editors and staff work their butts off to put on events for which people want to show up. They just had a very successful panel discussion/fundraiser celebrating the second printing of New Standards, an anthology of fiction collected from the magazine over the years. Check out the pictures. It was PACKED!
My favorite Fourteen Hills parties are the new-issue release parties, which have been held at The San Francisco Motorcycle Club. They prove (drawing over 150 word-nerds) that great food, good drinks, a fun raffle, a DJ and a dance floor (the last 14H party is where I first heard the mash-up of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and The Black Eyed Peas “My Humps,” which has invigorated my gym workout) can very much coincide with a quality literary reading.
Maybe now that I’m getting older I guess I want to have more fun, not less. I attended a reading last month where the participants were asked questions by the audience and some of the answers seemed so precious, so rarefied, bottled, and self-important it was practically unbearable. The writers didn’t even seem to be listening to what the audience was asking, but listening for a pause just so they could talk about themselves or how important it is “what we do.” They spoke as if there’s something inherently superior in being a writer or an artist.
Luckily the writers who struck me that way were balanced by those who just seemed passionate and nerdy about how great it is that these twenty-six letters can end up, somehow, turning into great stories. It was a good thing I was sitting toward the back and didn’t have a cyanide pill handy. If I had, I wouldn’t be writing this update.
Speaking of fun literary events, I’ll be reading tomorrow night at BaBL with three former Labbers! Brad Straw (who is organzing the event), the incredibly talented Jennifer Hasegawa (founder of The Barbie Cage and its accompanying haiku contest), John Yi (founder of Dublit); also reading is first-timer Scott Barney.
When: Thursday, April 1st
Where: H Café, 3801 17th Street, San Francisco
What time: 6:30-7:30
How much: FREE
Fourteen Hills has two upcoming events, the aforementioned release party for issue 16.2 on May 21st (mark your calendar, and stay tuned on Fourteen Hill’s Facebook Page), and Second Annual Gina Berriault Award: Featuring Adam Johnson at The Poetry Center in the Humanities Building at SFSU.
When: Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Where: The Poetry Center, Humanties Building, 5th Floor, SFSU
What time: 7-9pm
How much: FREE
RSVP on Facebook
Thanks for reading my update, and see you in April!
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Creative Writing San Francisco
Fri, 11/27/2009 - 9:43am | Matthew Clark D...
*Sign up for The Douglass Street Lab's next session starting 1/19/10.
***
The new issue of Fourteen Hills is also about to be released. You can come hear some of the writers at the release party on December 16th at the San Francisco Motorcycle Club. This issue is visually stunning and the work in it will please all of the word nerds in your life. You can buy it through SPD or you can subscribe here. Either way, come to the party. It’ll be fun. And it’s free. More info on the address/time/readers here.
***
Ok. It may not have been the best movie on earth but something that came out of that movie totally changed my life. Oprah interviewed the cast of the movie and several of the actresses lamented about how hot it had been on the shoot. The way I remember it, Oprah listened to the details about how hot it had been on set and Dolly Parton said nothing. Oprah turned to her and said, “Dolly, you’re the one who had to wear all those big wigs and all those layers. Weren’t you hot?” And Dolly Parton looked at Oprah, paused, then said, “When I was a little girl growin’ up in the backwoods of Tennessee I wanted to be a famous country western singer and a movie star. Now I’m a country western singer and a movie star and I’m not going to complain about the weather.”
In a recent conversation with my mother and a friend she's known for forty-five years, we all talked about the teachers who had an influence on us even when we didn’t know it at the time. I’ve had a lot of great teachers. But with most of them I’ve known how great they were even during the “during phase.” With some of them, I’ve had the pleasure of having time-delayed double-appreciation for what I’d already appreciated.
I had a high-school art teacher named Mrs. Fitz. Anyone who knows me knows that I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen. And I only attended a tiny portion of my freshman year so I couldn’t have been in her class more than a dozen times. My high school felt like an entirely hostile environment—students and faculty included—so I’d given up on any attempt to gain anyone’s acceptance or approval. Instead I rebelled, refusing any help. I don’t know if Mrs. Fitz ever even noticed me. But I noticed her. She came to our small-town conservative Massachusetts school with her spiked hair. She wore layered outfits that looked like a cross between Pat Benetar and Stevie Nicks. She called herself an artist and her teaching style reminded me of Debbie Allen’s character on the television show Fame.
Memory is imperfect, and my filters of that time were incredibly emotional and hormonal, so I’m not stating any of this as objective fact. I remember her talking to the people in the room who were most interested in what she had to offer. She didn’t exclude anyone or ignore anyone—but drew people in with her passion for the subject. To appear on her radar one needed to take risks and show some passion of one’s own. I was already too far gone. I’d hatched a plan to run away and return to California and make it as an actor. I didn’t want small town art classes. I judged her and everyone else I liked before they could judge me. I’m not sure she and I ever even had a one on one conversation. I do, however, have an awareness of how often I thought of her over the years. I wondered what it was like to be her. There. In that town. I wondered if she were married or single or if she had a boy or girl friend. I wondered if she’d sensed my gayness. (After all, didn’t all artistic people have advanced gaydar?) I’ve thought about her when in museums or when playing with clay with my nieces and any time I’ve ever attempted to sketch something on paper (a town square, an apartment’s floor plan, an outfit that I’ve needed to see first on paper in order to describe in a story). She once told me a sketch I drew of a mouse sticking his head out of a hole in a triangular piece of Swiss cheese had good shadowing. I’ve never forgotten her or it.
Why? She taught me that having a life as an artist is a possibility. It didn’t matter where you lived. It’s how you lived. What mattered was how you saw the world and how you responded to it.
Things have been tough this semester at SF State with the cutbacks, and word is that it’ll get worse before it gets better. But I’m not going to complain. Why? When I was a little boy sitting on a rock looking up at the stars in a small town in Massachusetts, all I wanted was to be around people who made art with words or paper or their bodies. I wanted to make my living not as a truck driver or a computer programmer or a waiter (all jobs held by people I loved), but as an artist. And now I’m making my living as an artist and I’m not going to complain about a couple of cutbacks.
I few weeks ago I wanted to complain about the classes I’m teaching to forth and fifth graders and at an afterschool middle-school program. But I held my tongue. And I’m glad I did. Not only because they’re starting to trust me, to open up and actually write stuff down, but because during this conversation with my mother and her friend I realized that being a teacher has nothing to do with getting the results I want to see. It’s about presenting possibilities. These classes through Performing Arts Workshop are the most challenging I’ve taught. Or maybe it just seems like that because I’ve been teaching the others for a while and I’ve gotten more used to them. At any rate, they make me feel alive.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. By the time this goes up it will be the Monday after. I’m writing this from Mendocino where my mother and I have spent the week driving up and down Highway 1 stopping to eat sushi and Thai spring rolls and avocados on benches overlooking cliffs that drop into the bright blue Pacific. I was raised in California before my father was transferred to Massachusetts and my parents took my brothers and me along this coast when we were kids. It’s quite a sensation to revisit this area with my mom. She with her head of hair as white as the wave caps and me with my baldhead and graying beard. On days like today it seems like all of it makes sense and no matter what happens it’ll be okay. Or not. And either way, everything will continue on.
Fiction Classes in San Francisco
Sat, 07/11/2009 - 1:51pm | Matthew Clark D...
This Blog Entry Contains:
*Updates.
*NY Reading with Anne-E Wood and Evan Rehill on 7/12.
*Fall 2009 Registration Douglass Street Lab.
*1-on-1 Manuscript Consultations.
*Become "a fan" of The Lab on FACEBOOK.
***
Updates:
I'm delighted to report that the finished draft of my novel manuscript is finally in the hands of my agent and a couple of trusted friends. I've learned a lot about writing (and about myself) from the last phase of the process, and wrote about it a bit in a blog entry I posted this past spring.
"Do not hurry. Do not rest." is a Goethe quote for which I've come to gain the utmost appreciation.
Now I'm vacillating between complete and utter calm and serenity (which very well may be denial) and impatience to get back to work. Happily for me, the ratio is about 80/20.
Given that I'm here in New York, with the splendid good fortune to be living in an art gallery, I have no shortage of activities with which to fill the time I'd been working on the novel. I've been going to plays and museums, walking around taking photographs, talking to visual artists about their processes, and reading, reading, reading.
In those ways life feels so very good.
The same day I finished my manuscript, I also received a phone call from my boss at SFSU. Two of the three classes I was scheduled to teach have been canceled due to the disastrous state California finds itself in.
That's never a fun call to receive.
But it's not surprising when one makes one's living in Arts Education in a state institution. After all, California employs a former bodybuilder as the governor.
It'll be interesting to see the art that will result from particular time in history.
My hope is my SFSU students will not be entirely discouraged by their ever-decreasing educational options—but will instead keep reading, keep writing, keep on engaging in the activities that ignite that fundamental human impulse to create.
***
R/A R/A READING with Anne-E Wood and Evan Rehill.
If you're in NY, or know someone who is, please consider coming to and/or forwarding this invite to your NY friends:
Sunday, July 12, 2009
7:00pm - 8:00pm
I'll be reading from LETTERS TO THE DEAD with the following two former-SF-writers who now live in Brooklyn:
Anne-E. Wood's fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in Tin House, Gargoyle, Able Muse, Agni, The Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Karamu Literary Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Other Voices, The Cream City Review, Fiction Attic, Fourteen Hills Magazine, Hustlers: An Anthology of Gay Male Sex for Hire (under a pen name) and others. She has an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University and won the 2006 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award for her collection Two If By Sea. She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, Rutgers University, The New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City, and in public schools, juvenile halls, homeless shelters, and youth centers all over the country. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a novel.
Evan Rehill grew up in Jersey. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Instant City, Watchword, 14 Hills, Big Bell, and Kitchen Sink Magazine. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006, won the Miriam Ylvisaker Award for Fiction in 2007, and earned his MFA from San Francisco State University in 2008, where he was also an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing. He has delivered lectures at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and on Neighborhood Public Radio. Push Press published The Way We’re Used To (limited edition) in the summer of 2008. Rehill has completed a collection of short stories (Night Comes Later) and is at work on a novel. He currently teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Douglass Street 6, The Fall 2009 Lab, starts Tuesday 9/8/9 and runs for 8 consecutive weeks. If you're interested, you can guarantee yourself a seat now. (The Fall session usually sells out a few weeks before it starts). As it stands, a few slots remain.
I've joined eventbrite to make signing up a breeze. Click Here for more info & to register. I'd also very much appreciate it if you'd forward this email to that friend who has been talking about taking a writing class.
Click here:
to find out more about The Lab
about Matthew
or to read testimonials from people who've taken The Lab.
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OPEN SLOTS FOR MANUSCRIPT CONSULTATION
Since I'll be teaching less at SFSU this Fall, I'll have a few extra open slots for 1 on 1 Manuscript consulting. For nearly fifteen years, I've been working with fiction/memoir writers who're interested in tightening their work to send out or to apply for graduate school, fellowships, grants—or to simply improve upon their craft. My clients have included Pushcart and O'Henry winning authors, and writers whose imaginations and hard work got them invited into MFA programs as competitive as University of Oregon, Syracuse, Columbia, and NYU.
While The Lab is ideal for people who want to generate new work and/or to expand a project; working 1-on-1 is best for those who have an existing project they're ready to work hard on finishing. Click here to find out more about how it works. Click here to read testimonials with people who've worked 1-on-1 with me.
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If FACEBOOK hasn't already taken over your life, here's an opportunity to increase the chance that it will. Click Here to become "a fan" of The Lab. Past, present, and future Labbers andlovers of words drop by and contemplate quotes for/by/about writingand/or life and/or art. Also, up-to-date information about The Lab andthe people in it.
Late Spring Update
Mon, 05/18/2009 - 6:31pm | Matthew Clark D...
Thanks for visiting my blog. Hope everyone receiving this is enjoying their Spring. San Francisco is having INCREDIBLE weather. As soon as I'm done with this entry, in fact, I'm off to Ft. Mason park with some sunscreen, a picnic, and pile of final papers from my writing students at San Francisco State.
This update contains:
*Fall 2009 Registration Douglass Street Lab
*Save The Dates! 2 Upcoming Readings
*Douglass Street 5 Update
*Matthew's New York Summer
***
If you're interested in being a part of The Fall 2009 Lab, which starts Tuesday 9/8/9 and runs for 8 consecutive weeks, you can garauntee yourself a seat now. (The Fall session usually sells out quickly). I've joined eventbrite to make signing up a breeze.
For more info & to register, CLICK HERE.
***
Save the dates:
1. Douglass Street Lab Session 5 will be having its public reading "Douglass Speaks" on Tuesday June 2nd, so save the date! Exact time and location to be announced soon on The Lab's Facebook Page.
2. To help kick off the inaugural evening of "The Barbershop: A Reading Series," I will be reading (along with a very special guest) from my almost-completed manuscript LETTERS TO THE DEAD (a novel-in-progress) . Randall Mann and Lorelei Lee, both wildly talented writers, will also be reading. Please join us for the fun. There will be an optional $5 suggested donation to help cover the cost of snacks, chairs, wine, beverages, etc. Here's the info:
Saturday, June 6, 2009
8:00pm - 9:30pm
2150 Market Street (between Church and Sanchez)
San Francisco, CA
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Douglass Street 5 Update:
Last Tuesday Douglass 5 completed their 6th Session. We read an interview with Rafael Campo, who is, among other things, a gay Cuban-American, a Harvard Medical School physician and poet, who describes his writing process this way
"I’ve been drawn so irresistibly to so-called received forms...they are physical touchstones that provide a kind of entrée into the arduous imaginative journey back to my lost, decrepit island, to inhabit the beautiful but forbidden body of my desire. So I try to rewrite the sonnet, pushing against its narrow walls, asking it to contain a not-so-different love; beneath the scaffolding of a villanelle, I imagine I might rebuild the fanciful architecture of crumbling Havana."
Members of The Lab, after reading the interview and one of Campo's poems, were then challenged to see what they could get onto paper about their characters using exactly thirteen lines (Campo's poem was five 13-line stanzas) under the catagorical prompts of: Injury, Esctasy, Dispair, & Repair.
While some of the members showed some initial resistance, the findings were INCREDIBLE. They were then encouraged to continue with or completely abandon the formal constraints of the exercize as their projects and vision deemed fit. THRILLING!
***
NEW YORK HERE I COME!
After a quietly glorious year of writing and teaching and frequent immersion in San Francisco's art & performance scene, I'm putting the finishing touches on the first real definitive beginning-to-end draft of LETTERS TO THE DEAD to send to my agent and a couple of trusted readers.
Then I'm getting on a plane to New York to spend 6 weeks with Greg, Michael, Jetson, and Frizbee (my new canine nephew who I have yet to meet.)
I plan on recharging by immersion into New York's artistic offerings while doing the final revisions on the novel. I'm also very excited to get back into short fiction. I recently took an inventory of the stories I've written and hope to be able to compile them into my next manuscript.
I'll update you in June and July from New York.
Happy Late-Spring early summer everyone!
Happy Holidays & Thank You.
Mon, 12/15/2008 - 8:09am | Matthew Clark D...
Douglass St. Writing Lab with
Matthew Clark Davison
6 Seats Remain for Winter 2009 Session Starting January 20th
UPDATE 12/29/08: 2 Seats Remain!
UPDATE 1/1/09: SOLD OUT!
Upcoming Readings
Tue, 09/16/2008 - 4:47pm | Matthew Clark D...
THANKS SO MUCH TO ALL WHO JOINED ME FOR THESE RECENT READINGS!
Check back here for future dates.
UPDATE:
“DOUGLASS READS 3”
Kicked Some Serious Ask on
TUESDAY OCTOBER 21st
6:30-8:00 pm
Last Laugh Cafe
1551 Dolores St. between 29th St. and Valley
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-5524
Fall Underway
Fri, 09/05/2008 - 7:22am | Matthew Clark D...
I had such a great summer. Not just the 5-week writing stint in New York, but I also enjoyed a visit from my momma (who is the world's best motorcycle passenger. She practices reiki on me while we drive). My younger brother Paul, and his wife and daughter, Terese and Amara, also trekked from Colorado Springs to the Bay Area, and were surprised by the chilly late-July-weather.
Upcoming Events
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 7:56am | Matthew Clark D...
“DOUGLASS READS 2”
TUESDAY MAY 27th
6:30-8:00 pm
Last Laugh Cafe
1551 Dolores St. between 29th St. and Valley
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-5524
Spring Check In and Upcoming Workshops
Sun, 04/06/2008 - 8:28am | Matthew Clark D...
Greetings from the life of a working writer in San Francisco.
Seems like just yesterday I was blogging from New York and here it is time for me to buy my tickets to go back this summer! A full year later?
About my novel: SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS! The Fall Semester made the day-to-day writing a challenge...but the books and stories I read and what I learned from my students ended up proving invaluable yet again.