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Author: Olga Zilberbourg
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.”
Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Preventing Senior Moments: How to Stay Alert into Your 90s and Beyond
by Stan Goldberg
Some senior moments are what they seem—brain glitches no more concerning than realizing the problem arose because of something easily fixable such as wearing hearing aids. But others are the result of complex information processing errors. Unfortunately, until Preventing Senior Moments, no book or article offered research-based strategies for preventing senior moments that range from forgetting appointments to becoming disorientated. Using real life, relatable stories, Goldberg reveals the processes behind senior moments, how to recognize the signs, and strategies for preventing them.
A workshop regular for several years before the pandemic, Stan Goldberg is a person living with cancer, Professor Emeritus who for more than 25 years taught, provided therapy, researched, and published in the areas of learning problems, communication disorders, loss, change and end-of-life issues. For eight years he was a bedside hospice volunteer and currently counsels caregivers.
Buy the book here.
San Francisco Writers Workshop Presents: Lit Crawl Reading
San Francisco Writers Workshop is proud to participate in San Francisco’s Lit Crawl 2023 festival. For more than eight decades, this free, drop-in critique group has met weekly, nurturing a wide range of local authors. Come hear from the recent participants at our home base!
Event details:
October 21, 5 pm
Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street
Originally from the North of England, Jo Beckett-King is a writer and translator currently based in San Francisco. Her fiction has been short- or longlisted for the UK’s Bridport Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Bath Children’s Novel Award. She is represented by Elise Howard at DeFiore & Company.
Tahirah Nailah Dean is a lawyer by day and writer by night. She writes about the difficulties of finding love and marriage from the perspective of a Muslim woman. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera and Insider. She is a recipient of the 2023 Hurston/Wright Fellowship and winner of the 2021 MFest Short-Story Competition. Tahirah is currently working on a novel.
Cynthia Gómez writes feminist anti-capitalist horror and speculative fiction. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere. Her collection, “The Nightmare Box and Other Stories,” will be published by Dread Stone Press in summer 2023.
Mike Karpa’s short fiction and memoir has appeared in Tin House, Tahoma Literary Review, Oyster River Pages and Foglifter Journal. His first novel Criminals was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022. His new novel, The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, won best gay book at the 2023 SF Book Festival.
Graham Smith built a solar-powered car in a locomotive shop and once traveled to an uninhabited island just to get some eggs. He was dredged, like an ancient bicycle, from the mud of the Upper Mississippi and continues to roll on through the hinterlands of San Francisco Bay.
Joel Streicker’s stories have been published widely. Recent winner of Cutthroat Magazine’s and Blood Orange Review’s fiction contests, he has also published poetry and nonfiction in English and Spanish. His translations of such writers as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Pilar Quintana have appeared in numerous journals.
Jason Tan graduated from St. Olaf college with a degree in Latin and Asian Studies. He writes primarily fantastical novels about people who are trying to figure out the rest of their lives. He lives in San Francisco.
Wildflowers
by Beverly Parayno
It often takes more than ten years for a talented workshop writer to gather the tools they need to publish their first book. We congratulate Beverly Parayno with her powerful debut WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press). In these nine unforgettable stories, spanning several generations and traversing the Philippines, the Bay Area, and Ireland, Parayno illuminates the emotional and psychological journeys of Filipino and Filipino American girls and women experiencing fear, desire, loneliness, and despair.
Parayno was born in the Bay Area and raised in East San José by immigrant parents from the Philippines. Her fiction, memoir, essays and author interviews appear in Narrative Magazine, Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Warscapes, Huizache, and Southword: New Writing from Ireland, among others. Her work has been translated into Mandarin and published by World Literature, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Buy the book here.
Window Eyes
by Philip Jason
WINDOW EYES is a novel about an eccentric comic book artist and writer Kellan Savoy who, in the wake of a tragedy, created one final work and then disappeared. That work, a series about a man who tries to make a golem to replace his dead lover, is presented here for the first time: Window Eyes is a collection of annotated issue summaries as remembered by the only person to read the work before it vanished with Kellan, Kellan’s best friend Thomas Levi, who hopes that in sharing it, he might be able to shed some light on the mystery of its creation and disappearance.
Philip Jason attended the workshop in 2014. His stories can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Canary and Summerset Review. He is a recipient of the Henfield Prize in Fiction. His first collection of poetry, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is available from Fernwood Press.
Buy WINDOW EYES from Unsolicited Press.
Wordhacking: San Francisco Writers Workshop Reads at Noisebridge
San Francisco Writers Workshop is hosting a benefit for our current venue, Noisebridge. This legendary maker and hackerspace in the Mission prides itself on being open to all and provides infrastructure to people interested in art and technology. Our workshop, for instance, has been meeting in the sewing room equipped with machines for professional sewing projects. Like all creative venues in San Francisco, Noisebridge needs help making rent. This event will be a celebration of our writing and creative communities and a fundraiser for one of the coolest spaces in the Mission.
The event will include featured readers, a storytelling game, refreshments, cash bar, and an opportunity to tour Noisebridge. PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!
Mark your calendars for 7 pm on April 6, 2023, at Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street. Suggested donation starts at $10, and please give as much as you can!
If you can’t come to the event and want to help, please use one of the donations options listed on Noisebridge’s website.
Our featured readers:
Abi Ramanan was born in India, grew up in the UK and has lived in San Francisco since 2018. In a narrowly won race, she chose fiction writing over bread baking during the pandemic and has been on a beautiful (sort of) journey ever since. Her writing won the Space to Write Project contest and has been featured in Metro. She is currently working on her debut novel, PROPHET, a project of speculative fiction about emotion transference, and otherwise can generally be found seeking out a good time in her free time. Connect: Facebook, abi.ramanan1, Twitter @abilalayo
Liz Henry is a writer, translator, blogger, zine publisher, and hackerspace fan. You can find their poetry in the book Unruly Islands, many zines digitized for Kindle, and translations on bookmaniac.org or as part of Carmen Berenguer’s autobiography in poetry, Mi Lai. Connect: bookmaniac.org, Facebook: lizhenry, Twitter @lizhenry, @lizzard@mastodon.social
Raised in rural Colorado, on the Rio Grande river, Michael Lukso nurtured prize winning chickens in 4H. At UCSB, he received his B.A. in psychology, before moving to San Francisco for his M.S. in organizational psychology. He worked as a management consultant for over 10 years. Then he started smoking meth. Homelessness; incarceration; failed suicide attempts; toenail fungus. If something sucks, Michael insisted on adding it to his resume. However, in San Francisco’s criminal law system and mental health services, Michael discovers you don’t have to quit meth, to get better. With a working title of “There’s Another Way,” Michael is writing this memoir to show harm reduction can lead to recovery and happiness.
Peng Ngin left his native Malaysia to attend Vassar College. He moved to the Bay Area for graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he took his first creative writing classes. Peng returned to his lifelong interest in writing and literature during the pandemic. He lives in San Francisco and works as an investment manager.
Tahirah Nailah Dean is a lawyer by day, writer by night. Tahirah (she writes under her middle name Nailah) enjoys writing about the difficulties of finding love and marriage as a young Muslim woman. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera and Insider. She is a blogger for a popular Muslim dating app, Salams, and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Oakland with her husband. Connect: nailahdean.com, Facebook: tnd0029 IG: @nailahdean28
Thomas Hobohm grew up in Texas and now lives in San Francisco. They are the web editor at The Adroit Journal, and their work has appeared in places such as SmokeLong Quarterly, So to Speak, and HAD. You can usually find them at the Roxie Theater. Connect: thomashobohm.com, Twitter: @thomashobohm, Instagram: @skyferreiraofficial
The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg
by Mike Karpa
The author of delightful CRIMINALS (Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2022) and RED DOT, Karpa published a novel he’s been workshopping on Tuesday nights, THE WEALTHY WHITES OF WILLIAMSBURG. As a very positive Kirkus review puts it, this is a story of “an affluent Brooklyn family navigates family drama, career trouble, and long-kept secrets.” Told by several members of this family, this story pulls together several threads, each of which develops in unexpected ways, coming together at the end.
Buy this book on Amazon.
My Year as a Boy
by David Ira Cleary
Recent workshop participants know Cleary as the author of a historical fantasy set in the ancient Rome. A science fiction writer of considerable repute, Cleary regularly publishes in Asimov’s. Don’t miss his novella “My Year as a Boy” in their Winter 2023 issue. This story is set in the same world as his story “The Kewlest Thing of All,” that ran in Asimov’s in March 2006. Cleary says, “The inspirations for it are many but include P.G. Wodehouse and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
Buy this issue of Asimov’s.
Sinking the Arc
by Tamim Ansary
Our own Tamim Ansary, who moderated the workshop for many years, has a new novel out! Published by Kajaki Press, it tells the story of a fictional “alternative” weekly in Portland, Oregon, the Rose City Ark, the newspaper of the city’s counterculture. In 1974, the paper embarks on a bold experiment: to dispense with all hierarchy and embrace pure democracy: no more managing editor, no more assigned roles, no more some-people-telling-other-people-what-to-do: under the new plan, every person will decide for themselves how to contribute to the paper.
Buy this book now on Amazon (and rate and review!)
The Shivering World
by Cynthia Gómez
Dread Stone Press presents SPLIT SCREAM, a new Horror Novelette Double Feature. “The Shivering World,” a story by long-time SFWW regular Cynthia Gómez, is about a brilliant student Nayeli, on her way to escape from a childhood of poverty and abuse, when she encounters a being she suspects to be La Llorona.
This book is available for sale on Bookshop.com.
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