by Kitty Costello
The San Francisco Writers Workshop has a long history, so long in fact, that even its oldest living members don’t know exactly when it was founded or who the original moderator was. As close as anyone can figure, it started in 1946 or ‘47 at San Francisco’s Main Library, and has met nearly every Tuesday night since then.
No one has ever disputed the group’s claim to be the longest consecutively-running writing workshop in the country, perhaps even the world. The Workshop has witnessed the rise and fall of the Beat era, the Summer of Love, the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the ’89 quake, the advent of personal computers and the web (with the concomitant demise of the typewriter), multiple wars, and two pandemics. It survived a sudden eviction from the Main Library in 1988 and a long nomadic period, meeting everywhere from the Civic Center Burger King to the State Building to noisy cafes to the Rex Hotel, then landing for years at Meridian Gallery near Union Square. In more recent times the group met at Alley Cat Books in the Mission District, on Zoom during COVID, and currently meets at Noisebridge, a collaborative space whose guiding rule is: “Be excellent to each other.” Each Tuesday evening at 7 p.m., yet another generation of writers continues to unfold their sheaves of paper, bringing to life their images, ideas, lyrics and tales for other participants who offer their feedback. No hype. No gimmicks. Just pure, live, original writing and critique.
I first came to the group in my early twenties in 1977, about a month after moving to San Francisco from the DC area. I attended regularly for several years, then drifted in and out of the group again and again, through various eras and incarnations. Now in 2024, it’s been there for me for 47 years, and more importantly, it’s been there for many thousands of writers for more than three quarters of a century.
So why has this workshop lasted so long? What has gone so right? First and foremost, we have to credit the devotion, generosity and constancy of its moderators who have shown up every Tuesday night for over 75 years and led the group… for free! And when it was time to retire, each moderator made sure there was someone to succeed them when they left.
The name of the original moderator has unfortunately been lost in the mists of time. By the time I started in 1977, the oldest participants didn’t know the name anymore, though some had heard that the Workshop was founded by two women. A former moderator told me that a woman named Lois Neville ran the group next, from some unknown date until 1960. Then there was the 32-year tenure of hard-boiled newspaperman Dean Lipton from 1960 until shortly before his death in 1992, followed by a two-year stint from 1992 to 1994 by Scottish poet and raconteur, Leonard Irving, who had long been backup moderator on the rare occasions when Dean couldn’t be there. Acclaimed Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary was next, leading the Workshop for 22 years from 1994 until 2015. Tamim waited a long time for a likely successor to emerge, then struck upon the innovative solution of having a group of four seasoned participants share the role. The current team of moderators is Kurt Martin, Judy Viertel, Olga Zilberbourg and Monya Baker.
Another reason for the longevity of the San Francisco Writers Workshop is—it’s in San Francisco!—a town known for creative thinking, a counter-culture mecca, a magnet and fertile ground for writing legends like Bret Harte, Dashiell Hammett, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Armistead Maupin and Alice Walker. People have long come to San Francisco looking for that special free-spirited something, and they find each other.
The set-up of the Workshop has always made it easy and inviting. You can’t beat the price—totally free—and there are absolutely no strings attached. You can come and go as often or as little as you please, as I have done for decades. There are no fund drives, publicity campaigns or membership dues. As Dean Lipton liked to say, “The Workshop doesn’t have members. It has participants.” As such, the group thrives under the power of its own persistent magnetism. For many years now, it has steadily drawn an overflow crowd.
The Workshop has always managed to keep a singular focus on its simple yet powerful mission, and has never gotten sidetracked by glamorizing itself or boasting about its accomplishments. Simply put, the group is humble. Little has been written about the Workshop over the years. The group has simply gone about its business, far below the radar of fashion or trend (though people do get excited to hear that Afghan-American writer Khaled Hossieni, author of the acclaimed novel, Kite Runner, honed his craft here). Any showcasing of its writers has been motivated not by fame or fortune but has most often been done to raise funds for the venues that have so generously donated space for the group to meet.
The Workshop has lasted, too, because it casts a wide net. It has always been open to every kind of writer and writing, welcoming all forms, genres and content—novels, poetry, essays, memoir, short stories, articles, children’s books, plays, biographies, potboilers, porn, travelogues, confessional writings, works published and unpublishable, odes and rants. If you can name it, it’s been read there.
The Workshop has also welcomed every kind of writer—locals and newly arrived writers, wealthy and poor, beginning writers and professionals, college graduates and grade school dropouts, veterans, immigrants, doctors, ex-cons, stockbrokers, exotic dancers, engineers, longshoremen, SSI recipients, techies, students, unhoused people. The lively and ever-changing mix has given generations of writers a safe view into the minds and hearts of others very different from themselves, each allowing themselves to be seen and shaped by these connections across difference.
The deepest of lifetime friendships, romances, and even marriages were forged in the group. (Frank and Hilda Kidder, for example, met at the Workshop—she was a fine arts painter and he was the local “godfather of stand-up comedy,” founding the renowned San Francisco International Comedy Competition.) Over time, these individual connections have woven themselves again and again into the fabric of real community.
As for me, I met three of my own most beloved, lifetime friends at the Workshop, and they each shaped the trajectory of my writing and my life in phenomenal and fundamental ways. They were all considerably older than I, so they are all gone now, but I recorded their memories of the Workshop, as well as interviewing a dozen or so other old-timers. Over the years, people started giving me things related to the Workshop—letters, posters, books, and other artifacts—so I initiated an SFWW archive in the San Francisco History Room at the new Main Library, donating most of what I was given. The stories I have to tell about the Workshop come from what I witnessed and what so many others confided.
San Francisco Writers Workshop 