The literary underground is teeming with life right now

Come support the brilliant Transit Books this Saturday in Oakland with me

I love this moment in the growing season. I think my peas and beans are growing like three inches a day. The native grape I planted near our gate is threatening to swallow it whole, and when I pass by, the tendrils grab at my clothes.

Maybe this is meant to be a season of action, not contemplation? I’ve been out in the community a lot, supporting galas, reading poems in alleys and bars, aaaaannd hosting fundraisers because everything I care about seems to be on fire and in desperate need of support.

So, news first. THIS SATURDAY, May 24, the inimitable Lauren Markham and I are hosting a fundraiser/party thing in Temescal Alley for TRANSIT BOOKS at Womb House, an amazing bookstore. 5 to 8pm! COME!

Expect to see the excellent Soleil Ho and Tomas Moniz, along with the wonderful publishers of Transit Adam & Ashley Nelson Levy. Plus perhaps even more special guests. (And if you have my book, I’ll sign it for you!)

Who is Transit? Only the tiny, Berkeley-based publisher of a Nobel Prize winner (Jon Fosse) and the creators of my favorite current book series, Undelivered Lectures, of which Markham’s Immemorial is a shining example. I’ve read several books from the series and they’ve blown my mind open. Undelivered Lectures aren’t just good reads. Transit has created a new and very particular form of writing, a container for a certain length thought delivered with an intensity and introspection that’s glorious. Y’all know I love a tiny book, and these slim volumes fulfill the promise of the form.

The Trump administration cut their grant, of course, and we’d love to raise some money to support their continued existence and excellence. Hence this rad event that you could and should attend on Saturday.

These days, though, I am also thinking about our literary (& arts) community more generally. It is under attack from a dozen angles. There’s the political environment and some philanthropists running scared from anything different and interesting. Almost no one can make a living writing beautiful and important things. Really, there is no money to be made writing online anymore. The glossy magazine world has largely collapsed. The book world relies on the rock star economics of a few hits to stay afloat. It should feel grim.

But maybe — maybe — this burned over terrain is giving rise to some strange and wonderful new movements. This week on Forum, we celebrated Zyzzyva’s 40th anniversary with editor Oscar Villalon, board member (and author) Daniel Handler, and writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras. During the show, Handler said that he thought San Francisco was in the midst of a creative renaissance, and I cannot agree more. It feels like different writing scenes are multiplying in this region. New projects are afoot everywhere.

And thinking about Transit’s work all over the world, I have started to wonder if this is something that’s happening in many different cities.

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by Huey Newton’s concept of revolutionary intercommunalism: this idea that resistance to the modes of global capitalism won’t come from a vanguard in one country overthrowing a government, but from a network of communities who find themselves in transnational solidarity. Maybe it was growing up around the anti-globalization movement of the 90s, but something speaks to me about the realization that so many circumstances and fights are (and could/should be) shared.

So right now, I want to read all my people here in the Bay doing all their new things in our underground and radical publishing traditions. I want to feel them respond to our particular crises. And I also want to read people very far from here, geographically and culturally, but who are facing a subset of the same problems.

This is my intuition: the answers to our problems don’t lie (solely) in national politics or in some imagined community like an American state. It’s you and me here on the street, in the cafe, at the book shop, and the you and mes in Mexico City and in Norway and in Seoul.