A city needs sweaty literary parties

This piece was featured first on Dec 11 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

A city needs its magazines and little publishers. Their importance is not just what they publish, but the communities that show up for and around them.

Last Wednesday, I walked in from a frigid night into a small space in the Mission. The walls were steamed up. The crowd was loud. We all had to shout. It was a party for Zyzzyva, the long-time San Francisco literary magazine, which is now helmed by Oscar Villalon.

For many, the night had begun with a Zyzzyva Movie Night at the Roxie hosted by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and then progressed to the party, where there were pour-your-own cocktails, pizzas, and donuts. It was not fancy, but it was fun as hell and filled with interesting people talking about ideas and projects.

Our cities need organizations that create space for the culture. In the days of yore, this kind of infrastructure was assumed. Nowadays, the business of publishing anything has become terribly difficult, and the positive externalities that these little operations created have become noticeable in their absence.

So, it was with great pleasure that I took my trench coat off and plowed into the drift of bodies. I heard about movies and consciousness, about earrings, about the nature of journalism these days, about Marfa, about PhD programs, about how damn cold it is, about science funding, about the relative desirability of pizza, about muscles, about flying little planes, about herbaceousness. It was a swirl of people meeting to celebrate the work of making the culture at a time when our industry is, more or less, collapsing.

The magazine and its parties are now 40 years old. This particular one was a delightful reminder that there was a San Francisco before screens, and there will be a San Francisco that remains, even if it ends up wrapped under and around our new identity as an AI hub.

Meanwhile, there has been an explosion of new publications, each with its own spin on what words the Bay Area needs to read. Just to name a few: Coyote Media, the Oakland Review of Books, the Bay Area Current, Gazetteer SF. And they take their place alongside the more established entities like Zyzzyva, and our book publishers like Heyday, Transit Books, and City Lights.

The recently deceased founder of Heyday, Malcolm Margolin, said something I’ll never forget about his life and this area. “In New York… perhaps I might have been world famous… But I also thought about how shallow greatness is in New York — how it depends on reputation,” he said. “What this place, what Heyday has allowed me to do is to create a real community, to be really useful, to create a home for certain people and certain ideas.”

This place and what Heyday did being almost synonymous is not accidental. Neither is the idea of a “home” for ideas and people. These publishers can create a new kind of space, and then, if you’re lucky, you can walk into it with both your mind and on some Wednesday night, your body.

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Want to go to a local literary(-ish) party, too? Here are three of them:
Come to the Oakland Review of Books Holiday Party at Local Economy next Thursday.
Or you can go to the Bathers Library Holiday Party that same night (why not do both?!).
Or maybe go to the Bay Area Current Holiday Party on the 13th at Tamarack.