Why There Are Words welcomes readers from The Fabulist, a journal for fables, yarns, tales and fantastical art, edited by Joshua Wilson. The Fabulist’s books, chapbooks, posters, and art prints have been featured in conventioneer goodie-bags at several World Fantasy Conventions and at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Awards Weekend. Join us June 12, 7 pm, at Studio 333 in Sausalito for a weird, wild, and wonderful night. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10.
Jen Burke Anderson is a writer in San Francisco. She writes the blog Civilization Party, is a three-time Litquake reader, and is at work on her first novel, which involves Bartok, Occupy, and Zen Buddhism. She has been published in The Fabulist, Instant City, Kitchen Sink, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is currently workshopping her fiction at Stanford Continuing Education.
Tantra Bensko teaches fiction writing through UCLA X Writing Program, Writers College, and her own academy. She has books out and a speculative novella being published by Bewildering Stories. She has a couple hundred stories in journals and anthologies such as Women Writing The Weird, Surreal South, Ironic Fantastic, and The Fabulist. She lives in Berkeley.
Jenny Bitner’s fiction has been published in Mississippi Review, The Sun, Fence, Corium, PANK, and The Fabulist. Her story “The Pamphleteer” was selected by Dave Eggers for Best American Nonrequired Reading and incorporated into an opera by The Paul Bailey Ensemble. Her nonfiction has appeared in Utne Reader, To-Do List, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Men’s Health. She organized Irrational Exuberance, a cross-genre series combining music, visual art, writing, performance art and lectures, and a literary reading series, The Basement Reading Series. Pine Press published a chapbook of her poetry entitled Mother. She has finished a novel Here Is a Game We Can Play and is seeking a publisher. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia.
James Hritz is a Northern California author who is eager to make the next great leap in his work. Previously published fiction can be viewed at So It Goes (A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut), Southpaw Journal (Editor’s Choice selection), and The Fabulist, among other places.
Jeremy Adam Smith is an award-winning journalist, and the author or coeditor of four nonfiction books, most recently Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood. His science-fiction novella The Wreck of the Grampus made numerous top ten lists in 2008, and his fiction has appeared in many literary and genre journals, including Conjunctions and The Fabulist. He lives in Berkeley with a wife, a son, and a tuxedo cat.
Maw Shein Win’s writing has appeared in journals such as 2River, No Tell Motel, Big Bridge, The Fabulist, and Forklift, Ohio, and has work forthcoming in Zocalo Public Square and the anthology Cross-Strokes (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). She is currently a poetry editor for Rivet: The Journal of Writing that Risks for Red Bridge Press, a co-publisher for Stretcher, and was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She often collaborates with visual artists and musicians, and her latest poetry chapbook, Ruins of a glittering palace, with paintings by Mark Dutcher, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. She is a freelancer at the SF Writers’ Grotto and lives in Berkeley.
John Zic holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and is working on a novel. His poetry appeared in Fierce Hunger, an anthology of poetry from Writing Ourselves Whole. He has been a director and actor with Aurora Theatre, Berkeley Repertory, TheatreWorks, and Young Performer’s Theatre, and he taught at the Academy of Art. His short story, “A Secret Mother,” is forthcoming in The Fabulist.
Josh Wilson, a journalist and editor in San Francisco, started The Fabulist in 2007 as a home for fantastical fiction and art of all sorts. The site reflects a certain omnivorous appetite for far-out stories that disregards genre, and instead breaks fiction down as “fables, yarns and tales.” By doing so, The Fab hopes to disrupt audience expectations and open up new terrain for the literature of the fantastic. Learn more about Josh’s nonfiction activities here.
Why There Are Words takes place every second Thursday of the month, when people come from San Francisco, the North Bay, the East Bay–everywhere–to crowd the house. The brainchild of Peg Alford Pursell, this literary goodness has been going strong into its fifth year.
