How to Make Readings Not Boring

An Oral History of Lit Crawls Across the Country

October 9, 2015  By Literary Hub

Over the last decade Lit Crawl—which started in San Francisco—has expanded to nine cities, with more added each year. Essentially an act of literary bar-hopping, the Lit Crawls have become bookish institutions in their respective cities, an ideal way for local literary communities to unite, and drink, and read. What follows is a brief history of the Lit Crawl, from across the country.

LIT CRAWL: SAN FRANCISCO

Describe your first experience with Lit Crawl...

Jack Boulware (co­founder and Executive Director of Litquake): This is sort of the apocryphal Lit Crawl tale, and it happened in 2004, the first year we did it in San Francisco. The event was scheduled to be in a bar in the Mission District, which shall go unnamed, and was curated by the MacAdam/Cage publishing house. We all assembled inside the pub and it was already packed with rowdy drunk people who of course had no knowledge there was a Lit Crawl. We asked the staff to turn down the music, and they just stared at us and said we needed to talk to the manager, who was not there. There were about five readers, and a cluster of people who wanted to hear them. TV screens were locked on some kind of game, the music was blasting. We were trapped. And then, hats off to the late David Poindexter, publisher of MacAdam, he grabbed a chair and hoisted it over his head, and we all followed him through the bar and out onto the sidewalk, and he sat it down, and each writer stood on top of the chair, in front of a janitorial supply store, and read from their work. No microphone, people just gathered around, drinks in their hands, and listened to the readings. Cars were slowing down, and people were hanging out the windows, asking what’s going on. Somebody shouted, “It’s a literary reading!” It was so raw, pure. I’ll never forget it.

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