Come to the Barbershop and see how December’s readers and musician take on the theme of incredible and improbable impossibilities. Enjoy an eclectic creative mix in an irreverent, unpretentious setting. As the Examiner described a recent Barbershop event: “For only $5 at the door, this event, which included endless amounts of wine, cupcakes, and beer, was a bargain so outrageous that when it ended we milled about and congratulated ourselves for having been witness to it.”

Our full line-up:

JIM PROVENZANO’S résumé reads like the history of gay media since the 1980s, mixed with that of a typical dancer- actor-waiter -stage carpenter-wrestler- dot-com survivor.  His 1999 debut novel PINS also became a successful play. He’s penned two more novels – MONKEY SUITS and CYCLIZEN –  and short fiction for a few dozen anthologies.  The former nationally syndicated sports columnist also curated and designed the world’s first exhibit about LGBT athletes. He recently returned to writing and editing at the Bay Area Reporter, where he often considers starting a “How to Write a Press Release” Boot Camp.

HELENE WECKER will be reading from her novel in progress, THE GOLEM AND THE DJINNI. Helene received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York. After a dozen years of moving around between both coasts and the Midwest, she is finally settling down in the East Bay, where she lives with her husband and works an increasingly odd series of freelance gigs. You can find her online at helenewecker.com.

MEGAN KEELY is a local singer-songwriter, homegrown here in the Bay Area. She plays with an everchanging roster, often including her father and brother, but can be found playing solo shows here and there with her banjolele and various other small musical instruments. Megan loves any opportunity to play in atypical venues, including woodshops, plant nurseries, and of course barbershops. Every day she is awed and inspired by the incredible, the improbable, and the impossible.

HOLLY PAYNE is a novelist, screenwriter and writing coach who serves on the faculty of the MFA writing program at California College of the Arts. She is the author of THE VIRGIN’S KNOT (a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book) and THE SOUND OF BLUE. Her latest novel, KINGDOM OF SIMPLICITY, set in her native Amish Country, was written as a response to a drunk driver who left her unable to walk for nearly a year. She has lived and worked in Hungary, Turkey, England and Croatia and continues to travel the world to research her stories. She is the founder of Skywriter Series writing workshops and Skywriter Ranch, a summer writing retreat held annually in the Rocky Mountains and is currently at work on a new book of historical fiction set in medieval Europe.

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)
Saturday, December 5th, at 8 pm.

We suggest arriving early if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs. Other seating, without footrests or armrest ashtrays, will be available.

Our awesome bookselling parter in crime, BOOKS, INC will be on hand with copies of our featured author’s books. Buy one or three and get them autographed.

SUGGESTED donation: $5 (everyone welcome)

That donation helps to cover our expenses and buys you highly addictive Kettle Salt and Pepper potato chips, baked goods, cold beer, and a Diet Coke or two.

We can always use volunteers to help set up and clean up afterward. Volunteers pay no cover and earn good karma. If interested, email Michael McAllister

Please join us for an exceptionally scary event, a joint production between The Barbershop and Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival, now celebrating its Tenth Year.

BE AFRAID!

Evil Queens, Menacing Dykes, and Secret Gay Agendas

From lurid pulp novels to YouTube sermons, America’s fear of the gay menace still runs strong. They could be your neighbors or your children’s teachers. They could be lurking in your locker rooms and your foxholes, moving, one step at a time, closer to world domination. Are these just crazy conspiracies, or is there something real to fear about the shadowy queens and dykes forced to skulk at the edges of society?

Our full lineup:

Meliza Bañales

is the author of SAY IT WITH YOUR WHOLE MOUTH. The first West Coast Latina to win a poetry slam championship in 2002, she has toured with Sister Spit and Body Heat. She won an AIRspace residency for her one-woman-show, ONE BAD YEAR, which ended its run at the 2009 SF Fringe Festival. She was awarded a 2008 Creating Queer Community Grant, and a 2006 Frameline Completion Grant for the film DO THE MATH, with Mary Guzman. She is currently working on her second collection, 51 POEMS ABOUT NOTHING AT ALL.

Justin Chin

is an award-winning spoken word/performance artist and the author of three poetry collections, all published by Manic D Press: GUTTED – which received the 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry by the Publishing Triangle – HARMLESS MEDICINE, and BITE HARD, as well as the essay collections BURDEN OF ASHES and MONGREL: ESSAYS, DIATRIBES, and PRANKS.

Marcus Ewert

wrote the groundbreaking children’s book 10,000 DRESSES, gorgeously illustrated by Rex Ray. He is currently working on still more kids’ books, plus a memoir about his real-life affair with William Burroughs. He is also an actor and director, and cocreated the hit animated series, Piki & Poko, Adventures in StarLand, currently being shown on MTV’s LOGO channel. He has appeared in the Gus Van Sant short film Four Naked Boys and a Gun, in Sadie Benning’s Flat Is Beautiful, and the movie Frisk by Todd Verow. In 2008, he starred in the feature film The Lollipop Generation by G.B. Jones.

Justin Hall

is an award-winning comic book creator and world traveler best known for his series TRUE TRAVEL TALES, HARD TO SWALLOW, and GLAMAZONIA THE UNCANNY SUPERTRANNY. His work has appeared in the Best American Comics and the S.F. Guardian, among others, and he has appeared at the San Diego Comic Con, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and the Tom of Finland Erotic Arts Fair. He recently read at the local Smack Dab Reading Series. You can find him online at All Thumbs Press.

Monica Nolan

is the author of THE BIG BOOK OF LESBIAN HORSE STORIES (co-written with Alisa Surkis) and LOIS LENZ, LESBIAN SECRETARY. Her next book, BOBBY BLANCHARD, LESBIAN GYM TEACHERS, will be out in 2010. Her films include Ashley, 22, Chuckie or Ben-Hur in Five Minutes, World of Women, and Lesbians Who Date Men. She has taught film at San Francisco State University, and the Film Arts Forum.

Aaron Shurin

is the author of KING OF SHADOWS, a collection of personal essays published by City Lights Books in 2008. He began publishing in the gay press in 1971, and is currently a professor in the MFA in Writing Program at USF. He has received California Arts Council Literary Fellowships in Poetry and an NEA fellowship in creative nonfiction. His book PARADISE OF FORMS: SELECTED POEMS was chosen as one of Publisher Weekly’s Best Books of 1999.

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)
Saturday, October 10th, at 8 pm.

We suggest arriving early, especially for this event, and especially if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs.

Our awesome bookselling parter in crime, BOOKS, INC will be on hand with copies of our featured author’s books. Buy one or three and get them autographed.

SUGGESTED donation: $5 (everyone welcome)

That donation helps to cover our expenses and buys you highly addictive Kettle Salt and Pepper potato chips, baked goods, cold beer, and a Diet Coke or two.

We can always use volunteers to help set up and clean up afterward. Volunteers pay no cover and earn good karma. If interested, email Michael McAllister.

UPDATE: Author Jane Juska had to cancel for this event, though we hope to have her read in the future. That still leaves two writers and a musician for our Chains of Love event…plenty of love and dysfunction to go around.

In honor of September’s annual Folsom Street Fair, “the granddaddy of all leather festivals,” and something of a High Holiday in San Francisco’s gay community, our theme of the night will be “Chains of Love!”

This month’s performers:

KATIE CROUCH was raised in South Carolina and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her debut novel, GIRLS IN TRUCKS, was published in 2008 and became a New York Times bestseller. “The just-published debut novel about Southern debs gone bad is winsome. Crouch possesses a deft comic voice and a gift for observation,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her next novel, MEN AND DOGS, will be published in 2010.

KEMBLE SCOTT is the author of the bestselling novel SOMA, finalist for the national Lambda Literary Award for debut fiction. He’s the editor of San Francisco’s SoMa Literary Review and THE LIT GUIDE. An alumnus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he’s been honored with three Emmy Awards for his work in television news. His new novel, THE SOWER is a twisted, page-turning thriller about a San Francisco bad boy who becomes the sole carrier of a manmade virus that appears to be the cure for all diseases. But the only way to pass the cure to others is through sex. When word gets out, he becomes the world’s most wanted man – the ultimate weapon in the culture wars, pitting him against right wing ideologies, The Roman Catholic Church, and the most famous pop star on the planet.

Our unofficial house musician, WOLF LARSEN, wowed everyone at our opening event this past June with her beautiful voice. Nomadic by nature, the singer-songwriter has currently settled in San Francisco, where she’s quietly gathered a devoted following. You can usually find her at the Hotel Utah Saloon’s open mike shows on Monday nights, where she recently had a solo gig. Rumors of a newly released EP have spread, so bring a few extra bucks and you might get a copy.

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop

2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

Saturday, September 5th, at 8 pm.

We suggest arriving early, especially if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs.

Our awesome bookselling parter in crime, BOOKS, INC will be on hand with copies of our featured author’s books. Buy one or three and get them autographed.

SUGGESTED donation: $5 (everyone welcome)

That donation helps to cover our expenses and buys you highly addictive Kettle Salt and Pepper potato chips, baked goods, cold beer, and a Diet Coke or two.

We can always use volunteers to help set up and clean up afterward. Volunteers pay no cover and earn good karma. If interested, email Michael McAllister.

Clockwise from upper-left: 1. Poet Oscar Bermeo, Host Michael McAllister, and Poet Barbara Jane Reyes. 2. Oscar Bermeo. 3. Writer Brent Fluty. 4. Michael McAllister. 5. The Barbershop crowd. 6. Barbara Jane Reyes and Joe Gallagher, shop owner. 7. Musical Curator Michael Mullen. 8. Musician Terese Taylor. 9 (center): Barbara Jane Reyes.

Our August 1st event was another terrific night of words and music played to a nice full energetic house, whom we shamelessly bribed with cupcakes and wine. Poet Oscar Bermeo was the first to read. I’d wanted him on board since his first email to me, in which he intuitively grasped the connection between a barbershop and a literary reading: “Some of the best stories (and sh•t talkin’) I’ve ever heard has come to me while waiting to get a new fade or catching a close hot shave so it feels only natural to bring some literature to a place where so much orature goes down.” His cool, clever and heartfelt poetry used rhythm and repetition to great effect. His recap of the reading can be found here. More of his photos from the night can be found on his Flickr page.

Brent Fluty, a participant in the first Barbershop Writing Group, read the opening pages of the story he wrote during our workshop, about his relationship to a Chicano named Roy, in New Mexico. The story illuminated, with self-deprecation, issues of festishism, cultural collisions, and the consequences of mouthing off to figures of authority.

Terese Taylor, a local singer-songwriter, absolutely rocked the barbershop with her songs, alternately melancholy and abrasive, but consistently compelling. The crowd loved her, and kudos to Michael Mullen, our musical curator, for getting her on board.

Barbara Jane Reyes closed out the evening. Though she shares the label “poet” with her husband, Oscar Bermeo, the first reader of the evening, their individual work diverges in style and content. Reyes read poems that used lyricism, allegory, and incantation to marvelous effect. Her recap of the reading can be found here.

Thank you to all of all performers, and to the awesome crowd. Our next event will take place Saturday, September 5th. In honor of that month’s annual Folsom Street Fair, the theme will be “Chains of Love!”