Writing from Fierce Love: Mira Sethi in Conversation

This is an excerpt of a free event for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Mira Sethi in conversation with Miranda Popkey, celebrating Sethi’s new short fiction collection Are You Enjoying? published by Knopf. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on ourpodcast.You can watch it in full as well on our YouTube channel.

Miranda Popkey: I wanted to ask you about your protagonist at the end of that story [“Tomboy”]. And I won’t spoil the twists and turns that the story takes, but she has a moment with her husband, where she’s remarking on a mutual friend. And [the protagonist] describes her as “brave.” And I think that “brave” is a word that’s overused when describing works of literature, but I’m curious what it means for her, for your character, but also for you, to be publishing work that is quite daring and that is really trying to paint a picture of different pockets, different communities, in Pakistan that we ignorant Americans may not be familiar with.

Mira Sethi: Miranda, thank you so much for asking that. And I’m not just saying this because I’m in conversation with you, but this has to the most thoughtful question I’ve been asked about my book, because a lot of the questions I’ve been asked so far have been about Pakistan and politics, and we’ll get to that. That’s also very important. But thank you for asking that.

As far as my protagonist–without giving too much away–she calls the other lady “brave,” because that other lady is living life on her own terms. And it’s not easy to live life on your own terms in a country like Pakistan, even if you have a lot of privilege, because of issues around sexuality and the often burdensome imperatives of family and your clan or your tribe and your parents. And then the larger superstructure above that, which is the state and the things that trickle down from the state. So my character says [the other woman] is brave because she, herself, is living this dual life and she hasn’t yet been able to come to terms with what it is that she wants. Although this, I imagine, is a turning point for her.

And for me, yes, I did think a lot about what the repercussions might be for writing about queer lives in Pakistan. But, you know, I’m in my thirties now, and I believe very strongly in a certain set of principles. I’m an outspoken feminist in Pakistan. That sometimes gets me into trouble. And I am going to write the things that I know and I love deeply. This book actually comes from a place of fierce love, and trauma and heartache and comedy, but mostly it comes from a place of love. And buttressing my fear is my love for people who are struggling to live life on their own terms. And so I wrote this hoping that if there are–I know I have so many queer friends in and out of Pakistan–I’m hoping that maybe if they read this, they can glimpse their lives and feel seen, because fiction is ultimately the desire to write, the desire to be seen fully.

Miranda Popkey: Absolutely. I completely agree that it’s hard to imagine a life that you have not seen represented. And I think that’s the experience that your protagonist is having. In that moment, she’s seeing the life that she wishes she could live. Instead, as you say, she’s living sort of a double life where she’s married, but she does have queer desires.

Mira Sethi: Absolutely. And I didn’t just struggle with this. I was kind of petrified while writing some of these, and not just “Tomboy” but also the title story, “Are You Enjoying?”because it’s about infidelity, a love affair, an illicit relationship, a taboo relationship.

So I’m writing about sex, you know? Yes, I worried a lot about that. I’m worried about if somebody screenshots a really vivid passage and then says, “Look at her. She’s spreading vulgarity.” I mean, this is something I deal with in my life as an actress as well. But yes, at the level of the sentence, it’s definitely something I think about, but I didn’t ever let that stop me from saying what I wanted. And in many ways, Miranda, I think it actually makes you more creative. I am not wishing censorship upon anyone. God knows, when there was censorship in Russia, people still wrote. There is a ton of censorship in Pakistan, and we still manage to tell stories. And it’s not great, but it does force your most creative instincts out of you in a way that when you can say things very openly and very clearly, the mind isn’t concentrated. It leads to a certain concentration of the mind when you’re forced to say things in code. And I did for “Tomboy” a little bit.

Miranda Popkey: I think just from the craft perspective, it’s also interesting that the story that is most explicit in its treatment of queer themes, and most affirming and its treatment of queer themes, is also the only first-person story. I think that’s an exciting, exceptional choice.

Mira Sethi: May I tell you a cute little story? So I wrote this story, which had a very different shape and form, literally three weeks before I submitted it to my editor. And I showed it to a friend who was queer. And she said to me, very politely, she said, “You know, Mira, I love you, and you’re a great writer, but you’re not queer. And you’re writing this queer story from the point of view of queer desire.” My protagonist in the early drafts would look at women in a certain way. And she said to me, “You’re great, but this is not working. You don’t know what queer desire is like, so don’t try and enter that consciousness. But you do know about patriarchy. So why don’t you reframe this story from the point of view of patriarchy.”

And man, that was such a hallelujah moment, because I was really struggling with the story in the early drafts. And then as soon as she said that, I was like, “Oh my god, yes.” This was actually reading as comic writing, because I don’t know about queer desire. And then I reframed the whole story. And it was a real breakthrough moment for me, because then the story just ran when I started reframing it from the point of view of patriarchy.

Miranda Popkey: Well, I’m glad that your friend gave you this wonderful piece of advice.

Can you talk about your editing and revision process?

Mira Sethi: Oh my god. The most false thing about becoming a writer is that you have a book and you get to show off your book, and nobody talks about how much real writing went into it. I mean, I’m practically tripping over my words right now because I rewrote the shit out of all of these stories. And the writing takes you to places that you hadn’t anticipated.

I often say that I think in order to write. The writing is what tells me what it is that I think. So after I’ve written the thing, I know what it is that I think. So the editing process works like this: I write something. It’s very raw. I’m actually not self-conscious when I start writing, because I know it’s vomit. And I know there’s nothing to be done with the vomit, you just do it. And then later on, you can go and clean it, but it gives you something to work with. And so I write, and then I clean it up, and then I think around draft fifteen, I show it to my editor. It takes at least fifteen drafts. And then they say “Okay, you’ve got a scaffolding, but where is this going?” So I’ve worked on these seven stories for five years. That’s a long time for seven stories. It’s almost a story a year. Writing is really quite grueling.

Miranda Popkey: I agree. My joke about my first novel, my only novel, is that I had to think about it for twenty years before I could write any of it.

Mira Sethi: And you said that in your acknowledgments as well, which I actually really appreciate.

Miranda Popkey: Are you the kind of writer who plans it all in advance or are you one of those who need to surprise themselves and somehow, through the writing itself, the ideas emerge?

Mira Sethi: It’s the latter. It’s exactly what you said. I don’t think, in order to write, I write so that I may know what it is that I’m thinking. And I don’t plan in advance. And honestly, this is not a critique of writers who plan in advance. I can’t relate to it at all, because so much of the beauty of me writing fiction is discovering things that I didn’t know. For instance, my take on identity politics. Yes, of course, I’m progressive, and I have a take. But it was only after writing this book that I really understood what I felt about the world. And I think that is one of the most beautiful things about writing fiction. There is a kind of slow dredging up of your subconscious. And then you’re like, “Oh, this is what I think about this issue.” It’s really quite amazing.

Miranda Popkey: I completely agree. I write in large part to figure out what it is that I think and when I get the words on the page, I know if they’re right, and I know if they’re wrong, and if it’s just a thought it’s much vaguer.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Mira Sethi: If it consumes you, you’ll probably end up doing it. Because I find that is the case with most writers.

And have a community around you! Something that I don’t have in Karachi is a community of writers. And I miss it. I have a community of actors, but I don’t have a community of writers.

And workshop your work with people you respect and admire and keep going. And, you’re not going to get it right the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time, but you might get it right the fiftieth time, and you’ll have to be in it for the long haul. It’s actually quite painful.

Because you don’t get it right. And then one day you get it right.

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PurchaseAre You Enjoying? from City Lights Bookstore.

Listening as an act of love: Marie Mutsuki Mockett in conversation

This is an excerpt of a free event for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Marie Mutsuki Mockett in conversation with Garnette Cadogan discussing her new book American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, published by Graywolf Press. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our YouTube channel.

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Marie Mutsuki Mockett: You don’t see me talking about love or the importance of love very much. Maybe I would have a larger Instagram account if I constantly put up memes about love. I should probably do that.

I consider [American Harvest] to be an investigation of something that I didn’t understand and that I thought was important. So I asked questions and wanted to try to answer those questions by talking to people who were very different than I am. To sit with them and find out what their genuine experience in the world is, and then see if I could answer some of the questions that I have.

I did not tell myself, “This is a book about love,” or “You must employ love.” I also didn’t spend a lot of time saying to myself, “This is a book that’s going to require you to be brave.” I just really was trying to focus on the questions that I had and on my curiosity. I was trying to pinpoint, when I’m in a church, when I’m in a farm, when I’m around a situation that I don’t understand, what’s actually happening. And that was really what I was trying to do and how I was trying to direct my attention.

Garnette Cadogan: But love comes up a lot in the book. And for you, a lot of it has to do with listening. In many ways, this book is a game of active listening, and listening–as you’ve shown time and again–is fundamentally an act of love.

You decided to go and follow wheat farmers and move along in their regimens and cycles and rituals, and not only the rituals of labor, but rituals of worship, rituals of companionship, and issues of community. When did you begin to understand what is the real task of listening? Because in the book, time and again, you remind us that there are so many places in which there is this huge gap, or this huge chasm, in our effort to understand each other.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett: Well, that is where love comes in. Because that is the only reason why you would spend time listening to people or talking to people. What would be the motivation for trying to be open to others? Why should you be open to others? We don’t have to be. So why should one be?

And you’re right that things do get reduced down to this question of love. I had always heard that Christianity was the religion of love. And that love was one of the things that was unique about Christ’s message. I didn’t really grow up with any one religion. Also, my mother was from Japan, so I also grew up always hearing about how for a long time, the word love didn’t really exist in Japanese. There really is no way to say “I love you.” Linguists still debate whether or not you can say “I love you” in Japanese and there are ways in which people say it, but it doesn’t have the same history, and it doesn’t have the same loaded meaning that it does in Western English.

So I was aware from a really early age, because I heard my parents and other people talk about this, that this question of love was very much a part of Western culture and that it originated from Christianity. And I really wondered what does that mean? And if it means anything, is there anything to it? And if there is, what is it? And there’s a scene in the book where I talk about my feeling of disappointment that no one had ever purchased me anything from Tiffany, the jewelry store, because if you live in New York City, you’re constantly surrounded by Tiffany ads. When you get engaged, you can get a Tiffany box. And then on your birthday, you can get a Tiffany box. And then in the advertisements, the graying husband gives the wife another Tiffany box to appreciate her for all the years that she’s been a wife and on and on. I know that that has nothing to do with love. I know that that that’s like some advertiser who’s taken this notion of love and then turned it into some sort of message with a bunch of images, and it’s supposed to make me feel like I want my Tiffany ring (which I’ve never gotten). That’s not love. But is there anything there? And that was definitely something that I wanted to investigate.

I think I started to notice a pattern where I was going to all of these churches in the United States, and I’m not a church going person. And the joke that I tell is that I decided to write American Harvest partly because I wasn’t going to have to speak Japanese. I could speak English, which is the language with which I’m most comfortable. But I ended up going to all these churches, and I couldn’t understand what anybody was saying. I would leave the church and Eric, who is the lead character, would say, “What do you think?” And I would say, “I have no idea what just happened.” And so it took time for me to tune in to what the pastors were saying, and what I came to understand is that there were these Christian churches that emphasized fear, and churches that didn’t emphasize fear. And then I started to meet people who believe that God wants them to be afraid and people who are motivated by fear or whose allegiance to the church comes from a place of fear, in contrast to those who said, “You’re not supposed to be afraid. That’s not the point.” That was a huge shift in my ability to understand where I was, who I was talking to, and the kinds of people that I was talking to, and why the history of Christianity mattered in this country.

Garnette Cadogan: So you started this book, because you said, “Oh, I only need one language.” And then you ended up going to language training.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett: I needed so many different languages! I mean, even this question of land ownership that we’re talking about: I feel like that’s a whole other language. There are places in the world and moments in history where people didn’t own land. It didn’t occur to them that they had to own the land themselves. So what’s happening when we think we have to? Like with timeshares. I’m really serious. What need is that fulfilling? And you don’t need to have a timeshare in Hawaii, where you visit like one week out of the entire year, right? So what need is that fulfilling?

Garnette Cadogan: Rest? Recreation? I’m wondering … has the process of living, researching, and writing this book changed you in any way? And if so, how?

Marie Mutsuki Mockett: I mean, absolutely, but it’s so hard to talk about. I think that I have a much better and deeper understanding of the history of our country, and a much greater understanding of the role that race plays in our country. A deeper understanding of the tension between rural and urban, and also of our interdependence, which is something I sort of knew, but didn’t completely know. And why just kicking out a bunch of states or getting rid of a bunch of people isn’t actually an answer to the tension that we’ve faced. And it’s because there’s this great interdependence between people. So understanding all of that and realizing how intractable the problem is, oddly, has made me feel calmer about it. Because I realize it isn’t as simple as if I just do “X” everything will be fine. I think, when you feel like, “If I just master the steps, if I can just learn this incantation, then everything will be fine,” I think when you live that way, it’s very frustrating. And I realized the problems are deeper than that. And some of the problems the United States is facing are problems that exist all around the world. I mean the urban rural problems: it’s a piece of modernization. It doesn’t just affect our country, it affects many countries.

Garnette Cadogan: You know, we’ve been speaking about land, God, country, Christianity, urbanity, and in this book, a lot of it is packed in through this absolutely wonderful man, Eric, and his family. Part of what makes it compelling and illuminating is we get a chance to understand so much through this wonderful, generous, and beautiful man, Eric. For those who haven’t read it yet, tell us about Eric, and why Eric was so crucial to understanding in so much of what you understood, and also some of the changes that you went through.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett: He’s a Christian from Pennsylvania. He’s a white man who’s never been to college, but has a genuine intellectual curiosity, although not immediately apparent in a way that would register to us. Because we’re at an event that’s hosted by bookstore. So when we think of intellectual curiosity, probably the first thing that any of us would do would be to reach for a book, right? That’s not what he would do. He wouldn’t reach for a book, he would find someone to talk to. He’s a person who is very much about the lived experience. But he was very open to asking questions and trying to understand other people’s experiences and how the world works, and he was very concerned.

He was the person who told me in early 2016 that he thought that Trump would probably win, when none of us thought that this was possible. And he said this is because we don’t understand each other at all. And he’s a very open-hearted, very generous person. And you see him change over the course of the book.

He called me the other day. He said, “I’ve been hearing a lot about violence against Asian Americans.” He’s met a couple of my friends. He wanted to know, “Are they all right?” And then he said, “I just want you to know that we talk about racial justice all the time in church,” because of course, that’s the way that he processes life’s difficult questions: through church. And I was kind of moved by that, because one of the points that American Harvest makes is that these difficult questions don’t get talked about in church. And he said, “I just want you to know this is something that we talk about.” So you see him really develop and change as a result of his exposure to me and to seeing how I move through space versus how he moves through space. And it’s a big leap of imagination for people to understand that other people have other experiences that are legitimate and real. It seems to be one of the most difficult things for people to understand, but he really made a great effort to do that. And I think that’s kind of extraordinary.

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PurchaseAmerican Harvest from City Lights Bookstore.

5 Questions with Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment,The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer,BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.

Kate Durbin will be reading from her newest poetry book, Hoarders (published by Wave Books) with special guest Alex Dimitrov, also reading from new work, in our City Lights LIVE! virtual events series on Thursday, May 6th!

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Where are you writing to us from?

Los Angeles, California. I’m sitting at my writing desk with a bowl of Lucky Charms.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I recently bought a View-Master from eBay, and I’ve been looking at all these beautiful old reels, of places like Yellowstone in the 60s, and miniatures of old Disney movies like Pinocchio. There’s something comforting about a little 3-D world inside a View-Master. It gives this feeling of a world continuing on, outside the frame, beyond your vision.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

Right now I’m reading Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, Henry Hoke’s The Groundhog Forever,Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, Divya Victor’s Curb, and Ted Dodson’s An Orange.

I return to more books than I can list here! I’m a big re-reader. The most recent is Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which are beautiful, short, strange meditations on everyday objects and spaces. I have been thinking a lot about objects, how mysterious they really are. And their complicated relationships to people. This object-person question is a thread through my books E! Entertainment, Hoarders, and a novel I’m working on now about my childhood.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was a big influence for my most recent book, Hoarders. Stein’s book is filled with slippery little objects with a language all their own. In Hoarders, the objects also have a kind of animism, or life to them, and a sense of humor too. For example, there’s a poem filled with surreal Barbies, that are real Barbies that have actually been made and marketed! Walk and Potty Pup Barbie, who comes with a tiny dog with nuggets of fake poop, Claude Monet Water Color Barbie, Tippi Hedren in The Birds Barbie, and many more.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My bookstore would be located inside the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas, somewhere near the shark slide. It would be called McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets, and our bestseller would be Jean Baudrillard’s America.

4 Questions with Hoa Nguyen, Author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. She is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, andA Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure which is new from Wave Books in April 2021. She has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and as a judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others.

Hoa is celebrating her new book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure on City Lights LIVE!, joined by Garrett Caples, on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021.

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City Lights: Where are you writing to us from?

Hoa Nguyen: I write to you from Toronto, the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation in the Dish With One Spoon Territory.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Poetry and my friendships, family. The love in my home; the love of my Dale.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people?

John Lemprière’s The Bibliotheca Classica, or Classical Dictionary containing a full Account of all the Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors.

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon.

A Guide to the I Ching by Carol K. Anthony or the collaborative translation of the I Ching by Anthony with Hannah Moog where they use a “clarifying method” to assist in that work.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Singer-songwriter traditions and folk song. Story as song in verse was something specifically that compelled me. An early musical lesson was from listening to Johnny Cash’s “John Henry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” next to Vietnamese folk songs on a reel-to reel. The poems’ narrative form in my new book is lyric that strays into fractures, checks out archive, and seeks musical reference—the orientation remains musical.

Another influence was Joanne Kyger’s work with biography in verse and her proposal of finding the lost tones of the poetry stone, specifically. A mythic orientation whereby you can render the actors of another era palpable and present. Along with that there was the experience studying Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee in a mythopoetics workshop (where we also read Kyger’s On Time and Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette). Thinking about how poems can address time; how to tell / retell and shape story, new relationships to meaning making, world making.

I was thinking through what it means “to document” to relate from memory. I was also looking into the history of Vietnamese music, especially the monochord of Vietnam, the đàn bầu. The music the bent string produces sounds like a voice and is distinct to the southern Mekong delta region, influenced by the Cham. The notes blur and bend in similar progressions as Mississippi delta blues and the slide guitar, too, has shared voice-like qualities.

We’ll be celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 102nd birthday on March 24, and what better way to remember his legacy AND to mark Women’s History Month, than to honor Nancy J. Peters, Lawrence’s business partner, friend, and longtime comrade at City Lights Books.

While Ferlinghetti certainly deserves all of the accolades he’s received, the fact of the matter is there would literally be no City Lights without Nancy Peters. Beyond shepherding City Lights through various fiscal crises and providing the steady anchor that allowed Ferlinghetti to travel the world as a poet and activist, Nancy’s vision as an editor and acumen as a publisher were a vital key to the success and longevity of City Lights Publishers.

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City Lights: How did you come to know what City Lights was? How did you meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti?

Nancy Peters: In Greece in the early 1960s, I became friends with Nanos Valaoritis and Marie Wilson who were at the center of an international bohemian/surrealist community. They had a large home which was always full of traveling writers and artists whom they made welcome. The Beat writers were among their guests, and City Lights was frequently talked about as a place everyone would meet up someday. I met Philip Lamantia there and in 1965 he introduced me to Lawrence in Paris at one of Jean-Jacque Lebel’s anarcho-surrealist festivals of free expression.  Before a riotous crowd Lawrence gave a show-stopping rendition of his “Lord’s Prayer.” I was impressed by his powerful stage presence. Later that year, when Philip and I were living in Andalusia, Lawrence wrote Philip, asking for a selection of poems for a Pocket Poets Series volume. We corresponded some while we were putting the book together, but I didn’t see him again until 1971 when I moved to San Francisco.

I’d been working as an executive-trainee librarian at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1968. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the impassioned protests that ensued left Washington neighborhoods in ruins. There was shockingly little assistance to residents from the government and my part of the city was under military surveillance, helicopters hovering over my apartment through the night. A Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam took place in Washington the following year. Over 750,000 people peacefully demonstrated. In a small way, I was involved in the planning and, during the protests, my apartment was crammed with fellow activists.

The Library of Congress was an amazing, fascinating place with compatible co-workers from all over the world—thousands of book people all in one place. However, the mission of the Library is to serve Congress, and the institution was a huge conservative bureaucracy serving a conservative and ineffective Congress as I saw it. I believed that if I stayed there I would have little contact with actual books or opportunities for civic activism.

So I moved to San Francisco, where Philip was living and urging me to come, and spent an enormous amount of time at City Lights while I was job hunting. It seemed like paradise, such a stimulating atmosphere where people could sit down to read, share ideas, and have conversations about books, politics, art. One day in early 1971 when I was walking down the street in North Beach, Lawrence hailed me and asked if I would like to help him with a bibliography of Allen Ginsberg’s writings.  After just a brief meeting at the publishing office, Lawrence went to Europe and his editorial assistant Jan Herman suddenly decided to move to Germany. Jan showed me how all the editorial work was done in the office, told me Lawrence “wouldn’t mind,” and so I found myself beginning an exciting new career in publishing.

What was your experience taking over as executive director and co-owner in 1984?

The store back then employed seven people: six men at the bookstore and one (me) at the publishing branch. So “executive director” is far too grand a title. City Lights was a small, failing organization by 1982. The store was not founded to make profits for the owners and it never did make a profit. Breaking even was the goal. But every year the losses mounted and there came a time when there were very few books left on the shelves. No one had seen a customer venture downstairs to the lower part of the store for many months.  

At the time, Lawrence was immensely popular and in great demand as a performer and a speaker, so he was traveling much of the time, visiting foreign colleagues, living abroad, finding new writers to translate. At this low point in the store’s history Lawrence told me in a frustrated moment that if I’d like to own City Lights, he would give it to me outright if I would run the business, freeing him to do all the other things he wanted to do. I declined, but told him I would be honored to be his partner. Theft was seriously addressed, and a protracted payment plan was agreed to by Book People, the East Bay employee-owned distributors who extended us credit for a generous period. Savvy booksellers Richard Berman and Paul Yamazaki headed the re-stocking plan. The three of us would go every week to Book People and Lou Swift Distributors to collect enough books to sell the following week. As time went on, everybody at the store consulted book catalogs and took on the responsibility for buying subject sections. I envisioned a participatory structure. If not a co-op, I wanted a bookstore where all the staff had responsibilities and power.

Why the decision not to have multiple bookstore locations around SF?

At one time we seriously considered additional locations. We explored sites in San Francisco’s Mission district and visited city officials in San Jose to talk about a second store there. But our resources were limited, and we were concerned about the time and money that would be required to create a sister store that would embody the same spirit and ethic as the original. During my time as director, the evolving challenges from chain stores and especially Amazon made beginning a new store a very risky enterprise. In retrospect, so many independents were closing that we decided to invest in our present, iconic location. In retrospect I think it was a good decision after watching attempts by other stores fail to duplicate their success elsewhere.

How has North Beach changed, how has it stayed the same? With the exodus of Big Tech and falling rents, how do you think that will affect North Beach and San Francisco in general in the future? Will there be “a rebirth of wonder”?

North Beach when I came to SF was a small bohemian village, where neighbors shared meals on their flat rooftops watching the sun set over the Bay. My rent was $125 a month, cheap even then. City Lights and the Discovery Bookstore (used books) next door to Vesuvio were key places to spend an evening. Two large Italian grocers delivered (no charge) bags of groceries up four flights of stairs to my apartment. The neighborhood was full of inexpensive Basque, Italian, and Chinese restaurants, and many cafes, many of which seemed unchanged since the 19th century. Change happens, and City Lights is well prepared for the future. It’s never easy to predict how things will develop, but the feeling of a lovely Mediterranean town persists, with the wooden buildings painted pastel colors, and the shimmering sea light on misty days. I feel certain that the light of City Lights will prevail for a long time to come.

Do you feel that your gender had any impact on your experience during your 23 years as director? Do you have any comments about women in bookselling or publishing in general?

Gender always has an impact. The Beat movement was certainly male focused. Even though the undaunted Diane di Prima was recognized, she was never enthusiastically supported by the inner nucleus of Beat poets. It was a long time before the Beat women came into their own. From the start, Lawrence, who insisted he wasn’t a Beat, had eclectic tastes and was open to women’s poetry. He admired Marianne Moore and Edna St. Vincent Millay as much as he did T.S. Eliot, Jacques Prévert, and Allen Ginsberg. In the Pocket Poets Series, he’d published di Prima and, very early in the series, both Marie Ponsot and Denise Levertov.

Women’s rights and opportunities are always vulnerable and cyclic. The Women’s Movement of the 1970s was very powerful and widespread, its impact on women’s lives enormous. At City Lights we hired more women; we published more women. There have always been outstanding women in publishing and bookselling, and during that time increasingly more women writers were published, reviewed, and were given accolades and awards. Women opened general bookstores and women’s bookstores, founded feminist and lesbian presses. It was a thrilling development, to see so many marginalized writers, and not just women, finding established publishers or creating their own presses. Together they created a larger, much more diverse national literature.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with many talented women at the bookstore. And in the publishing branch: Stella Levy, Kim McCloud, and Patricia Fujii. Gail Chiarello collected and edited our bestselling Bukowski stories. Annie Janowitz proposed the timely Unamerican Activities, and Amy Scholder brought us classics by Karen Finley, Rebecca Brown, and others. I’m happy to say that Amy Scholder is again working with City Lights as an editor.

When did you meet the now current publisher and executive director Elaine Katzenberger? What was her position at the bookstore? When did you know that she was the right person to take over as director?

Ah, Elaine, the woman who can do everything! Elaine began at the bookstore sales counter, then reorganized files and the store accounts, and very soon excelled as a book buyer. She had a great feeling for good writing, so I asked her to become an editor and she immediately began adding excellent books to City Lights’ list. She’s smart, witty, multitalented, and politically astute. We are very lucky to have her at the helm.

What is your understanding or vision of what of City Lights is and what it could be? How has Lawrence’s passing impacted this?

Lawrence’s democratic inclusiveness made him the best-selling poet in the U.S. His moral principles, his courage and resilience are a model to be emulated. He conceived City Lights as an educational institution that would open minds to explore and relate to the world through books. “One guy told me he’d got the equivalent of a Ph. D just sitting in the basement reading all our great books,” he often reminded us.

His “literary gathering place” was to be a fulcrum of San Francisco cultural experience, where our bookselling and publishing could amplify the voices of diverse experiences, connect with other creative communities, and serve as a center of dissent and, at the same time, a force for creating a better society.

Lawrence’s vision will continue to be our guiding light. An optimistic realist, he believed that City Lights would long endure as the co-creation of all the dedicated people who work here and make it what it is.

Eileen Myles is an acclaimed poet and writer who has published over twenty works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and libretto. Their prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Eileen Myles will be reading from their new book, For Now in our City Lights LIVE! reading series on Tuesday, September 29.

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Where are you writing to us from? 

Right now, Greenport Long Island. The water is right there.

What’s kept you sane this year? 

Yoga, reading, lifting weights, long phone conversations writing poems. My dog.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people? 

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc; Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks; The Book of Frank by CAConrad.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Laurence Sterne, Cesar Aira, Chantal Ackerman.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

Swan Place, it would be on the island in Spy Pond in Arlington, Massachusetts. Frank B. Wilderson III’s Red White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.