The light changes and you step out into the street, you're late for work and you're thinking about a cup of coffee, already, you should cut down, but not this week, the project is due and it'll take a fucking miracle, Brandon is useless since his girlfriend left him, he can't focus for two minutes and everyone else is taking up the slack, and you don't, you really don't want to work late tonight, you have a real date and you want time to get home and change, that sweet dress you bought last week, and you've already decorated the little one-bedroom you'll rent together, you and your date, between the light changing and that first step into the street, and a hand grabs at you, pulls you short, you feel a mass shove through the air a cracked inch from your nose, a city bus running the light.
How long does it last, that pulse-pumping realization,
I could have died? Long enough to thank the stranger who saved you by the breadth of his hand, long enough to shake and laugh and maybe tell your co-workers when you sit, alive, at your desk, but you can't really feel it, you can't begin to believe you're only a wrong step from oblivion.
Portuguese Artists Colony will take you over the edge, bring that bus all the way to its destined catastrophe. Take your last wrong turn with us Sunday, September 23.
Chiwan Choi is the author of two poetry collections,
The Flood and his new book,
Abductions.
He is now trying to finish
Exit to Hope Street, a collection of short
stories. Chiwan also runs Writ Large Press with his wife and partner,
Judeth Oden, and is spearheading an effort to establish a badass
lit/music/art crawl in downtown Los Angeles, using tactics learned from
watching
The Wire.
Doug Cordell is an Emmy-nominated television writer,
essayist and radio storyteller whose pieces have been broadcast on, among others, National Public Radio’s
Snap Judgment and American Public Media’s
Marketplace.
A former host of the
Brooklyn Rail magazine’s
Rant/Rhapsody
reading series in New York City, he has also performed at HERE Arts Center in
NYC, LA’s
Tongue & Groove and
Vermin on the Mount, and the
Bay Area’s
Quiet Lightning and
Lip Service West.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Nigeria and has lived in
Kenya, France, and England. She is the author of
In Dependence (Legend
Press, 2008) and Editor of
Pulsations, The Journal of New African Writing. She
currently lives in California where she teaches at San Francisco State
University. She is a Hedgebrook alum and serves on the Board of the
Museum of the African Diaspora.
The victorious
Jeremy Ravdin returns with his completed piece from our last show!
Crazy great music from
Jhene Canody.
Live writing:
Vote on a prompt as you enter the show, and four writers will write on
the winning topic while you watch them sweat, swear, and get inspired.
Each writer will read what he/she wrote, and you get to vote on which
piece you'd like to see developed into a finished story/poem/rant to be
read at the next PAC performance. It's always a thrill.
Jenny Bitner
Kristin FitzPatrick
Sarah Karlinsky
Sean Owens
Sunday, September 23
Hotel Rex
562 Sutter Street
In the Salon, just behind the Library Bar
San Francisco
Show at 5:00 pm
