Meeting dates and location Meetings take place on the third Saturday of each month, from 10 am to noon except for July and August. Unless otherwise noted, our meetings are held at Barnes & Noble bookstore, in Jack London Square, Event Loft, Oakland. There is a nominal fee for underground parking; elevator available, or take a bus from the12th St. BART station. There's a coffee shop inside the bookstore.

You too? Kemble Scott

 

Welcome to SoMa

 

We’ll try our luck at Bondage-a-Go-Go. An attendant, scratching at “the scab around her cheek piercing,” informs us that admission’s only seven bucks if we’re dressed according to the theme: “Leather, boots, teddies, whips, chains, tit clamps, vinyl, hoods, nudity, Goth . . . .”  Welcome to SoMa, San Francisco’s gritty South of Market neighborhood. Our tour guide, the source of the quotations above, is Kemble Scott, whose novel SoMa was a Chronicle best seller.

Scott, our featured speaker for the April 19 meeting, is a longtime journalist who won three Emmy awards for his work in television news before turning to fiction. He helps run San Francisco’s literary festival Litquake and is the editor of two e-mail publications—the monthly ezine SoMa Literary Review and the weekly SF Bay Area Literary Arts Newsletter.

SoMa tells the interwoven stories of twentysomething hipsters disillusioned by the dot.com bust and wallowing in anomie. Scott’s characters prowl for thrills on a journey toward self-discovery, or self-destruction, in a neighborhood where no one needs to ask what is allowed. The settings in the book are real; the events are based on more than urban legend. Publishers Weekly describes SoMa as “a fun, frisky novel of shock horror.”

In marketing the book, Scott did something original. He produced a series of videos for YouTube in which he took viewers to places that inspired the novel. Interested? Go to http://www,youtube.com/kemblescott and stimulate your curiosity about our speaker’s insights, not to mention his research methodology. Then come to the April meeting and passively accept enlightenment or manifest your dominance with probing questions. Either way, you’ll find the experience entertaining.                                                                         

                                                                        

—David Baker

Interested in upcoming meetings? Peruse our future speakers!

 

Our 2007 Contest Winners Read Their Stories

Membership Dues

Time to renew for the coming year.  Please send check for $45 annual dues (and something extra for 5th-Grade writing contest, to help out our most expensive project) to Barbara Ruffner, Membership Chairman, 2741 Golden Rain Rd. #7, Walnut Creek, CA 94595.

And, PLEASE, if your check does not have your address printed on it, send us your current mailing address, phone number, and e-mail address.  We are investigating the possibility for payments online, but our budget is slim, and we can’t spend too much as recipients.  Anyone who knows a bargain method for a nonprofit to collect money this way, please contact Ken Frazer,

 

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Contacts

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