Lit Crawl Sebastopol 2025

Fresh off the success of our Mixtopia – What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger, at the Gestalat pub in San Francisco for Litcrawl 2024, ten days before the general election, we now present Mixtopia – Now and Zen. Our vision remains the same for Mixtopia, a future that is neither a dystopian Max Mad nor a utopian Nirvana but a fermentation of the corpus of human knowledge in all languages inclusive of arts, culture, somatic healing, and technology. This time we would focus on the job at hand in 2025 as a group of whimsical writers, aspiring artists, psychedelic performers and recorders of information. We are firm believers that the future is decided by fearless optimists who also understand that the time for now us to honor our three Zen minds of magnanimous mind, parental mind and joyful mind. As a presenter/host/writer I (Saqib Mausoof) have done multiple litcrawl events in the last decade. In 2014 we did "Arrivals" at 18 reasons with around 40 people attending and in 2015 we did "Sleeping with the enemy" at Brick and Mortar with over 65 people. We continued with "Subcontinental noir" in 2016, "Kindness of strangers" in 2017 and "Border crossings" for 2018. In 2019 we did "Fear of the unknown and Mixtopia in 2024. The Artist in our group Dylan Freitas-D'louhy is a resident of Sebastopol as well.

We are a group of MFA alumnus from Dominican University. Last year, I participated in two readings, one with alumni and professors at Dominican University and had a wonderful time. This year, I am proposing an interactive reading inspired by an interview I heard on Rattle with poet Hayden Saunier. Our interest as the Mount Tam Writers is to give the experience of poetry/reading as playful, fun, inspiring, reflective and interactive. In other words, to restore and kindle a relationship between reader and writer by using our common experience and language as a bridge. The proposed interacting reading will begin with a reading of a poem. I will then ask the audience for a word or phrase that resonated with them, something they liked. The next reader will choose a piece of writing based on the audiences' response. For example: the first poem is read, and the audience says the word "frogs" one of our writers will locate and recite a piece they have written with or related "frogs". We will then continue back and forth for the duration of the time allotted. Meanwhile, I will be collecting the words or phrases chosen by the audience to possibly create a short poem that will be shared at the end of the event to commiserate our experience together. We have a wonderful group of writers from different genres that includes poetry, flash-fiction, essay and short stories that are sure to delight and intrigue our audience, as well as offering something of interest for everyone.

Have you ever found yourself in an untenable situation, one that threatens to upend the life you've carefully constructed and put you in harm's way? The pieces in this proposed group of readers run from memoir to fiction, but all put their central "characters" in jeopardy to varying degrees. There's a video game maker with a conflicted conscious and a faltering moral compass. A woman being watched by some force the scrapes both her window and her nerves. A sheltered girl contemplating betraying her culture to move into a new world. A documentary filmmaker facing her mortality on a shoot. And a mother trying desperately to reconcile the daughter she thought she knew with the fugitive the authorities would paint that young woman as. Step into our parlor and play some Dangerous Games with us.

Join us as 15 talented writers from our community read no-more-than-3-minutes pieces on our theme, Sour Grapes: 15 Super-Short Stories About Having a Bad Attitude. Emceed by LitCamp/Page Street founder, Janis Cooke Newman