The Writers Grotto: Tides of Autumn

The Writers Grotto brought their very own atmosphere to Telegraph Hill Books on Saturday, September 19, for their reading-aloud event called “Tides of Autumn.” The Writers Grotto has been a home to San Francisco writers since 1994. It is a nonprofit, coworking space, and artistic sanctuary that has cultivated creativity for decades. Amidst the swath of doom that is artificial intelligence, their worlds revolve around processing the human psyche with their own nimble minds. The event was graciously curated by Leslie Kirk Campbell and emceed by Tara Dorabji, and the room gathered with authors stirring in their stances to read aloud recently published work or something special they had recently written. A table was adorned with wine, sparkling drinks, cheeses, fresh breads, and bakery goods as friends and fans waited for the event to begin. Telegraph Hill Books had an astute warmth to the air, mostly due to the obvious support of writers’ loved ones.

Reading aloud truly allows for a different lifehood of writing to reveal itself. It is somehow more vulnerable than the quiet of the page; one must trust the audience with the tremor of a voice, the cadence of your own emotion, a feeling that slithers across a face even after reading it many times before. The Writers Grotto authors each have their own patchwork of writing styles and backgrounds that made the room particularly impregnable with their love and grief. They even put together a raffle with the opportunity to win signed copies of their books and a hearty bottle of wine.

The night’s namesake, “Tides of Autumn,” was due to the September haze that it happened upon, but Dorabji joked that it felt as if we were finally in the dead of summer, as San Francisco had hit a heat wave in mid-September after a blustery July and August. But that is the thing about loss, love, and remembering — it happens in the blistering sun and in the downpour.

The first writer was the wonderful Preeti Vangani, a poet and writer from Bombay and based in San Francisco. Her previous book, Mother Tongue Apologize, won the RLFPA Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and a myriad of places. She is currently a Steinbeck Fellow, teaches at the University of San Francisco, and recently published her poetry book, Fifty Mothers.

Preeti Vangani is absolute magic, sweltering in the room, and as much as she was born to write, she was born to speak and born to share. She begins by discussing how the San Francisco heat reminds her of the fiery weather in Bombay and that “in San Francisco it is always autumn for her.” Vangani explained that Fifty Mothers is for “her mother who they lost very young and also for her father.”

The first poem she reads is called “Astro Mischief,” and she reads it with fervor. The poem details youthful jealousy of a mother’s exactness, a preciseness with a needle and thread, the toy claw machine, and also the way things vanish, plucked away. Vangani is skilled with metaphors like they are invisible tools, never to be noticed except for the tactile imagery and emotion that emerge from her conversational voice, which could make traditional poetry cower.

The next poem she read was called “The Cremation I Wasn't Allowed to Attend.” In this piece, Vangani draws compellingly gruesome and beautiful parallels between her mother’s cremation and an adolescent sex life. Vulgarity at a young age and the concept of sex are closer to in utero and death and dying than people like to think. She read with conviction, “Every performed orgasm is a rhythmic contraction of muscles to forget which parts of my baby soft mother must have surrendered to fire first.”

Vangani then read the poems “After You Died” and “Home Science” and divulged how her mother had concentrated in “Home Science” after the 12th grade in India and her complicated relationship with art and school because of it. Throughout her reading, she talked about how surprising the monotone aspect of grief has been in the many years since her mother’s death and that it was something tackled in her first book. But in her second book, Vangani twinkled as she explained that she has learned to find joy in grief and revive the playfulness of her mother and the memories and life forms created from death.

T.K. Rex read aloud next, a science fiction and fantasy author with stories appearing in over 40 publications. Recently, their debut book collection, The Wildcraft Drones, came out this year from Stelliform Press. Their second book, The Cursed Blade of Wek, arrives in 2027. Rex’s work hangs on alternate realities where technology has pushed too far and makes humans regress, becoming more wild. While their stories balance on an extreme mixture of modernity and sci-fi elements, commentary on the climate crisis is woven through their stories and conversational dialogue.

Their first book is a collection of short stories that take place in a shared future. The story that Rex read aloud takes place in the near future and has been described as “the bleakest” of the collection. While the collection as a whole is optimistic, “A Tent Where the Buffalo Roam” is “certainly about loss.” Rex’s writing is completely interesting and futuristically incomprehensible, but also too close to home.

The short story is told in the first person by a man who finds himself displaced in San Francisco. Except in this version of displacement, he has a drone following him around while he attempts to find a plot of land permissible for him to camp out. It feels especially surreal because apocalyptic societal changes are mentioned, like “rewilding” and seven-year-long waiting lists for homes (not as unrealistic as one may think). Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park, and familiar haunts are mentioned, making it all the more eerie. The man ends up bonding with a child separated from his family and plays a role in his past as well, but the story forms a more outside standpoint, a revealing front-car view of the broken systems in the story and the broken systems of today.

Next, the booming and brilliant Claudia Meléndez Salinas read aloud, and she had a presence like no other. Salinas was a journalist for many years before returning to her heart of writing, poetry, and fiction. She wrote a young adult novel, A Fighting Chance, and her poem “Transitioning” was selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Award. She is a co-founder of Voices of Monterey Bay, a bilingual internet magazine for California’s Central Coast.

Salinas had not published anything recently, so she pulled out a piece of paper with something she had written for a friend's birthday. It is a story chock-full of vibrancy and truth, and as much as it is a tribute to her friend, it is a tribute to her friend's father. It begins by describing her friend, “the goddess,” and then follows a fantastical and ardent tale of Salinas’s previous obsession with her friend’s father, a restaurateur with fame and magnetism that attracted her like a moth to a flame.

In order to be noticed by him, she had to be brave and unabashed; she had to learn by herself. Their friendship spanned many years, and he helped her believe in herself enough to pursue her career in journalism. When she circles back to the goddess, her friend, whom she knew as “a deity in the making,” it allows her to be that believer in her friend, just like her father before he passed. In remembrance, she marvels at the woman across from her, recently divorced and flourishing. She sees the mischievous spark, “abandoning modesty.” Salinas realizes that she is there to be the person to say, “you are all this and more.”

Following Salinas, Kush Khandelwal read aloud. Khandelwal was a tech entrepreneur until he began documenting what he was learning through long-form conversations with athletes, adventurers, scientists, and everyday people who continue to reinvent themselves, and he is now a San Francisco-based writer. He now writes essays and focuses on “Ageless Athlete,” a podcast and newsletter.

Khandelwal reflects on where he came from, just like the writers who previously spoke. Whether you're from a mother or another land or a tech job, Khandelwal has built a livelihood on understanding the beauty of deliberating on growth and the metamorphosis and adaptation of life. He reads an essay called “I Wasn’t Raised for This Life,” a story about growing up in India and the resilience it has taken to thrive in various environments.

He has a different relationship with the ocean than he does now: his mother chased after him in the water, and now he surfs consistently. He recalls a comment from his friend Susan when discussing India. She said, “People do first and think afterwards.” Khandelwal didn't quite agree at first, but he listened. He did not think of India as a place that fostered adventure, but he quickly realized that adaptation, bravery, and spontaneity sat at the heart of how he was raised. He thought the world he grew up in was “more careful.”

Susan talked about women in saris going out into open surf without knowing how to swim and climbing the Himalayas with little preparation. Khandelwal, with San Francisco as his home, knows how much adaptation it has taken himself to bloom, and he keeps trailing back to the ocean, as he grew up landlocked. He says the ocean can still feel foreign, unordinary, in a life before the ocean was imaginable. But now the water still gives him a “flicker of wonder,” even just on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, with a life unimaginable in the palm of his hand.

Lastly, Leslie Kirk Campbell, curator of the event, read aloud. Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, and she teaches creative writing in a program that she founded called Ripe Fruit Writing. She read the beginning of a longer piece called “Mother Load.”

Campbell builds up grief and flattens it out to give a new perspective. It is gritty and visceral and honest. The story orbits around a woman experiencing her mother’s death firsthand. She is glued to her mother in her final moments, and when that shattering moment of ending occurs, the woman can’t seem to accept it. She essentially enacts everyday life with her mother’s corpse, and it is touching and funny, but more than anything — unlike some other grief stories — it really forces the reader to stomach reality. The drooping head, the bloating flesh, the amount of legal days you can wait before reporting a death. It is incredibly written and moving. Campbell makes the pain tangible, the bo

dy tactile, the grief rough like edges.

You can these authors' books available now at TelHiBooks.com