The Writers’ Grotto is opening its doors after hours for food, wine, mingling, and a showing of who’s here and what we’re up to. Drop by to hear Grottoites read from their recent books, emceed by former SF Chronicle book review editor Oscar Villalon. Take a glimpse at works-in-progress by browsing our first ever “door party”–each office door will be decked out with excerpts, research, and photos related to the inhabitant’s current project. We’ll have information about Grotto writing classes, a new art exhibit by photographer Sheila McLaughlin titled “Photography from Ireland,” and books for sale! Bring yourself and a friend. 490 2nd St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco.

RSVP here.

Memoir II: Intermediate/Advanced Workshop
Instructor: Rachel Howard
Contact: rachel dot howard at gmail dot com
Number of sessions: 8
Meeting Times: Tuesday evenings, 6:30 pm to 9 pm; September 21 – November 9
Course fee: $475

This weekly combination seminar and workshop provides ongoing craft discussion, support, and critique for committed memoir writers. During the opening portion of each class we’ll look at published memoirs, with an eye to guide and inspire your own writing. What is your story really about, and how can your evolving understanding power the writing process? How can you keep opening up parts of your story that might feel too hot to touch? We’ll balance an awareness of the emotional process behind memoir writing with the study of practical techniques, talking about building tone and style, finding short and long lines of tension, and thinking about theme to discover new layers of meaning that can shape your larger work.

Then we’ll turn to your workshop submissions, aiming to reflect back to the writer what has been communicated, and to describe the further opportunities we see. We’ll point to strengths, and offer ideas for substantive revision in a thoughtful environment. Every writer in the class will have the opportunity to submit to workshop twice during our eight weeks together. Ultimately this class will help you gain greater perspective on your work by listening to others. But my deeper goal is to help you build a strong personal writing sensibility by encouraging you–amidst the flurry of feedback–to listen foremost to yourself.

I’ve just finalized information and dates for the fall eight-week Memoir II (intermediate/advanced) workshop I’ll be teaching at the Grotto starting in late September. I’ll be posting that information soon.

Meanwhile, you can now join the SF Writers Grotto Classes group on Facebook.

I’ve just opened registration for the six-week summer memoir workshop I’ll be teaching at the San Francisco Writers Grotto in July and August. I’m looking forward to working with a great mix of returning students and new ones. The readings and discussions will be all-new, and every student will receive personal weekly writing assignments and feedback, as well as a chance to have a longer section workshopped. Contact me at rachel dot howard at gmail dot com if you’re interested in saving a spot.

Summer Memoir Workshop

Instructor: Rachel Howard
Contact: rachel dot howard at gmail dot com
Number of sessions: 6
Meeting Times: Monday evenings, 6:30 pm to 9 pm; July 26 – August 30
Course fee: $375

Description:

You want to tell your story and you want to tell the truth. But how does truth differ from mere fact in memoir? And how do we find and give form to the deeper truths that compel readers to compulsively turn pages?

Memoir poses a contract with the reader—“this really happened.” But whether your story is outrageous or ordinary, a memoirist must dig beneath the facts to unearth a deeper emotional honesty.

In this combination seminar and workshop, we’ll embrace Vivian Gornick’s edict: “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” Through weekly readings and writing assignments, we’ll explore how memoirists use fictional techniques to transport the reader beyond surface factuality, and how you can develop an on-the-page perspective to give your story movement and meaning. Each writer will submit a memoir chapter for constructive workshop response.

We’ll also reserve plenty of time to hash out ethical quandaries, from the fallibility of memory to the eternal question: “What will my family think if they read this?” We’ll talk about how to sustain your writing practice over the course of creating a full book. And you’ll get the scoop on paths to publication.

This class is for writers already at work on a memoir, as well as those just starting out.

Instructor Bio: Rachel Howard is the author of the memoir The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2005. Her personal essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her advice is quoted extensively in The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

“For general balletgoers, the run of Romeo and Juliet that opened Saturday and continues through this week is the crowning jewel of San Francisco Ballet’s 2010 season, which takes over the War Memorial Opera House every January through May. For close followers of this internationally ascendant company, though, this R&J also serves to crown Sarah Van Patten as one of the troupe’s — indeed, one of the country’s —most powerful ballerina-artists.

Van Patten, now 26, came to San Francisco in 2002, after a precocious start to her career at the Royal Danish Ballet. In her early seasons here, she was bold and headstrong, yet so green and unknown that we hardly knew what to make of her; her performances were suspenseful, often commanding, and sometimes edgy and erratic. In 2007, the last time San Francisco Ballet danced this Romeo and Juliet, Van Patten was granted a single night’s performance in the lead. She was utterly naturalistic, impassioned, and convincing; finally, it seemed, we had been granted a clear glimpse of her full gifts. Over her last two seasons, especially, that glimpse has become a consistent, steady view. Van Patten’s dramatic authority as Juliet on Saturday was no revelation — but only because the diehard subscribers and standees have seen her dominate the entire repertory this season.

To see her as one of the great Juliets makes catching this 1994 staging by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson tremendously rewarding, even though a new production would be welcome. (Van Patten will alternate with Vanessa Zahorian; a highly anticipated debut in the role by Maria Kochetkova was nixed, for unknown reasons.) ”

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I hadn’t read any of Rick’s novels when I began my semester under his supervision, but I knew at once from the clarity of his thought on writing that I should listen closely to his every word. (Listen to this interview with Rick on NPR and you’ll understand just what I mean.) Judging from early reviews and reader response, “Day for Night” is finding a wide following, but gratitude and admiration compel me to add my small voice. It’s an astonishing book. Read it and you’ll be glad.

Here are excerpts from reviews:

“Brilliant plotting, haunting characters, and an elegiac tone distinguish this dazzling novel…Contemporary fiction at its best – accessible, breathtaking, and heartbreaking.”
- Kirkus (starred review)

“It’s an entrancing and profoundly complicated tale Reiken tells as he slowly reveals the submerged connections among his intriguing characters while sustaining psychological sophistication, suspense, shrewd humor, and many-tiered compassion. Reiken’s novel of miraculous survival and discovery embraces the earth’s splendor, humankind’s capacity for good and evil, and the fact that we are all linked and that much is concealed within our oceanic psyches.”
- Booklist (starred review)

Here is Rick’s website.

“A resident choreographer earns his keep when he feeds the audience what it wants and needs, brings out qualities in the dancers only someone intimately familiar with them can, and stretches his own talents in the bargain. Yuri Possokhov’s new “Classical Symphony” at San Francisco Ballet does all this and more: It makes you smile, nonstop. This caper of stretched-to-the-extreme classical technique forms the zippy centerpiece of a short and spirited seventh repertory program likely to delight ballet diehards and newcomers in equal measure.

In his ninth work for the Ballet, the former principal dancer has turned to Prokofiev’s first symphony and drawn on its teasing qualities. This is neo-classicism that can trace its influence back to William Forsythe’s “Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude” – right down to Sandra Woodall’s space-age pie-plate tutus – but Possokhov adds so many idiosyncratic twists that “Classical Symphony” rarely feels derivative.

To his fleet of three lead couples and eight corps members, Possokhov gives Russian-flavored high classical steps in combinations rarely if ever seen in contemporary ballet, from the men’s grandes pirouettes with windmill arms – the legs swoop too, ending in plunging arabesque penchée – to Maria Kochetkova’s simple relevé turns with free leg in a charming front attitude. The lines are rounded and harmonious, only taken to the nth degree – a finishing position with one arm overhead and torso arching becomes practically a backbend.

Nineteenth-century positions on pointe spiral down into quirky floor work. But it’s the sweeping inventions that imprint the ballet in memory. It was a terrific idea to give Prokofiev’s lightly bounding third movement to a herd of men who gambol like stags. And the finishing image, with the women gathered into an undulating center, and the men dashing in jeté en tournant all around, is a kick.”

Read more.

–Rachel

“Benjamin Levy’s latest dance was inspired by an increasingly common experience: He changed his “relationship” status on Facebook only to realize that he’d just broadcast his private pain to the world.

In “Everyone Intimate Alone Visibly,” which opens tonight at Theater Artaud’s Z Space after a week of “flash mob” performances all around San Francisco, the audience is invited to share the space in which Levy and partner Aline Wachsmuth dance. Web cameras pick up movements to trigger animated projections by new-media artist Mary Franck. As in the new social network reality, personal exchanges become public chain reactions.

Levy’s movement style has a chain-reaction quality, too: His steps are swift and hyperkinetic, the torque of a hip or an elbow moving through the whole body like an electrical current. Not yet 30, he founded his company LEVYdance as a UC Berkeley senior in 2002, after his first piece of choreography won the top award at the American College Dance Festival, going on to performances at the Kennedy Center. Levy quickly won press acclaim and notice as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch.”

Q: “Everyone Intimate” wasn’t prompted only by your “relationship update,” though it seems that was one spur.

A: I’ve had a lot of shifts and transitions in my life in the last year. It made me curious about how I react to change and how people generally react when they’re uprooted and threatened, and how that’s changed. How do you express heartbreak in a status update? How do you write about a five-year relationship ending in an e-mail?”

Read more here.