 So much welcoming. Thank you. But wait, Heather, do you want to talk first about these kids? I think that I should introduce you first. OK, you guys are really lucky to be here right now, because I got to work with these kids in the past, and I'm going to teach a three-week course in creative nonfiction with them coming up in a couple weeks. And I get so inspired as a writer being able to hear and read their stuff, because they're so good. But really, their teacher, what she does is she gets all these writers in San Francisco in the Bay Area to come in and guess teach. So not only do they get her wisdom and enthusiasm, but just all this constant influx of all these voices coming in to work with these guys. So everybody I've ever met is so impressed by her program. Please welcome to the stage Heather Woodward. Hi, I'm Heather Woodward, and I'm the director of the creative writing program at school of the arts. And I'm sorry I didn't expect to say anything, but I never turned down an opportunity to say anything. So the creative writing program at school of the arts has been in existence for now six years, and we're the seventh discipline. The other six at SOTA have been around for quite some time. Theater, dance, and vocal, instrumental music, and others. And there was never a creative writing program until about six years ago. And I was very happy to start it. And the students here are absolutely brilliant. This particular class, I shouldn't say this, probably just one of my favorite classes ever, they came in as really strong readers as an entire class. And it saddens me very much to see that the amount and the intensity of reading that students come with today has decreased since this class. And I'm just so proud of them, and they're all brilliant. And they're going to go out and have wonderful college experiences. Some of them will perhaps pursue creative writing, but actually I don't advise them to go to an undergraduate program because, frankly, they've completed more than one. I modeled this on the MFA program that I went through at San Francisco State. So they're primed to, I think, now take that writing and learn about something else and then go to grad school if they want to. Anyway, SOTA's great. Send your kid there. I wouldn't work at any other school, and I wouldn't want to work with any other kids. I love these guys. Thanks. OK, so these guys, we don't need, do we need that? You guys, if you're talking to Mike, I think everybody can hear if you're just standing like this, right? And this is just a little protector. Here we're being videotaped. All right, so we're going to make this fast because these guys only have four minutes. The first writer, these guys all wrote their own bios, too, and they're really funny and cool. So our first writer was just doing some last minute editing. As I sat next to her, she barred a pen for me. Please welcome Fiona Armour. Can everybody hear me? OK, OK. Percy brought home two new pairs of shoes on Friday, and that made us officially broke. What are you doing? I asked. He shook his head. I need shoes. I need shoes. He looked close to tears. I imagined my life in a trailer park and went to go sulk in the shower. I pulled my knees up to my chin and realized that if I hadn't met Percy, none of my money issues would have happened. Percy liked to spend. I like to spend. Because we spent over $100 a day, we weren't perfect for each other, and we knew it. What are you doing? Percy was rattling the doorknob, taking a shower, I said. Doesn't sound like you're taking a shower. Percy proposed to me a year ago. He didn't get down on one knee, but he had the velvet case in a pretty big rock. You know I can't accept this, I said. I'm not sure if I'm ready yet. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's fine. We can do this for a couple more years, I guess. It's not that I don't want to marry you. No, it's fine, really. He closed the case and put it in his pocket and then pretended to shuffle around the newspaper on the table. His hands were shaking. What are you gonna do with that, huh? The ring, are you going to return it? Are you serious? What? You just turned down my proposal, but you're worried about what I'm gonna do with the ring? I should throw it down a goddamn well. Fuck. He stood up and stormed out of the kitchen. I heard multiple door slam and the car in the driveway cruise away. The car we had bought together, his first and my second. Are you sure you want red, he asked. Yeah, then we'll always be able to find it. All cars are red, he said. Why not green? That's a stupid color, I said. We got a small white Volvo and named it the wheels. This nickname stuck. Babe, I'm taking the wheels to work tomorrow. No, you can't because I'm taking the wheels to the shop tomorrow. I called my grandmother when he wasn't home at midnight. For Christ's sake, she hauled into the receiver. Do you know that I sleep? Grandma, what? What do you want from me? I bit a fingernail too short. Percy's gone, I said. My grandmother did not respond. I could hear my grandfather in the background. Grandma, I asked. Where are you? Home. Grandma came over eventually in her old person pajamas. She made tea and I try not to cry into my pillow. And we have no money, I said. Grandma nodded and run my feet. You have money. No, we don't, we never do. We're too different to agree on anything. He'll be home by tomorrow, you big baby. She left around four in the morning and I poured out the cold tea into the sink and tried to fall asleep. When Percy and I were angry at each other, I was always the one to sleep on the couch. It's not like I'm going to beat you, Percy had said. I know, but space is so important. Whoa, he said, we don't agree on anything. I remember this frightened me, so I turned up the radio. Steve Miller's The Joker was playing. You like this song, he asked. I love this song. Percy smiled, me too. I was still awake when Percy came home, but I decided to pretend. Jesus, come to bed, okay? I opened an eye. Where have you been, I asked. I couldn't help it. Blowing off steam, come to bed. I did, quietly, because by the time I had mustered enough courage, he had turned off the light. Sorry, he said, he fumbled for me in the darkness. Don't be, I said, okay. He threw an arm around me. Percy and I had been looking for new places to live all week. We finally agreed to check out a one bedroom, one bathroom, and a lousy neighborhood. It was too much for us, but we pretended it wasn't. You know, I said, we could always move in with my grandma for a little while, you know, save some money. Percy took his hand off the bare mantle and shook his head. For Christ's sake, grow up, he snapped. The realtor popped his head into the room nervously. Nice living room, eh? The veins in Percy's neck were transparent, obvious. I can't take this, he said, and stormed out of the room. The realtor and I listened as the car in the driveway pulled out. I had forgotten myself and at our apartment, but he probably knew that. The realtor coughed and rubbed his hands on his thighs. What, I snapped. Well, I was just thinking, it's always stressful finding a new place. Trust me, my wife and I have been there. He paused. Are you still interested in seeing the backyard? I looked at him and felt the tears in my eyes, the growth in my throat. Things that the Steve Miller band could never erase and nodded. Hey, Fiona Armour. Okay, our next reader is somebody who I get to be her thesis advisor, which is such a privilege. And another thing I love about her is her parents moved from Los Gatos to San Francisco so that she could go to the School of the Arts. Yeah, please welcome Yael Green. Okay, four minutes. When my parents took me and my brother on a train up north to San Francisco for a weekend, my brother and I roamed around downtown at five in the evening hoping to see someone get shot. No one pops a gun out at five in the afternoon, he said, but this is San Francisco, I argued. Just give it a half hour. Five bucks says we at least someone's purse gets snatched. Back in the Santa Cruz Mountains, my brother and I would grow tired of trying to chase down deer and resort to injecting excitement where we normally wouldn't find it. So he'd say, we've got good reception today. You wanna listen to NPR? Do I, I'd ask, and move to cradle the radio in my arms like an infant stroking its speakers. Have I ever said no? On better days, we might get good enough reception for a music station, but we never got our hopes up. Sundays were spent shining civilization by becoming one with nature, trying to build a miniature dam by the garage. If civilization didn't want anything to do with us, we didn't want anything to do with it. Sometimes we caved in and tried to see what was out there, throwing notes taped to tennis balls over a forest of trees to what was rumored to be a backyard, but no one ever replied and it seemed that the friendlier the notes became like, how are you doing? We're here to talk. The more isolated we really were. My brother came home one day with a Nintendo 64 and a Smash Brothers cartridge. It quickly became our new addiction. Every night as I was closing my eyes to fall asleep, I'd see Donkey Kong throwing a hammer over Mario's head and blasting him off the spaceship. My brother's friend had handed the thing to him free because his mother feared carpal tunnel syndrome. I feared the loss of feeling in my thumb from pressing too many buttons too quickly, but my brother told me to hush and said that at best I'd smudge out my fingerprints and become unidentifiable. This way I could be a successful drug lord. There was nothing to worry about. We wanted to enact whatever we did at friend's houses down in the suburbs in our own neighborhood. When we grew tired of Nintendo, we bought a basketball hoop and ball, but a thunderstorm knocked over the hoop and the ball bounced down the hill into some bush. We tried selling lemonade on our street which resembled more of a hiking trail than a paved road and set up shop on the side, pounding the legs of our table into the dirt to stabilize it. When the first and only car passed us by, our glass pitcher fell off the table and smashed in clear tiny fragments. We threw a few leaves over them and went back inside to play some more Nintendo. Finally, we decided to throw a party. It wouldn't be big because there'd be trouble getting a caravan up the mountain since people couldn't be trusted to find our house on their own and because we couldn't have more than a few people barfing along the way. My dad, who'd seen the upholstery of his brand new car puked on by my first friend on our first sleepover years before, voted for no more than five people. Less sick people at a party, he said, is better than more sick people at a party, as I always say. I invited my friend Shelly from school. My brother invited his friend Phil to make up for the free Nintendo. Uh-oh, my dad said, the minute we pulled up to Phil's driveway and saw his mom give him a kiss on the cheek, goodbye. That boy's a puker. Later on the drive home, Phil did puke. And my father, being familiar with the early signs of queasiness, pulled over and ushered him out to the side of the road. Out of boy, he said, patting his back, as streams of a burrito in an early stage of digestion started to slowly slide down the hill. The evening had started out well. My brother and I entertained our friends the way we knew best. I hopped in my miniature red car made out of plastic and pedaled to the tip of our driveway, which slanted down into a long, spiraling twist. My brother placed his hands on my shoulders to give me a push, a weekend routine, and Shelly jumped forward to protect me. What are you doing, she squealed. He's giving me a push, I assured her. I'm going down the hill. I heard the three of them run after me as my red car sped down the driveway, but I was going too fast. When they reached the bottom of the driveway panting, Phil and Shelly gasped as my brother pulled me and the car out of a bush. I was itching all over. Looks like that one has poison oak, I told him, scratching my arms and legs. Phil and Shelly jumped back a step. No biggie, I said, I'll shower quickly and it'll all go away. I found myself speaking slower to them, enunciating every syllable understandably. My brother nodded, no biggie, he said, brushing leaves and twigs off the red car. Anyone else wanna give it a go? Later that night as we were huddled in a circle on the living room carpet playing pickup sticks, we heard a wind start up. The windows began to pulse and we could hear rain hitting the side of the house. Soon the lights began to flicker slowly and sped up until they reached a crescendo blanking out completely. When the lights came back on, though the wind was still howling, I saw Phil and Shelly curled up together, closing their eyes. Shelly and I had learned this tactic at school. The teacher had taught us to assemble this way whenever an earthquake struck. When the storm calmed down, we decided to traipse downstairs to reward ourselves with some ice cream for surviving the storm. We got up to the top of the staircase with Phil in the lead when he paused before the first step. Where's the railing, he asked. We don't have one, remember? Phil looked down the steps. No, he said, I don't. Not from when you climbed up the stairs, my brother asked. But we're going down this time, Shelly said. It's different. Downstairs was pitch black and the hallway light from the second floor illuminated only the first half of the stairway. We couldn't see the rest. But ice cream, I said. Don't you guys want ice cream? Come on, we'll go first. No, they uttered, entranced. Their faces expressionless. They turned around and returned to the living room carpet where they sat down in silence, arms wrapped around their knees. I brought out my brother's mini radio hoping to get a signal and sooth everyone with the sound of Michael Krasny's voice. But even MPR was just static. Yeah, I'll agree. I'm sure Michael Krasny would be very excited to know he's in your story. Our next reader was such a great writer when I read his stuff two years ago. So I'm excited to see what he's been up to. Please welcome Alex Henderson. If Rosemary was a princess, she would not kiss a frog. She just wasn't that kind of person. Not because she was particularly cruel or enjoyed the trap prince's predicament or even that she had some type of aversion to amphibians. She just wouldn't do it. I know this because she told me. She also told me she would never have children for spiritual reasons. But in a fit of absent-mindedness, Rosemary had become pregnant the night of her junior prom. Because her foster parents did not believe in abortion, she unwillingly proceeded to birth the child who she stubbornly named Rosemary's baby. In the hopes that it would one day cause the world as much pain as it had caused her. It all had to do, she explained to me, with waiting. If you go looking for things, people get used to even comfortable rejecting you. The more actively you pursue the things you need, the easier you make it for people to say no. But if you let things come to you, you're spared not only the effort, but also the rejection embarrassment. This all seemed very nice to her. A little package of personal philosophy in which the universe, against whom she was bluffing, revolved around her. Rosemary smoked, which is one of the few things she did that made me crazy. Kissing a smoker is not quite the same as an ashtray. It's closer to smoking yourself, which in reality isn't that bad. That said, there were definite parallels that existed between her mouth and the tray. There are things we are willing to do for the people we love, and her cigarettes were one of them. She told me they were hip and secretly, I thought they were almost romantic. That said, I couldn't see any way to make her quit without the planets aligning or some type of divine intervention. She just wasn't that kind of girl, or so she said. The day we fought was a bad day. We'd never actually argued over anything important. Not to say we didn't have our scraps now and then, but they generally ended happy. This day, however, was something different. Rosemary had been fired from her job and in a fit had given our galaxy the middle finger, deciding not to go out job hunting. It was the second week of what seemed to me to be a clever disguise for depression, and as much as it hurt me to see her upset, it was hard to know that I was working while she got high and watched cartoons all day. At the time, it seemed like a nice life, and when I got home, it seemed even nicer. The air was pleasantly spiced with the smell of the ashtray, and ooh, smell of the ashtray, the television blaring while Rosemary lying on the couch channel surfed blankly. I started it, I suppose, saying something about a job, then she started yelling, and I yelled back, and it's too soon escalated. She threw the ashtray at me, and then I apologized and locked her in our room when she unwittingly accepted. She ended up climbing out the window onto the fire escape back into the apartment where I found her trashing the living room, turning over couches, and knocking pictures off the wall. I would have said something, grabbed her, thrown her and her stupid plastic bong out that instant if I wasn't needed at the front door. There was a policeman there. He had a deep voice and an authoritative looking gut. He asked me if there was any problem and if he could come in. Apparently, there was some sort of domestic dispute going on in the apartment. I told him he was welcome to come in if he wanted to deal with the crazy woman that had broken into my apartment. Ultimately, it was me that was arrested when the crazy woman accused me of abuse. And then it was a laughing, teary-eyed rosemary that would bail me out and refuse to press charges. She told me she never wanted to fight again, which I told her just wasn't realistic. She said, that's the difference between us and drove me home crying. Alex Henderson, and that's the lovely Mark Cappell over there in the piano, adding some atmosphere. Our next reader is an award-winning playwright and she's working on her senior thesis about the six weeks that she spent in Honduras. Please welcome to the stage Tania Lunsford. Last summer, when Frederick Douglass and I found the bones and dirty flesh and skull of a man under the ruins of my neighbor's garage, we made a silent pact. My neighbor, who my mother was always skeptical of, had moved away five days earlier, never even shaking hands with her, which meant a lot because my mother was a very touchy-feely person. Frederick Douglass never liked my neighbor either. And although Frederick Douglass was the friendliest seven-year-old pit bull you've ever seen, we trusted his judgment. Frederick Douglass was almost always right about people, except that time he attacked the mailman. After that incident, we had to hide him for five months from the city because they threatened to put him to sleep. Soon after Frederick Douglass was admitted back to society, that is, after I could walk him without being called the owner of a devil dog, his favorite place to walk was in the woods behind our house. I didn't mind the woods, either. I think neither of us minded for the same reason because he didn't have to wear a leash and me because I didn't have to hold the leash and be pulled along by his strength as if I were the one being walked. One day as we returned from the brush behind my house, I heard Frederick Douglass panting behind me. I could imagine without turning around the look on his face, his tongue wagging, his jaws flapping and his back legs higher than his front. He didn't slow down when he saw me. I'm guessing because he tackled me down right onto our back lawn and kept running. He leapt over the short fence that separated our yard from my neighbors. In a panic, I jumped up to retrieve him because I didn't know how my neighbor would react to an oversized pit bull barking and scratching at his garage. I finally got him back over the fence to our yard by, against my better judgment, pushing his butt up and over the fence. When we got back to our yard, he refused to stop barking, even going on for so long as to only be stopped by a smoked jerky stick, bacon flavor, of course. Frederick Douglass loved those sticks, but I can definitely see why. I had to wrestle the pack away from him just as often as I had to wrestle it away for my five-year-old little brother, whom I would catch periodically whispering, one for you, one for me. While sneaking a snack with Frederick Douglass. I didn't stress over Fred's fit. Besides, I had all, I had just stopped having temper tantrums a year earlier. I totally understand that folks just have to act out sometimes. Even if it is kicking your little brother's television set in or in Frederick Douglass's case, I'm leaping wildly over a fence and only being contained by jerky sticks. When I was nine years old, we adopted Frederick Douglass. My father was driving old people from one doctor's appointment to the next in one of those vans for a living. And one of the elderly women grabbed him one day and looked him in the eye a couple of minutes too long and handed him a little pit bull for a huge purse, which I am sure was used to store other things in her younger days. My father, newly divorced from my mother and a self-proclaimed bachelor, found no room for a dog in his new life and gave the dog to us. To my mother's disagreement in my relentless pouting, we took the dog. It was Black History Month when we got Frederick Douglass. I was in Mrs. Horn's class and we were learning about famous black figures in history. I, having grown up in a family where my grandfather marched for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and everyone talked about it as if it was present day is in the 60s. I was well equipped with information on black history. On a Tuesday, Miss Hornsby brought pictures of some of the famous figures. Madam C.J. Walker, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King in Rosa Parks, Nat King Cole, Jackie Lou Robinson, and among those was Frederick Douglass, a beautiful man with a parted afro and a strong and tense stare. So when my mother asked what I would like to name my dog, I named him after the strongest most beautiful man I'd seen yet, Frederick Douglass. And after much calling, he came to me and it was too late for my mother to change his name. A couple days after the incident with Frederick Douglass' barking fit, our neighbor moved. It was on a Wednesday. He had only been there for about three months and hadn't spoke to us except for once to give us the mail that accidentally had been put in his mailbox. It was as if my neighbor had predicted the storm that came soon after he moved because what used to be his garage had collapsed along with the tree that sat in what used to be his front yard soon after he left. The storm lasted for two days after which the sun decided to come out full force and apologize. Frederick Douglass and I forgave it and took advantage by going for an extra long walk through the woods. When we returned, we admired the strength of the storm, both of us silently marveling over the damage in our neighbor's yard. So Frederick Douglass jumped over the fence again to inspect the damage, forcing his nose into the ruins embarking when he hit rock bottom, I imagine. When I saw what Frederick Douglass had found, a skeleton, the skin on the forehead still intact, I could not scream. I didn't run home like I should have. I looked at Frederick Douglass who had been looking at me for God knows how long. Any of the one of us said anything. For the first time, Frederick Douglass didn't know what we should do next. So Nia Lunsford, God, Frederick Douglass, Michael Krasny and Rosemary's Baby. There are some good references in these stories. Our next story, our next storyteller, our next reader is the editor in chief of Umlot which is the super awesome literary journal at School of the Arts. Please welcome Naomi Nio. Hi, so this is an excerpt from my senior thesis which is a rotating narrator novel about Centralia, Pennsylvania, or it's actually about a family, but it's said in Centralia, Pennsylvania where they've had a minefire burning for 40 years and they recently evacuated the town during the 1980s. So. I hadn't been home in 22 years and in all that time I had seen my mother only twice at my father's funeral and at my wedding. Later she wouldn't come to California to see her only grandchildren. The town needed her, she said, and besides, what if they tried to tear down her house while she was gone? Now I brought my family of strangers and come to live with her again. You grew up here, mom? Hannah ran over to investigate a wide-mouth pipe rising out of the earth beside the road, rested and overflowing with last year's leaves. We were walking down what used to be Park Street, I guess still was. But the tidy white parallel lines of row houses had been replaced by thick overgrown foliage, jungle-like, converging over the still paved road. I looked around coolly at it and proud of myself of staying calm. Don't touch that, honey. I grabbed her small hand and steered her back into the asphalt of the road, but I felt guilty, as I often do with Hannah, who is much more delicate physically and in her personality than her sister, who often looks at me in such a knowing ways if she understood me completely and uncharitably. I felt guilty for interfering in her discovery and began to explain apologetically. That is a borehole. They drilled a lot of holes in the ground when I was a little girl because there used to be mines under the town, coal mines, back with my mother, that's Grandma Helen, was young. But then the old mines caught on fire. You know what a mine is, right? Hannah was four years old, almost five, but she had been diagnosed with mild attention deficit disorder and drawn out conversations made me nervous. I could only talk as fast as possible and wait for her to lose interest. A mine, she asked. A mine is where people find out there's something underground they want, like coal, which we burn to make electricity. So they dig coals and tunnels under the ground and they take it out. Anyway, there are lots of old tunnels under there. I stopped my foot to add emphasis. And one day they caught on fire by accident. And because coal is flammable, that means it burns, the fire just kept burning. So anyway, the people who wanted to stop the fire drilled all these holes and stuck pipes in them to let all the bad poisonous air out that a fire makes from underground and also so they could see where it was hot and then they would know where the fire was. I could see her getting bored. She stopped to look at a blue butterfly on the ground, but I kept nodding along to my words politely. Anyway, Hannah, I said loudly, trying to wrangle her attention for one last sprint. The important thing is that you shouldn't go too near the pipes because the air that comes out of them is really bad for you, okay? And they might be hot, you understand? I held my breath, please let her understand. She surprised me, she asked a question. How did they put the fire out if they couldn't see it? Well, they argued about that for a long time. Some of the government men wanted to pour water down the holes, just like they were putting out a regular fire. Some wanted to dig the fire up and take it away. Some wanted to fill the mine tunnels with like non-flammable, you mean material that doesn't burn? But in the end, they tried all three ways in other ones, but because they could never agree and didn't try very hard at any time, since not everybody was working together and cooperating, I looked at her until she met my eyes. I wanted her to pay attention. And they never put the fire out at all. It's still burning right now. She looked at her feet and her mouth opened slightly. And that's why they tore all the houses down because nobody could live there anymore on top of a fire. This used to be a regular little town with houses up and down the street, just like in Sunnyvale. But now hardly anybody lives here, just Grandma Helen and a few other people, stubborn people who refused to give up. Look, Hannah pointed to a gray roof rising above the trees, close now. We came upon the building, a neat white clapboard row house set close to the street with three false chimneys rising in brick on either side, merry golds in the evenly mown front yard. There was a freshly painted lawn jockey in red and yellow costume standing on the strip of clean sidewalk remaining only before this house. The lawn jockey's face had been painted with orange lips and wide white and blue eyes. His outstretched hand held a lump of gleaming black anthracite coal. On the porch of the house, a heavily bodied woman in navy blue house dress strained against her strong shoulders and wide hung belly stood up on the front porch, a tall glass of iced tea in hand and brushed imaginary crumbs from her thighs. I knelt next to Hannah and whispered in her ear, go hug your Grandma Helen. Naomi Neale, that was great, thank you. Our next writer comes from my side of the bay, Oakland, and she likes to write poetry and fiction and also apparently has an active interior life in the subject of polemics, which is very interesting. Please welcome to the stage Yamina Abdurrahim. There are seven blocks between my house and where I live, and every day I walk between these two points laced with street merchants and the smell of cinnamon and piss. There are times though few that I sink myself into the boulevards and avenues and appreciate the beauty of street junctions in the present. The house is saddened. The house is saddened through progress, appear romantic. They hold with their arms saddened people whose faces and feet are worthy and unrealized. Few of these saddened people claim the streets with aerosol and paint pens as it's the only way they know how. Neither the taggers nor the gangsters anger me because they're only trying to belong to something that can never belong to them. To make home out of this wasteland and cultivate families from strangers to form gods from loudspeakers and rosaries. My neighbor holds God in car windows and presses symbols of such into her chest. For moments of few she and I walk together, the barbed wire fence casting diamonds on our bodies. The children run and scream and kick neon soccer balls on the sidewalk and in the street. They're happy even in golf by looming naked buildings with histories too heavy for their young arms. They maneuver through the cars and play. They play as if they own the city as only God could. And as they age they give up this innate right and use the latter part of their lives to reclaim what they knew as truth. That was beautiful, thank you. Our next writer is the managing editor of Umlat and also maybe for the first time in your life you're gonna lay eyes on a world-class fencer. I don't know if I've ever done that before. This is exciting. Please welcome Sasha Schmidt. When we hiked we always yearned for the top of the mountain to finally be at the destination. To be able to wipe away the sweat draining off your forehead into your eyes. When we hiked we rarely did it for the journey. We did it for what comes at the end. The satisfaction of looking at down the mountain at the beaten path, shrubbery that stuck to our ankles and gravel that almost made us flip down the hundreds of feet we had just climbed. When we hiked in the summer of 06 it was hot and cloudless and every time we thought we were at the top of the mountain there was always another slope, another ridge just above teasing us. Julia and I had wanted to take a greyhound down to Monterey to stay in a youth hostel and enjoy the beaches. But instead we went hiking. We decided to hike to a campsite at the top of Pinnacles, a state park not far from Monterey. It was just the two of us off in the wilderness. When we got to the top we were exhausted, not so much from hiking but from hoping. We had hoped for the summit so many times yet it hadn't come not until we had given up. We fell asleep, our sleeping bag zipped up tight because of the chill at the top. I wake up at 5.30. I think I hear a coyote howling. It is brisk but I decide to unzip the sleeping bag and crawl out onto the cold hard earth, still half asleep. The dew from the night had swelled all the cracks and crevices shut. I sit on my hands trying to feel the pulse of the earth. I lie back against a rock. From our campsite I can see valleys stretching east and west. In the distance I can make out the silver line of the ocean. To the east I see the fields of artichokes and strawberries that will soon be speckled by bowed heads, dark necks of the pickers exposed to the sun. The air nips my eyelids and I am awake as I could ever be. The world is asleep around me. I can just make out a pink horizon in the east. I hear the coyote again. Yesterday I had missed the mountain, the sky, the earth as we walked up the mountain. I remembered last night we had seen a turkey vulture at dusk circling the sky, its beak open. The sky is full of stars and little points of pink light where the sun's rays are creeping in. If that vulture had flown around now it would have gulped a mouth full of light and stars in cool air. I consider waking Julia but the sky is changing quickly and if I left even for a moment I would miss something, something that happens every morning but that no one seems to know about. At 6.15 the sun is sneaking up over the horizon. I shield my eyes as the red sun millions of miles away bathes me in the morning. The earth under me starts to harden. I hear crickets somewhere off in a bush with shrubbery and a bird opens its lungs. The coyote is gone. Julia stirs. I decide to go back into the tent. I appreciate the beauty of cities and of that giant metropolis and metropolitan muscle but I can appreciate it while walking and talking and doing things. Nature is different. It requires solitude and chances to catch your breath and just stare. Time to sit on a rock and see the curve of that gnarled tree alone on the hillside. Nature is alive. It says, come on, take a seat and think well and we do. Thanks Sasha. Our next writer is an award-winning poet and classical guitarist as well as a hoop dancer and I don't know what that is but maybe where are you Natasha? Can you, Natasha Weidner? I wanna find out what hoop dancing is. Just briefly, what hoop dancing? It's when you dance with hula hoops. Do they have ribbons on them? Sometimes or sometimes they have fire. Ooh, do you do it with fire? No, I don't. Okay, not yet. Please welcome Natasha Weidner. Thank you. Three months ago I cut a potato into four pieces and buried them in my front lawn. Just impulsively because there was mist outside and I wanted to feel it on my face and because I was home alone listening to my classical music and overflowing with this hunger to plant something. Of course, once I had planted the potato and smoothed the dirt with my hands, I felt unsatisfied and I sat on the front lawn for a minute staring at the patch soil wondering if the potato was changing yet. And if it was, what would happen if I dug it back up right this instant? Would it be ruined like film stolen from the dark room? I went back inside and probably made pancakes or something and after that I completely forgot about my four quarters of potato and was sucked back into the circles of my life, the cups of tea, the checking of the email and such. Now my neighbor says to me, what's that growing out of your front lawn? And I say, I don't know because I can't believe that those little wedges could have grown into all this green wildness in such a short time. Weeds, I decide. I go into the yard in my overalls and start ripping out the muscular stalks. Underneath them though, are hundreds of potatoes perfectly smooth, comfortably enveloped in the soil. I uncover them with amazement. They do not seem to be linked together under the ground. I fill an entire bucket with them, wondering when did this happen and where have I been this whole time, oblivious to the magic unfolding in the dirt? I can't even remember. It's as if the repetition of all the things I do day after day has made them unremarkable and this dance with civilization, with computers, microwaves, schedules has dragged me inside far away from the soft clickings of the earth to which I have become oblivious. And what did I ever do to deserve all these potatoes? What have I done for this world that it is so generously, so quietly, nourished me all my life? The least I can do, I decide, is marvel, be thankful, lie down on the grass with my eyes closed, feel myself sinking into that softness, recognizing that I'm a part of this land, a creature, changing and growing all the time, like everything else that's alive. The least I can do is take my bounty inside, turn on my classical music and preheat the oven. My mom and I can stand together in our yellow kitchen, chopping potatoes slowly, slowly, tossing them with olive oil, sliding them into the oven and enjoying the warm smell filling our house, remembering where everything started and will eventually return. Natasha Weidner, that was beautiful. Our final reader is, this is great, McSweeney's publishing puts out a great anthology called the best American non-required reading and there's always great essays and stories in it and our next writer is an editor for that anthology. Please welcome Eli Wolf. Nobody thought I'd really grow up to be a loaf of bread. When I told my teachers, they'd asked me to think of a real job, but I had a real job in mind. What's more real than being a loaf of bread? Nothing, that's a trick question. One day I crawled inside my cardboard box. I had at least a dozen of them, all refrigerator crates, having decided that today was as good a day as any to grow up. I turned a knob on the side of the box, shut the flaps and baked. At first the prickles along my skin hurt and I fidgeted and scratched and nearly cried, but eventually I gave in and let the heat soak into me until my viscous sourdough inside sponged into soft springy dough and my skin crusted tan and brittle. The bell of the oven dinged and the flaps flopped open, ejecting cloud of delicious steam. Mom called me to dinner, I obviously didn't move. She stuck her head in the den and called my name Sing Song. As a loaf of bread I was not obligated to respond. Eli, your asparagus is getting cold, get out of the box. Now what does a loaf of bread eat? I hadn't considered this, I already felt hungry, especially for asparagus dipped in lemon butter, but maybe that was just the old me trying to drag me back into the habits of my old breadless self. So I curled up a little tighter, savoring a whiff of my own fresh, yeasty body. I wondered what sort of bread I was. My crust was thick and crumbly like rye, but my dough was snow white like ciabatta. I wouldn't know, I didn't have eyes. I was happy with myself whatever I was. I don't think bread discriminates against itself. While my mom went to get my dad, which she always did when I became unmanageable, I scooted into the kitchen. The marble tiles were smooth and cool under my crust and I had a sudden pang of nostalgia for the countertop where I was conceived in an ecstatic splash of water and flour, salt sprinkling like a drizzle over the exhausted union on the green Formica tabletop. I nudged the pantry door open and rolled inside, coming to a rest under the shelves. So this was home. The yellowish kitchen light filtered in through the slats on the pantry door, spilling over the avenues that ran between the cans of pinto beans and tomato sauce, blinking off a slumbering jar of pickles. I wanted to crawl up on the bread shelf and meet my friends, but the shelf was cramped, so I dragged them down to the floor and arrayed them in a semi-circle around me. I was kind of nervous, seeing them all at once. I asked the whole wheat, who looked really friendly, if he'd introduced me to the group. Sure, if you like, but they won't like you. Why won't they like me, I asked. You're unsliced. Unsliced, the whole group hissed. In unison through the pores in their dough, as they edged in around me. Embarrassed, I realized that I hadn't even considered this before. The whole wheat added sympathetically and you're not even packaged. Where's your plastic bag? Were you homemade? I was made from scratch, I said proudly. The plastic bags muffled the group's laughter, but it resounded in the pantry, waking a jar of sleepy olives that glared down at us before sinking back into their oily dream. I was heartbroken. Now it was the whole wheat's turn to look embarrassed for me. He scooted closer to me and whispered, we've had homemade here before, something's just wrong with them. Their crust is lumpy, they're big and slow, they go stale in a day. It's like they weren't baked long enough if you know what I mean. And nobody eats them. Nobody, I asked, nobody, he said. They just sit there on the shelf as the days go by, getting staler and staler, pecked that by mice and crumbling over the place. They get to be a real mess by the time anyone notices them. Then it's straight into the trash can where you get chopped up for croutons. No, I shouted, I refused to believe it. My skin still felt warm from the oven and even though my heart was buried in dough, I could feel the strength of each throb cracking my crust. I was soft and perfect. Who wouldn't want to eat me? The bread loaf circled around me jeering and threw their twisties at me as they chanted, unsliced, unsliced, unsliced. The whole wheat loaf was thrust aside by his companions and he shrugged helplessly as he was absorbed into the mob. They lifted me on their shoulders if bread has shoulders and carried me to the other end of the pantry. We passed from the sun-dappled suburbs into the dark inner city of preserved herring and marachino cherries floating inertly in their sticky sap like dead cores of red dwarfs. They threw me into a dusty dark corner and then they fell upon me, all those loaves, digging into my body with their sharpened scissors. They flayed the crust off my back and gouged deep holes in my tender body. Bits and pieces of me were flung in the air like confetti and I weakly struggled to stuff myself back together even as the loaves cut me into pieces and stuffed themselves in a cannibalistic frenzy. Mom wrapped on the side of the cardboard box. Asparagus Eli. I heard her set the plate down outside the oven door then she walked away. I opened the flap of the oven at just a crack to look at the neatly decapitated asparagus heads. When I clambered out of the box I was hardly baked at all, just sweaty and itchy from rolling around in my sleep. I put the first asparagus head in my mouth and crunched down on it. Lemon burst in my mouth like a tiny sun with each bite of the dead organic flesh and I felt no remorse for the corpse when I swallowed. Thank you. Eli Wolf, let's hear it for all the readers from Soda. That was great. God, you guys are so good. We're gonna take about five minutes for the change over the changing time when it turns into poetry hour and there are some great poets that are coming up including Maxine Chernoff, Michael McClure, Joel Gomez. So we'll take a little break and we'll be right back. Thanks to Mark Cappell too for playing the piano.