rolling writers fall

Really enjoyed reading ("Because I Could Not Stop for Death" and "Crazy Jane's Cup of Tea") in Jon Sindell's beautiful garden in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. Steve chose Crazy Jane from a list of very short flash that I was considering and it turned out to be fun to read. I think I wrote it back when I envisioned THE LUNATICS' BALL as combining flash fiction and flash nonfiction. ("Let us imagine," Virginia Woolf said, "since facts are hard to come by." Or something like that.) I learned from Elaine Showalter's book on women and madness that Crazy Jane was a stock character in poetry and the visual arts before Yeats wrote about her. And that there were indeed itinerant lunatics in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

All of the readers were great (unusual for me to like all of the writing in a reading), and the music was great too. I love having the opportunity to read outdoors in the Rolling Writers series, which meets only twice a year now. We managed to find a tapas restaurant with outdoor seating in Burlingame on the way home. 

Attaching a photo where you don't get the full effect of the garden, which is gorgeous.

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