Writers with Drinks

WWD is the best deal in town. Incredible performers/​writers/​etc., Sassy drinks/​barkeeps & a kick-​ass hostess!

I love this event. If you’re a writer, come! Everyone else, please stay away because it’s so jam-​packed, you have to come at least half an hour early to get a seat. It’s a hodge-​podge of professionals who read their work. Some of them are amazingly good. You sit in silence momentarily after they finish; you can’t believe what you just heard. It’s chilling. Others aren’t so good, but there’s a silver lining. All of us ‘barely published’ writers can dream. I am better than that. Let me get out there, persevere with editors, and continue to perfect my craft. It’s very community-​building. Thank you Charlie (the organizer) for your inspiration :)

There’s a pretty wide variety in what you get. Charlie’s introductions are sort of well, strange. Right on the verge between not understanding what’s going on and thinking you do and understanding what’s going on and thinking you don’t. If that intrigues, you, then maybe you should go. Or you could stay at home and listen to a book on tape backwards, which would pretty much replicate the experience. Sometimes it’s funny, but not nearly as much so as the crowd would make it out to be.
As for the writers, well, some are good, and some go right over my head. It’s entirely possible that I’m not sophisticated enough to understand some of them, or that they are chosen to be intentionally obscure and difficult to follow.
In any case, get there early, because seating is quite limited.

All I have to say is that Charlie rocks and has the best of the best in SF literati! All the cool kids are there… well most of em anyway.

Cute name + crowded event + have seen Nalo Hopkinson read + heard a Seuss-​ified homage to the dangers of international bullying. «Would you like some nuclear weapons? No, I would not like nuclear weapons!»

I’ve got a special place in my heart for Writers with Drinks. I read for them once, only my second readig ever in The City, and I bombed. Just flat-​out bombed. It was hilariously bad. The rest of the readers that night, including the author of Stiff, were fantastic and I was so glad to be there.
Writers with Drinks has been going on for years with the basic concept of being a mash-​up of literary styles in one reading. You might get Armistead Maupin and Tad Williams on the same bill with a stand-​up comic and someone who really wants to be Maggie Estep. It’s an important piece of the puzzle to get the right mixes of almost incompatible genres.
Host Charlie Anders is great introducing the various readers and puts together these great cards. I’ve never had a WwD where there wasn’t at least one writer I was really interested in hearing.
Writers with Drinks is easily the best reading series in the Bay Area and one of the best regular readings in the US.