About Us
SLF at OmniCircus: an event report
I don't know how I can describe the OmniCircus space, other than a sort of post-apocalyptic Mad Max room mixed with "Something Wicked This Way Comes." Which is a good description of the OmniCircus performance later that evening too, actually. We ended up with about 40-50 people in the space; very unclear on how many were performers and how many were paying attendees, but it felt like a nice big crowd (and about as much as the space could hold -- we could have squeezed maybe five more people in, but not much more than that). Lots of friends showed up, of course -- but also quite a few new people came, mostly from the Borderlands Bookstore mailing list. So thanks, Borderlands!
We made a little over $200 towards the Fountain Award, which is great! That's about enough to cover the shipping costs for mailing manuscripts out to the jurors. And more importantly, we got to meet a lot of new people, and tell them (and some old friends) about the Fountain Award and the SLF, and I think we created some good buzz. It was a lot of fun -- this is really the first public event we've done for the SLF, and it made it all seem more real, somehow. We've been entirely electronic up to this point, and while we've gotten a lot done, it's nice to actually talk to people in person about it.
We served food and went through about twelve bottles of wine (plus three bottles of juice) so big thanks to our sponsors again for bringing the liquor. That's Strange Horizons, other magazine, NFG, Emerald City, and Borderlands. Yay! (Small Beer offered subscriptions to LCRW as door prizes, but Kaolin and I never quite got that coordinated. Hopefully next time!)
The evening also was heavily dependent on our great volunteers. David H. kindly came and worked the door; Kaolin (one of the SLF webmasters, and also with NFG) played bartender. Charlie Anders (who hosts the monthly Bay Area Writers with Drinks) was a terrific MC, giving funny personalized intros to each reader. The readers gave generously of their time and talent: Pat Murphy, Rudy Rucker, Ken Wharton and Terry Bisson all read without compensation, out of the goodness of their hearts. (Buy their books!) And behind the scenes was Jeremy Smith, another of our SLF volunteers who has been teaching me all sorts of things about fund-raising (in his day job, he does this kind of thing for small press publishers, since he works for the Independent Press Association) -- he's the one who put this whole thing together. I just showed up for the fun part.
Thanks to everyone who helped and everyone who came. Great event, great fun. I wish I could be in the Bay Area for the upcoming second event, the May 20th reading with Michael Chabon (co-sponsored by McSweeney's, Zoetrope, and other fine people, more details soon). But I'm really glad I made it to this one!
