LitCrawl returns to Sebastopol this Saturday
On May 17, Lit Crawl will bring 200 authors—and, they hope, a thousand admirers—to venues around Sebastopol
This Saturday, May 17, from 2 pm to 6 pm, Sebastopol will host 200 writers from Sonoma County and the Bay Area for the 2nd Annual Lit Crawl Sebastopol.
How to explain what LitCrawl is? Well, it’s like a pub crawl—but with books instead of beer, words instead of whiskey.
The event kicks off on Friday evening with a presentation by Anita Gail Jones, author of The Peach Seed, who will dive into the wonders of storytelling via visual art, literary art, and oral tradition. She will screen the inventive book trailer she created for The Peach Seed and weave an original fable, Cloth & Tale, into her discussion of the creative process. She will also give a reading from The Peach Seed.
“She made this beautiful book trailer, which is like a cinematic masterpiece,” said SebArts director Serafina Palandech, who is very excited about this weekend’s event. She expects Lit Crawl 2025 to be almost twice as big as last years.
The core of Lit Crawl consists of writers reading their work at 12 different venues around town, including Goldfinch, Retrograde Coffee Roasters, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Copperfield’s, Community Market, Silk Moon, Soft Medicine, Spinning Threads, Taylor Lane Coffee, The Livery, Toyworks and Third Pig Bar. See the full schedule here. Throughout the afternoon, authors will be appearing at Copperfield’s to sign their books.
How are the writers chosen? It’s a little complicated.
“Writers groups submit together,” Palandech said. “So it’s a group of authors: they might be poets; they might be MFA students; they might be part of a writing group. But they create a topic and a theme, and then they put together and submit writing samples, describe what the theme is about, and then all of those submissions are reviewed by our jurors.”
They had 32 different groups submit this year, and 30 groups are participating. Each group has between five and 15 authors.
Palandech talked about some themes of the different groups.
Stacks and Stories features writing by local librarians—including some who work at the Sebastopol Library.
A Taste of Influence offers writers reading essays about their “patron saints” (people like Frida Kahlo, Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler).
Sour Grapes features 15 super-short stories about having a bad attitude.
Other groups include Words of Resistance, a group on Writing the Truth in Fiction and Memoir, Travel Through Time with Historical Fiction, LGBT Love and Solidarity, and more.
Community Market is not only hosting three different groups during the Lit Crawl. They’re also doing a book swap from 2 pm to 6 pm, and they’re hosting a free afterparty with live music and dancing from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm.
After Lit Crawl ends, you can go to the afterparty at Community Market or partake of another event at SebArts: Particles of Speech: Spoken Word & Music from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm. This performance features spoken word poetry over traditional and non-traditional hip-hop/rap music, in English but sprinkled with the group’s native tongue, Bengali.
For Palandech, Lit Crawl is the ultimate community experience. “Everybody donates their time. There’s no fee to enter, there’s no fee to attend. None of the venues charge anything. So it’s an entirely a community, grassroots event that’s entirely free,” she said.
She also sees Lit Crawl serving a deeper purpose—a purpose art has always fulfilled in times of crisis.
“I think we need to be together,” she said. “We need to hear art. There’s so much bad news—and we need to look at that clearly—but hearing all these authors share their works of art is really inspiring. It’s a way for us to come together and do something beautiful, which we really need right now.”
Learn more at sebarts.org/litcrawl