Literature meets tennis in this guerrilla reading by Neal Rabin.
Rabin has been a Club Med tennis and surf instructor, refrigerator stocker, and even worked as a “fetch” for Time Life Films. One-time founder and CEO of a global software company, he now spends his time doing the kind of stuff you’ll see in this video. Plus, he raises chickens. 23 Degrees South is his first book.
Watch as A.R. Taylor does a guerrilla reading of her story of horticulture gone amok. Listen as a murder of crows contributes to the soundtrack.
Taylor’s debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion won a Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015, and Kirkus Reviews named it one of the 12 Most Cinematic Indie Books of 2014. She’s been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goes––the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Magazine on Humor, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud, where this story comes from. In her past life, Taylor was head writer on two Emmy winning series for public television. You can also find Taylor in the usual social spaces: @lonecamel and the Facebook.
Jessica M. Wilson is one of those poets you’ll find everywhere. She’s organized all sorts of readings and reading series around LA including Writers’ Row, SoapBox Poets Open Mic, Writer Wednesdays, the NoHo Salon, and she’s the LA Organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. Jessica teaches with California Poets in the Schools and she’s also founder of the Los Angeles Poet Society, who participated in the 2015 North Hollywood LitCrawl, reading at the NoHo Metro station.
Her latest book is Serious Longing from Paris-based Swan World Press.
James Berkowitz is a poet, writer, multidimensional artist, and event producer. Recent credits include Edgar Allan Poet Journal #3, San Francisco Peace and Hope literary and art journal, anthologies The Revolutionary Poets Brigade, Men in the Company of Women and Los Angeles Poetry Society Features amongst several places where his work is recognized.
This guerrilla reading is at the 2015 LA LitCrawl, at the Metro Red Line Station in North Hollywood. Berkowitz read with other members of the Los Angeles Poet Society.
Berkowitz calls himself “a human camera of observation.” He loves the magnificence of nature and its many settings as well as the pulse and stimulation of city streets. His greatest reward is connecting with other sentient beings, which you can do virtually at http://www.jamesberkowitz.com
Ian Brennan is probably best known as a Grammy-winning producer, working with acts that include Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Tinariwen, Lucinda Williams and David Hidalgo (Los Lobos). Some folks also know him as the author of three books (and a fourth one coming soon).
Brennan’s most recent novella, Sister Maple Syrup Eyes, is a fictionalized account of a man who survives his partner’s rape. It’s something Brennan knows about from a very personal experience.
At age 21, Brennan’s life was forever changed when his first love was raped. He describes his experience this way:
I knew full well that the trauma I’d experienced was infinitesimal compared to hers. Yet, nonetheless, it was still devastating and changed the course of my entire life. The one thing I was determined to do was to try to produce something good from that bad, a celebration and memorial of what was, and that if it leant some small healing to even one person, it was somehow worth the while to help tip the scales however insignificantly back towards sanity.
Brennan has gone on to train people in violence prevention, anger-management, and conflict resolution at shelters, schools, hospitals, clinics, jails and drug-treatment centers across the US and in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This book delves more deeply, exploring the experience of the other victim of rape.
Watch out, 50 Shades of Grey, here comes Fluid: Out of Darkness Comes Light, a collection of grown and sexy stories about the locomotive power contained in the 7th chakra. In this guerrilla reading, Savannah Mae Jenkins, who co-authored the book with Tiffany Maxwell, gives us just a taste of what’s inside the covers. It’s the first mildly NSFW reading I’ve ever posted to GuerrillaReads, so watch at your own risk – you might get scalded.
Charles Degelman has been an antiwar activist, political theater artist, musician, communard, carpenter, hard-rock miner, and itinerant gypsy trucker, and eventually grew up to be a writer, editor, and educator living in Los Angeles.
In her article at The Atlantic, Taking Literature to the Streets, Katharine Schwab profiles a number of terrific ventures around the world that take literature out of bookstores and libraries and, well, into the streets. GuerrillaReads was included
It's a literary thriller about one man’s struggle to solve his wife’s murder, set against a backdrop of geopolitical turmoil in the last days of Soviet Lithuania.
Creating your own guerrilla reading is easier than you think.
You just need a writer, a friend with a camera and a good setting. Check out our video tips for writers.
Want to shoot videos of writers at your next book event? You don't need us to make it happen. Here's how we did it at the West Hollywood Book Fair, and how you can do it too.