The San Francisco Writing Life
All that I ever really wanted to be when I was a kid was a writer. And the only place that I ever really wanted to live was in San Francisco. And here I am – living in the city, making my living by my chosen career. But what does that mean exactly? What does a San Francisco writer look like? The funny thing about living life on our own terms is that we get to decide, every single day, what those terms are. I don’t think I realized that as a kid really – I think I thought that I would step into life as a San Francisco writer and it would be fully formed around me.
Maybe it’s the romance of the writing life in general and the creativity of the writing life in San Francisco in particular which gave me this notion that there was a certain way to live as a writer here. When I would visit here as a kid, I would inevitably go to City Lights Bookstore and pick up free poetry zines and get coffee in a nearby North Beach café with my journal in hand. I would trace the steps and read the biographies of the Beat poets and the queer lit movements, thinking that the San Francisco writing life is made up of those periods of time.
But writing isn’t like that. Writing is what happens each and every day that you sit down to your computer to pen out the thoughts that are consuming your mind. And living in San Francisco isn’t just the views from Coit Tower and the architecture of the Financial District and the history of the famous neighborhoods and their revolutions. Now that I live in San Francisco, I almost never go to City Lights (although I pass by a lot on the way to lunches in Chinatown) and I don’t read the Beat poets because they really aren’t my style.
But I write – and the writing comes from my life as it is lived and experienced inside of the boundaries and landmarks which make up San Francisco. This city is dynamic, and the energy here pushes and pulls constantly, and the tolerance for others is high … all factors which combine together to create this place where creativity of all kinds can thrive. Writing in San Francisco isn’t anything like I imagined it to be as a dreamy kid. It’s far, far better than that.
Comments Off