Tzara's Hat at Litcrawl in San Francisco

Tristan Tzara knew something about the creative power of community and constraint. During a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, Tzara offered to create a work on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. We applied this technique to writing flash fiction, pulling the five words that each of us contributed from a hat at timed intervals and thereupon their selection immediately incorporating them into the stories as we drafted them. Come hear the results!

Tzara’s Hat: Five Writers, Five New Works at the legendary Litcrawl. Phase One: 6 - 7:00 pm, Oct 13, 2012. Four Barrel Coffee. 375 Valencia St. SF.

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Daniel Levin Becker

Daniel Levin Becker is the youngest member of the Paris-based Oulipo collective. His essays, reviews, fiction, and translations have appeared in The Point, Monolith, The Believer, American Book Review, Formes Poétiques Contemporaines, The Wall Street Journal, The Quarterly Conversation, Drunken Boat, Berfrois, and others, and anthologized in Avery, Sudden Flash Youth, and the forthcoming second volume of The &Now Awards. His first book, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, was published in April 2012 by Harvard University Press. Kirkus called it "more palatable than expected."

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Ethel Rohan

Ethel Rohan is the author of the story collections Goodnight Nobody (forthcoming 2013) and Cut Through the Bone, the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook, Hard to Say. Her work has or will appear in World Literature Today, Tin House Online, The Irish Times, The Rumpus, Post Road Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review, among many others. She earned her MFA in fiction from Mills College, CA. Raised in Ireland, Ethel Rohan now lives in San Francisco where she is a member of the Writers Grotto.

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Janey Smith

Janey Smith is the writer of Animals (2011, Plain Wrap) and The Snow Poems (2012, NAP). She is fiction editor at Metazen. If you want to hang out, 415.202.4378.

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Olga Zilberbourg

Olga Zilberbourg was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. Her first two books of fiction were published in St. Petersburg, where her parents still reside. "Where Does the Sea Flow," a short film based on one of Olga’s stories, was recently selected as a finalist in the Manhattan Short Film Festival. Olga’s English-language writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, J Journal, Mad Hatters’ Review, Prick of the Spindle, HTMLGiant,
and other print and online publications. Olga is a senior associate editor at Narrative Magazine.

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Peg Alford Pursell

Peg Alford Pursell. Me. Who you already know all about, or can by going to the home page (click on my name).

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