From Bar to Book by Ailene Sancur

Lifelong Press Turns Literary Readings into Published Work Photos: Victoria Hudson (McNally's), Angela Srivani (B&W).
Valyntina Grenier is no stranger to poetry: by her undergrad senior year, she had already put together two chapbooks. She is finishing her second year as an M.F.A. poetry student at St. Mary’s College of California. She is also no stranger to bars: she works as a bartender at Lanesplitter (http://www.lanesplitterpizza.com/) in Oakland. And it was her friendship with two other East Bay bartenders on which she built her multi-genre reading series Back Room Live. Most people go to bars to have mindless fun, to relax, get wasted; Valyntina used them to as a vehicle for “…a polyphony of voices, united by the desire to make art, enjoy language, and drink a pint or two.”
First, Sheila from the wonderful dive Hotsy Totsy Club in Albany let Valyntina read the poetry from her first chapbook. (Incidentally, the Hotsy Totsy, not in a particularly trendy, or safe, East Bay neighborhood where the only competition comes in the form of the Club Mallard or the Ivy, wins the dive bar competition against San Francisco any day.) The readings went well; surprisingly well-received by the bar crowd. After those experiences, she toyed with the idea of doing another reading series at a bar. After befriending Tony, the bartender at McNally’s Irish Pub on College in Oakland, she asked if she could do a reading series there. He agreed, and after a few months it became a regular event: the last Saturday night of each month.
Valyntina, now in her M.F.A. program, decided to bring together others from the program—students and faculty—as well as other Bay Area poets and authors. Literary readings have long been thought of as the property of dim bookstores, mousy clerks shakily whispering introductions to authors, bad wine, and an intellectual elitist. With the Back Room Live series, Valyntina wanted to get away from that. She says, “My initial impetus was the sense that if you’re not in academia, and even sometimes if you are, you can feel left out of literary events. So I thought by bringing it to the bar, people would be engaged in it. Really just to broaden the community, get different genres of writers together and people together who wouldn’t necessarily go to hear writers…”
The reading series became so popular Valyntina decided to publish a Back Room Live Reading Series magazine, the first Volume and Issue being sold at the reading Saturday March 29 as well as online, at Diesel Books, Book Zoo and Pegasus. The magazine is published through Valyntina’s other venture: Life-long Press Publishing.
She began Life Long Press when publishing her first two chapbooks. The name comes from her hope to (obviously) have a long happy life, and the Long Life Veggie House, a Chinese restaurant next to Krishna Copy--where she does her printing and copying work --on University Ave. in Berkeley. Now, in a business savvy not usually associated with poets, she has a bank account, a tax I.D. number, and collects donations. In the do-it-yourself savvy commonly associated with broke-ass poets, she had help: volunteers Trevor Calvert (with an M.F.A. of his own from Mills College), Eleanor Johnson (working on her doctorate at U.C. Berkeley) and Challen Clarke and Zach Demby, a couple both working on their M.F.A.’s at St. Mary’s College with Valyntina.
It is Zach Demby, another poet who perhaps puts the goal of Back Room Live best—or most lyrically--in his Editors’ Note:
“Like radio hymns and cactus land brushings" (Larson p40)
“Back Room Live requires a fisheye lens. The humble and normatively curved lenses often used to capture the particular will be useless here. Sure, tangents could be taken, dualities could be observed (hey, it’s not front room live...) but when it comes down to it, BRL is more about bringing people together than finding differences between them. It is a mosaic, a community of language.”
This Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 7 p.m. is the next BACK ROOM LIVE at Mc Nally’s Pub in Oakland.
Friday, April 25, 2008 at 7 p.m at Book Zoo. It will be a Celebration Reading of Back Room Live Magazine 2008, with the contributors reading. Copies will be available for $8. Reading: BLAKE ELLINGTON LARSON creates photographs, writes music and poetry. His most recent chapbook /Live-In Dreams/ has been eaten by the troll that is modern technology. He has since written more poems. He has recently quit smoking and resides in Oakland, CA. CHALLEN CLARKE is named after a distant relative with a clubfoot who disappeared one day. So she limps and writes. SARA GARRIGAN is a student at the University of California at Berkeley working towards a degree in English. She is currently on the editorial staff of the Berkeley Poetry Review. After college, she looks forward to living in a box while discovering what exactly one can do with a B.A. in English. She enjoys reading everything that comes to hand, unobtrusively correcting grammatical errors, and compressing herself into brief biographical paragraphs. ZACH DEMBY has managed to keep all ten of his fingers, and most of his toes. His mother is very proud. TREVOR CALVERT lives in Oakland, has studied poetry at Mills, and is currently studying to be a librarian. Some of his writing can be found in /Bay Poetics/, VeRT www.litvert.com and /Loop 5/. He studies and teaches Japanese martial arts, is interested in puppets, and loves comic books. ELEANOR JOHNSON is an archive-spelunker and renegade medievalst, resident of Oakland, native of New York.
Friday April 25th 7pm
Book Zoo
6395 Telegraph Ave.
Oakland 94609