San Francisco Pioneer Cemeteries - 10/31 at the Main Library

Lowell High School author visit

Doug Dorst talked with more than 600 Lowell High School students and then signed books for 100+! The school also created an awesome display.

Cabbages and Marble Orchards - 10/28 at SFPL

Holy Cross Cemetery Walking Tour Pix - 10/11/09

Doug Dorst, (a)live and in person in San Francisco!

Doug's hitting the streets of SF, and the graves of Colma, and talking about Alive in Necropolis this week. Here's where you can find him 10/9-10/14:

Black, White and Read: Litquake’s Book Ball
Litquake kicks off its 10-year anniversary with a ball loosely modeled on Truman Capote’s famous Black and White ball held in the late sixties. Attendees can expect to mingle with many authors, including Doug Dorst. For complete details and ticket information visit litquake.org
Friday, October 9 – 8 p.m.
Herbst Theater’s Green Room,
401 Van Ness Ave. at McAllister Street

Doug Dorst on West Coast Live: San Francisco’s Live Radio to the World
Saturday, October 10 – 10am-12pm
Freight and Salvage, 2020 Addison St. near Shattuck, in Berkeley

Author reading with Doug Dorst
Saturday, October 10 – 3 p.m.
Books Inc. Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Ave., (415) 776-1111

Doug Dorst reads at Writers with Drinks
$3-$5 sliding scale, All proceeds benefit local non-profits.
Saturday, October 10 - 7:30–9:30 p.m. (doors at 7 p.m.)
The Make-Out Room
3225 22nd. St., San Francisco CA

Notable Figures of San Francisco: Free Cemetery Walking Tour in Colma
Co-sponsored by the San Francisco History Association
Joining the tour, led by Monica Williams of Holy Cross Cemetery, will be Doug Dorst, author of San Francisco’s One City One Book 2009 selection Alive in Necropolis, a remarkable and original novel set primarily in Colma’s cemeteries. For more information visit SF History Association.
Sunday, October 11 – 11 a.m.
Holy Cross Cemetery - 1500 Mission Road, Colma

Spirits, Tarot & the Page …One City One Book One Bar
Help the San Francisco Public Library celebrate this year’s One City One Book pick. It’s only fitting that we’ll be celebrating this can’t-put-down supernatural thriller with custom “Necropolis” cocktails, free Tarot card readings, and a live reading from Dorst himself. The Page Bar inspired a bar on the pages of Alive in Necropolis – have you spotted it yet? Book sales by Green Apple Books.
Monday, October 12 – 6–8 p.m.
The Page, 298 Divisadero St. at Page Street, San Francisco; 21 and over

One City One Book and Litquake present: Doug Dorst in conversation with Adam Johnson
Join us for an insightful discussion between our One City One Book author and author/Stanford University lecturer Adam Johnson. foolsFURY Theater Company, under the direction of Ben Yalom, will open the evening with a staged reading of an excerpt from Alive in Necropolis. After the conversation, there will be lots of time for audience questions and Doug Dorst will sign books. Book sales by Book Bay.
Tuesday, October 13 – 6 p.m.
San Francisco Main Library, Koret Auditorium – 100 Larkin St.

About the Cover by Tomer Hanuka

I think books are, by design, meant to evoke visuals. When reading a book, images come to mind, and some images seem to communicate on a few levels at once, a bit like metaphors: They encompass the soul or spirit or the grand concept of the text as well as being a moment in the plot. In the reading process it is these exact moments that I aim to distill into a visual.

From there, I start with visual research that is as specific as I can get. In this case, with the cemeteries of Colma.

During the sketch stage, I explored two directions, both taking place in a cemetery at night. The first was of the protagonist, Michael Mercer, tucked right under the horizon line while aiming his flashlight towards the ground. The idea was that his whole attention and body language are directed downwards, into a world or a reality that exists "underground" (an intentional visual pun to conjure the buried dead, much like the ghost scene existing under the surface of the book's reality). And as a detective, Mercer's job is to dig up the unknown, the hidden, the buried.

The second sketch is of Mercer coming from the edge of the frame and illuminating the surroundings with a bright light at the center. But with Art Director Lisa Amoroso's guidance, a third option emerged that we thought was the most compelling and thus became the cover.

On the cover, Mercer is a dynamic element, yet compositionally his figure is mostly "under-ground"-the implication is that he is stuck in a mass of black soil and digging downwards, searching for answers (both professional and personal). I wanted to preserve something of the original concept while communicating both the drama of a detective thriller and suggesting its unlikely context.

--Tomer Hanuka, Alive in Necropolis cover illustrator

"Ask the Book Guy" Giveaway - 10/6 at 8am

What: 30 copies of Alive in Necropolis up for grabs

Where: Dynamo Donuts, 2760 24th St

When: Tuesday, October 6 starting at 8am, till the books are gone

How: Oscar Villalon, former SF Chronicle book editor and current publisher of McSweeney's will be outside of Dynamo with the books. Ask him a question about books and/or football and receive a thoughtful answer, a free book + a very informative and super-exciting program guide and bookmark.

Also: Dynamo will be selling the "Colma Copper" donut on 10/6, a custom blueberry cornmeal treat made especially for One City One Book.

Spooky! Send in your photos today!

The Curiosity Shoppe is asking you to send your very best, most "spooky-iest" picture to smartsandcrafts@gmail.com. They'll pick the one that gives us the biggest chills and that lucky person will get a free copy of the book, courtesy of the SF Public Library.

Deadline is today! Here are complete details.

San Francisco's "Dove Cove"

Last night a nice crowd in SFPL's Koret Auditorium enjoyed watching Trina Lopez's A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco's Lost Cemeteries , her documentary about "the hidden history of how this modern metropolis managed to systematically relocate nearly all of its burial grounds to make room for the living."

Trina got some terrific stories on tape from native San Franciscans with childhood memories of playing in the graveyards. One of the most compelling and charming characters in her documentary is Emmitt Watson, caretaker and unofficial historian of the SF Columbarium, now owned and operated by the Neptune Society.

Here is a "Finding My Religion" interview with Watson by David Ian Miller on sfgate from 2006, definitely worth a read. My favorite question/answer:

"Where do you want to go as your final resting place?

In a paint bucket inside the house. I got the idea from some of these families here. They put objects in their apartments, whatever their loved ones treasured. I want to be in a paint bucket because I'm a painter. That's what I do. Besides, my loved ones need the money. I don't need no $5,000 casket."

Here are a few links with information about the Columbarium, which is open to visitors Monday through Friday from 8:30AM to 5:00PM – Saturday and Sunday from 10:00AM to 3:00PM:

San Francisco Reader essay
Broke-ass Stuart on the Columbarium
SF Oddities: The Roman Columbarium: House of the Living Dead

Photos from the Colma Cemetery Bike Ride 9/27/09

Doug Dorst and Jenny Boylan on fiction, invention, and zombies

In late summer, 2009, Doug Dorst (ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS) and Jennifer Finney Boylan (SHE’S NOT THERE; I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU) shared this brief exchange about writing, invention, and the nature of zombie mutants:

Jenny Boylan: Doug, I loved your book. One of the things I found so engaging about it was the tension between the realism of the police/detective sections, on the one hand, and the more invented and imagined sensibilities of the zombies. Did you have a hard time balancing the two?

Doug Dorst: Balancing the two storylines (living folks dead folks) was by far the most difficult part of writing the novel. In the first draft (which was about 900 pages), the dead people ran away with the story, largely because I was having such a good time inhabiting their world. I had developed a Root-based economy for them, along with some pruno-bootlegging wars, and… well, it’d take me about 900 pages to describe it. I’ll just say that it was a bit of a mess.

In the second draft, I cut the dead folks back to the point that they were no more than grace notes in the narrative–which pretty much stripped them of any purpose for being in the book at all. My editor helped me find more of a balance in the third draft, but I was still trying to fine-tune it until the last minute.

Jenny Boylan: I wonder, sometimes, if there is less of a difference between the laws of writing “horror” fiction, as a genre, and writing “realism,” than readers–and writers–think. Did you feel like you were encountering a whole different set of rules, in terms of what your reader might be willing to believe, when you switched from zombies to cops? Or did you find that your cops and your zombies both were constructed from the same writers’ toolkit? (I’ll note, as an aside, something my friend Richard Russo once said to me; I’d been working on an allegedly comic scene in which some guy winds up wearing pants made out of ice cream (don’t ask), and he just shook his head and said, “See, the sad thing is, given the way your mind works, Boylan, you think this is realism.) Anyway: cops? zombies? Same approach to both for you as a writer? Which one was harder to make real?

Doug Dorst: Wait– ice cream pants aren’t real? I begged my parents for them when I was in middle school. I suppose it’s for the best that they said no.

Anyway: Same toolkit, different tools, I think–say, socket wrench vs. crescent wrench. I mean, character is character, regardless of genre, don’t you think? Either that person-on-the-page’s experience feels emotionally true in some way–even if it’s not perfectly grounded in everyday realism–or it doesn’t.

The living characters were more challenging because they had to experience a range of emotions truthfully. The dead were drawn a bit more simply– my intent was for them still to be motivated by the sorts of things that motivate the rest of us, but in an amplified or distorted way. (You’ve got Phineas Gage, for example, with his monomaniacal need to possess this object that he needs in order to feel whole.) If the underlying emotions feel somehow recognizable, then I think you have a lot of latitude to play around with the sort of world the character is operating in. (And “play” is the right word there… one of the reasons I wanted to work in the world of Colma’s dead was that I thought it’d be fun–a big ol’ sandbox where I had thousands of cool toys and got to make all the rules, too.)

As for what readers might be willing to believe: I didn’t overthink it, and it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. I was aware that I was writing a strange little (well, sprawling) book that straddled genres and made use of both the everyday and the fantastic. At some point, after a great deal of worrying, I figured that there was no way for me to predict how readers (who no doubt would have different tastes or sets of expectations) were going to respond and that I should just follow the characters wherever they took me. In retrospect, that was the best decision I could’ve made, although I didn’t fully understand why at the time.

So, yeah: character. I think it’s what makes realist fiction work, and I think it’s what makes the very best genre fiction work–e.g., The Shining (Stephen King’s book, I mean. The film is terrifying, but for different reasons.). I figure it’s what makes all the stuff in between work, too. In short: whether our person-on-the-page’s trousers are made of denim or Rocky Road (ouch), what matters is that we believe in his experience of wearing them.

I would love to see that ice cream pants scene, by the way. Any chance I can convince you to share it?

Jenny Boylan: Doug, as you well know, some drafts are better left unshared. Although I can tell you that the key line I kept straining to get at in that story was this: One person has forced our hero to wear the pants made out of ice cream–which, if I recall right, were one leg vanilla, one leg chocolate, and the crotch strawberry–making these “Neapolitan” pants– and then says, sadistically, “So! How do you LIKE wearing these pants made our of ice cream NOW?” And our hero says– and this is the single phrase I was reaching for– and I quote, “They’re cold!”

To change the subject a little, I’m curious about the way you leave some questions unanswered in ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS–and other questions are answered, but only slowly. Was this part of a conscious plan, following Dickens’ motto of, “Make’em laugh, make’em cry, make’em wait?” Or was the difference between your 900 page first draft and your much-shorter final draft the difference between answering all questions, and leaving some open? Do I smell a sequel?

Doug Dorst: I don’t think that it was a strategic decision to “make ‘em wait”. It was more that I was having a lot of fun working on a large canvas, and I made my peace early on with the fact that the novel was going to be a little shaggy and sprawly. I think one certainly could do a much shorter, tighter, and more action-focused cut of the book — and who knows, maybe that’d be a better book –but it wouldn’t have been the book I wanted to write. Or, more precisely, it wouldn’t have been the one I wanted as much to write at the time I was writing it.

As for the unanswered questions: some were definitely a result of my having to cut the manuscript in half. Some things I chose to scale back, and some things I chose to cut out. (There are also a couple of things that I chose to cut, but I screwed up and didn’t cut them out completely– so, yeah, there are a couple of sore thumbs in there that make me cringe a little. Live and learn.)

Another big struggle for me was the ending. When I finished the third draft, I realized with some horror that the book went on for over a hundred pages after the climax of the action because I had so many ends to tie up. I decided that I couldn’t subject the reader to a hundred pages of denouement and that I’d have to make some sacrifices in order to bring the proceedings to a close more quickly. In retrospect, did I make all of the best choices? Probably not. But again, all you can do is make your peace with the idea that the book is what it is, move on to the next project, and try to turn your regrets into learning experiences.

How about you– any tales of post-publication regret? And if so, how did you deal with it?

Jenny Boylan: I think there are different kinds of post-publication regret. There’s the little kind, where you find something you missed– a copy-editing mistake, or a vestigial trace of an earlier draft you forgot to sand down; those make me sad, but not for long. Then there’s the other kind, where you look at a whole book you’ve published, and say, kind of resentfully, “Oh jeez. What’d you all go and let me do that for?” There’s at least one book of mine I’m still wondering, What was I thinking? Fortunately, nearly fifteen years later, it’s out of print, so the damage at this hour is somewhat contained.

On the other hand, as someone who’s been well published over the years, I have to say that post-publication regret is a luxury. It’s no-publication regret that breaks my heart. I remember what it was like to keep getting those rejection slips. Anybody who survives long enough to publish a book–even one riddled with mistakes, as mine always are– should still be grateful. Period.

I like your comments about “writing past the ending.” I have heard both Stephen King and Richard Russo talk about this. It’s funny, we always think of ourselves as writers struggling to come up with the satisfying ending– but we think less about the not-uncommon affliction of writing right past that ending and coming up with chapters and chapters more stuff. I think this is why they have closing times in pubs, in Ireland, anyhow. There are a number of projects I’ve found myself at the 700 page mark where I wish someone would ring the bell and say, “Hurry up please, it’s time.”

I’m actually at about the 650 page mark on my own next project– is this where I get to plug it? This is a young adult series, commencing with volume one, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR, which is a book about monsters. The quick pitch: when kids in a certain town reach thirteen, they start turning into monsters: Banshees, vampires, mummies, the works. So they get sent to a “school” where they’re taught how to disguise themselves, how to pretend to be humans, in order to survive. So the question becomes: What’s the right thing: to pretend to be something you’re not, in order to live? Or to embrace your “true self”, even if your true self is, say, a zombie.

Which I hope will be a gas for young people to read– I wrote FALCON QUINN with and for my middle-school age boys–but you don’t have to squint real hard to see that these books are sort of about some of the same issues I’ve been writing about for the last seven years, only in a more oblique and playful way. It’s very freeing, writing about zombies. I should have done it years ago.

I guess this is a good place to leave things, unless you want another chance to dodge the question about a sequel to ALIVE. What next for Doug Dorst, besides faculty meetings and syllabi? A novel about bugs and spiders, maybe? Tell you what, next time YOU have the sex change, and I’ll write about SF cops and–as Groucho Marx once noted, “outside of the improvement, you’ll never notice the difference.”

Doug Dorst: Whoops— didn’t mean to dodge the sequel question. I suppose the ending of Necropolis might work well as a bridge to a second book, but that wasn’t my intent, and I don’t currently have plans to write a sequel. Every now and then, though, I do find myself wondering what the next chapter in Mike Mercer’s life might be like. So who knows? If the right “Mercer 2.0” story finds me, I’ll write it. For now, though, there are other projects I’m excited to be working on. One of these is the short-story collection (The Surf Guru) that’s coming out next year, which I’m putting the finishing touches on as we speak.

As for the next novel: will there be dead people in it? There aren’t yet, but, again, who knows? (I’m a big fan of William Kennedy’s work, and dead folks slip into his novels all the time.) I agree that it’s freeing to write dead characters—I wonder if it’s because you somehow have more license to super-size their desires and their quirks. Or maybe it’s just fun to refuse to play by the rules of everyday reality. Whatever the reason, when I was writing Necropolis, it was usually the dead-person storyline that would get me excited about writing again after a dry spell. And believe me, there were some dry spells.

The next novel will definitely have its share of horrible, crawly bugs and spiders and other critters. Some of it takes place in Central America, and if there’s one thing that moving to Texas has taught me, it’s that the farther south you go, the scarier the insects are. I hadn’t planned on any of the characters (or the author) having a sex change, although I now think you’ve just given me a way to liven up the third act.

Falcon Quinn sounds like a blast—and a great way of approaching what I think is the most fundamental question a person can face: how to harmonize who you are with who you present yourself to be. (And middle school is right about the time that it gets excruciatingly difficult.) In a way, that’s the very issue that Mercer and Jude struggle with throughout Necropolis. Anyway: I’ve got a place on my bookshelf reserved for Mr. Falcon Quinn, and I look forward to meeting him on the page.

As a final thought, I just want to echo my agreement with something that you put quite well: post-publishing regrets are a luxury. Writing is a hard gig, especially in this economy, and I know a lot of incredibly talented writers who are having trouble getting their work out. I’ve caught more than my share of breaks, especially lately. Case in point, One City One Book—in which I get to have my book widely read in the city I love most, and through which I’m getting the chance to talk to a lot of amazing, talented, and inspiring people about words and stories and writing. Case in point, Jenny Boylan.

Jenny Boylan: Well, case in point, your own damn self. Thanks for this exchange, Doug, and I do hope I get to see some of your Texas bugs some day. Although, just out of home-state pride, allow me note that while Maine blackflies might be small, they do get the job done. Congratulations on a fine book, and good luck with the next one! J.

Van Ness/Turk

“City of Souls” - Colma Cemetery Bike Ride - Sunday, September 23

Click for full size.
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Also Known As: Locations in Alive in Necropolis

Doug Dorst has provided handy notes to help you place some of the spots whose names have been changed in the book...to protect the innocent. *Spoiler Alert - You may want to finish the book before you read these!*

Fern Grotto is in Cypress Lawn Cemetery, on the east side. Go in the main entrance (under the archway, where Featherstone was found), head up the hill to your right, and you’ll see it on your right after a couple hundred yards or so.

The Death’s Door Tavern is loosely based on the Globe Tavern, 379 Mission St. in Daly City.

The Hard Ten is based on The Page (formerly Chances, and before that, another name that I’ve since forgotten). 298 Divisadero (@ Page). (ed. note - did you know we're having One City One Book One Bar at The Page on 10/12/09? More info if you scroll down here.)

Mia’s apartment is on Grove Street, near Broderick. I used to live on Baker between Grove and Fulton, and I’d walk down Grove with my dog twice a day (en route to Alamo Square Park).

The DiMaio house is at a nonexistent address on Buena Vista Park Ave. West. Interesting thing about Buena Vista Park itself - if you look closely at the stones that line the walking paths, you can find some with letters and numbers. These are pieces of old tombstones that were “repurposed” after the cemeteries were taken out. I’m told that old stones were also used in the retaining wall at Fort Point.

Neptune, where Mercer’s gang gathers, is loosely based on Mars (798 Brannan @ 7th St.). The SF Writers’ Grotto folks used to gather here for a weekly happy hour. This was back when I was working as a lawyer, and I really enjoyed having this social connection to other writers in town.

The Tonga Room, where Toronto proposes to Mia, is at 950 Mason (bottom floor of Fairmont Hotel).

The San Francisco Zen Center, where Toronto has a moment of grace, is at 300 Page (@ Laguna).

Don't These Just Make You Want to Pull Over and Look Closer?

Tombstone Display Pix - SFPL History Center 6th Floors

One City One Book in Pictures

Two videos for your viewing pleasure!

Both were created as public service announcements which will run on KPIX CBS5 this fall. The One City One Book PSA was created by Jacob Kornbluth.

Attention Coffee Drinkers!

Order Sumatra Gayo/Supreme Necropolis from Blue Bottle Coffee, San Francisco's best coffee!

In 2008, Doug Dorst added another layer to the already-rich canon of San Francisco-area detective fiction with Alive in Necropolis. This year’s selection for One City One Book, “Alive,” is less about the formulaic search for who did it, and more about the ones doing it, and the ghosts watching. Yes, ghosts.

But what does it have to do with Sumatra? Sumatra, as a coffee origin, is like the proverbial detective novel. Many people drink it because they associate it with certain known qualities: “Rich” and “bold,” as if the coffee was a dashing oil magnate tooling around town in his new convertible. To be fair, the Gayo Supreme is big-bodied and blunt-nosed. But just as Chandler really wrote about why people would kill more than the fact that they did, this particular Sumatran coffee is really more about nuance. Raisins, port, and the sweet earthiness of the candy cap mushroom all ooze out of this coffee. For the full experience, we urge you to try it with the blueberry cornmeal donut that Dynamo Donuts is baking for One City One Book. $1 from every pound sold will be donated to the One City One Book program, so drink up!

Sumatra FTO Gayo Supreme
Location: Takengon, Aceh Tengah, Indonesia
Altitude: 1300-1900 meters
Varietal: 80% Hybrido da Timor, 20% Typica
Processing Method: Wet-Hulled Process/ Semi-Washed
Certifications: FairTrade, Organic
*Cooperative: Koperasi Baitul Giradh Baburrayyan
*Number of growers:6,700 farmer members

Order some right now!

2 Questions for Doug Dorst

What is your favorite story of death in San Francisco? Warren Harding? Al Jolson? Emperor Norton?

Well, I'd hate to call any death my favorite. The death that grabbed me most, though, was that of Lincoln Beachey, whose plane crashed into the bay during an airshow in front of a quarter of a million people at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Expo. The drama of his death aside, though, Beachey was a remarkable guy, one who lived life to the fullest and entirely on his own terms, and the more I read about him, the more fascinating I found him. There's an excellent biography by Frank Marrero called Lincoln Beachey: The Man Who Owned the Sky, which I recommend to anyone who's interested in finding out more about him.

Which story line came to you first: the one about the ghosts and their world in Colma, or the story of your protagonist's maturation into an adult, amid the allure of San Francisco and the grittiness of cop life. Or did you see them as one piece from the beginning?

The original idea came from a newspaper story that I read while living in Iowa about a kid who'd been duct-taped to a tree in a cemetery on a cold night. He'd been found by a guy who was out walking his dog, and he'd survived. I knew I wanted to work with this somehow, with the rescuer as the main character, and I assumed it would be a short story. It didn't go anywhere, though, and I put it away for a year or two. When I was back living in San Francisco, I picked up the idea again and realized that the rescuer ought to be a cop--in part because I had a friend who'd become a cop, and I was really curious about how that had changed his life. It was only a day or two later that the Chronicle ran a feature piece on Colma (which I hadn't known much about). I knew immediately that I had my setting. Once I decided that, I figured it'd be a shame not to invite some of these dead folks into the narrative. The two storylines evolved in parallel from there.

(For a recent, great story about Colma, check out this article on SFgate about the late famous of Bay Area.)

KQED's The Writer's Block

Doug Dorst spent some quality time in an Austin recording studio recording a passage from Alive in Necropolis for KQED's The Writers' Block. Enjoy!

The Writers' Block is a weekly reading series featuring stories, essays and poetry by all kinds of writers -- from accomplished beginners to established authors.