S.F. writers’ Grotto enters new chapter
Expansion, digital plans mark group’s 20th year
“It’s like a gym, where being around other people motivates you.” Joy Parisi, Paragraph co-founder
When Rachel Levin left her job at Sunset magazine to freelance, she tried writing at home. “I couldn’t get any work done,” she said. Squatting in cafes, where she struggled with the noise and fretted about leaving her laptop unattended when she went to the restroom, was no better.
So Levin did what scores of journalists, novelists, memoirists, screenwriters, playwrights, filmmakers, radio producers and poets have done over the past two decades in San Francisco. She rented office space at the Grotto, a shared work complex that offers the monk-like quiet and privacy that writers need and the mutually reinforcing sense of community they crave.
It’s a paradox members extol with vivid personal testimony about the help they’ve found with everything from pitching a story to fixing a sentence and the almost ineffable sense of support and courage they derive from being near other people trying to do the very hard thing they are trying to do
Journalist and author Todd Oppenheimer recalled a time when he was trying to expand a magazine article into a book and found himself “paralyzed” by the piles of notebooks he had amassed in his research. Roaming away from his desk, he bumped into Grotto cofounder Po Bronson and spilled out his writer’s block dilemma.
‘Ignore the boring’
“It’s easy,” Bronson told him. “You just ignore the boring stuff, take all the interesting stuff and explode it out.” Oppenheimer’s work flowed after that. His book, “The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology,” was a hit.
Laura Fraser said her memoir, “An Italian Affair,” never would have happened if another Grotto co-founder, Ethan Watters, hadn’t read some online pieces she’d written for Salon and suggested the book idea. David Ewing Duncan joined the Grotto in 2000 after moving from Baltimore. “I was new to the city, recently divorced and feeling very isolated,” he said. Several years later, Duncan was an enthusiastic participant in the Grotto Nights series at the San Francisco Public Library, the packed readings-cum-parties that were emblematic of a new energy in the city’s literary life.
Levin had heard about “these cool older writers” at the Grotto and thought it was a place where serious work got done. Now, having published her first piece in the New Yorker and busy with many other projects, Levin is both producing and surrounded by serious writing all the time. “I could spiral inward without this,” she said. “Just being here motivates you to do your own best work.”
Now in its fourth location, a snug maze of 32 offices threaded around a lunchroom, communal kitchen and classroom space on Second Street near South Park, the Grotto is taking steps to remain creatively vital and fiscally viable as it marks its 20th anniversary. (A celebration is in the works for March.) Newly constituted as a four-man limited liability corporation, the “institution that has never had much organization,” as Watters put it, is behaving more and more like a grown-up that intends to ensure its own future.
Rising rents
Membership has now grown to about 100, with more writers sharing offices and thus increasing overall revenues. Some office rents are rising in January, and everyone will now pay an annual fee to help cope with a building rent increase. Public classes, held at night and on the weekends, contribute 8 percent of the $200,000 annual budget. “Enterprise members,” like the online magazine Collectors Weekly, pay a higher office rate than individual writers but still below market value in the tech-driven South Park office-space boom.
Having already helped incubate the Rumpus, an online site that covers everything from art to comics to sex, the Grotto constituents would like to do more things digital. Fraser’s female-author Shebooks — a curated collection of short e-books — is one example. Duncan’s health-and-bioscience-based Arc, which borrows something of the TED Talks model of public events as conversation and publication starters, is another.
Hanging out in Watters’ invitingly disheveled office, its occupant and Bronson sounded both proud and slightly bemused by the growth of something that began, in 1994, as an improvisation. Along with fiction writer Ethan Canin (now a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), the two friends rented a flat in a Market Street Victorian. The name was “stolen,” said Bronson, from a writer friend of his who rented a cramped room, labeled the Grotto, in Bronson’s home garage near Ocean Beach.
In his informal Grotto history, Bronson acknowledges some of the skepticism people had of what they imagined was “the boys with the tree-house fort, a place to get drunk at 2 in the afternoon and screw women and never grow up.” But work got done. Midday drinking was rare. Books and prominent magazine articles appeared. Aced out of the first space by a group of lawyers who could afford a rent increase, the writers found a second home and invited more people to join, only to be out on the street again a few years later during the dot-com boom. An abandoned pet facility near City Hall saved the day.
The Dog & Cat Hospital is the setting for some of the more cherished episodes in Grotto lore, even if the principals can’t always agree on the particulars. Watters and Bronson remember the bird that crashed through Oppenheimer’s skylight as a duck. Oppenheimer thinks it might have been a seagull. And then there was the fire, Watters remembered.
Unreliable narrators
“What fire?” asked Bronson, setting off a meandering discussion of oven pilot lights, a leak and basketball games on the Dog & Cat deck. It could have been a textbook illustration of unreliable narrators, something to be discussed in the Grotto lunchroom or a hallway.
The Grotto moved to its current location nine years ago. What Fraser remembers as a “boys’ club” when she joined in 1996 is now a very different place. Women outnumber men by 2 to 1. Asked why that might be, Fraser proposed that “there may just be more women interested in finding support and community. A lot of guys think they can go it alone.”
At one recent lunch, 15 women and three men gathered around a large table, over sandwiches and microwaved leftovers, to hear guest speaker Oscar Villalon, managing editor of the San Francisco literary journal Zyzzyva. People wandered in and out as the discussion meandered away from slush-pile submissions to the challenge of creating “buzz” for a book. The collective energy picked up. Almost everyone had something to ask or say about the battle to get marketplace attention for their work.
Grotto members insist that the atmosphere is supportive rather than competitive. Grace Rubinstein credits the place for helping her recapture “the creative, personal style of writing I got away from in graduate school.” Janis Cooke Newman found a new agent from a Grotto crony and confers with others about pay rates. “I’m not saying it never happens,” she added, “but it’s surprising how little professional jealousy there is.”
According to Watters and Bronson, only one Grotto writer has ever been asked to leave. Fraser remembered her as “this very snarly person” who bragged one day about writing for the New York Times. “I looked around the room,” Fraser said, “and realized a third of the people there had written for the Times.”
There’s one point of geographic-specific pride that gets repeated around the Grotto. In San Francisco, the line goes, writers read each other’s books. In New York, they read each other’s reviews.
“We probably are a little more snarky in New York,” allowed Joy Parisi, co-founder of the shared writing space Paragraph in Lower Manhattan. “But not here. People come here to work. It’s like a gym, where being around other people motivates you.”
Open space
Both Paragraph and the Writers Room, a space that opened in New York 18 years before the Grotto got going, have open-space plans rather than closed-door offices. Members — the Writers Room has 300-400 during the course of a year — claim desks on a firstcome, first-served basis. There are no phone calls and therefore no working journalists, as there are at the Grotto — where some writers occasionally wear noise-canceling headphones to drown out voices in nearby offices. “We have what I like to call sanctuary,” said Writers Room Executive Director Donna Brodie.
Quiet prevails, too, at the Writers Junction in Santa Monica, a haven for aspiring screenwriters. Member Jay Elias compared the place to a college library, complete with long tables, comfortable chairs and couches, and a completely silent “deadline room.”
The Grotto has spawned its own spinoffs and imitators in the Bay Area. One of them, the Sanchez Annex, recently moved into a Castro Street space not far from the Grotto’s original home. “We were very much inspired by the Grotto,” said the Annex’s Scott James. “Without them, I don’t think we would have done this. They’ve had a tremendous impact on San Francisco — maybe more than even they realize.”