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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
If you’re a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org.
Welcome to Voices from the Hill, celebrating the vibrant literary voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Jennifer Barone, along with Joseph Carbone, owner of Telegraph Hill Books. Each episode, we sit down with a local author to explore their creative process, inspirations, and the unique stories that shape our community. Today, I'm joined by a novelist and teacher, Janis Cooke Newman, a deeply respected voice in the Bay Area literary community. Janis is the author of Mary, a luminous reimagining of Mary Todd Lincoln's life, a master plan for rescue, a novel that explores identity, memory, and the stories we inherit, and memoir, the Russian word for snow about adopting her son from Russia.
Jennifer Barone:Beyond her own writing, Janis is a longtime instructor at Page Street Writers, where she has guided countless writers finding their voice and bringing their stories into the world. Her work lives at the intersection of history, imagination, emotional truth, and her teaching reflects a deep commitment to craft, community, and connection. In this conversation, conversation, we'll explore the creative life here in San Francisco, what it means to build literary community, and how writers can find both solitude and belonging in their work. So let's dive in. Janis Cooke Newman, welcome to Voices from the Hill.
Janis Cooke Newman:Oh, thank you so much for having me. Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:I'm so excited to have you here. So I'd love for you to kick us off by, like, starting a little bit about your personal writing journey. What inspires you? You know, how you became also a teacher as well as a mentor.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. I feel like I'm a little late to writing. I always wanted to be a writer, but I took detours into tech. And for many years, fifteen, I wrote corporate comedy here in San Francisco.
Janis Cooke Newman:Did you perform corporate? No. Thank goodness I did not. But my ex husband did. Oh, wow.
Janis Cooke Newman:We started a company where, like, let's say, Apple wants to take their sales team to Hawaii, but they want entertainment. We would find out all about them and what made them crazy and what they liked and what they didn't like. And we would write it was kind of like a Saturday night live format show with sketches and song parodies, but all the jokes were about them. Wow. Yeah.
Janis Cooke Newman:But, I mean, I think I learned so much as now a novelist from that time because I learned about writing for an audience. You know, you write a joke and it dies. You can really see it. So I think that it made me more aware of my reader as I went forward.
Jennifer Barone:I was gonna say that writing comedy is incredibly hard.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yes. That's why there were three of us because I have a theory that everybody only has fifteen funny minutes every hour. So it was like I guess it probably was like a foreshadowing of the writers rooms for TV now because we would be locked in a room writing these shows.
Jennifer Barone:Have you ever written for TV?
Janis Cooke Newman:I have not.
Jennifer Barone:Oh. Is that like something
Janis Cooke Newman:that you might wanna do with that experience? Yeah. Mean, I certainly watch enough of it. So I I could see moving into that for sure. But then during that time, I adopted my son from Moscow.
Janis Cooke Newman:And I wanted to write a book. I wanted to write the book that I couldn't find when I was in the process of adopting. Because the only books that were out there were about how to do it or I don't know. This was the greatest moment of my life, but it really is. It's a lot of ups and downs.
Janis Cooke Newman:So I started to write that book. I kind of taught myself, and I was very lucky because memoirs were hot. And Russian adoption was like, 5,000 kids a year were coming from Russia to here. So I was able to sell that book and kick off my career.
Jennifer Barone:Wow. That that it's so interesting, I think, to go from comedy corporate comedy writing to something with so much gravitas and also something, like, so personal. How did you navigate that journey?
Janis Cooke Newman:It was it was hard. At first, I thought it was gonna be the memoir would be all these funny weird things that happened to us in Russia. And then I realized that's not really what people wanted. I had wonderful writing groups and instructors, and they kept pushing me to write about all the stuff I didn't wanna write about. Like, why did I wait so long to have kids?
Janis Cooke Newman:And why was it my mother dying from breast cancer made me want to have kids? And so I was forced to get into that. I'm really grateful to them for sort of moving me in that, and I think that's the key to memoir. You have to write about the stuff you don't wanna write about. You have
Jennifer Barone:to take risks.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. For sure. I mean, it's not just I'm gonna go tell a bunch of funny stories.
Jennifer Barone:Right. Well, it sounded like your personal writing journey started with community too. Like, where did you go to get that kind of that
Janis Cooke Newman:into what is now called Community of Writers, which is a terrific writers conference every year that they hold. And at the time I got in, they did not have a nonfiction or memoir track. It was only fiction. But that turned out to be really good for me because because I did not realize till I got in that you were supposed to write your memoir like a novel. It's supposed to be scenes and, you know, it should move along with a narrative through line.
Janis Cooke Newman:So that was incredibly helpful. And then in my time there, I met a couple of writers, one of whom I just saw yesterday because we are still friends, and we formed our own writing group. And two of us out of the out of, like, four people published books within, like, two years of doing that group, and I feel like they really, really helped me.
Jennifer Barone:Do you think that, like, writing having the support of, like, other writers around you sort of, like, propels you, gives you momentum, gives you connections? What is it about, like, writing with other writers that, like, propels you forward?
Janis Cooke Newman:Well, first of all, they remind you that you're not insane, that other people would do this. Because, really, for the most part, the other people in your life don't get it. They don't get what the writer's life is like. So I think that's one of the biggest things we get. But there is always like, you can talk through these things.
Janis Cooke Newman:Like, I'm stuck here or this. And sometimes just saying it out loud helps you. Sometimes they do. You know, we exchange work. I always have certain people I exchange work with, which is really helpful.
Janis Cooke Newman:It's you know, writing is very solitary, but it's hard to produce something, I think, in a vacuum. So you need that feedback all the time and that encouragement you get from other people. Do you think that writing memoir has become more popular? And I've also noticed that memoir
Jennifer Barone:is now sometimes called, like, fictional memoir. Like, you just mentioned that you were supposed to write your memoir like a novel. Right. There it seems like that genre is evolving, and there's different terminology. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. Mean, I I think one of the most interesting books about that is the new Gischen Bad Bad Girl because she builds it as a novel and she kind of has to because her mother who is dead as a character and talks to her. But it is really a way for her to talk about her difficult relationship with her mother and why did her mother end up like this. And I think that is probably right now evolution of what you're talking about, this combo memoir. Yes.
Janis Cooke Newman:It is very popular to write. It has, I have noticed, gotten increasingly more difficult to publish. And so most memoirs I know go to smaller presses. There is a fairly new imprint in the Bay Area called Sibylene Press that focuses on publishing women 50. Oh.
Janis Cooke Newman:And I know a lot of women who have gotten their memoirs published through them.
Jennifer Barone:What else do they publish? Is it mainly memoir?
Janis Cooke Newman:No. They will do fiction. They will do fiction. They do historical fiction, regular fiction. They're very interesting.
Janis Cooke Newman:They are not quite a hybrid publisher. Writers come in and pay a certain amount for marketing, but they take care of everything else. And they have editors, and you also can't just call them and say, I want you to publish me. You have to you know, there's gatekeepers there. For sure.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. So it's it's an interesting model, and I'm hoping we'll see more of those models in publishing as time goes on because it has gotten increasingly difficult to publish with the big five. What do
Jennifer Barone:you see is, like, the next genre of writing coming out? Because I feel like there's more people getting into fantasy fiction, for instance, fictional memoir and, like, these hybrid sort of genres. But what do you think is, like, hot next top of mind that you see in your community?
Janis Cooke Newman:Well, I'm thinking about when I interview people for Page Street, I have them talking about what they're working on. And there are a lot of people, particularly younger people, working on some form or another of speculative fiction. Mhmm. It may be climate related, like you know, since you recently did an event with that. Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:There is a lot of dystopian future stuff. But sometimes it's also a lot of robots, AI. Mhmm. We're in the Bay Area. So this is what you know, we kind of live in the future here.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yes. So people are kind of writing to that. So I think I see a lot more loosening up of that. Mhmm. And the speculative fiction genre really encompassing a lot of things.
Jennifer Barone:Do you feel, like, inspired to write on the in that genre? Or what do you think might be next for you?
Janis Cooke Newman:That's interesting. When I finished the book I'm currently working on, which is my first contemporary novel, I am actually thinking about writing a mystery. I have never read mysteries before, I just started to explore them. And I see why people like them because you can be pretty much guaranteed everything's gonna get tied up at the end, and they're usually very plot driven. And I want to write about what it's like to be a middle aged woman in a place like San Francisco, something I finally know something about.
Janis Cooke Newman:And I I was thinking that a mystery might be a good framework for something like that. So that's what I'm toying. I have not thought about doing speculative fiction, but
Jennifer Barone:who knows? You never know. It sounds like you're branching off into all different new ways of writing to challenge yourself, I assume.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. I don't ever wanna write the same book twice. Mhmm. After I I published the novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, there was a lot of pressure to pick another president's wife, and, you know, your fans of that book will read this book. But I didn't wanna do that again.
Jennifer Barone:Do you feel like writers get pigeonholed really quickly when they have success with something?
Janis Cooke Newman:I think so. I think, you know, but that's any profession, you know. And, you know, I think it's also it's it probably feels really good to stick with what you know. But the Mary Lincoln book, okay, for the record is like 650 pages long. I was by the end of that, I was kind of done with President's Wives, and I wanted to go someplace else.
Jennifer Barone:What made you wanna write about her?
Janis Cooke Newman:Oh, yes. That so my son was about nine at the time, and I had taken him to Washington DC, and he was obsessed with John Wilkes Booth. I did because John Wilkes Booth had a knife and a gun, and it was an exciting American history story. So I took him to Ford's Theater, and they they talk about it, then they take you across the street to where the boarding house where Lincoln died. And the ranger was talking about it, and he said, yeah.
Janis Cooke Newman:And Mary Lincoln was by his bedside, and the secretary of war came out, and he said, get that woman out of here. And I had, like, a kind of physical reaction reaction to it where I was like, how dare you? You know, that's her husband. Mhmm. And then I noticed every little tour we went on in DC, somebody had something nasty to say about Mary Todd Lincoln.
Janis Cooke Newman:So I thought, I really need to know more about this woman. And I went looking for a historical novel about her, and there wasn't one. So then I picked up Jean Baker has written this really interesting feminist biography of her. And I I read it, and as I read it, I thought, oh, she is interesting. I mean, the term first lady was coined for her.
Janis Cooke Newman:Oh. She she was very politically savvy. I I don't think Lincoln would have become president without her. And yet at the same time, she was a shopaholic. She probably had an affair while she was in the White House.
Janis Cooke Newman:And she also had a tell all book written about her, and she was really into seances. And I thought, I am not gonna understand this woman.
Jennifer Barone:Did she have them at the White House?
Janis Cooke Newman:But Lincoln was too. I mean, in the civil war time, actually, that was fairly common because so many people had lost family members. The seances and spiritualism was huge at that time. So I thought, I'm just gonna write from her point of view, and I'm gonna figure her out. And also a little bit, I wanted to sort of rescue her reputation.
Janis Cooke Newman:I was thinking well, first of all,
Jennifer Barone:when I'm when I'm hearing from you, like, as a theme right now is, like, find the story that you wanna hear that doesn't exist and go write
Janis Cooke Newman:it. Yeah. Which is
Jennifer Barone:very inspiring. Like, as a woman, do you feel like there's barriers to that? Like, us, for instance, like, needing to get over needing anybody's, like, permission to do these kinds of things. Like, it sounds very much like you are forging different new paths that maybe weren't the year before. And, like, is that just an aspect that we can't help as being women writers?
Janis Cooke Newman:I think there's some of it. I will tell you this. Whenever I teach memoir, there's always gonna be a few women who come up to me to say, oh, do you think anybody's really interested in my story? Should I really write this? I can 100% guarantee you that no man has ever said that to me.
Janis Cooke Newman:Right? They're like, I'm fascinating. Here goes my story. I did feel a little like I couldn't write a male point of view Mhmm. For a while.
Janis Cooke Newman:And then because I am the mother of a son, I think that broke that. So my book, A Master Plan for Rescue, there are five points of view, but really two are the main characters. And one is a 12 year old boy living in New York City and during World War two. And the other is a young Jewish man living in Berlin as Hitler is coming into power, and later they they interact. But I don't think I would have felt like I had permission to write those points of view until I became the mother of a boy.
Janis Cooke Newman:And I got a huge amount of insight into 12 year old boys for sure.
Jennifer Barone:Do you think it's necessary? I feel like so many people have been writing, like, let's say the women's voice as a man for, like, I don't know, millennia. Like, do we do we need to have the real experience? Like, what do you what is it about the real experience that makes it maybe juicier?
Janis Cooke Newman:Well, I'm gonna say that you are now, like, treading on the the big discussion about can you write from a point of view that's not you? Mhmm. Whether it's a different gender, a different race, a different ethnicity, a different age. And my personal feeling is, yeah, that's what we do as writers, particularly fiction writers, but you better get it right. Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:So everybody has a different way of getting it right. For me, to to get it right, to write as a man or a boy, I I needed to be living with with that kid. Mhmm. But not everybody needs that. Some people are just really good at getting inside the head of somebody else, somebody really different from them.
Janis Cooke Newman:Mhmm. I have a couple characters now in my book who are, like, young millennial age, and I use my son to sort of check things, you know, so that I get their dialogue right.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, the terminology is a lot.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. And it's different words, you know, I'm a lot older than that. Words that I would use, I think, yeah, they're probably not gonna use that expression. Mhmm. So, you know, I think you do need to be paying attention to the world around you Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:If you wanna write another point of view. Yeah. It brings in the depth and the media gets closer to the reality of that character,
Jennifer Barone:I would assume.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. I mean, ultimately, there's a certain there are certain truths about being human that supersede all of that. And so I think that's the other thing in novelist favor that we explore that. You know, we're always exploring what is it like to be human Mhmm. In the world.
Janis Cooke Newman:And so I think that that sort of transcends everything else
Jennifer Barone:in many ways. And this, like, environment of AI especially right now, I feel like humanness is is even more, I wanna say valuable. Right? Like getting into the heart of our humanness, maybe the way we
Janis Cooke Newman:make
Jennifer Barone:mistakes even, our flaws. But now, do you feel like with the advent of AI that like the human the flawed human is almost like elevated, almost more beautiful, more important, more interesting?
Janis Cooke Newman:That's an interesting question. You could be right about that. I have a good friend and whenever like lots of times at lunch at Page Street, we talk about, is AI gonna take our jobs? I mean, because AI is writing books now. And one of the members who has been a business and science writer said, you know, the thing is AI can't feel.
Janis Cooke Newman:Right. And people can feel. And I think that's 's very, very key when you're writing a book. You need to make your reader feel things. People don't really wanna read books if they don't feel something.
Janis Cooke Newman:If they're not rooting for the main character or they're not worried worried about the main character or they don't hate a character or love a character. So I feel like, at least for now, the emotional state of being human is what differentiates a human writer from an AI writer. Who knows what they'll learn in the future, but for now Yeah. When when we're getting
Jennifer Barone:connected to a character, like, find historically, it seems it's usually an underdog character. Their life is a mess. There's a challenge they have to come over. It's like AI can't make a mess. Like AI sort of makes mistakes.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. But not like a big giant messy mistake the way humans do. Yeah. But that's what makes, I think, for a really good story and a really good character. It seems like we, as humans, connect to people who are struggling, connect to people that are, like, going through a lot, and we wanna see, like, an underdog basically overcome something in a story.
Jennifer Barone:Do you feel like that's gonna come forward even more?
Janis Cooke Newman:I think you could be right about that. I mean, one of the things I'm always telling my students is don't protect your characters. Let your characters look bad. Yeah. Let them make bad decisions.
Janis Cooke Newman:Charles Baxter talks about let your character has have unthinkable thoughts.
Jennifer Barone:Oh.
Janis Cooke Newman:These are really important things that we need to use as writers, and I think it's super easy to not do that, to present your characters as, you know, pretty savvy and smart and got their life together. Because I think we see our characters as reflections of ourselves, and we have to let go of that and, you know, show them making bad decisions all over the damn place and doing things that get them in trouble. Otherwise, your book is pretty boring.
Jennifer Barone:Do you think your life is boring also if you go that route? I I guess I'm wondering from what you're saying, like, what does writing teach us? What does the process of writing, like, teach us about knowing ourselves or, like, approaching life, like, in a deeper way?
Janis Cooke Newman:And that's that's and it that's also interesting. You know, about seven, eight years ago, I I started to study Buddhism. Mhmm. And there is a whole big thing in Buddhism about suffering is caused by wanting things to be different than they are. Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:Right? Wanting things, desire, that is what causes suffering. And the thing is that in literature, it's the suffering and wanting of things that makes the story, that makes it interesting. So that has been a really interesting dichotomy for me to get a sense of that of, okay. This is what you would do for a happier life, but here's what you need to do to write a good book.
Janis Cooke Newman:And they're very different, the way you approach your characters and the way you think about them. So I think you learn that about yourself. I think also just anytime you write in a point of view, you begin to see, well, here's how I would react to this. But you learn that but this person might react this other way. I And think that's a good lesson of, you know, figuring out how do other people react to things.
Janis Cooke Newman:That the way the script I you know, my playbook is not everybody's playbook.
Jennifer Barone:Is there something profound that you've learned about yourself through the process of each of these books that you had in the memoir and the and the one about Lincoln? Yeah. Is there something that came forward for you about your own life?
Janis Cooke Newman:Well, they always say that you are, in some way, always writing the same book over and over again. Mhmm. And I think the theme that I am always putting in my books, whether intentionally or not, is the idea of denial. And, you know, who are the people who can look at the truth? Who are the people who can't look at the truth?
Janis Cooke Newman:And I think that that's a as I've been writing, I've been thinking, yeah, that's a big thing for me because I'm like a big believer in looking at things, looking at the reality of things. And I think that denial can cause a lot of problems in your life. So I think that that has I haven't realized how important that was to me until I realized, oh, this keeps turning up in all my books somehow. Do you
Jennifer Barone:think finding your personal truth is sort of like peeling an onion where it's like you get to one layer and then there's even deeper to go?
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. And, I mean, I don't know. Your personal truth can be a moving target. Right? As you get older and have more experiences Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:You know, it's all I feel I feel like a very different person than I was at 30. My personal truth at 30 is very different now. So I, you know, I I do think it's a bit of a moving target.
Jennifer Barone:I love that. What that brings me to something you said earlier, which is women 50 writing here in the San Francisco Bay Area. What is it about, like, that demographic that has something special that they could bring forward? Like, what is it that the world needs to hear from their voice right now?
Janis Cooke Newman:Well, I think that there's experience. I recently took a class on mystery writing, and the instructor said, you know, most people who write mysteries are older because you need to have some experience. You need to understand things about human nature to write something like a mystery because it's all about motives, you know, and the reason people do things. And I think that with, you know, women of that demographic, they have been through a lot. And yet, I also feel like to a large extent, because we are so youth oriented in the Bay Area Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:That they are not listened to a lot, and they have really interesting things to say. That's what been one of the interesting things about Page Street because our ages there range from people in their twenties to a couple of people in their eighties and everything in between. So when we sit down at lunch, you will have these different ages. And this is a place where I think everybody gets listened to because we have this writing thing in common. And that's been very gratifying because I think we get siloed with people our own age all the time.
Janis Cooke Newman:I We kind of do it to ourselves a lot, and this forces us to spread out and be with all different ages. Mhmm.
Jennifer Barone:And I feel like you get exposed to all the different things that people have experienced then, and you can bring that into your work too. Yeah. Like, bring in that inspiration. Well, let's segue a little bit into the birth of Lit Camp. So that happened in 2012.
Jennifer Barone:Can you give us a background about that?
Janis Cooke Newman:Yes. I started Litcamp, which is a nonprofit, basically to run an annual writers conference. Originally, the founders of Litquake had approached me about, you know, we're thinking about doing a writers conference. Do you wanna curate it with us? And because I had been running the classes at the Writers Grotto.
Janis Cooke Newman:So we went. We explored it. We played around with the numbers. It didn't make sense for them, but I had been up to what it was really nice little retreat center outside Calistoga, and I could see it happening. And so I said, okay.
Janis Cooke Newman:Look. I'm gonna do this, and you guys can help me do this, and we'll put it together. And we did it that first year, it was a huge success. One of our instructors was Adam Johnson, and I picked him because I had just read The Orphan Master Son and loved it. He came up.
Janis Cooke Newman:He taught. He was amazing. And three weeks later, he won the Pulitzer for that. He made us made me look like a genius.
Jennifer Barone:That's exciting.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yes. But anyway, that's that is how lit camp started. Wow.
Jennifer Barone:Good start. Yeah. And but
Janis Cooke Newman:it was mainly just to always run the yearly writers conference. I wanted to create a writers conference that was small. You know, I love community of writers, but it's more like, I don't know, a 120, a 150 people. We never had more than 40 writers at at ours. And we're doing one this June where we are only doing 24 writers with six faculty members.
Janis Cooke Newman:So it's it's like a really good ratio. I wanted to fill that niche with the Writers Conference. So that sort of was the beginning of Litcamp, and we have run a conference almost every year since 2012. One year, we didn't because our original place burned to the ground. Oh, no.
Janis Cooke Newman:Then we actually took it to Essilane.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, wow. And then COVID. I'm noticing a thermal bath theme.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. Yeah. And then after COVID, eschelon had gotten a little too expensive. Yeah. Because I also want this to be affordable for riders.
Janis Cooke Newman:I don't want it to just be for rich riders. So we now do it up in a retreat center in Booneville. Okay. Yeah. Which is really lovely, and it's enough out of the way that you feel like you have gone somewhere.
Jennifer Barone:Wow. Well, how did lit Camp get into the birth of Page Street Writers? Were they connected, or was that a completely different product?
Janis Cooke Newman:Well, they are connected now because Page Street is part of Lit Camp. But how Page Street started, it was 2022, kind of the tail end of the pandemic. And I had a friend who ran something called the Castro Co op, which was writer's collective. I had been a member of it before COVID, and he was looking for a new space. And I also knew that the cafe across the street from San Francisco Zen Center was empty.
Janis Cooke Newman:Because I practice at San Francisco Zen Center, I knew that they had, before COVID, been thinking about making it a cafe for themselves. And then, of course, they were gonna open March 2020, so they didn't. And they decided, yeah, I don't think we wanna be in the cafe business. So I said to them, how would you feel about renting this to Writers? Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:And they were like, yeah. That sounds great. So I went over to look at it. Okay. The space already looked like a cafe.
Jennifer Barone:Was that the old Saint Laurent?
Janis Cooke Newman:Yes.
Jennifer Barone:Oh oh my god. It's gorgeous.
Janis Cooke Newman:That space.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. We have
Janis Cooke Newman:samovar's sign in our basement. And then for a while, it was Revelry, a French restaurant, but it had been empty since before the pandemic. And I I loved it. And my friend that I had looked for the space where he wanted something more traditional with offices. But while I was in there, was thinking, alright.
Janis Cooke Newman:Wait a minute. People love working in cafes. Yes. You know? And what if I remove everything they don't like about working in a cafe?
Janis Cooke Newman:Like, okay, if it's members only, the door is locked, you can leave your computer on the table and go to the bathroom. There's a kitchen and we provide coffee and tea, so there's no barista, like, giving you any side eye, like, you better order something.
Jennifer Barone:Go out. You leave. It's time to go. Yeah.
Janis Cooke Newman:It's also a silent workspace. Mhmm. So except for lunch, we are a quiet workspace. And I thought, I wonder if this is really gonna take off. And Zen Center really made it possible because they didn't make me sign a lease up up front.
Janis Cooke Newman:They gave me a pretty reduced rate to kick off just to see if we could do it. And I had the community because of Lit Camp having been around for so long. Lit Camp had been around for, like, ten years. So we had a big mailing list, and I reached out to them. And before we opened, we had enough members to cover our cost.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, that's wonderful.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. And I realized, you know, this is the only I think it's the only sustainable model. I know there are other writing cooperatives cooperatives and collectives that have a more office based model. But the thing is you can only have so many members then. Mhmm.
Janis Cooke Newman:And not every member comes in every day. Mhmm. Whereas we are you come in, you find a seat, you start working. Do you
Jennifer Barone:have to book a seat? No. Okay.
Janis Cooke Newman:I'm very careful to make sure we never have so many members that you wouldn't find a seat. Got it. Okay. And members also have access twenty four seven.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, is it open twenty four hours a day?
Janis Cooke Newman:Yeah. They come and go via an app on their phone. Oh my goodness. So because I want them to think of it as their space. So they can come whenever they wanna work.
Janis Cooke Newman:They can work as long as they want. You could do work for forty eight hours straight if you wanted to. But the great thing about this model, which my friend calls the Gold's Gym model, is that I could take on I could accept more members than could fit in the space at one time. Great. Which in a city as expensive Francisco means we can be self sustaining and means I don't have to charge writers a lot, and it means I can give fellowships out to writers.
Janis Cooke Newman:That's wonderful. Yeah. So the model really works, I think, here. And then about a year and a half after we opened the Page Street in San Francisco, we opened one in Berkeley. We I had a lot of writer friends over there who kept saying, I wish you were over here.
Janis Cooke Newman:So we found a space. We had to build it out to look like a cafe, but it is along the same lines. And then members can go to either one. Wow.
Jennifer Barone:And now you said that there's quiet hours, essentially. So, you know, probably so, obviously, people could be writing. Is it a space where also the writers can interact in some way besides lunch? Like, I noticed that you might have events and you have workshops there. Like, tell us a little bit more about, like, how writers can also connect in the space.
Janis Cooke Newman:Right. Because I I wanted it to be more of a more than a coworking space. I wanted it to be a community. Mhmm. So, yes, every day, we gather in the back for lunch, and that's when people talk.
Janis Cooke Newman:Once a month, there is a happy hour in each space. So it's usually got Friday around 05:30, and people can bring a guest, and we'll do that. We have craft groups. So any member can create a craft group, and any other member can join it. They typically meet in person in the spaces, usually between five and six.
Janis Cooke Newman:We've got a memoir group, a short story group, a couple of novel groups. We had a screenplay group. We have a poetry group. I mean, it's it's great. And the members really drive this.
Janis Cooke Newman:They decide what the groups should look like.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, wow.
Janis Cooke Newman:So members can join that. We also just started I in San Francisco, I run a thing called the Page Street Salon once a month, where you can bring work, any genre, and whoever comes gets ten minutes to use as they want, you know, to read and get feedback. So we're always trying to give that that to the members. We do a big free public reading every other month alternating between San Francisco and Berkeley. How it works is I come up with a theme.
Janis Cooke Newman:I put out a call. I'll say, if you wanna be a reader, submit no more than three minutes any genre on this theme, and I pick 15 readers. Mhmm. And it's a super fun night. I mean, it's very fast paced.
Janis Cooke Newman:We get something like 70 to 80 people come, probably because we pour free wine. Not only helps, but it does help. But it it is another way members members volunteer behind the bar, members, you know, read there. You know, so we do that. We open our space every month for a free public write together session.
Janis Cooke Newman:Mhmm. We cosponsor these with Litquake and the Bay Area Book Festival. And that's for peep anybody from the public to come in and write for the on a Saturday morning in our space. What else do we do? We do a couple of big social events.
Janis Cooke Newman:So coming up in May, we go up to Marin Bocce and do a bocce tournament and picnic, which is super fun because we're all quite terrible. And then we do our holiday party in January because that's when people can come at the Bayview Boat Club. Mhmm. So there's always lots of these. And then you mentioned events.
Janis Cooke Newman:Yes. We partner with Litquake to do a series that's very we call it how they did it, and we ask writers to come and talk about how they did a certain aspect of getting their book out there. So we have one coming up in April on the art of revision. Okay. How they did it, the art of revision.
Jennifer Barone:We You'll be teaching as part of this.
Janis Cooke Newman:I'm going to be the moderator for that one. Okay. What I did was I asked writers in all different genres. So Ma, who you mentioned Mhmm. She's doing poetry.
Janis Cooke Newman:Ma, Shane Wynn. Yes. She's gonna do poetry. I have someone doing creative non fiction, someone doing short story, and someone doing novels. Okay.
Janis Cooke Newman:So they'll each talk about that aspect of revision. Okay. So I try to make sure all our events it's not just somebody reading from their book. It's always something that you're gonna learn something.
Jennifer Barone:Well, so in this whole experience, this all sounds amazing, and that space is so beautiful that I've been to before. What do you think is the barrier for a writer in terms of, like, finding community? Like, what do you think it is for them that they're needing, that maybe they're afraid of, that maybe, like, you know, they just don't even know exists about, like, getting connected to other writers?
Janis Cooke Newman:I think there's numerous things. I think as a whole, writers are not super extroverted. You know, we we chose a profession where we stay in a little room with our imaginary friends, and we're happy doing that. So I think there's some of that. I think I think there's also a little impostor syndrome happens.
Janis Cooke Newman:People you know, we have a lot of members of Page three to hurt people who are new. You know, they'll say to me, I always wanted to be a writer, and now I'm gonna explore this. And this could be they could be 20 telling me this, and they could be 70 telling me this. Mhmm. And so I think they feel like they can't call themselves writers.
Janis Cooke Newman:Mhmm. And I'm always trying to say, okay. You get to decide whether you are a writer. Unfortunately, someone else decides if you're an author, but you decide if you're a writer. So I think there's some of that that stands in the way.
Janis Cooke Newman:I think money. Mhmm. It was one of the reasons I wanted to make sure that Page Street was affordable Mhmm. And that we did have fellowship so that money wouldn't be a barrier. Because I do know in the early days, when I was a a grotto member and we all had offices, at at some point, my rent went up to, like, $450 a month, and it was like, okay.
Janis Cooke Newman:I'm even a published writer. I can't afford to come and do this anymore. Mhmm. So I think money is part of it, but I think it's also just finding the people. Right?
Janis Cooke Newman:So I a lot of people come to us through Liquig Yeah. And the events we do with them.
Jennifer Barone:Well, I guess, like, let's end here. I have this last question for you, which is also through this experience. I'm I'm sure you've seen so many writers working on their stuff, hopefully getting published. What has been, like, maybe the most exciting, surprising, like, thing that has happened as part of creating Page three Writers for you?
Janis Cooke Newman:What has been, I think, almost a little surprising is how well it works. Because, like, you never know. I had many sleepless nights and you're crazy. You're gonna, like, lose a bunch of money doing this. But it's the members.
Janis Cooke Newman:The members make it work. I have never had to ask a member to leave. I do personally interview everybody before they become a member, but there's a a vibe about the place where people are encouraging, and it's not competitive. And I watch them, you know, make friendships amongst themselves, and I watch them create these these craft groups, and it works better than I ever imagined it would. And I would say that every day that I'm there and I come in and I see people busily writing at their desks, it feels really good to me.
Janis Cooke Newman:It's like, oh, yeah. I made that happen. And here they are. The writers are here. So that is really gratifying.
Jennifer Barone:That is a beautiful, beautiful thing to create. Yeah. Well, thank you. I just wanna thank you so much, Janis, for sharing your work, for sharing all these beautiful spaces that you have developed and your journey as a writer in the Bay Area. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you.
Jennifer Barone:So for listeners who would like to learn more about Page Street Writers, visit pagestreet.org and lit camp, litcampwriters.org. And to find out about Janis Cooke Newman and her work and her beautiful books, you can visit janis cooknewman.com. And you can find her books at your local independent bookstores such as Telegraph Hill Books. Thank you for joining us, Janis.
Janis Cooke Newman:Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.
Jennifer Barone:This podcast is brought to you by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review. Visit tellhighlit.org to find out about our local events such as author talks, writing workshops, and more. Consider making a donation to support our public programs. If you are a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we'd love to hear from you.
Jennifer Barone:Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Jennifer Barone along with Joseph Carbone at Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. And this has been Voices from the Hill. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, stay inspired, and come visit us at Telegraph Hill Books in North Beach, San Francisco.