Quaken and Stirred

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More About

• JT LeRoy
• Savannah Knoop
• Neal Pollack
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Books and Literature

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Writers make mistakes. This is true; it has been fact checked. Hence, Litquake, the city's annual festival of words and the people who use them effectively, which has gone on long enough that it's getting hard to come up with clever seismical puns to describe it, gets trembling (see?) with an event called "Suckered: Writers Confess a Profound Lack of Judgment." Copresented by the Porchlight storytelling series, it involves extemporaneous, unscripted tales of self-delusion and hilariously, or cringingly, or just plain wrong choices from Alternadad author Neal Pollack, Mythbusters cohost Adam Savage, Caligula for President author Cintra Wilson, and several mistake-making others. Some writers become writers by making the mistake of pretending to be a writer, getting caught, and writing a memoir about what a mistake that was. Well, one writer did that, anyway. Savannah Knoop reads from her book, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, presumably to settle the matter: Which makes the better memoir — growing up as an exquisitely sensitive truckstop prostitute or impersonating someone else's fictional creation thereof for glossy-mag photo shoots? Those unfamiliar with the JT LeRoy hoax should just understand that perhaps not since the double whammy of Leonard Nimoy's I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock has the literary establishment been so confused.
Oct. 3-11, 2008