The Sanchez Grotto Annex
In 2005, Doug
Wilkins opened a second grotto location on Sanchez Street near the Castro District of San
Francisco. There are private rooms for 9 writers on one floor of a three-story building in
a residential neighborhood. Their fledgling website is here. Currently working there
are:
Alison Bing - art and food
critic, Lonely Planet contributor, editor, and self-styled content maven
Melodie Bowsher - a
former Wall Street Journal reporter, Melodie has worked as a freelance business writer in
various forms. She is the mothe of two, whose crisis-filled teenage years provided
fodder for her first novel. That novel, My Lost and Found Life, is published by
Bloomsbury in fall 2006.
Michael Chorost-
freelance writer, contributor to Wired, and author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part
Computer Made Me More Human
Scott James (aka
Kemble Scott) - journalist, editor of the SOMA Literary Review, and author of the
forthcoming SOMA (a novel)
Kara Knapfelc -
Travel writer, Lonely Planet contributor, USF writing instructor, and fiction writer
Paul Linde -
psychiatrist and author of Of Spirits and Madness: A Psychiatrist's Year in
Zimbabwe
Shana Mahaffey -
fiction author and web content contributor
Rob Tocalino -
freelance writer, 826 Valencia stalwart, freelance web content provider, and fiction
writer
Doug Wilkins (aka
Wells Dunbar) - professional goof-off, and author of the forthcoming novel of futuristic
nostalgia, Wag and the Distant Bums, as well as the young reader's
novel Trudy and the Transdimensional Trolley
The Grotto is a
place. Or, it is a hypothesis about "Place", which we have been testing for some
time. The hypothesis is that working writers will be more productive (and have more
courage to pursue the kind of writing they really want to do) if they work in a community
of writers -- if they surround themselves with other writers pursuing this same vague
ambition. The writers and filmmakers at the Grotto are not united by anything more than
that -- not by any school of thought, or style, or genre. Our differences rub off on
each other, informally, and we grow into talents we didn't even know we had.
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