Susan Sontag in a bear suit

Reposted from vol.1brooklyn.com ...

New Fiction Coming in 2012!

Bear Star is very pleased to announce that it has just contracted with Rob Davidson to publish his second collection of short stories, The Farther Shore, in early 2012.

And the winner is ...

Bear Star is proud to announce that Christine Deavel of Seattle has won the 2011 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize for her manuscript called Woodnote. The book will be released in September of this year. Now comes the fun of formatting the poems, choosing the right fonts and cover art, and shouting into the universe that a new book is a’coming soon. If you are a reviewer and would like an advance copy, drop me a line and I’ll get you an ARC when they’re ready.

Speaking of, the comments section for this blog is not reliable and I’m not sure why not. Lots of comments don’t register at all. So it would be best to contact me via email: bethannspencer [at] gmail dot com.

The Bear Star Interview with Rick Bursky

I love your new book, Death Obscura (Sarabande), but as usual I never know how much faith to place in the information you so casually disperse throughout the poems — the bit about the spoons in "The History of Traitors," for instance, "coated ... with a chemical that turned orange under ultraviolet light" if the soldiers who used them were, presumably, treacherous. Or, in your title poem, the 'fact' (?) that "in 1900, seventy-two colleges offered courses in writing obituaries." I'd ask whether these things are factual, but I suspect you'd point me to "the story about the man who caught a Bengal tiger / with a butterfly net ... / It doesn't matter if it's true." Instead, let me ask where you get most of your ideas for poems. Dreams? History books? Ripley's?

Poetry occupies an interesting place in literature. Poetry, in the minds of many people is confessional writing — it must be true. If it’s not, you would have written it as fiction. Someone recently commented that some of my prose poems had a journalistic quality to them. I never thought of journalism as a word I would use anywhere near my poems, but I write them to have the veneer of reality. While I’m writing them I think of them as real events. In that way the poems have a certain amount of honesty. I don’t control them. I want them to be as true as possible to what really happened, even if it never did. I wonder if this makes any sense? Truth is so overrated. The possibility of truth is what interests me more. By the way, take “The History of Traitors”: do you really think the government hasn’t tried many weird methods to detect traitors? Now I’m not saying true or not true either way, but you don’t have to look at the world too long or hard to see what a bizarre place it really is. I don’t know about heaven or hell, but this world is a great place for a poet.

The second part of your question, where do the poems start, wow, I really don’t know. What’s that old cliché: God gives us the first line and we sweat for the rest. Sometimes I just try to think of an odd line, like “a man caught a Bengal tiger / with a butterfly net …” and see where it goes. I’m constantly scribbling in my notebook. My undergrad degree is in photography. I love images, especially in poems. I might see something out of place, for instance, an apple in a flower pot with tulips. Hmmm, how did that get there? I try to answer that question in a poem.

In the title poem of Death Obscura, you mention a location that is also the site of one of my favorite poems in your first book, The Soup of Something Missing: "The Seaport Diner, Point Jefferson Station." Will you say a little bit about Point Jefferson Station? What is it about the place that inspires such arresting poems?

I don’t really believe in inspiration. You decide to be a poet so you have to write poems. If I waited for inspiration I’d hardly get anything written. You — I — have to go out and look for poems. I do that by opening my notebook and beginning to scribble lines, images, whatever. Sometimes I find my way into a poem. There’s that old cliché: you juggle at the altar of the muse and sometimes she rewards you. On occasion a poem comes to us. “The Seaport Diner, Point Jefferson Station" was one of those poems. It’s completely, absolutely, word-for-word true. On New Year’s Day my mom called to tell me they took Dad, his ashes, to his favorite diner for New Year’s Eve. You can’t make this stuff up. I said, “Mom, therapy might be good.” And then I wrote the poem. That said, I believe a poet has to live an inspired life. You have to be fully engaged in life, love and art. Be part of the world, not a passive voyeur.

Hmmm, I don’t think I really answered your question so let me add that I never lived in Port Jefferson Station. But lots of my family did and still do. My grandparents lived there on a street named after my grandfather. I have many memories of going to visit them and staying for weekends and holidays. It was a little on the rural side at the time and I remember the forest behind their house. My father also died in that town. Too many memories to avoid. And to tell you the truth, I don’t even try to avoid them.

You’re from Far Rockaway, as is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and I don’t recall you ever writing about the place. Are you consciously avoiding writing about it?

You know, I never thought about it until you asked the question. Now it strikes me as strange that Far Rockaway has never shown up in a poem. The name is even poetic; it sounds like a place I would write about. I haven’t consciously avoided it, but now that you bring it up I do want to include those words, Far Rockaway, in a poem. It’s a thin strip of land you fly over when you’re getting ready to land at Kennedy Airport if you approach from the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a little kid there was boardwalk with lots of amusement and food places on it. People used to rent bungalows for the summer. I was last there about ten years ago. Most of what I remembered was burnt down or abandoned. On one block there were only three houses left. One was the house I lived in when I was seven. I stood on the sidewalk and tried to imagine myself as a little boy sitting on the porch.

How does your work in advertising inform your poems? The language of ads and of poetry would seem to be in total opposition, but you've been a poet and ad man for many years now.

A great headline could be poetry, I mean in the literal sense. A handful of words that move the reader to action or an emotion — wouldn’t that be true of both a line of poetry and a headline? If I’m busy at the office, writing a lot of ads, the poetry suffers. It feels too “written,” and often too clever. The attributes of the ad sneak into my poems and that’s not a good thing. I’m constantly on guard for that. Though being an ad writer means you have to be disciplined. You have to have ideas on demand every day. That’s helped me as a poet. The discipline required to write poetry every day, or least most days, is easy for me. If I don’t write something on any given day it doesn’t feel natural. Also, being an ad writer means churning out lots of writing that never sees the light of day. I make few demands on the poetry I scribble out every day. The vast majority of it never leaves my notebook, but in constantly writing, every now and then I get something that has potential and if I’m lucky I manage to turn that into a finished poem. Oh, I’m in the process of writing a book-length poem about advertising called “The Vampire of Madison Avenue.” It has nothing to do with vampires but sort of sums up the feeling of being an ad writer in a large agency.

What ad have you worked on that makes you proudest in terms of artistry?

I wrote a commercial for Ameriquest Mortgage that appeared on TV during the Super Bowl. It won advertising awards all over the world and is in a museum. You can see the spot on my website at http://rickbursky.com/html_broadcast/ameriquest-doctor.html. It’s pretty funny. I don’t want to say too much about the spot and give away the punch line. I’ve also done a campaign for a lingerie company that’s pretty risqué. On the left side of the page is a photo of a naked woman with the headline “the gift.” On the opposite page is the same photo except the woman is wearing lingerie and the headline is “the wrapping.” On the other side of the spectrum, I wrote a newspaper ad for Wells Fargo Bank, about a charity they supported, probably the most beautiful ad copy I’ve ever written. It’s all on my website: rickbursky.com. There are a few poems there, too. But it’s mostly advertising. The poetry is on my blog, rickbursky.blogspot.com. In all fairness, artistry is a tough word with advertising. Writers and art directors in advertising have to keep reminding ourselves that we’re not creating art, we’re creating communications that serve very specific client needs.

There's a wonderful question in "The Hypnology": "Isn't this the best use of night, / to make us afraid, make us uncomfortable, / make us stare at the ceiling until morning. / Is sleep a skill or a prize?" Do you try to answer such questions, or do you, like Rilke, think more is to be gained by living them?

I’ll split the difference with Rilke. I believe there’s more to be gained by living in the questions. Poetry is a wonderful place for introspection, as long as it doesn’t come off as introspection. How do you make art out of questions? Not with answers, that’s for sure. I love Neruda’s Book of Questions. Though I never try to answer them. I don’t think he intended them to be answered. One of the things I love about poetry is the way our own poems have the ability to amaze us and teach us things about ourselves. Sometimes I write a poem and wonder, Where’d that come from? “Is sleep a skill or a prize?” is for those who read the poem to answer for themselves. If you twist my arm right now I’d say it’s a prize. Tomorrow my answer might be different.

The women in your poems are endlessly mysterious. In The Soup of Something Missing, I thought they seemed mythic, but in Death Obscura I noticed their legs and painted toenails.

The women in The Soup of Something Missing are mythic, in the sense that they aren’t specific. All the women in Death Obscura are real ex-girlfriends, in some cases named, in most not. In some cases, they’re probably pissed about the poems. In other cases, they’re flattered. I think of myself as a surrealistic, romantic poet. And when I’m not thinking of myself as that I consider myself an Eastern European Duendest. I dated a lawyer who used to say literary journals should have a rebuttal column for the poet’s significant other.

On the back jacket, your publisher calls your work "California Gothic." Can you say a little about that?

It’s difficult to escape our environment. It sneaks into our poems without asking. When Los Angeles, or California, sneak into my poems there are no palm trees or movie stars, no Hollywood, no glitter. My version of Los Angeles is darker and grittier. California Gothic, hopefully, hints that my version of the city isn’t the popular version.

When did you begin writing poems? Do you recall reading (or writing) a poem that made you realize this was the path you wanted to follow?

Yes, I remember the exact moment. It was in the basement of a church in Los Angles. I began my life as a poet some twenty years ago with a poetry class at UCLA Extension. I took the class hoping it would make me a better advertising copywriter. I always believed poets were great writers of prose and thought it would be useful to my advertising career. In the first class the instructor read us Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and Etheridge Knight’s “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.” Right then and there my entire life changed. I found what I would dedicate the rest of my life to.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a book, Ironmongery, of short surrealistic essays about poetry. Some of them are on my blog, rickbursky.blogspot.com. I also have two book-length poems that are just about finished — “The Myth of Photography,” which is my version of the history of photography, and “The Vampire of Madison Avenue.” I’ve also been writing a lot of prose poems lately. I try to write every day, try being the important word here.

To what extent do you feel your experience in the army encouraged your instinct toward poetry? Were you writing much before you joined up?

I was 17 when I joined the army, very much a kid, and they gave me an automatic weapon. What were they thinking!? Being a soldier provides wonderful grist for poetry. Even the words, their sounds — platoon, cartridge, infantry, sergeant — have resonance and depth. Some poets like to use the names of flower and nature-like words in their poems. I’ll take artillery over bougainvillea. Operation Homecoming, the program that provided creative writing classes for the military, was a great thing. I hope more of the recent veterans start writing. The first time I ever wrote anything was while I was in the army. I was assigned to the staff of an infantry battalion in Germany. The adjutant, Captain Caggiano, told me to write a about our basketball team for the battalion newsletter. I guess that was the start. Just by coincidence, when I went to AWP in Denver last year I had dinner with Captain Caggiano and his wife, Jean (also a writer). He’s now a retired colonel living in Colorado. I hadn’t seen him since I left Germany. It was a wonderful reunion. For the longest time I’ve wanted to write a book-length poem about boot camp. One day …

Do you have favorite poets, books that you return to?

I’m always rereading Yannis Ritsos. I’m pretty sure I have everything of his that’s been translated into English. There’s something about his poems that speak directly to my soul. I’ve even attempted to translate a few of his poems. That proved more difficult than I could have imagined. Charles Simic is another poet I love. Other poets I couldn’t live without include Nin Andrews, Laura Kasischke, David Young, Zbigniew Herbert and Lola Haskins. I have about 2,500 books of poetry and think that I’m pretty well-read, still I’m always thrilled to discover someone new, I mean new to me. Vern Rutsala, for instance, has been publishing books of poetry for some 25 years and I just found him. Some books that I’ve just read that really impressed me are Purr by Mary Ann Samyn, Tongues of War by Tony Barnstone, Tall If by Mark Irwin, Zero at the Bone by Stacie Cassarino, Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder, and Alexis Orgera’s book that’s about to come out, How Like Foreign Objects.

Last question, Rick. I know you have a pen fetish. What pen do you use when you're "writing raw" in your notebook?

Yep, I collect fountain pens. I currently have about 90. Most of them are old, from the ’30s and ’40s, though I have a few modern fountain pens. I couldn’t imagine writing with anything else. I have some favorites — the 1939 Parker Oversized Vacumatic with a stub nib, for instance. But I rotate through them so they all get used in the course of two years. I once took a day off from work and spent it learning to make simple repairs from Fred Krinke of the Fountain Pen Store in Monrovia. Fred is a third generation fountain pen repairman. He can fix a fountain pen just by staring at it.

You can really feel the line being written on the paper with a fountain pen. It’s satisfying to watch the ink dry. Writing with fountain pens lets me sort of live with a line before moving on to the next one. Sometimes I write the same line over and over again. Writing with a fountain pen slows me down, and that’s good for a poem. There’s nothing poetic about a computer, though I do love my MacBook Pro.

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THE SEAPORT DINER, POINT JEFFERSON STATION

My mother and a cousin decide to go to The Seaport Diner,

my father's favorite, for a cup of coffee on New Year's Eve.

Though he's been dead for six years, they take him along.

The black marble box that holds his ashes is placed

in a shopping bag, then on their table next to a window.

On another night the waitress might have asked about the box.

But tonight the diner is crowded, she doesn't notice

that two women asked for three cups of coffee.

There are many ways to suck the marrow out of time's bones.

This is my mother's. No one's seen the inside of the box,

though at times I've thought all of heaven was within.

By refusing to bury it my mother is unwittingly hiding

my father from the devil. At a small table in the center of the box,

my father sits. Ashes piled to his knees, he remembers

flames and fears he's in hell. If he walked forever

he would discover the wall and on the other side of the wall

my mother's hand holding the spoon she stirred coffee with.

(c) 2004, Rick Bursky, The Soup of Something Missing, Bear Star Press

Robert Hill Long on The Kilim Dreaming

I asked Robert if he would say a few things about his book and he graciously sent the following essay.

Where my writing touches on nature it often concerns paradise, whether this or that place is Edenic/Arcadian, a peaceable kingdom lost in mythic past; or a place beyond death/after this life, a heaven or Elysium for the just and the brave and the virtuous; or a parallel to our world but invisible except to private imaginings (as it is in my personal life), the dreams of cults, the prophecies of shamans or utopians, where all is as it might be—as it could or should be Only If—(fill in your hypothetical ideal conditions here).

The poem “Hemlock” (which closes my earlier book, The Work of the Bow), set in Colorado near Aspen, is in part about how people pioneering west in search of a paradisal future brought with them—unknowingly, half-knowingly, or fully aware—seeds of old European/eastern botanical culture, along with their books of Homer & Virgil, that altered the landscape and the culture-scape of the West, and brought old death to new earth. Another poem in that book, “The White Ibis,” takes the matter up in a more direct way: how any human incursion (in this case, real estate development of Carolina barrier islands) into a previously unsettled habitat destroys what can be protected only by leaving it alone forever.

In “The Spear Lily” and “The Kilim Dreaming” (as well as in “The Wire Garden,” once part of The Kilim Dreaming but now a limited edition of elegies for my father) my essential aim was to retool the Garden of Eden myth, starting with the moment that the two human inhabitants realize they’re stuck together in what might have been a paradise—except for what humanly happened to each of them. As Robert Hass so casually put it as a premise: “In the life we lead, every paradise is lost.”

The core metaphor—the heart of both narrative systems—is a mythic garden where a pair of strangers, after becoming acquainted, find that they must mutually negotiate their sense of belonging (their place on the earth, their place in each other’s life); examine their responsibility to tradition (the cultural past), to community (the present) and to posterity; and finally, come to terms with having permanently altered each other’s identity, and how this in turn will alter their destinies.

In “The Spear Lily,” the protagonists are survivors of sexual abuse as well as sexual outsiders: the woman an urban, middle-class Bay Area prostitute, the man a Dutch coffee dealer and avowed celibate after years of gay prostitution. Neither has family nor a partner, but over the course of an afternoon, each considers what their sharing of similar life-stories entails. Would they make sensitive partners, granted each other’s history of violations and tragedies, and each other’s differing strengths of character? Would each be a good candidate to ‘protect the other’s solitude,’ in Rilke’s phrase about an ideal marriage? The Dutch man proposes this is worth thinking about, but as in Milton’s poem, “The Spear Lily” closes with a woman and a man leaving a darkened garden together, without any resolution about either’s future.

“The Kilim Dreaming” is fundamentally about how a Turkish rug dealer’s attitude toward the welfare of innumerable women who live as rug-weavers changes after he meets a younger woman who not only possesses some very rare kilims, but is apparently capable of supernatural communication—with him, with a recently dead woman who was her nurse/chaperone, with other weavers she introduces him to. In short, he encounters the cultural remnants of Amazon matriarchy and changes his life and business practices. And like “The Spear Lily,” “The Kilim Dreaming” is also a romance about the mystery of displaced, shifting identities, about the stripping of veils and masks, the relative costs and consolations of maintaining solitary illusions and of mutually sharing disillusionment. But while “The Spear Lily” was pure fiction (other than some of the botanical settings), “The Kilim Dreaming" was first inspired by a nonfiction profile of a Turkish rug dealer, and gradually built out of research into the history of flatweave textiles in the Anatolian region. It does have a San Francisco connection: one of my primary sources was the book Anatolian Kilims by Cathryn Cootner, which catalogues the Jones kilim collection at the de Young in San Francisco.

It meditates on weaving (presuming natural dyes/wools/practices) as the closest human analogue to what the earth does as a total system. (“The Spear Lily,” which I wrote before “The Kilim Dreaming,” is more straightforwardly based on the Adam & Eve conundrum, and set in the San Francisco Botanical Garden.) In “The Kilim Dreaming” I was committed to telling a longer story, developing the characters more deeply, but also to portraying how the concept of a paradise-garden is transformed into a valuable artifact, a purely human object. I was also pursuing a formal analogy between the sonnet sequence and rug-weaving. In their traditional forms, both depend on standard measures of length and width—the loom’s warp and weft designed for certain sizes (the 3x5 of a prayer rug; the 9x12 of a main tent rug, the 14 lines times 10 syllables (12 in my case) of each sonnet. Both can (hypothetically) be endlessly lengthened—the red carpet runner unrolled for visiting royalty, the thematic or narrative sequencing of sonnets; both depend on the rhythmic joining of the abstract to the concrete—the knots that join dyed wool to patterned images, the accentual-syllabic joining of syllables and linguistic elements to imagery and metaphor and story. Another formal intersection, for me, is how flatweave techniques favor repeating geometrical images and visual rhythms, while my thinking about the poetic elements of syllabics, rhymes, cadences and verbal music is a sort of musical math designed to represent people living the mystery of earthly existence.

Back to the cultural and paradisal aspects, though, here’s a useful generalization: Anatolian rugs portray a heaven seen from earth, while Persian rugs portray an idealized earth seen from the eternal perspective of heaven. (The word “paradise” itself derives from the Persian word for a walled garden.) So each is rich with paradoxical suggestions about time, and about the functions of desire and memory in depicting the intersection of the mythical with the actual. Rugs are not only image repositories, but cultural repositories; their commercial and cultural values are inextricably knotted together, warp and weft; yet they are made be walked on, sat on, eaten on, prayed on, and among some nomadic people they retain their oldest function: portable flooring in a world where the pastoral life and country itself is a homeland not to be desecrated by permanent dwellings, which are in any case an illusion. Many rugs are composed of one or more central “fields” and one or more “borders”; common images in Anatolian kilims include fruit trees and flowers (but also a figure thought to be a relic of Neolithic goddess-worship, and winged creatures who may be angels); the oldest surviving fragment from the fifth century BCE has representations of horses, deer, and humans together in a liminal state between the wild and the domesticated. And of course every ancient kilim is composed entirely from living materials extracted from the weaver’s environment: wool, dyes from vegetables, fruits, insects, woven on a wooden frame.

I think of the old inscription-on-stone best known in the paintings by Poussin and Guercino of bucolic pastorals: “Et in Arcadia ego”—And I am in Arcadia. Is this, as some critics think, evidence of Death being a tagger in paradise, where the chiseled graffito means “I’m in Arcadia, too, like any other place—you can run but you can’t hide from mortality”? Or is it what Simon Schama terms “a wistful epitaph” about what works of art have in common with gravestones: a formal, compressed testimony, designed to communicate as long it exists the mysterious privilege of having lived as a name on an earth where most of what exists inhabits its essence with no name for itself, no memory (that can be communicated to us), no history, and no future? Kilims are not only colorful memorials to the tedious (but perhaps social and companionable) hours of nameless women. Kilims announce, after their fashion, that the weaver was, at least this once, a visionary medium between the past and the future, and her artifact contains the coded patterns and colors necessary to understand how she conceived the world and abstracted its mysteries—which would outlive her, along with her kilim.

It’s been a crazy fall, people. Bearnice has barely had time to breathe. Still, I think it would be good if she reminded everyone that Bear Star’s annual competition for the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize will end on November 30. Polish up that manuscript and send it to us, or take advantage of our new online submission process—all reading fees support the publication of the winner’s book.

In other news, Bear Star poet Rick Bursky has a new book coming out with Sarabande this fall and I can’t wait to read it: Death Obscura. It sports another stunning cover, right up there with the one for The Soup of Something Missing, but when you work for an ad agency and teach at an art school you have no shortage of creative friends with whom to collaborate. Congratulations, Rick! Don’t forget you promised to let me interview you sometime soon.

Meanwhile, Steve Gutierrez has an essay in the fall Redwood Coast Review—“The Big Fresno Fair” (online at http://www.stephenkessler.com/rcr/rcr_2010fall.pdf )—that I loved. Here’s his description of his Aunt Ella. “She was the younger one: the rebel who had been a 'career girl' into her late twenties, daring the barrio to call her an old maid, working as a secretary for a corporation and saving enough money to travel. She conquered Mexico with Capri pants that stirred the natives. She dropped in on Hawaii and broke some hearts.”

Also, I’m excited to announce that Bear Star will be publishing a book of poems by Quinton Duval, beloved Sacramento-area poet who passed away unexpectedly last spring. Gary Thompson at Cedar House Books (Friday Harbor, WA) has taken Quinton’s unfinished manuscript and added to it from various files the poet was working on at the time of his death. The book is called Like Hay and will come out in Spring 2011. I can’t wait to begin setting it up in InDesign.

Finally, it’s been a pleasure to enter The Kilim Dreaming for some awards I feel it deserves. Each poem (there are only four) would make a terrific film, but you’re just going to have to order a copy if you can’t wait for Hollywood to come to its senses and make something good for a change. Robert Hill Long is a fabulous storyteller and one of the best sonneteers around.

Congratulations, Steve!

At last it can be revealed: Stephen D. Gutierrez has won an American Book Award for Live from Fresno y Los. The entire list is as follows:

Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music University of California Press)

Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press)

Nancy Carnevale, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945 (University of Illinois Press)

Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney’s/Vintage)

Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook (City Lights)

Stephen D. Gutierrez, Live from Fresno y Los (Bear Star Press)

Victor Lavalle, The Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau)

François Mandeville, This Is What They Say, translated from the Chipewyan by Ron Scollon (University of Washington Press)

Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls (Viking)

Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, editors, Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (University of Texas)

Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, editors, Poems for the Millennium: Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry (University of California Press)

Kathryn Waddell Takara, Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems (Pacific Raven Press)

Pamela Uschuk, Crazy Love: New Poems (Wings Press)

Lifetime Achievement:

Quincy Troupe

Katha Pollitt

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From the press release:
"The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees,and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to underrecognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers."

The awards ceremony will be on Sunday, September 19th, from 1:00-4:00 p.m. at the Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove), San Francisco, CA. A reception will take place following the ceremony. This event is open to the public. For more information, call (510) 642-7321.

See you there!