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IT’S ‘FIRE SEASON’ AT THE LATEST SoMa WEST LITERARY HAPPENINGWHAT? Stir: Seasonal Readings South of Market returns for Fire Season
WHERE? Cafe Suspiro and Arc Gallery, 1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco CA 94102
WHEN? 6–8 p.m., Oct. 2
South of Market’s seasonal reading series STIR returns for Fire Season, happening October 2 at the coffee shop/bookstore/record shop/fine-art gallery Cafe Suspiro and Arc Gallery at 1246 Folsom Street in San Francisco.
STIR is a seasonal event, with four readings per year: Foggy Season, Fire Season, Rainy Season and Flower Season.
For Fire Season we’re presenting a dazzling lineup of award-winning authors, pioneering performance poets, and explorers of queer, climate-change and indigenous intersections, including Charlie Jane Anders, Syr Hayati Beker, Charlie Getter, and Lehua Taitano. STIR is hosted by T.K. Rex (The Wildcraft Drones, Stelliform Press, 2026), and Josh Wilson (editor, The Fabulist Magazine).
Our Oct. 2 reading will also include a panel discussion and audience Q&A about writing, art, and the nature of Fire Season as both destructive and creative. What does it take to adapt, survive, persist and thrive in a world on fire? How do we fill the gaps, niches, and open spaces created by fire? How does fire quicken and enable change? How do we respond when the fires burn too hot … ?
On October 2, stop by Cafe Suspiro from 5-6 p.m. for coffee and vibes, and then join the hosts and four local authors at Arc Gallery next door from 6pm to 8pm for an evening of local literary adventure in the thriving SoMa West/Folsom Corridor neighborhood — a longtime home to after-hours art, literary happenings, music and performance. STIR now joins SoMa Nights, new cafes and restaurants, and a resurgent arts and nightlife scene as part of SoMa West's post-pandemic flowering.
Full October 2 lineup and bios follow.
Charlie Getter is a poet in San Francisco, he has an MFA in poetics, has published five collections of poetry, the sixth is coming out before the end of the year and he has performed poetry at the corner of 16th and Mission every Thursday for the past 22 years (give or take).
https://www.instagram.com/charliegetter
Syr Hayati Beker is a writer and immersive experience creator in search of the queer love language of climate change. Their novella in mutated fairy tales, What A Fish Looks Like, is out now from Stelliform Press!
https://syrbeker.com/
http://syr.bsky.social/
https://www.instagram.com/syr_real/
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry — Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
https://www.lehuamtaitano.com
https://www.instagram.com/lehua_m._taitano
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, out now from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult “Unstoppable” trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
https://charliejaneanders.com
https://charliejane.bsky.social
https://www.instagram.com/charliejaneanders
HOSTS:
T. K. Rex is a science fiction and fantasy author who first moved to San Francisco for art school in 2002, whose stories can be read in more than forty publications, including Asimov's Science Fiction, Gizmodo, and Strange Horizons. Their debut collection, The Wildcraft Drones, is coming in 2026 from Stelliform Press. They’re an alumni of the Clarion writers workshop, a podcast co-host at the Writers Grotto, and the bookshelf curator at Cafe Suspiro. T. K.'s stories, socials, and newsletter can be found at tkrex.wtf.
Josh Wilson, is an editor, journalist and writer in San Francisco, and publisher of The Fabulist Magazine, a home to fantastical fiction and art in print and digital editions. Stories published in The Fabulist have been finalists for the Pushcart Prize and the Shirley Jackson Awards. He is a recipient of the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, and founder of the 501(c)3 organization Independent Arts & Media.
https://fabulistmagazine.com/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1246 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA, United States, California 94103
