By Ailene Sankur
Valyntina Grenier is no stranger to poetry. By her undergrad senior year at U.C. Berkeley, she had already put together two chapbooks and now she’s in the second year of an M.F.A. in Poetry at St. Mary’s College of California.
She is also no stranger to bars: she works as a bartender at Lanesplitter () in Oakland. And it was her friendship with two other East Bay bartenders on which she built her Back Room Live (www.lifelongpress.blogspot.com) reading series. Most people go to bars to have mindless fun, relax, get wasted; Valyntina used them as a vehicle for “…a polyphony of voices, united by the desire to make art, enjoy language, and drink a pint or two.”
First, Sheila from the wonderful Hotsy Totsy Club in Albany let Valyntina read the poetry from her first chapbook. (Incidentally, the Hotsy Totsy Club, in a not particularly trendy East Bay neighborhood, wins the dive bar competition against San Francisco anyday.) The readings were well-received by the bar crowd. After those experiences, she toyed with the idea of doing another reading series at a bar. After befriending Tony, the bartender at McNally’s Irish Pub in Oakland, she asked if she could do a reading series there. He agreed, and after it proved successful Back Room Live became a monthly event—on the last Saturday of each month.
Valyntina, now in her M.F.A. program, decided to bring together others from the creative writing masters program — both students and faculty — as well as other Bay Area poets and authors.
Literary readings have long been thought of as the property of dim bookstores, mousy clerks shakily whispering introductions to authors, bad wine, and an intellectual elitist. With the Back Room Live series,Valyntina wanted to get away from that. She says, “My initial impetus was the sense that if you’re not in academia, and even sometimes if you are, you can feel left out of literary events. So I thought by bringing it to the bar, people would be engaged in it. Really just to broaden the community, get different genres of writers together and people together who wouldn’t necessarily go to hear writers…”
The reading series became so popular Valyntina decided to publish a Back Room Live Reading Series magazine, sold online and at Diesel Books, Book Zoo, and Pegasus (all in Oakland). The magazine is published through Valyntina’s other venture: Life Long Press Publishing.
