READING GROUPS

Active Listening Club
Amar Lal
As we’re confronted with an ever-denser sonic landscape of urban and human-made noise in addition to podcasts, music and more, it is increasingly essential to examine not only what we choose to listen to, but how we listen. Each week, participants will read about Deep Listening, Musique Concrete, Sonic Journalism, Acoustic Ecology, Soundscape Studies, environmental noise, “functional music” and more, to develop ideas around the active choice to listen. Weekly field recording prompts (no field recorder or experience required) and listening sessions will cultivate not only the concepts behind Active Listening, but also the open and active ears of participants.

Amar Lal is a Canadian artist, musician and mastering engineer currently based in Oakland. He runs the studio Macro Sound, recently published the game, Sing! To Oppose Time through Bathers Library, and previously spent a decade touring internationally as a member of the band Big Ups, while living in New York City. His greatest love is the art, music and food made by his friends.
Anarchist Book Club
Hannah 
A book club for people looking to expand their knowledge of anarchist way of organizing. We will look at both contemporary and historical perspectives and applications including how anarchist structures from the past have been applied and possible anarchist futures. 

Anti-Fascist Fiction Club
Emilye Lewin
What is the role of fiction under fascism? Starting with Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, we’ll examine this question and consider the American fascist. We’ll also borrow from Dorothy Thompson’s ‘Who Goes Nazi?’ as we consider the types of people who might ‘go’ fascist and how these narratives play out historically.

Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and Deconstructing Spears
Omar Almatov
In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula Le Guin argues that most things in life are actually shaped like a bag, holding food, medicine, gifts for friends and loved ones, babies, even weapons. In this reading group, I want to share this essay alongside Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris,” a sci-fi novel about spear-minded humans encountering a bag-shaped higher being, and I hope participants will learn to identify spears they’ve been told, reshape them into bags, write their own bag-shaped narratives, and invite contradiction and plurality into their lives.  

Hi! I’m Omar. I grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan and now live in SF. I’m a technologist interested in data sovereignty and permacomputing. In my free time I like to write poems, run, climb, go to the beach, and hang out with friends.

[Cancelled] Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home
Heidi Harmon 
Join us for a guided process through Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, the powerful new book by Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save. More than a traditional book club, this series uses essays, poetry, art, music, and thoughtful conversation to help us move from climate ache and overwhelm toward connection, possibility, and meaningful action. (The first eight people to sign up will receive a complimentary copy of the book!)

Heidi Harmon is an Oakland-based community organizer, public leader, and coalition builder with more than 25 years of experience advancing climate action, equity, democracy, and community resilience. A former three-term mayor and Senior Organizer, she specializes in bringing people together, developing leaders, and transforming ambitious values into durable public policy and collective action.

Dead Gay Poets
Joe Flynn 

In this reading group, we’d be reading and discussing selected poems or short collections of poems written by 19th & 20th century poets who either identified as queer/gay/lesbian. Depending on interest, we could focus on North Americans like Whitman, Hart Crane, Auden, Elzabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, or others. My knowledge is limited so if you have a suggestion, feel free to let me know! I hope the conversation centers around appreciation for beauty in language-form and questions willing to explore how queer poets enter into the world, the past, historical, creatively, public and private.

Joe Flynn is a writer and artist living in Oakland, California. Born on the Central Coast, he loves the Oakland hills mostly because it reminds him of home. 

Destroying AI 
Jingyi Li
We know that generative AI is built on stolen artistic labor, pollutes the environment, and concentrates power and wealth under the guise of progress, but what can we do to counter the tech oligarchy? Moving through topics of history, power, labor, and global empire, we’ll read a mix of academic and non-academic literature to envision a future where humans collectively uproot the weeds of AI.

Jingyi Li (they/them) is an assistant professor of computer science at Pomona College, currently on sabbatical at UC Berkeley. Having returned back to the belly of the beast, Jingyi is excited to be in community with other people who wish to exterminate AI from bay area life. https://jingyi.me/ 

Eating Beef at The End of The World
Hanna Gregor
As the general cost of living rises around us, American public imagination is preoccupied with the cost of ground beef. How does a nation obsessed with protein forge ahead, as a world without drought, without stable global market economies, without cheap cattle on large tracts of land becomes less and less probable?  Through an omnivorous selection — poetry, agri-ecological journalism, speculative literature in translation, and excerpts from the excellent history of American beef production “Red Meat Republic” — we will discuss “what is beef??” and “who are we when we eat it”?

Hanna Gregor is a private chef and recipe tester. Now based in San Francisco, Gregor grew up spending summers on her family’s farm in upstate New York. 

Existential Dread
Nathaniel Page
Existential Dread performs table readings of dramatic works. Each participant will read one or more characters. The readings are about two hours in length. We focus on themes of loss, grief, dilemmas and the unknown. During this session, we will focus on several works by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. 

Nathaniel Page was born out of a cloud of cannabis smoke on a mountain in northern California. He leads a completely undistinguished life. He is most comfortable living in a construction site surrounded by sawdust and piles of boards. 

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Fat Liberation Camp: Unruly Bodies and Embodied Resistance
Talia Monet
How do we make sense of the increase in weight loss drug marketing, body surveillance tech, eating disorder internet subcultures and the proliferation of fitness centers as third spaces in relation to the rise of authoritarian fascism in our government? In this group we’ll consider a variety of historical and contemporary texts (internet memes, film, music, popular print media, literature) to explore what fascism is and how it impacts our bodies. Through reflection prompts and play we’ll imagine how we might redefine collective and individual health and wellbeing in the liberated communities we are creating beyond this moment of crisis. 

Talia Monet is a blackqueer nonbinary cultural worker, dancer and yoga instructor based in Oakland, CA. She situates her practice within the Black feminist tradition through a commitment to sustainability, healing justice, cultivation of communal art spaces, and study of the political stakes of making art at the end of empire. 

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for authentic relating
Flore Costumé
Read and reflect on the FIVE core skills listed in Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person’s Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically by Devon Price from a strength based lenses. Each week we will highlight a skill to expand on and practice in our lives. Contemplative practices will be offered to tone the group field and support self exploration!

Flore is a black nueroqueering Haitian artist living on unceded Ohlone Land. They are interested in uplifting and remembering our inherent connection with the Earth, our expansive selves, and each other. They are deepening with weaving and piloting the project Yon Bèl Lakou, as a practice of transmitting the Haitian cultural technologies anchoring them to life as a creative practice.

OFFSITE
Form, Desire, Embodiment: Revisiting New Narrative in the 21st Century
Srihari Nageswaran
This reading group revisits the queer and feminist experiments in narrative form that emerged from San Francisco’s New Narrative movement of the late 1970s through the 1990s alongside the questions it opens up about desire, pleasure, and labor’s claim on the body. We’ll read foundational texts by Robert Glück and Dodie Bellamy, theoretical touchstones such as Silvia Federici’s “On Sexuality As Work” (1975) and Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), as well as excerpts from precursor and contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and film by Anaïs Nin, Amia Srinivasan, Gregg Araki and others. 
Srihari Nageswaran (he/him) is a doctoral student in anthropology at UC Berkeley, where he works on organized labor, foreign investment, and regional development in South Asia. He lives in Oakland.

Friendship on Film
leena joshi
Over four weeks we will watch four films on friendship, and gather to talk about what we see in the films and in our lives. What are the dimensions of friendship, and how do we each define or experience being friends? How does friendship figure into our political consciousness, our ideas of joy, or change, or survival? What place does it have in our ideas of romance and love? in cohabiting? does friendship feel grounded or challenged by place, such as in the bay area? Come chat film and make a friend along the way :)

leena joshi is an artist, poet, and educator working between poetry, digital media, sculpture, and performance. They work designing and facilitating free youth video and media making programs at the Bay Area Video Coalition, and live on unceded Huichin Ohlone land (Oakland, CA).

OFFSITE
Glitch Feminism
Naira Diptee
A group where we will be reading and discussing “Glitch Feminism” by Legacy Russell in four parts over four weeks. This text is part art manifesto, part cultural essay, and part memoir about the idea of a “glitch” as a pathway for queer and racial liberation, as well as radical gender self-determination. 

As queer artists of color what does it mean to “glitch” within a system not built with us in mind? How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?”

Naira Diptee (she/they) is an Afro/Indo Caribbean-American artist and contemporary arts professional currently based in Oakland, CA. With a deep connection to her roots, her passion is nurturing the arts community, supporting artists of all disciplines, and advocating for artists; especially those of the Global South, the Caribbean and its diasporas. She views learning and artmaking as lifelong project, and is constantly reading, writing, and engaging in dialogue about the arts and its role in our everyday lives.

ONLINE
From art to ART©
Pia Schneider 
What does art do to a society — and what does a society do to art? These will be the leading questions for this 4-week reading group. We’ll pair old texts in the philosophy of art with new ones: Immanuel Kant with Sianne Ngai, who makes the case that “zany,” “cute,” and “interesting” — not Kant’s “beauty” and “sublime” — are the aesthetic categories that actually run our commodified world; and Walter Benjamin with Hito Steyerl, who picks up Benjamin’s question about art in the age of mass reproduction and pushes it into the age of digital media.
Pia is a philosopher located in the Bay Area. She recently finished her PhD at UC Berkeley where she spent the last 10 years thinking, writing, and teaching about thinking, Kant, art, and feminism. 


Grassroots Governance Structures…  for Dummies
Isaak Cagampang Heller, Thibault Irissou
How do grassroots social movements build progressive governance structures despite hostile corporations and governments? We will examine how organizing efforts build community power, how to pressure decision-makers into negotiations, and how adversaries attempt to suppress movements. Specific cases include unionization campaigns, land redistribution movements, and cooperative formation movements across a variety of countries.
As a labor movement researcher, Isaak maps employer structures in order to plan powerful strikes. He previously worked in Philippine peasant social movements resisting corporate land grabs.

Thibault is a software engineer, previously in green tech. He is now building tailoring software with the long-term goal of local, cooperative production.

ONLINE
Hackers
Claire Mullen
What is hacking? Who are hackers? Why do they do what they do? These questions form the starting point of our investigation into the reality and myths of hacking through its representation in film. Beginning in the era before personal computers and working up to the present, this reading group will touch on themes of inter-connectivity, anonymity, cyberpunk culture, whistleblowers, surveillance, war, terrorism, and both past and present conceptions of technology and the future.

Claire Mullen is a producer, editor, and archivist of images, words, and audio. In 2025 she earned a masters in film preservation and audiovisual archive studies from the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. 

Hailing to the guardians of the watchtowers of the north
Kelly Egan
This group will read texts that both imagine and encounter the north—as directional symbol, geographical rumor, immediate physical encounter, ecological indicator, and creative muse. We will ask the question, what is desire for northernness made of and how does it meet with encounters of northernness? A question of the journey being both inner and outer.
We will read excerpts and fragments from ancient and modern texts across genre potentially including Strabo’s Geography, Pytheas’ On the Ocean, Friedtof Nansen’s Farthest North, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and Leslie Harrison’s Blue Pearl, and Roni Horn’s Iceland Zombie.

Kelly Egan is the author of the poetry chapbooks Millennial, Vagar, and A Series of Septembers. Her full-length collection, Myth of Day, a poetic wander consulting the oracle of north, is forthcoming with White Stag on Imbolc, 2027. Kelly has participated in writing residencies in Iceland and the Peruvian Amazon and lives for taking the longer route. Find her at kellyjeanegan.com.

In Limbos: 
Reading The Undercommons
Peach Kander
Together we will read Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, alongside supplemental material that we will collectively decide on. My thought is to read and discuss the text in relation to the practice of building networks and nodes between the rigidities of institutions and structures - how that feels, what the opportunities and challenges are, methods for reclamation and redistribution of their resources, and what is available outside/under/between these “gaps.”

Peach Kander is a queer poet and dioramist. They are currently in an ongoing collaboration, writing libretto for Opera Lab Berlin. Their writing has appeared in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books), bæst, Sporklet, Peach Mag, Landfill Journal, Fugue, No, Dear, Dream Pop, In The Mood Magazine, Bombay Gin, and American Chordata. 
Measuring the waters we swim in
Michelle L
Reading about how the ineffable continuous world is counted, measured, sensed, discretized, datafied, visualized, narrated and controlled, sampling from works in data visualization, media theory, automation, economic theory, cybernetics, systems theory.

Michelle is a writer and newcomer to the west coast interested in the history of cybernetics and its integration into science, culture, management, and economics.

Madness & Civilization
Anastasia Chernysheva
In Madness and Civilization (1961), Michel Foucault traces how “madness” went from something medieval and Renaissance societies lived alongside to something confined, medicalized, and spoken for only through psychiatric discourse — a discourse that didn’t just describe unreason but produced the categories of rational subjecthood still used to decide who counts as free, competent, or dangerous. We’ll extend this history to how race, gender, and class shape today’s production and pathologization of socio-economic precarity in the US.

Anastasia Chernysheva Hi there, I’m a scholar and curator specializing in the cultural reception of neurotechnology and the mediation of knowledge about the brain and mental life through art. If you’d like to learn more about my work, check out Cybersentics Book Club and Library at Gray Area. Looking forward to picking your brain on the topic!

ONLINE
New Life in the Public Domain
Jessi Haley
While we see the same famous older books constantly revisited in popular culture, there are many more that we don’t already know waiting to be rediscovered by readers and people looking for inspiration for their own projects. This reading group will explore literature from the public domain that is weird, surprising, prescient, funny, and bold—by authors whose identities and experiences don’t match what we think of when we consider who wrote “the classics.” All readings will be accessible online for free; we’ll also look at other artworks (film, visual art, etc.) and some contemporary works adapted from or inspired by public domain materials.
Jessi Haley is the editorial director of feminist open access publishing project Cita Press (citapress.org). She has edited several new editions of work by essential women writers of the past, including writers who have been long neglected. She is the author of the monthly newsletter Cita Press Bulletin (citapress.substack.com), which explores the history of feminist literature, art, and technology. 


OFFSITE
Painting Support 
Ali Vaughan
Painters! Feeling burdened by the demands of your own work, the questions posed by an expanded field of contemporary and historical art criticism, and the general weight of history? This group is designed as a space for local painters to convene and discuss some of the questions and issues surrounding painting today. We will attempt to address seminal and provocative modern and contemporary texts on art to situate ourselves and our work, finding a new way forward.

Ali Vaughan is an artist based in Richmond, California. She was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, and received dual BA degrees in Art Practice and Art History from Stanford University in 2019. She regularly works between mediums of oil painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through process-based abstraction, her work examines notions of place and identity.


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Playthings: Reading Dolls in Contemporary Literature
Kristina Ten
Dolls have a stronghold on our imaginations long after childhood. Far more than decorative collector’s items, they have served as grief and memorial objects, surrogate children and caretakers, and lasting representations of beauty standards, bodily autonomy, and the strange, permeable barrier between the inanimate and the living. They comfort us! They freak us out! This reading group will examine the role of dolls (along with puppets, action figures, mannequins, and more) in recent fiction and nonfiction—beyond harmful objectification and easy nostalgia, and toward the doll motif’s potential for subversion and reclamation.
Kristina Ten is the author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine (2025, Stillhouse Press). Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus Award, and the Conjunctions Residency. Ask her about her complicated relationship with the popular ‘90s plush toy, Doodle Bear.


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Poetics of Irony 
Scout Faller
The moment we discern a statement’s irony is the moment we replicate the unspoken interests and predilections that form its “underlying truth.” This is easily registered in a medium like film, with exploitable distance between what we hear and what is projected, seen. But how is irony established a poem? And is it fixed? In this reading group, we’ll examine irony as a complicated agreement between reader and speaker, a structure composed on the fly. We will look at criticism and essays alongside poetry that flips in and out of this register, including works by Violet Spurlock, Wayne C. Booth, David Foster Wallace, Catullus, Trisha Low, Kai Ihns, Steve Orth, and Natalie Shapero. There will be opportunities for participants to generate and share writing along the way.
Scout Faller is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Poetry. They have been published in Antiphony, Coma, blush, Little Mirror, and Transat’ with poems forthcoming in  Rampage Party Press. They are rarely bored.



OFFSITE
Queer Love Letters Salon
Mim Shafer & Noelle Armstrong
Queer Love Letters Salon is a reading group in the truest sense: we show up and read out loud to each other. Printed materials provided (no preparation required). Children & babbly babies welcome. Parents, caretakers, busy organizers, and notorious book club slackers, come feel something with us.

A tight one hour with the promise of a spark of inspiration, heady lust, lesbian pining, and the ambiguity of epistolary communication (straight scholars “aren’t sure” but we are…).

If you or your household feels sick, catch us the next time!
Former housemates, current milfs; Mim & Noelle are eager to be your tour guides through pining and posturing on the page.