Essays

It's probably the closest thing to Hogwarts you’ll experience in SF Hidden away among San Francisco's Victorians of the foggy Inner Richmond district, the veteran bookstore seems delightfully bewitched. Staircases go every which way; rooms appear out of thin air; hidden depths and archives unfold before your very eyes.  Ever-expanding, it’s a place of endless wonder.  For many years, a bonus storefront — the Annex — was squeezed, almost invisibly, between two other shops along the sidewalk. Blink, and you could miss it: a treasure trove of magazines, graphic novels, and stacks and stacks of genre paperbacks.  While the main store always felt like the main event, the Annex held a special place: a tucked-away spot for the especially perceptive, a Room of Requirement for those seeki...

A three-part series about my upbringing and growing up... to see a new version of Black San Francisco During the great migration, my grandmother and her siblings sojourned with thousands of Black families. In hopes of escaping Jim Crow laws of the South, hundreds of Black folks packed up their lives in search of the promise of a better life in California. The shipyards and factories were full of jobs that could create a new reality for themselves. During the 70s in the Ingleside neighborhood where my grandparents and their siblings resided, the population was 60% Black. San Francisco used to be bustling with Black-owned businesses in the 70s and 80s according to my mother. My aunts and cousins living either in my grandmother’s Ingleside home would each know how to clean a kitchen to ...

Weighing the cost of staying anchored to the Bay Area. When I turned thirty, I moved to a boat in the Berkeley Marina. This was not the accommodation I'd imagined for myself at this age, but owning or even renting in the Bay Area felt out of reach. At a couple of hundred dollars a month and boasting views of the bay, the slip in the marina was a steal. The downside about life in the marina was my boat leaked. If I did not bail out the boat within forty-eight hours, the water would creep up from the unseen hollows and spill over the boat's carpeted floor. If I went away for more than a day, I would hold my breath at the marina gates, relief flooding me when I saw the blue sail covers, the boat gently rocking in the tide. Although the boat was old and only worth a few thousand dollars, i...