These days, I'm consulting on book projects: fiction or nonfiction, proposals or manuscripts. I just edited a book, due out in a few months from UC Press, on some amazing species of ants--very fascinating. I advised a local novelist on her third book and am polishing a Jewish memoir. (Feel free to email for more info on what I do and for how much.) For ten years, I was the literary and arts editor at San Francisco magazine, the Bay Area's premier city and regional magazine. I assigned and edited feature stories and all the cultural coverage--essays on the arts, book, movie, theater, and music reviews--and wrote many pieces myself. (See links.) Now I'm a contributing writer. I also lead book groups at my local bookstore, Book Passage. We talk about a book during the first hour, then discuss it with the writer--Joyce Maynard, Mary Roach, Adam Hochschild, Daniel Alarcon, Elizabeth Rosner, to name a few--in the second hour. And recently, I "curated" a reading series at my friend Todd Hosfelt's classy art gallery in SoMa. He had a terrific show called More Stories; all the art had a narrative quality of some sort. I brought in five Bay Area authors (Barry Gifford, Yiyun Li, Daniel Alarcon, Jodi Angel, and Eric Puchner) to read from their work in that classy setting. I'm writing more myself these days, too. Ah, the literary life.