I love San Diego for the weather.  Don’t you? 

But this city is so much more…

I love San Diego because of the people who live here:  The women who work at La Jolla Dry Cleaners, my favorite English teacher at Mesa College, my mailman, the Firefighters, your mom, the regulars at the restaurant I worked at for too many years, Sarah, Will, Bobby, Stacey, Tony…so many of you. 

I love San Diego for the local artists.  The bands that play any night of the week.  At the Ould Sod, Beauty Bar, Twiggs.  CityFest, Street Scene, Pride, The Little Italy Art Walk.  The Hillcrest Book Fair.  The artists who inspire and are inspired by our city.  Art.  Books.  San Diegans.

I love San Diego for our restaurants and bars:  Turf Club, Mamma Mia, Ono Sushi, The Linkery, Pizza Port, Neighborhood, The Casbah, Belly Up, House of Blues, Canes, Whistlestop, Hamiltons.

I love San Diego for the neighborhoods:

The darkness in Golden Hill in the evening is loud.  Noises talking screaming a car door slams sirens music “frank over here” and occasional helicopters.  The buildings tell stories from the outside in, of families lost and ideas born and ghosts.  Always ghosts.

The toilet runs.  The landlord needs to fix it.  The fan is set on medium as the sounds of the street grumble and spew outside the windows and walls.  In Golden Hill there are no diamonds or Bloomingdales or mansions with loud expensive parties.  Instead, dive bars with eclectic folks who exchange ideas and consume one another for entertainment.  Instead, men pee behind the 7-11 and the firemen close the garage door at night to avoid visitors. 

Women do not walk the street alone at night.  Those El Cajon Boulevard street walkers stick to their part of town.  Mostly. 

In the apartments that were once nice houses now split in threes or fours or seventeens, wood paneling, wood floors, fireplaces that work or don’t, a mess, a love, a desire to build. 

At sunset, the glance towards The Gaslamp, described, as layered in thick buildings, tinker toys, legos built up, smashed and rebuilt again.  Old men and layers.  The needy and abused.  The debt.  The credit.  The park.  Frisbee.  Volleyball.  The lovers of central San Diego.  Art fairs.  Notions of offering what one can give to help.  “Screw yous,”  “Ok thens,”  tourists and you.  In my bed.  Again.  I sleep in.  The darkness of Golden Hill.

Abbie

Abbie Berry is inspired by our city every day.  She wants to know what you think and feel about San Diego.  Email her at creativecusp@gmail.com.

Our next workshop is coming up quick.

http://www.creativecusp.com/august/

We are pleased to have Joe Kane join us again as a Guest Writer. Joe, Jon and I will be focusing on Fiction and all of its pleasures:

• Characterization.
• Voice.
• The experimental.
• The concrete

And anything else in between.

Join us and help grow this community of San Diego writers.

Write on!

- Abbie

And it was a new day.

Our July workshop may be over but it is not forgotten.

Saturday :
1. Jon and I led an experiment in writing perspective, in which we took on the same subjects from two opposing viewpoints - introspective and what Jon calls ‘extraspective’. Some preferred the inward take, some the outward, but everyone had a favorite, and there were plenty of surprises.
2. Deniz Perin ran a section on Characterization, where we let the magic of Ocean Beach’s scene give us characters that we brought to life.
3. Jon tied into Deniz’s exercise with an experiment in audience consideration. He believes in writing for one person, and challenged us to narrow our own focus when writing to appeal strongly to a singular interest, rather than trying to please everyone.
4. Deniz led us on an archaeological expedition into OB where we unearthed modern relics and fictionalized their history. How did it get here, and why, and who brought it?
5. I led the final exercise of the day, in which we faced our worst fears and turned them into fictionalized absurdities.

On Sunday we were joined by guest writer Jenny Minniti-Shippey.

Sunday :
1. “Thieves in the Grass” was Jenny’s first exercise. We took lines from poems that we love and melded them with our own to form new poems.
2. Deniz challenged us to “draw the landscape.” Many of us were inspired by the ocean, the pier or the sand. I personally described the palm tree we were under - “…the bark of the tree does not have the initials of couples in love etched into it. It might, but not today.”
3. Jenny’s second challenge was to create a “how to” list, explaining how to do simple things : eating potato chips, doing a push up, lifeguarding the beach.
4. Jenny showed us how to utilize the strong voice from the Biblical chapter of Genesis to create our own authoritative pieces - And it was good.
5. Jon led an editing exercise that he called “Pass the Rock”, in which we took suggestions made by our fellow writers and dove into the process of editing our favorite piece from the weekend.

Our participating writers had good things to say!

Steve said, “Thank you for a great weekend workshop! Very inspiring!”

Nicole said, “As an inexperienced writer, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the workshop. I was pleasantly surprised. I found it to be fun, interesting and challenging.”

Amen.

We are currently planning our August weekend which will be held the weekend of August 23rd and 24th. Please, take the next step in your writing career and join us!

The second-ever Creative Cusp workshop is this weekend, July 19th and 20th. There is still time to sign yourself (and your friends) up for two days of free-writing exercises led by experienced writers and publishers :

Abbie Berry

Jon Oropeza

Deniz Perin

Jenny Minniti-Shippey

Ocean Beach is ready for us. The grass, the blankets, chairs and towels, our little selves spewing words and ideas. I’m excited!

Jon and I are looking forward to meeting everyone. Deniz will be back from her time abroad and Jenny has been excited about joining us for quite some time. It’s a win/win.

So bring your journal and be ready to write. We’ll use the heat, the people, the setting and our hearts to come up with new ideas and new characters.

Are you ready?

- Abbie is a co-founder of The Creative Cusp and believes that words are the answer to sanity. So write people! Write!

I get you to lunch and pitch you with my next big idea.

“Dude,” I say, “I’ve got this great idea for a cafe. It’ll be just like a Starbucks. We’ll serve all the same drinks. Lots of milk and sugar bombs, high caff. Skimp a little on the coffee, cause who cares, right? Well-lit. Jazz on in the background. Cute little tables and couches. Modern look. And I’m going to open right next to a Starbucks, too! Only it won’t be Starbucks, it’ll be Jonbucks. I even drew my own green mermaid. Only it looks more like a manatee. What do you think?”

You’re a friend of mine. What are you going to tell me? Good luck? Or are you going to try to talk me out of it? I mean, it sounds pretty preposterous, right? A fake Starbucks, right next to the real thing? Who’s going to go there?

If you were a good friend you’d slap me silly and tell me not to quit my day job.

What I want to know is this : Why aren’t we good friends to our fellow writers?

Why do we encourage our friends to write the next Great American Memoir? Why don’t we tell them to write it to a focused audience? Why do we tell them, hey, finish it, print out a dozen copies and send it to all the big houses? Because you never know! Maybe your Starbucks will be even more Starbucksy than the real Starbucks!

Yeah right.

I’m writing this from Caffe Calabria. There’s a Bucks just down Uni and another just up 30th. And yet Calabria is packed. Could it be because Calabria, instead of trying to be Starbucks, has made a hard choice on who its target audience is? And, having defined who it wants and needs to be, it’s able to focus on being the best possible coffee house for that audience?

It’s an idea…

- Jon O

Jon Oropeza is a local writer, an enthusiast of San Diego fiction and a contributor to the Creative Cusp project.

The first ever Creative Cusp workshop on June 21 & 22 was a great success. Thank you to all of the participating writers who joined us in the Ocean Beach heat.

Here’s a sample of some of the writing exercises we worked on:

I sent us adventuring around Ocean Beach on a mission to snare an overheard fragment of dialogue, haul it back and use it as the basis for brewing up a short piece. I also had us conjure up an alternative ending to a chapter from a best-selling novel.

Jon Oropeza launched his series called “Kill Your Babies” with an exercise he claimed was “borrowed from a drawing class.” We also teamed up on an experiment in introspective and extraspective writing.

“Great dialogue is about two people having a disagreement,” Joe Kane led both dialogue and flash fiction exercises. We were challenged to tell an entire story in the length of one page.

Billy Hughes invited us to borrow and expound upon a line from verse found in books of poetry that he brought with him. The exercise prompted Joe to remark that “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Billy also challenged us to take on the same situation from multiple points of view, writing the same scene from first, second, and third person perspectives.

Words were written onto the page and that was our biggest goal. The Ocean Beach setting brought interesting objects and characters to us as we sat and shared ideas.

Participating writer Brooke R. said, “I loved writing and participating in the workshop. I felt inspired. I appreciated the feedback on my work. What a great weekend!”

That’s what we want to hear. Write on Brooke!

Hey Abbie, what can I expect this weekend?

We will be writing. Be ready to write.

I am very excited about this weekend. Jon, Joe, Bill and I met on Monday night and devised a very interactive weekend for y’all.

Since this is our first workshop, we will probably be a fairly small group. Participation will be key. If you know of someone who may want to attend, please have them contact us. It is not too late

How to prepare for the Creative Cusp weekend workshop:

Bring clothing that you will be comfortable in. Be ready for all weather possibilities even though it will probably be warm all day.

Please bring a blanket or a towel to sit on. You can bring a chair if it is low to the ground.

We will provide bottled water and a light snack on Saturday. Lunch is not scheduled until 1:00 p.m. You will have an hour for your lunch break and there are many places to eat within walking distance of our scheduled meeting area.

Please bring a journal or a pad of paper to write in/on. We will not be able to plug in, so please do not plan on using a laptop during the workshop.

Don’t forget sunscreen.

Saturday is scheduled to come to a close around 4:00 p.m.

On Sunday at 11:00 a.m., you will have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with any of our Guest writers. We’ll tell you more about that when we see you.

Sunday’s workshop will begin at noon and will end by 5:00 p.m.

There will not be a scheduled lunch break on Sunday. You are welcome to bring a lunch with you if you wish.

Be ready for the expected and the unexpected. We will be walking, moving and talking through Ocean Beach.

We cannot wait to meet you.

- Abbie

We’re so excited about the first Creative Cusp workshop coming up next weekend!

This project has taken over my life and I love it. Working with Jon Oropeza is a blast. He’s talented, smart and he cracks me up. We have both been spending a lot if time promoting The Creative Cusp: putting up fliers, talking to people, hanging out with other writers, writing blogs, adding friends to Myspace and Facebook. Spreading the love. Busy but loving it.

We would like to thank everyone who has shown interest in the Cusp and we value your support.

We’re fortunate to have two interesting and creative Guest writers for our first workshop. Billy Hughes has his MFA in Creative Writing from SDSU, with an emphasis in Poetry. He teaches English and Writing and works in the SDSU library. Billy resides in Ocean Beach, surfs and is a genuine, nice guy.

Joe Kane is a freak and I mean that in the best way. I love Joe Kane and you will as well as soon as you meet him. Joe has his MFA in Creative Writing from SDSU, with an emphasis in Fiction. Joe is originally from Ohio, but don’t let that fool you; he is a part of San Diego now.

We are also going to be honored to have Jenny Minniti-Shippy and Deniz Perin as Guest writers in July.

Looking forward to seeing all of you next weekend.

Write on.

Abbie

Abbie Berry is the founder of The Creative Cusp. She writes short fiction as well as teaching and coaching other writers. She lives on, loves on and loves Golden Hill.

To my fellow San Diego lovers, artists and especially writers :

My friends, we are not well.

We have a bad reputation. They call us a Navy Town. Just a Tourist Town. Just a playpen for wealthy LAistas, a Party Town. We don’t even have a real downtown, we have Disneyland-South, with bums and parking issues. We’re commodity - Sea World, The Zoo, Pacific Beach, Mission Bay, a sunny day and a speedbump on the way to Baja. Even our baseball team sucks.

I take trips. “Oh, you’re from San Diego?” someone in Seattle, or Boston, or Bangkok will say to me. “Yeah, that’s a nice place. I spent some time there back in the (choose your decade)s… great weather. Loved the beaches. What’s the name of that big park again?” Sometimes it feels like half the country’s done some time here, pissed away a part of their twenties hanging at the beach, left with pleasant memories tinged with the odor of cling wrap. Everybody knows San Diego… the way everybody knows George Clooney, or Cate Blanchett. You start talking about Hillcrest, North Park, Golden Hill, Clairemont, they look at you like you’re talking about the moon.

I hang in our cafes, our bars. Hear the same crap ad nauseum - “Yeah but if this was New York…”, “It’s so much better in Chicago”, “Like, in LA, this place would be…” All these unwinnable comparisons, like we’re a small town in provincial France and since nothing’s Paris then nothing’s nothing. “Des Moines with a beach” - you heard that one? “Orange County South.”

And I’m not going to slip us off the hook - We deserve some blame. Let’s be honest - All in all, we do a lousy job of telling our story. I mean us, not the government. Those bureaucrats do a fantastic job of marketing - marketing by way of Don’t Rock The Boat. You know, America’s Finest City and all that. It’s hard to blame them. It’s what they’re elected to do - maintain status quo, make Ma and Pa from Kansas comfy during their stay. It’s our fault. We’re the artists here. We ought to be adding to the story. But we’re not.

Don’t mistake this for a blanket indictment. I see and hear and read wonderful things being produced in our city. And in music and the visual arts there’s some fine adoration for San Diego going on. But where are the words?

Few and far between. As far as I can tell, they’re either a) not being written or b) not being marketed well. The latter may as well be the former

Actually, there’s a c), isn’t there? Maybe the idea of writing about San Diego isn’t being marketed well…

I think that we think that we can’t sustain ourselves. We’re dreaming so far, so wide. We’re lusting over the screenplay we’ll sell in Hollywood, over penning the Great American Novel in a New York City penthouse, over being on Oprah and getting rich by writing Barbara Kingsolver with an attitude or Candace Bushnell with a SoCal angle or Hemingway meets Thomas Pynchon meets Holden Caulfield. Everyone wants to build a hardware store to compete with Home Depot, and five years later, when they realize they’ll never be able to compete at that scale, they drift away. There’s little to no notion of writing local, for a local audience -

Yeah, we’ve got a rep. Yeah, people come here to party and play, to spend their twenties messing around before moving back home, or up to San Francisco where VC firms dole out millions to every turkey who can figure out how to install Wordpress and get Join Our Alpha List! between a pair of h1 braces. But you know what? There’s a million people here. This is A City. I feel like we have to continually remind ourselves of it… As I write this I’m on my way to Port Orchard, WA for a week’s vacation. Population 7,600. Too small to support a literary journal. But San Diego? There’s a million of us! You sell a million copies of your next book, would you consider that a success? If not, why not? How many readers do you need?

What if there were ten thousand really really interested people who wanted to buy your next book? And you made five dollars a book. And you wrote one book a year. And those ten thousand people loved your book so much that they convinced ten thousand more people to buy your book, because your book is about them, and their city, and heck they’re just about in the darn thing!

The soil is so rich. Come take a walk with me…

Meet me in North Park. Go into Caffe Calabria on 30th and get a macchiato that’s as good as anything you’ll get in Seattle, let alone SF. Go down a few blocks to the Linkery and talk to Jay Porter about eating local and being a good citizen. On the way you’ll notice one of the most interesting phenomena in our city - the exact place where the eastbound wave of development money broke and has even started to subside a bit. After you fatten and drink to your fill at The Link, walk down to Hamilton’s and throw a few more beers in you. Between the two you won’t find a better beer selection, not even in San Francisco’s best. Sit at the bar, talk to your fellow man and woman. You never know who you might meet - maybe a writer, maybe a lover, maybe someone to go singing in the streets with, shouting about politics or philosophy or Rimbaud. Think of it as your civic duty! Who knows - enough intelligent shouting at 3AM and we might even get a reputation as an Intellectual Town… wouldn’t that be a nice change?

But it’s not just Uptown that needs your love. Walk around Mission Valley sometime - I mean park your ride and walk. Stroll around condotown down there. There’s real people there. It’s not just the SUV / cube farm set. I saw a girl just the other day in one of those condos. She was working on a big canvas in the light of her second story window. Painting our city - a part of our city. Her part.

Or go up to Serra Mesa, drive into the old burbs and dig the neighbors being neighbors, the big boats parked on cracked driveways, the crusty husbands mowing the lawns in their garish yellow early 80s T Gwynn jerseys. Yeah, that’s San Diego too. Then go down Convoy St. and eat at the diviest Vietnamese joint you can find. That’s our city too!

I’m not a doctor, I don’t even play one on TV. I’m a writer, a cobbler of words. I don’t give medicines for illnesses, I don’t write prescriptions, I’m not in cahoots with Big Pharma or Big Lit. I’m also not a rant-writer. There’s enough of those out there. Easiest thing in the world - to tear a thing down. I’m a builder. My tools are love, are rough shoves and hard elbows. As well as warm hugs and well-intentioned kisses.

So this is a kiss, San Diego. To make you feel better, cause you’re looking a little blue. I hope you like slobbery, and don’t mind a little tongue.

There’s much more to come - from Abbie, from myself, from the other writers who are getting involved in this project. I hope you will too.

Come on, she’s cuter than you think. Put your arm around her, throw her head back and slip her some tongue…

- Johnny O

Jon Oropeza is a local writer, an enthusiast of San Diego fiction and a contributor to the Creative Cusp project.