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Ariane Koek, Director of Arvon, asked me to write up some of my experiences from a recent trip to San Francisco.

“Imagine an Arvon writing house in San Francisco,” I thought as I walked around North Beach with Arvon writer and tutor, Julia Bell. San Francisco has had its fair share of big names in the world of words - John Steinbeck, Allen Ginsberg, Alice B. Toklas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac. Now it has Julia Bell and look, there’s Danielle Steele’s house! We walked for what felt like days. The hills in San Francisco are quite something to behold. You have to walk down them by stepping sideways, Julia said. Signs advise drivers how not to runaway with themselves. Hummingbirds fly around the parks, all hectic and uppity and beautiful. The fog is like an anti-duvet that the city pulls over its back, not keeping us warm.

Julia Bell wrote Dirty Work (Macmillan, 2007) to much praise. It’s not an easy topic, teenage sex trafficking, and I chatted with Julia about the quality of sex education in the UK, about writing for young adults and the need for greater conversations and openness to tough subjects. (Julia is tutoring our Writing for Young Adults course in October with Tony Bradman and Kevin Brooks.) We were sitting outside an internet café, It’s a Grind, on Polk – an eclectic, buzzing, typically San Franciscan street which, with long outstretched arms, manages to scoop around a hundred different types of shop and person. We’d just been into Polkadot Variety to buy an original Roosevelt-head pencil sharpener from the sixties. We’d seen it in the window. The woman behind the counter seemed sad, somehow, to be selling it.

Later in the week we stared up, in a large, close-knitted crowd, at a slightly anxious Miranda July (pictured above), as she climbed her way up a bookshelf in Modern Times bookstore. The place was heaving, the windows were all fogged up with book breath, faces peered through from the street. Sat in her chair on top of the bookshelf, Miranda July read two stories from her new collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. She admitted that she herself didn’t like being read to.

A few blocks down this street is Valencia 826, a writing centre for young people in San Francisco. (“Imagine an Arvon writing house in San Francisco!”) At the front is a pirate supply shop selling eye patches, pirate dice, flags, treasure and message-in-a-bottles. There’s even a mini-cinema with a fish-tank and cinema seats. You can just watch the fish with the big eyes for days. And if you were uninformed, or uncurious, perhaps you’d think that was it – another quaint boutique in San Francisco with random fish-cinema.

But Valencia 826 is Arvon in San Francisco. Because if you peer round the back, behind the till, through the hanging beads, you spot something like home, something very recognisable to anyone who’s been to an Arvon writing house. (Anyone can go on an Arvon writing course: we run a grants scheme to ensure that.) And what is that? A long wooden table, of course. Just like the long wooden tables at Arvon where the writing takes place, where the food is shared and eaten, where two people might bump into each other and have a life-changing conversation, where plots are twisted and new metaphors discovered. And look further still and you’d see the schedule of writing classes, the education outreach programme, the tutors, the 8-18 year olds writing, writing, writing! Valencia 826, set up by a contemporary of Miranda July’s - Dave Eggers, is one of six writing centres in the USA, working tirelessly and glamorously with imaginative flair and big respect for young writing.

I had to have another quick look at the fish.

Philip Cowell
Arvon Friends Co-ordinator

p.s. Miranda July is appearing at the Guardian Hay Festival on Sunday 3rd June 2007, in conversation with Marina Lewycka and Director of Arvon, Ariane Koek

Ange Drinnan wrote a poem about the Hurst, Arvon’s writing house in Shropshire.

Hurst May

A passover week: from the beginning, endings
hover, a flock of birds beating
their wings against Saturday.

Fears about death
of languages. Stories
of exile and surviving attack.

Memories imported across borders,
some smuggled, some stowed away.
Internal tyrants censor words.

I cross a border,
to Wales, with a wrong turn to Clun,
and wonder about being in between.

In between but part of a circle,
the face of a clock.
The spaces between the numerals still count.

Spanning the years, a family
tree of surprises, including Daddy long legs.
We sup wine and Shropshire bluebelled.

I picture us as a glowing
necklace of poems, each taking
a bright bead for the journey home.

You can read this poem and lots more  writing at the Arvon Friends website