Stories on Stage Sacramento

See our April performance:
Alia Volz | HOME BAKED: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco
Performed by Megan Smith

COMING NEXT: 5 p.m., May 28--author Nancy Johnson &
The Kindest Lie, details tba.

photo by Dennis Hearns

Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and winner of the 2020 Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Salon, The Best American Essays and The Best Women’s Travel Writing. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Ucross Foundation, and her family story has been featured on Snap Judgment, Criminal, and NPR’s Fresh Air.

A blazingly funny, heartfelt memoir from the daughter of the larger-than-life woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that distributed thousands of marijuana brownies per month and helped provide medical marijuana to AIDS patients in San Francisco—for fans of Armistead Maupin and Patricia Lockwood.

Megan Pearl Smith is an actor and musician based out of Davis, California. She's worked in productions at many theatres over her career such as Capital Stage, Sacramento Theatre Co., California Shakespeare Theater, Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, San Francisco Playhouse, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and many more.

She is also half of the band Misner & Smith that play their own brand of story-driven, harmony-filled, acoustic folk/rock music.

order a signed copy of Home Baked

Check out Sue Staats interview with Alia on the Stories on Stage blog!

May 1, 1:00 - 4:00 pm | Writing Workshop with Alia Volz
Memoir: The Art of Questioning Everything
Live via Zoom - Register via Eventbrite - $50

National Book Critics Circle finalist Alia Volz used to think personal writing had to begin with questions and end with answers—not unlike the essays we were taught to write in high school and college. Her breakthrough came with the realization that the most interesting moments in memoir happen when questions lead not to answers, but to more questions. Memories change and become unreliable. The book starts out investigating one thing, then shifts as the narrator’s worldview crumbles and new questions arise. Uncertainty becomes a plot device. This craft talk will explore relentless self-interrogation as the driving force behind contemporary personal essays and memoir. Volz will share practical tools, tips, and techniques for getting the most out of questions that refuse to be answered.

In this three-hour workshop, you will learn how to structure personal essay and memoir like a classic whodunit, using the core mystery and shape of popular crime fiction to make personal writing more exciting. Volz will deconstruct her award-winning essay “Snakebit” (The Best American Essays 2017) to show us how an evolving series of questions–and relentless interrogation–produces a winning plot. In-class exercises and discussion will focus on how to apply this technique to book-length memoir.

During the '70s in San Francisco, Alia's mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia's future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life.

Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town—and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple—in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia's stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers' distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS.

Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

order a signed copy of Home Baked!

Our 2021 Season

We'll begin with our special opening night partnership with 916 Ink and B Street Theater. Then you'll see work performed by authors Ellen Michaelson, Alia Volz, Nancy Johnson, Tod Goldberg, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Natashia Deon, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.
Stories on Stage Sacramento is publishing a fantastic collection of stories:
TWENTY TWENTY: A STORIES ON STAGE ANTHOLOGY.

Check the SOSS blog for Sue Staats' interview with April 30 featured author Alia Volz about her award-winning memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco
and Jessica Laskey's interview with April 30 featured actor Megan Pearl Smith
AND
Stay tuned for updates on our SOSS TWENTY TWENTY Anthology
43 stories from Northern California authors, including from SOSS friends and alums
Karen Bender,Joshua Mohr, Pamela Houston, Anita Felicelli, Debra Gwartney,
Sands Hall, Peter Owner, Joan Frank and Vanessa Hua

Find the books featured on Stories on Stage Sacramento at Capital Books on K, our local bookseller partner, and receive postcard-sized art of the bookstore and their neighbor, the Crest Theater. Free with your book(s). Heidi and Ross Rojek have been getting stories to readers in Sacramento and beyond much faster than the big guys during this crisis, so let's reward them for that!

In addition to mail order and curbside pickup, the store is now open, so you can browse again (appropriately masked of course!)

Capital Books & Crest Theater, by Kyle Thaw and his mother, Heidi Rojek. This beautiful artwork FREE with your book purchase!

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