Dialogue: Grotto Nights at the Library

How does writing across genres feed our imagination and strengthen craft? 

Cross-train your writing muscles at this month's Grotto Night at the Main Library. Novelist and professor Nina Schuyler leads a conversation with Xandra Maria Castleton, Matthew Clark Davison, and Devi S. Laskar as they discuss the commonalities between poetry, fiction, film, and more.    

Bios:

Xandra Castleton is a screenwriter, script consultant and educator whose scripts have been the basis for award-winning documentary and narrative film projects, among them an Emmy Award-winning profile of John Waters and a dramatic comedy, Full Grown Men, which won a Sundance Channel award prior to a theatrical release.

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author (with bestselling writer Alice LaPlante), of The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton ’25) and author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21). Matthew is a member of The Writers Grotto and has served on the board of Foglifter Journal and Press. Matthew is Emeritus Faculty in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Devi S. Laskar is a poet, novelist, visual artist, photographer, songwriter, and former newspaper reporter. Her debut poetry collection, Self-Portraits Ex Machina is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this fall. Laskar is the author of the award-winning novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, and recently, Circa. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War is forthcoming from Mariner Books (April 2026) and her first spoken-word album is coming winter 2025. 

Nina Schuyler’s story collection, In This Ravishing World, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her novel, Afterword, won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary. She teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies.

The Writers Grotto is a community of working writers and narrative artists who connect in physical and virtual space, pooling their talents to support each other, mentor and teach others, and engage the wider world. The Grotto fosters a literary culture that is generous in spirit and deeply inclusive, elevating writers of all backgrounds. 

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