The Landmark Revelation Society
Bodegas and Bougainvillea

The unofficial but constantly-used crosswalk… The bodega with the good honey… The lost dog sign that no one ever takes down, all the phone numbers still attached… The gum on the sidewalk that takes the shape of granddad’s profile on the way to work, of an oak tree on the way back… The bougainvillea that blooms, fades, and falls at the last turn for home… The curtain that flutters out a crack of second-story window even when there’s no wind....

Our lives are filled with landmarks.

We rely on them as heralds of our homecoming in a world with too few parades. They are our companions on a path seemingly solitary, yet we often pass them by without acknowledgment. Recognizing our own landmarks brings us to ourselves, to where our feet hit the cement, to here. Sharing these landmarks with others lifts us from this spot and catapults us into community. The Landmark Revelation Society holds all landmarks dear, from the personal to the official, from the temporal to the permanent. It is the Society’s mission that every landmark be honored and witnessed and the Society calls on you now, to join The Revelation.

While every Invisible City Audio Tour is about seeing what has always been with new eyes, Tour V, The Landmark Revelation Society, brings Tourists even closer to what is unknown in the familiar by revealing a shared landscape populated by landmarks of each contributing author’s choosing. Previous Invisible City Tours have moved along dictated routes through distinct neighborhoods. The Landmark tour, featuring award-winning writers from Los Angeles and New York, will allow Invisible City Tourists to choose their own path, be it an unexplored route or a favored walk. As the stories are told, the authors’ landmarks overlie those on the Tourists’ actual path, revealing what was always and never there before.

Since Landmark Tourists choose their own route, they will be encouraged to print, draw, knit, or otherwise devise their own maps, including on them their personal landmarks. In lieu of the maps usually provided, Invisible City will offer Landmark Revelation kits. Kits will come complete with icons that Tourists can affix to their maps at intervals along their routes as well as stencils for Tourists to use to mark the actual places where the imaginary intersects the real (within the bounds of the law).  

The Landmark Revelation Society begins with these Revelationists but their number will grow. The Landmark tour allows Invisible City Audio Tours to join with loved writers from outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and will be the first in a series of Landmark Tours that will bring together not only non-localized authors but non-localized Tourists, creating connection across barriers cardinal and digital in a landscape of their own imagining.

The Society

Producer: Tavia Stewart-Streit
Curator: Tupelo Hassman
Director: LJ Moore
Composer: Jesse Solomon Clark

The East Coast Revelationists

THORN KIEF HILLSBERY
Described by Outside magazine as a “renowned outdoorsman,’ while still in his early ‘twenties, Kief Hillsbery began his writing career as a rock climber living in a tent in Yosemite’s celebrated Camp 4. His first features appeared in the large-format pages of the eclectic, influential Mountain Gazette. He became a field correspondent for Outside soon after its founding by Jann Wenner, and also published articles in Backpacker, Adventure Travel, and Cross-Country Skier before joining Outside full-time as an editor and columnist as well as writing feature articles for Rolling Stone, California, Geo, and other magazines. His first novel, War Boy was published by HarperCollins and his second novel, What We Do Is Secret, published by Villard (Random House), was a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award in fiction. He currently is completing Empire Made, a memoir about a quest for family history in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Kief Hillsbery received his B.A. degree from the Evergreen State College and his M.F.A. from Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

JAIME MANRIQUE
Jaime Manrique is a Colombian born novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who has written both in English and Spanish, and whose work has been translated into many languages. Among his publications in English are the novels Colombian Gold, Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, and Our Lives Are the Rivers; the volumes of poetry My Night with Federico García Lorca; Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus; and the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His honors include Colombia’s National Poetry Award, 2007 International Latino Book Award (Best Novel, Historical Fiction), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Manrique was associate professor in the MFA program in writing at Columbia University (2002-2008), and he has also taught in the MFA programs in writing at Long Island University and Rutgers University. Mr. Manrique has just completed Cervantes Street, a novel.

SARA MARCUS
Sara grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where she attended Riot Grrrl meetings, wrote a zine, and joined her first punk rock band. Since then, she's lived in a 64-person vegetarian co-op in Ohio, an anarchist utopian community in Philadelphia, an urban homestead in upstate New York, and several friends’ spare rooms in Portland, Oregon, as well as an array of Brooklyn lofts and apartments. She's written about music and politics for numerous publications, including Slate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Out New York, The Forward, and Heeb magazine, where she was politics editor for five years; her poetry has appeared in Encyclopedia, EOAGH, Tantalum, and The Art of Touring, and her catalogue essay for sculptor Wade Kavanaugh was published in 2008. Sara has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 2008 and 2009. She's taught at girls’ rock camps in Portland and New York, has played drums and keyboards in a long string of relatively short-lived bands, and she continues to instigate communal, de-skilled music making whenever possible.

KATHLEEN MILLER
Kathleen Miller is a poet and social worker who lives in Brooklyn.  Her work has been featured in publications such as HOW2, Jacket, Faux Press’ Bay Poetics Anthology, Matrix Magazine and Shifter Magazine.  Her chapbook, The Weather is Happening All Around Us, was published by Delirium Press in 2006.

ALAN ZIEGLER
Alan Ziegler received a B.S. from Union College and a Masters in Creative Writing from City College of New York.  His grants and awards include a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Beat Fiction Book Award (selected by George Plimpton), four PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, a CAPS (Creative Artists in Public Service) fellowship, and NEA and New York State Council on the Arts grants for Some literary magazine and Release Press, which he co-edited. He has taught at Teachers and Writers Collaborative, the Poetry Society of America, Interlochen Arts Academy, Bronx Community College, and for Poets-in-the-Schools.  His books include The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes; The Green Grass of Flatbush (stories); So Much To Do (poems); The Writing Workshop, Volumes I and II; and The Writing Workshop Note Book.  His work has appeared in such places as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Party Train: An Anthology of New American Prose Poetry, The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Village Voice, Carolina Quarterly, Sun, and Creative Writing in America.  He is a recipient of Columbia University’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and from 2001-2006 he was chair of the Writing Division.

The West Coast Revelationists

VICKI FORMAN
Vicki Forman holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. for the University of California at Irvine.  Her memoir, This Lovely Life, is the winner of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize and other of her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and has appeared in the Seneca Review and the Santa Monica Review as well as the anthologies, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs, This Day: Dairies From American Women, and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined.  She lives in Southern California with her husband and daughter.

BRIDGET HOIDA
Bridget, who waggles her left foot when she writes, lives and works in the “other OC,” an imaginary subdivision off the coast of southern California. In a past life she was a librarian, a DJ, a teacher of high school journalism and a ghostwriter. In this life she experiments with fiction, sings short songs about donkeys in Quebec, walks a small dog, and has taught writing at UC Irvine and the University of Southern California.

JIM KRUSOE
Jim Krusoe’s first novel Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press, and his others, Girl Factory, Erased, and Toward You, by Tin House Books. He has also written five books of poems, and two books of stories, Blood Lake, and Abductions. His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, the Chicago Review, the Denver Quarterly, the Iowa Review, Field, the North American Review, the American Poetry Review, and the Santa Monica Review, which he began in 1988.  His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and Manoa. His novel, Parsifal, is scheduled for publication in 2012.

SUSAN MCCABE
Susan McCabe was born on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and received her PhD at UCLA. She also taught and conducted research in her mother’s country of Sweden. She directed the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program (2006-2009), and has been President of the Modernist Studies Association. She is currently an editor for the poetry series of University of California Press. She is the author of four books, including two critical studies—Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State University Press, 1994) and Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005)—and two poetry volumes, Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003), and Descartes’ Nightmare, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize (Utah University Press in 2008). McCabe received a Beinecke Fellowship at Yale, was awarded the Provost’s “Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and the Sciences” (2007-8) to focus upon Bryher’s myriad “triangles” within modernism and is simultaneously finishing another book of poems, Fates, a collection focused upon the voices of the dead as they intermingle with the living, and the uneasy companions of contemporary technology and ecopoetics.