Publications
My San Francisco
By Gordon Ball
January 1, 2020
Tags Occasional Publications
40 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-937370-32-9 ($15)
Gordon Ball first saw San Francisco as a small child, traveling there by train with his Ohio River Valley family to join his father in Japan after his narrow escape from Shanghai before Mao Zedong took it. In My San Francisco he recounts incidents and experiences from family furlough visits in the City of Hills every few years, followed by hitchhiking there in the war-torn 1960s and embarking on a six-month stay a few years later, the culmination of a cross-country journey with poet Allen Ginsberg—a stay marked by a failed love affair and the start of a lifelong friendship. My San Francisco, a large format chapbook with several photographs including two by the photographer author, is both a highly personal memoir of and tribute to the city, vitalized by imagistic gists and brief encounters melded with longer narratives; it is, as some readers have celebrated it, “honest,” “brave,” and “beautiful.”
Author Bio: Gordon Ball edited Allen Verbatim and two volumes of journals with Allen Ginsberg. He’s the author of three memoirs (’66 Frames, Dark Music, and East Hill Farm) and a volume of short stories, On Tokyo’s Edge. His films and photographs have been shown and acclaimed widely. He’s currently at work on a half-century of family history from the Ohio River through 1920s Shanghai to prison camp World War II. He teaches at Washington and Lee University and with his wife Kathleen lives outside Lexington, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley.
