Wasted Author Gets Boost from Berkeleyside Interview, Plus Review from Berkeley Recycling Veteran
By John Byrne Barry
After an excellent turnout at Copperfield’s Books in San Rafael, my Wasted Author Tour went to Berkeley for a reading at Urban Ore on October 22 , and Mo’Joe Cafe on October 24. I am coming back to Marin on November 1 at the Tam Valley Cabin.
I had the good fortune this week to get an interview in Berkeleyside, a “local newspaper without the paper.” I presented a pretty good case for coverage —Berkeley author writes mystery set in Berkeley—In the gritty and malodorous world of garbage and recycling—even better!
It probably helped that Berkeleyside writer and co-founder Frances Dinkelspiel is in the midst of her own book tour, promoting Tangled Vines, a true story about the dark side of wine, specifically the 2005 wine warehouse fire on Mare Island deliberately set by Sausalito businessman Mark Anderson. So she knows that it’s tough to gather a crowd and to sell books.
Here’s her Q and A with me in Berkeleyside.
A day earlier, the co-founder of Urban Ore, Dan Knapp, sent me his review of Wasted, which he liked, but found it “eerie and unsettling,” because, as a veteran of the Berkeley recycling scene, he was so intimately familiar with the real world that informed my fictional world.
Just for fun, he said, he made a list of all the direct parallels to the real history of Berkeley recycling. “So far there are more than 20,” he notes. See Berkeley Recycling Veteran Offers His Take on Fictional World of Wasted.
For the full schedule of the Wasted Author Tour, see greennoir.com.
