Beth Lisick is a writer and performer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include the New York Times bestselling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself. Lisick has toured the U.S. and Europe as a solo spoken word performer, front person for the band the Beth Lisick Ordeal, and member of the groundbreaking queer roadshow Sister Spit. Her other projects include comedic performance for the stage and screen with Tara Jepsen, curating the monthly Porchlight Storytelling Series with Arline Klatte, and teaching creative writing to young adults. She played the female lead in Frazer Bradshaw’s award-winning feature film Everything Strange and New and recently received a grant from the Creative Work Foundation to write a book about the developmentally disabled artists at Creativity Explored. Yokohama Threeway, a book on Sister Spit press (a new imprint of City Lights) is due out in 2013.

After reading a few articles about myself that were cobbled together by Google searches, I decided to make things easier (and possibly more accurate.)

I am mostly a writer and performer. A native of the Bay Area, I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in American Studies. I liked school, but I liked baking more, and worked as a pastry and bread lady during most of my time at college. When I moved to San Francisco in 1991, I got a job as the pastry chef at the Fog City Diner for a couple years, before hanging up my oven mitts to work as a messenger and receptionist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Around 1994, I started writing poems and stories for the sole purpose of reading them at open mic nights. The poetry scene was ridiculously rowdy and fun at the time and I realized I didn't mind standing in front of a microphone and getting heckled. I kept at it, writing new stuff week after week, never thinking about publishing anything.

A couple years later, Jennifer Joseph, who ran the Poetry Above Paradise reading and is the publisher of Manic D Press, asked me to submit my spoken word pieces to her for a possible book. I was kind of scared. I was pretty sure what I was writing didn't belong on the page, that it was meant only to fill the air in a smoky bar between the hours of 9pm and midnight.

Then a weird thing happened. Jennifer was invited to a writing conference in Birmingham that she couldn't attend because she was very pregnant. She sent me in her place, along with poets Jeff McDaniel and Bucky Sinister, both of whom had new books on Manic D. While we were there, Jeff, Bucky, and I did a reading at a cocktail party that had some fancy writers and publishers in attendance. After we read, James Tate told me he really liked one of my poems. He had just been asked to edit the Best American Poetry anthology and was wondering if my poem had been published. (I guess to be in those books, the piece has to be previously published somewhere.) Anyway, Clockwatch Review editor James Plath was standing there, and said he was about to go to press with his new issue. Plath said he would publish it and Tate could pull it from Clockwatch for the anthology.

I didn't even consider myself a writer at the time, but when James Tate called my thing a poem and put it in a book called Best American Poetry, making this my first ever published piece of writing, I realized that there were obviously not a lot of rules in this literary world. It made me like writing even more. Shortly after that, in 1997, Manic D put out my first book Monkey Girl. With the help of Juliette Torrez (of Last Gasp and Kapow!), I organized a 30 city road tour around the U.S.

Since then, I've spent most of my time going from one project to the other, which all somehow adds up to a semi-career in the field of life called "the arts", the highlights of which have also been some of the lowlights. Which is how it should be, I think.

Here are some things I've done: I read poetry in a tent on a few of the Lollapalooza dates. I competed in the National Poetry Slam a couple times. I had a band called the Beth Lisick Ordeal that put out a record and played at the Lilith Fair. I went on some big tours with Sister Spit, the infamous queer spoken word roadshow started by Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson. I opened for Neil Young once. Ha ha. That was funny and terrible. I mean, who wants to see that? A spoken word performance while you're waiting for Neil Young to come on? Ugh. I went on a couple European tours and read at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin and Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

I wrote a nightlife column for eight years where nobody ever told me what events I could or couldn't cover. I was in a sketch comedy group called White Noise Radio Theatre that performed at festivals in Seattle and Chicago. We also did a bunch of shows in Los Angeles and an extended theater run in San Francisco. I did an artist residency with my husband (who's a musician/recording engineer) in the Czech Republic. I acted and did narration for some short films. I worked as a writer at an animation company that went under.

I wrote a short story collection for Manic D called This Too Can Be Yours, which won something called a Firecracker Award. This award, no longer in existence, was determined by internet vote. I know the only reason I won is because my parents (!?) sent out an email to all the other people in the United States who own Portuguese Water Dogs and asked them to vote for me. This is not false modesty on my part. My book was OK, but it beat out books by JT Leroy, Kelly Link, and Jonathan Lethem, and I was (still am) extremely embarrassed about it. Colson Whitehead, who handed me my award onstage, also seemed embarrassed for me. I think it is not a coincidence that after that year, the award ceased to exist. Let's hear it for the internet!

My friend Tara Jepsen and I do weird comedic lady stuff together. After performing at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, we did a stage show called Fumbling Toward Rock that we later made into a too-long short film. We made another film called Diving for Pearls in which we appear unattractively naked, that has shown in film festivals all over the world. We do shows and host events as Carole Murphy and Mitzi Fitzsimmons, two confusing comediennes with incredible personal style. Tara and I performed at the original Ladyfest in Olympia, as well as Homo-A-Go-Go, and we've opened for Neil Hamburger and Tig Notaro.

My most recent book is called Helping Me Help Myself, which came out in 2008, which I am realizing is a long time ago. I have three other books going. One is the advice book with Creativity Explored for which I received a grant from the Creative Work Fund. (I will be thanking them for the rest of my life.) I've also got one coming out in 2013 with the new Sister Spit imprint from City Lights, and then there's the novel that I've been writing for like three years. I'm still co-organizing the Porchlight Storytelling Series with my friend Arline Klatte. We brought Porchlight to Paris in 2010 and Nairobi in 2011. And sometimes I still dress up as a banana and hand out bananas to make some extra money.