Grab some tea and come to the back room for a midweek break and a chance to connect with other members over words. Our Kaleidoscopic Readings are a means of bringing the solitary process of reading into community and is modeled on a teaching practice also known as Text Explosion.

(Community & Co-Working Members)

Grab some tea and come to the back room for a midweek break and a chance to connect with other members over words. Bring a pen and yourself, and join us for a quick writing exercise.

(Community & Co-Working Members)

This month we’re reading…

Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

About the Author

Lior Torenberg’s work has been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. Just Watch Me is her first novel. Learn more at LiorTorenberg.com.

This event is restricted to Backstory co-working and community members and their guests. If that’s not you (yet), but you’d like it to be, apply for a community membership today for $20/month + onboarding fee.

* Backstory Members: all in-person purchases at Green Apple Books on the Park receive a 10% discount. Remember to show your membership card.

Join us a for a co-working members’ pizza lunch. Take a break, grab a bite and chat with other co-working members.

We’ll be picking up vegetarian pizza from Arizmendi. You can view their flavor of the day here.

Grab some tea and come to the back room for a midweek break and a chance to connect with other members over words. Bring a pen and yourself, and join us for a quick writing exercise.

(Community & Co-Working Members)

Grab some tea and come to the back room for a midweek break and a chance to connect with other members over words. Our Kaleidoscopic Readings are a means of bringing the solitary process of reading into community and is modeled on a teaching practice also known as Text Explosion.

(Community & Co-Working Members)

Join us a for a co-working members’ pizza lunch and a conversation about the publishing industry with Mark Tauber of The Watermark Agency. Bring your questions about querying, submission, the path to publication or whatever else you’ve been wondering about.

We’ll be picking up vegetarian pizza from Arizmendi. You can view their flavor of the day here.

Grab some tea and come to the back room for a midweek break and a chance to connect with other members over words. Our Kaleidoscopic Readings are a means of bringing the solitary process of reading into community and is modeled on a teaching practice also known as Text Explosion.

(Community & Co-Working Members)

Carve out four hours from your weekend to dedicate to your creative work. We’ll use each other for accountability and companionship as we dive into individual projects. Focus of this half-day retreat is still to be determined.

The day will be broken into two 1.5 hour sections with a guided intention setting exercise to start us off, a break for movement in the middle, and a closing reflection.

Warm beverages will be provided. Bring a snack if you need one.

Provided at no cost to community and co-working members. Please RSVP below.

(Members only)

We’ll be joining Green Apple Books on the Park and celebrating Independent Bookstore Day! In addition to their exciting offerings (we hear tarot readings are on the menu), we’ll be opening up the mezzanine for blind contour drawings, a kaleidoscopic reading amongst friends & strangers, and more!