The Backstory Above, a coworking, continuing education, and community space for writers, agents, and editors, will open in San Francisco’s Sunset District on November 1. According to an announcement, the space’s aim is “to help members of the San Francisco literary community deepen their craft, create and collaborate with each other in a peaceful working environment.”
Located on the mezzanine level of Green Apple Books on the Park, an outpost of the stalwart Bay Area bookstore, Backstory will serve as a rendezvous point for literary professionals as well as a third space for community members, said Susannah Emerson, who cofounded the book hub with Paige Patterson Duff.
First and foremost a coworking space, Backstory features public workspaces and private meeting spaces (including a booth for phone calls, from which Emerson was calling), that members can utilize for a monthly fee starting at $195. Among Backstory’s founding members is the Watermark Agency, founded in 2021 by Mark Tauber, a veteran of Chronicle Books and HarperCollins.
For community members who aren’t interested in the coworking functionality, Backstory will offer low-cost workshops, talks, and readings at a reduced community membership rate of $20 per month. It will also open its doors to the public after Green Apple events, where attendees and authors can continue mingling upstairs.
This latter idea, Emerson said, recalls the genesis of Backstory itself, the idea for which came 15 years ago when she was studying abroad in Paris. Emerson, who has an MFA, was waiting in line to get a book signed by her classmate after a Shakespeare & Co. reading, when she was ushered upstairs by a local.
“It was a secret society above the bookstore that you could sometimes be invited to, if luck was on your side,” she said. “And it was a group of about 10, 12 people, some of whom were regulars, and some of them were completely random, like me, sitting around and talking about books for the afternoon.”
Emerson acknowledged that the coworking membership fees are somewhat steep, but said that, ideally, ideas can be the currency of community at Backstory. “We’re doing sliding-scale memberships as much as possible, and we hope to get enough capital behind us that we can kind of offer scholarships,” she said.
Backstory is also offering a reduced-rate membership until after its open house on the weekend of November 1, where members and prospective members can get to know the space.