"Walk through Green Apple Books' Ninth Avenue location, past the notable new-fiction releases and the "sideline item" impulse buys, and you'll see a velvet rope blocking a staircase that used to lead to ... nowhere."
"At the top of the stairs, you're met by a Post-it note on the wall. It's one of many scattered around the airy space, with prompts like "First Major Failure" or "First Memory," with the intention that members of the space add their own notes, creating living story walls."
""The dream is that it will be eventually, this will be full of people's stories," co-founder Susannah Emerson told SFGATE."
""We were at a reading downstairs and standing next to the stairwell and asked what happened upstairs, and they said, 'Nothing,'" Emerson said, describing the genesis of the idea in late spring."
A previously vacant mezzanine above Green Apple Books has been converted into Backstory Above, a coworking office and third space aimed at writers. The space features participatory elements, including Post-it note story walls with prompts like "First Major Failure" and "First Memory." Founders Susannah Emerson and Paige Patterson Duff are both MFA graduates of Warren Wilson College who discovered the unused space after attending a reading downstairs. The Backstory Above leases the mezzanine from the building owner and opened approximately four months after the founders conceived the idea. The space preserves traces of the building's past, including a framed photo of the former tenant, Le Video.
Read at SFGATE
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