No journalist in recent memory has created quite the stir that Mark Morford has. From his columns on SFGate.com to HuffingtonPost, his incendiary, passionate style of opinion-venting has earned him both worshipful fans (thousands and thousands of them) as well as hardcore haters. And now he's an author, which will earn him more fans and haters on a national level.
According to his website: Mark Morford was raised by nubile long-eyelashed callipygian wood nymphs and spoon fed dark chocolate and raw pomegranate seeds and 18-year-old Scotch until he could fly. He attended Musicians Institute in Los Angeles during the mid-'80s when the denim was tight and the hair was big and Eddie Van Halen was still God. Life later spit him into the halls of U.C. Berkeley, where he investigated the pagan influences in Milton's "Paradise Lost" and discovered how Eve taught the serpent to use its tongue. He managed to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and caveat emptor.
He landed at SFGate.com in 1997, where he soon became the lead writer and editor for the site’s main landing (home) pages, editing the site for three full years, along with creating/writing a hit underground email newsletter, called “The Morning Fix,” the irreverent/sexualized/opinionated voice of which served as the inspiration for his column.
Mark became a full-time columnist for SFGate in 2000 via a strange cocktail of sheer nerve, oddball mentors and divine cataclysm. His “Notes & Errata” column soon became a bit of a sensation, quickly rising to become one of the most popular features in the site’s history. It was invited into the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle in the middle of 2005, where it ran in the Datebook (entertainment) section for three wonderful-but-misfit years, before being yanked back out in mid-2008 by a new editor-in-chief who considered Mark’s work too irreverent and kinky for the older, conservative print readership. Mark’s many older, kinky print readers were none too pleased at this, but what can you do.
His writing has been described as blasphemous, inspiring, lickable, transgressive and terribly verbose, self-aggrandizing bullshit -- often all in the same sentence. He has almost been fired -- twice -- for the contents of his column. He has also won first place in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' annual contest -- also twice, and been nominated for multiple GLAAD Media Awards for his outspoken support of gay rights, a fact for which he feels particularly grateful and blessed, considering how he’s relatively sure he is exceedingly straight.
Mark’s writing and freelance work has appeared in numerous publications ranging from Mother Jones to The Sun to The Bark to Yoga Journal, but not Guns & Ammo or Quilter's World, so please stop asking.
Mark’s new book, The Daring Spectacle, a mega-compendium of his finest and most incendiary Chronicle columns and assorted hate mail, banned pieces and related journalistic sacrilege was published in March of 2010. His new blog, Cult of Yes, will hopefully also be launching very soon, if not sooner.
Jane Ganahl has been a journalist, author, editor and arts organizer in San Francisco for more than 25 years. She is the co-founder and co-director of Litquake – the west coast’s largest independent literary festival, the author of “Naked on the Page: the Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife,” and editor of the anthology, “Single Woman of a Certain Age: 28 Women Writers on the Unmarried Midlife.” She has contributed essays to five other anthologies. Ganahl has also been a journalist for almost three decades, most of that time with San Francisco newspapers, covering everything from City Hall to pop culture. During her final five years at the Chronicle she penned the “Single Minded” Sunday column about the unmarried life. Jane has chaired panels at the Commonwealth Club, Book Expo America, Book Group Expo, and various other conferences. She has appeared on numerous TV programs, including “The Today Show,” and innumerable radio shows, from Sirius network to NPR. Her work can now be found on Huffington Post and Match.com; she has also contributed to Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, Harp, Parenting, Book, Salon.com, Vanity Fair.com and Rolling Stone.com.
