Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making.

We last talked with poet Josiah Luis Alderete back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer.

Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back.

One of his coworkers at City Lights came up with the idea of doing poetry out the window onto Columbus Avenue. The first poet to read up there was Tongo Eisen-Martin. Josiah says that the reaction from passersby, the looks of joy on their faces, is one of his favorite memories from this time.

Then we talk about Josiah’s monthly Latinx reading series, Speaking Axolotl, which has been going strong for more than six years now. It started pre-pandemic in Oakland, pivoted to Zoom from early in the pandemic, and resumed in-person in the Mission once that was possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves now.

Josiah reminds us that he was evicted from his home in the Mission back during the first dotcom wave of the Nineties, and that he hadn’t been able to move back until recently. Before getting the job at City Lights, he owned and ran a taco shop up in Marin for 20 years. He told himself toward the end of that long run that he never wanted to own a business again.

But then he went into Alley Cat Books one day and was talking with that store’s owner, Kate Razo. Josiah had been putting on events at Alley Cat for his friend for years, but now, Kate mentioned that she was considering selling the bookstore. To explain his reaction, Josiah begins to talk about how much the Mission means to him.

Having given so much to him, his life and his poetry, Josiah felt he owed the neighborhood. He knew that if he didn’t step up and take over the space as a book store, it would be prone to whatever trendy gentrifying business happened to move in. But he also knew that it would take a lot of work and a lot of money to do what he felt had to be done.

And so he assembled a group of folks and they approached Kate Razo with an offer. That was in August. They opened Medicine for Nightmares a few months later, in November.

He originally envisioned keeping his job at City Lights while helping to open the new store in the Mission. But the enormity of the task had other ideas. Some of those folks he’d gathered to do the work also fell off, which seems natural in hindsight.

Nonetheless, defying odds and perhaps expectations, the new book store opened. Originally, after having gone through the Alley Cat book inventory and given much of that back to Kate, they opened “bare bones.” Around Day 2 or Day 3 of being open, Josiah realized that he couldn’t be both there and City Lights. It was obvious that he needed to quit his job in North Beach, a tearful process he describes.

We end Part 1 with Josiah taking listeners through the space that Medicine for Nightmares inherited from Alley Cat Books.