If there is one overarching change to the community of Philip K Dick scholars and fans that I've witnessed in my quarter centruy of participation it's that we've all met and discovered we like hanging out. This is the reason for the increase in frequency of Dick-Fests, which have multiplied from once a decade, to once every three years, to their now biennial cadence.
Case in point, Dick-Fest 2026 (they're trying to take the more mature road and call it PKD Fest, but we know what it is) is scheduled for August 20-23 in Orange County!
Here's what you need to know:
It's free.
Now, having said that, there is a registration option that allows you to donate just $20 and walk away with a grab bag of PKD-related goodies. There is also a festival t-shirt you can buy.
But basically, rank consumerism aside, you can show up at this Fest and listen to some talks about PKD, witness some of PKD's old friends and acquaintances (like Gregg Rickman and Bill Sarill!) wax nostalgic, take in the first ever Pink Beam awards wherein we stroke our many Dick-related achievements (Oh, grow up!). There's even a table reading of a Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch script (which of course you never really leave).
Not only is the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center a full-on sponsor of the Fest, but I'll be there talking about Phil's life in Point Reyes Station as well as selling PRRIC merch, including a special collection of t-shirts, more on this soon.
You can thank David Agranoff, host of the DickHeads Podcast on YouTube, for his tireless efforts to assemble a ragtag cadre of authors and weirdos to talk Dick for a couple of days.
Check out the Fest website here, replete with schedules, mailing list sign-ups, and more!
But wait, there's more!
On August 26 the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center will be hosting a post-Fest-adjacent dinner in Point Reyes Station with special guest Bill Sarill, who not only surfed Dick's couch, but, according to a note of at the beginning of Dick's 1970 novel A Maze of Death, helped brainstorm the novel's theological dimensions during late night sessions "to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."
RSVP for the dinner here. ($25 donation suggested, but no one turned away for lack of funds).
We're just a week away from my community read of Confessions of a Crap Artist in Point Reyes Station. To say I'm excited would be an understatement.
So, to get my wiggles out (as my mom used to call it), I thought I'd provide some resources for readers of the novel, whether they be Point Reyes Stationians or internet bound.
First off, readers may have noticed that some of the novel's geography doesn't quite work.
Chapter two begins: "Seville, California has a good public library. But the best thing about living in Seville is that in only a twenty-minute drive you're over into Santa Cruz where the beach is and the amusement park is. And it's four lanes all the way."
Google's driving directions don't lie (except when they do): Seville California is just a bit more than three hours from Santa Cruz.
So what's Dick up to here?
Anne Dick recalls in her memoir:
“One afternoon not long after the discussion about Phil's career, we were lying on the bed in the study, our arms around each other. We had just made love and I was feeling happy and relaxed. Phil started laughing and laughing. He said, "I have a great idea for a novel. It's about this guy, Jack Isidore. I'm naming him after an early encyclopedist, Isidore of Seville, who collected weird bits of knowledge. The novel will be in the first person. The opening line Jack Isidore says is, 'Let me tell you about myself. The first thing is: I'm a pathological liar." (In the published version it is, "I am made out of water.") And Phil laughed and laughed some more. For some unknown reason I felt a little chill of unease, but nevertheless I smiled encouragingly. Phil began working on this novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist, during the honeymoon period of our relationship.”
“At a time of disintegration of classical culture, aristocratic violence and widespread illiteracy, Isidore was involved in the conversion of the Arian Visigothic kings to Catholicism, both assisting his brother Leander of Seville and continuing after his brother’s death. He was influential in the inner circle of Sisebut, Visigothic king of Hispania. Like Leander, he played a prominent role in the Councils of Toledo and Seville.
His fame after his death was based on his Etymologiae, an etymological encyclopedia that assembled extracts of many books from classical antiquity that would have otherwise been lost. This work also helped standardize the use of the period (full stop), comma, and colon.”
But I think Phil is really excited about this: on January 17th, I'll be leading a community discussion of his literary novel Confessions of a Crap Artist in Point Reyes Station, where the novel is set, and where Dick lived, off and on, between 1959-1964.
As part of my PRRIC-ular duties, I have been getting to know the locals in the tiny town of just under 850 people. I spend a couple days a week inhabiting Dick's slow-paced pastorale landscape: walking by Cheda's Garage, shopping at The Palace Market, and working in my office above The Old Western Saloon. The experience has enriched my reading of Confessions of a Crap Artist, which is about Dick's time in Point Reyes Station, as well as his marriage to Anne, who I knew pretty well.
So for an expert, which Henry Kissinger famously said is someone who knows more and more about less and less, it doesn't get much better than this. I will post some study materials for those of you interested in reading the novel along with us. Until then, enjoy these pictures of locations from the novel courtesy of Henri Wintz and The Philip K. Dick Bookshelf.
If you're in the Bay Area, GET YOUR ASS TO POINT REYES, on January 17th.
Western Weekend occurs every year in the small West Marin town of Point Reyes Station over the first full weekend in June. In conjunction with my work for PRRIC, I spent both days of last weekend enjoying the festivities.
Saturday's events included a farmer's market, open artist studios, a bunch of local musical acts, a barn dance, and a bunch of other cool stuff. The highlight for me was when I got my portrait sketched by a robot (well a robot arm and camera attached to a laptop and equipped with a pen).
Sunday's main event is a parade that runs down the main street featuring cowboys and sheriffs on horseback, floats from local orgs like Rotary International, and even local Flyn Q's cosmic enlightenment rap group, Spacesuit.
In the run up to this year's festivities, a picture was posted in a Facebook group from a Western Weekend parade taken around 1960. It wasn't long before one of Anne Dick's daughters identified Phil, Anne, and a very young Laura in the picture.
Even better, I was able to find the building in the background of the photo and to watch Sunday's parade from the same vantage point.
The last six months have witnessed a number of staggering changes in my life. As many of you know, I was "exited" from San Francisco State University at the end of last year. A perfect storm of declining enrollments, administrative greed and incompetence, and the elimination of a required lower division writing class (see previous list item), all conspired to relieve me of the job I've held for the last seventeen years.
The whole thing really sucked. The good news is that I put up a good fight, plastering the campus with "Missing" posters featuring myself and my other exited colleagues, disrupting the College of Liberal Arts Christmas party with some pointed "Ho, Ho, Ho-ing," and some quality protests.
Here's a short documentary movie made by a student in SFSU's journalism department about my fight:
Eventually I landed on my feet.
The crazy thing is that it was THIS BLOG that saved me. A post about Phil's time in Point Reyes Station drew the attention of a local resident and tech entrepreneur named Chris Hulls who is interested in preserving the town of Point Reyes Station along with the weirdness of West Marin county.
Together we created an independent non-profit, the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center or PRRIC. Here's a video introducing the Center, shot and edited by Paul Shelton, a Dick-Head I was fortunate to meet at last summer's Colorado Dick-Fest.
So what does PRRIC do exactly? That's a good question. We're interviewing and photographing residents of Point Reyes Station; we are looking to fund serious scientific research involving consciousness, psychology, neuroscience, and psychedelics; and we're hoping to create a Esalen-style retreat in the area.
Last week I moved into my new office above The Old Western Saloon on Highway 1 in Point Reyes Station. The building is more than 100 years old and it's haunted. It's also featured in Dick's Confession of a Crap Artist: "Then he caught sight of the Western Bar..."
So I know there a lot of people convinced that we're living in a Philip K. Dick novel, but only a lucky few of us have offices in one.
Check out PRRIC's Substack, where I will be writing about reality, technology, science fiction, Point Reyes Station, and more...
I have a fairly lengthy (and interesting) interview with Anne Dick posted on i09.com today. As part of my effort to promote Anne's revised and newly available memoir, I'll be posting some excerpts from the book here.
In this excerpt, Anne discusses the role of art and craftsmanship in her marriage to PKD:
I had been fascinated with all the accidental metal shapes and splashes that were produced while I was working on my welded sculpture. Lorraine and I thought we could turn them into an interesting form of jewelry. Phil encouraged us and bought me an anvil, a drill press, and a polishing motor. He built a well-constructed workbench in the utility room where I kept my welding tanks. He told me, “I don’t like to do carpentry. I made this bench extra strong so I won’t ever have to make it over again.”
Lorraine and I worked out wild new techniques for making jewelry using a tiny welding torch. We forged black iron bracelets with pearls set on them, made jewelry out of fire-glazed red copper and textured bronze, and learned to weld bronze rod into various shapes. About the same time I began to tile the master bathroom in our house. I bought different colored small tiles and made a mermaid, several fish, a cosmic eye right over the toilet, a boat, and a large sea serpent. It feels like you’re under water when you’re taking a bath. Phil wrote about this mural in We Can Build You. In that novel the bathroom tiling project is done by Pris Frauenzimmer, a horrible woman.
While Phil was writing, I was making jewelry with my partner, Lorraine Hynes, but we weren’t getting along well. Phil went back and forth between our neighboring houses, supposedly mediating, but somehow everything between us kept getting worse and worse. Soon Lorraine quit and I was working alone in my small laundry room workshop. To keep me company, Phil starting making some molten globby metal forms. He loved doing this. He made an irregular silver triangle and polished it for an hour on the buffing wheel. He described this object in The Man in the High Castle: “… a single small silver triangle ornamented with hollow drops. Black beneath, bright and light-filled above.”"
More excerpts to follow, but don't wait for me to get around to posting them, buy the memoir here.
Here's another rare shot of PKD. This one was taken in the backyard of the Point Reyes house near the end of his marriage to Anne Dick. Like this other picture I posted earlier, Anne says that this photo was taken around the time that PKD was writing The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Actually, you can see this picture featured in the short PKD documentary packaged with the five DVD box set of Blade Runner. While light on details, the documentary does a pretty good job of painting a basic picture of PKD's life. There's nothing new in it for us initiates. Rumor is there's a much longer and more detailed Argentinian documentary about PKD in existence somewhere. Don't even get me started on The Gospel According to Philip K Dick - too much typing!
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