Morning in Marin

Marin native David Perlis launches Morning in Marin with a reading, conversation, audience Q&A and signing. Free; registration recommended.

Copperfield’s Books is delighted to welcome Marin County native David Perlis to Petaluma for the launch of his captivating debut novel, Morning in Marin —a poignant exploration of home, memory, identity, and the enduring pull of the places that shape us.

Join us for a special evening featuring a reading and intimate conversation followed by a live audience Q&A and book signing.

Free and open to all ages. Registration recommended for seating.

Across the Golden Gate and enter the rollicking creative scene of midcentury Marin County, a fertile font of risk-takers and radical thinkers. In these misted hills, currents of art and philosophy swirl, giving rise to the seismic cultural awakening out of which Star Wars, Alan Watts, and the Grateful Dead all emerge. Marin is where Anna Halprin dances, Philip K Dick dreams, Gary Snyder circumambulates, and Janis Joplin hides. What made Marin such a galvanizing force of iconoclasm and counterculture: Was it the money, Mount Tamalpais, the acid trips? With a fresh voice steeped in local lore, David Perlis dips into parties on Sausalito houseboats, hangs around communes in West Marin, and introduces us to the visionaries who sowed the seeds of an organic inner revolution that bloomed into a global commercial empire--transforming Marin along the way as outsider elements became the consummate insiders. Blending pop culture, biography, and a deeply affectionate sense of place into an immersive narrative history, Morning in Marin traces a movement of Zen thinkers, Beat poets, mystic feminists, and psychedelic rockers from their radical beginnings through their crises and contradictions. Forging an unbroken chain from bohemians and Beats to New Age and New Hollywood, Perlis reveals how the people, places, and ideas of Marin combined to create a lasting American mythology.

Author: David Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show Night People on WFMU. He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History. He now lives in Corrales, New Mexico. Morning in Marin is his first book.

Between World War II and the 1980s, Marin County became the unlikely epicenter of a cultural awakening, one whose reverberations would be felt across the country and around the world. In his new book Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast, David Perlis delivers the first comprehensive narrative history of this awakening—what he calls the "Marinaissance."

In this talk, Perlis will delve into the early figures and cultural influences of this movement, which would give rise to Star Wars, the Grateful Dead, Alan Watts, and much more, seeding a creative revolution that would script the American imagination for generations.

David Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show Night People on WFMU. He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History. He now lives in Corrales, New Mexico. Morning in Marin is his first book.