Discovering Pittsburgh’s raunchiest and most welcoming book club: Sex and Death.
By Tyler Barton
Sex and Death Book Club is a free, live reading series—where Pittsburgh writers perform their hottest, heaviest work alongside touring authors—that feels much more like a concert than like church. Which is to say that boredom doesn’t belong at this bi-monthly gathering on the second floor of Brillobox, because any child fresh off a story time will attest: sometimes being read aloud to can feel downright holy.
“I’ll never forget just falling under the trance of it,” Jake Maynard said, host of SDBC, recalling one of his first live reading experiences: humorist Ian Frazier captivating a college audience.
But let’s face it: live literary readings can carry a reputation of being overlong, stodgy, inauthentic, and preachy from its ivory-tower. Every bookish person has a lit event horror story, something like how a fellow listener’s snoring became louder and more variable than the distinguished author’s monotone slog, through a seemingly endless manuscript about a European vacation he took on last semester’s sabbatical. There’s the issue of attire, poor lighting, having to pee and having to hold it, Q&As filled with audience “questions” lacking a question mark. Tell a friend who isn’t in love with books that you’re heading out to a literary reading, and they might laugh, “Have fun.”
Maynard and his partner, Noelle Mateer, had a lot of important choices to make in order to cultivate the nightlife vibe they knew readings could successfully embrace. The punkish, dimly lit Sex and Death Book Club is as casual as a house show, buoyed by a bar, and curated with an ear toward the humorous, the raunchy, and the youthful. Though the city has long boasted premier reading series like City of Asylum’s Free Association and 10 Evenings by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, SDBC is proud of its do-it-yourself ethos. “What I felt was missing was a series that could draw in people who had never been to a reading before, one that could connect to the broader art scene here,” Maynard says. “The idea is to get young, emerging writers from out of town and pair them with [members of] Pittsburgh’s great literary scene.”
At SDBC, each of the four featured poets or prose writers gets about 10 minutes. “I have never heard someone read, even my favorite authors, and thought, That should have been longer,” Maynard told me. He believes in leaving the audience wanting more; it’s not only good for inspiring attendees to check out the author’s book, but it also keeps the event lively. After each reader, there’s a music-infused intermission to give time for refilling, for door prizes, and for pursuing the offerings at the Stay Gold Books pop-up table. Best of all are the conversations between fellow audience members and the performers themselves.
After her reading at the February installment of SDBC, writer Margaret Saigh (whose own DIY literary project, circlet, was a forerunning inspiration for so many of the reading series that have popped up across the city over the last four years) had strangers coming up to her to recite back their favorite lines. “It was just crazy to experience, to see that your words are in the head of someone you don’t even know.”
“In the breaks, we’re all here in a room together,” Maynard said, “so there’s no real difference between the writers and the people.”
“Writers are people too,” I offer.
“Unfortunately, we are,” he says with a laugh. “We’re just trying to approach the whole thing with a sense of scale, a sense of humor.”
As an author himself, it was the events Maynard scheduled around the release of his debut novel, Slime Line—a tragicomic bildungsroman about grief, amphetamines, and the commercial fishing industry—that taught him what he’d want to keep and what he’d want to lose when it came to organizing his own series. “For a lot of people, writing is fairly lonely, and publishing can be really lonely and isolating, so we need to make more opportunities to celebrate each other and hang out,” Maynard told me. “I bet that writers who work in academia probably hang out with other writers quite a bit—but, I’m a landscaper, right? I wanted just to build a different kind of space.” Libraries, galleries, and cafes were all a little too prim, quiet, and delicate. Even bookstores were out. “No matter what, there’s always a pressure to buy something.” He wanted a space that was neutral and comfortable, a place where his coworkers wouldn’t have to feel put upon to enter in order to give live literature a chance.
At Maynard’s summer 2024 book launch for Slime Line at Bottlerocket Social Club, a country band played before he read, and in addition to the fellow writers in the audience, the crowd was very local, proletariat, made up of folks just looking to have a night out with a twist of something different—funny, thought-provoking, but still entirely unpretentious. Another writer on Maynard’s book launch line-up, grace (ge) gilbert, said, “That reading… made me feel seen and excited. I didn’t grow up going to fancy bookstores. People go where they can go. I think bringing the lit scene to more accessible places is a way to keep things interesting and not create an echo chamber, which often happens with MFA programs.”
At Brillobox, Maynard and Mateer are naturals at making attendees know they belong. Whether that’s through greeting newcomers, employing disarming icebreakers, or giving out delightful door prizes—house plants, local honey, hot peppers—anything to make the readings spicier and dynamic. He remembers fondly seeing West Virginia’s legendary Scott McClanahan reading a piece about his g randmother and life’s impermanence, while furnishing the audience with cookies made from her classic recipe. “A lot of people feel like literary events, especially with ones that are more academic, aren’t for them. They don’t know the right words; they’re not hip on the discourse; they might say the wrong thing or act the wrong way.” Sometimes, Maynard and Mateer offer guests temporary tattoos. “I never realized how much of this would be about being a good party host.”
All writers and punk musicians alike have stories about the time they performed for three people, and they’d be lucky if that only happened once. However, over the course of its six readings in 2025, the SDBC audience has been uncharacteristically large—filling the Brillobox consistently with over seventy listeners, half of them sitting, the others standing, no rules against milling about while someone’s on stage. Saigh told me her reading was the largest crowd she’d ever read in front of. The turnout has also been widely intergenerational, as well as diverse in terms of sexual identity. When I was there in April, nothing moved the crowd so much as West Virginia-based poet Jenny Johnson’s emphatic odes to asses, submission, and pee-play. This series takes the “sex and death” part seriously. No punches are pulled, no kink shamed.
Other favorite performers this year have included Pittsburgh-born, but now Asheville-based, Claire Hopple, whose story about a family negotiating over a dead relative’s belongings elicited bigger laughs than she had expected. Hopple says Asheville doesn’t have a series quite like SDBC, but that her visit to Pittsburgh last summer was inspiring. “It was beautiful and strange, coming back as a Pittsburgh native yet feeling welcomed in whole new ways. [Maynard] is setting an example for other cities, there’s no question about it.”
Poets Rachelle Toarmino (Buffalo) and Lisa Somme (Pittsburgh) impressed attendees at the November installment of SDBC. Toarmino read, pregnant and radiating confidence, from her sophomore collection, Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025), poems that explore the beauty of casual, Millennial idiom. “[Rachelle was] a great reader, and very centered,” Wallace said. He appreciates a reading from a book, as opposed to a random assortment of poems or disconnected excerpts, because the cohesion and rhythm of a text arranged for publication can create an incantatory atmosphere. “It makes it feel much more like the reading of a holy text, which Rachelle’s definitely did. Her book does, after all, end in heaven.” Of Somme’s performance, gilbert said, “[She] read absolutely gorgeous sonnet crown, and it was so quiet I could hear myself breathing—an unforgettable performance.”
In addition to the reverent, breathless quietude that a great reading can engender, SBDC brings about all kinds of audience responses. Despite lacking a mosh pit, the readings offer attendees plenty of acceptable modes of affirmation. You’ll hear laughter more than anything, but also appreciative finger-snaps, participatory mid-set banter, the occasional affirmative holler. “I’m the kind of an appropriate woo guy, like [you hear] in the middle of a guitar solo,” Maynard says. “But readers also love that sort of feedback.” Heckling is of course still out; the respect the audience gives can be felt in how they lean in, hang on the words and repeat back favorite lines to readers as they’re getting their books signed. The bottom line: at SDBC, the only rule is to be yourself (and don’t read too long).
Because I work full-time in the literary arts, during our conversation, Maynard asked, “Do you think are readings having a moment right now?” While I do believe there’s been a springing-back of in-person literary community since the Covid doldrums and Zoomification of all events and workshops, I’m more convinced the moment-haver is Pittsburgh.
In four years, many other DIY literary readings have popped up around the city. Though circlet is on a bit of a hiatus, there’s also meTamorphosis (a queer and tans-led series hosted by past SDBC feature Amari Onyx, which has been running twice as long as SDBC) and Green Burial (a series devoted to the monstrous and surreal, hosted at Bantha Tea Bar in Bloomfield). Bookstores like Bottomfeeder, Fungus, Stay Gold, and White Whale all offer their own regular readings as well. When it comes to indie bookstores, Pittsburgh’s offerings have doubled in the last ten years—there’s an indie in almost every neighborhood. This post-pandemic proliferation of small, specific-stock bookstores, and a diversity of new community reading series and workshops shows a similar effect of what Maynard and I both experienced with the punk scenes that grew in our small, rural PA hometowns in the mid-aughts. “When my friend Ryan started the first sort of punk band in our tiny town [in McKean County], within a year, there were like seven more bands. We were having shows in people’s barns, in our parents’ basements, and at the Elks Club. Eventually it hit a kind of critical mass, but I don’t feel that in Pittsburgh.” In a city of this size, there’s still room to grow, and audience enough for these many unique upstarts.
“I’ve noticed a confluence of artists at these events—visual artists, musicians, writers, etcetera. I think people are more willing to go to a reading if it’s scrappy, and unpretentious, and there’s a $5 well drink in store,” says gilbert, whose presence at nearly all of the aforementioned series shows how, rather than being territorial, the DIY lit scene in the city might be avoiding the dreaded cliquishness that plagues many other cities. “And Pittsburgh is the kind of place where you’ve got salons and makeshift readings and performances. The art community here is strong, and loyal. You help each other out. I think that’s what makes our community so tight knit.”
Readings, performances–these words kept coming up in my conversations. Is a literary reading as simple as a reading of text aloud? A dramatic recitation? A one-person show? Lloyd Wallace, a poet, editor, and frequent audience member at a variety of Pittsburgh’s scrappy readings, believes that a reading is a performance. That dash of artifice, of the reader adopting a persona or honing the mood and tone of their delivery, is, in these spaces, an act of intimacy. “It changes the entire performer/audience dynamic. It amplifies the actual experience of the work for the listeners, and it brings you closer to each other.”
You might think the reason parents read books aloud to their children is to put them to sleep, and you’d be wrong. It develops their cognitive faculties, creates a bond, teaches empathy, encourages creativity, and exemplifies how people speak to one another. All good things I think humans should never stop learning, especially how to speak to each other, which, after years stuck inside and forced to socialize primarily online, is something adults could use a lot more practice with.
At SDBC and so many other vibrant, necessary DIY literary gatherings in Pittsburgh these days, the social is practiced in ways that the community cannot live without. Local artists and those passing through town can be supported financially, creatively, spiritually—a great reading being the boost needed to pen the next story or essay. Businesses like pop-up bookstores, bars, and cafes see what might be quite on weeknights activated with full crowds, new customers. The attendees are talking, sharing recommendations, affirmations, and important news about the sociopolitical goings in town and other nearby cities. Best of all, the overhead for these experiences couldn’t be lower: a PA system isn’t even necessary. That’s what makes writing the most democratic art form there is: it takes nearly no supplies. You can write lines in your head and read from your voice, creating unforgettable experiences for friends and strangers alike. It’s ancient, and often sacred—but rather than religious, the kind of readings Pittsburgh is championing right now are squarely humanist. Because writers are people first.
You can find out when this every-other-month series returns by following Brillobox on their socials (@brilloboxpgh) and website: https://www.brilloboxpgh.com/
Tyler Barton is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum and The Quiet Part Loud. He is the Artistic Director of Writers & Books in Rochester, NY. Find him on Instagram at @tylerbartonlol and online at tsbarton.com.
