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.
In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street.
The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events in the gallery.
To couch our discussion of how they choose which books to sell at Medicine for Nightmares, Josiah points out that the last time he checked, something like 75 or 80 percent of bookstores in the US are white-owned. He shares stories of sneaking out of his home in Marin when he was a teenager, driving to The City, and going to City Lights, which was open until midnight in those days. It was there, though, that Josiah discovered Latinx poets, writers who spoke his language, literally.
For him and his business partner, Tân Khánh Cao, it was always about wanting to see themselves reflected on the shelves. Josiah mentions a long-held, racist belief by publishers that Black and brown folks don't read. That, of course, is nonsense, and the bookstore stands with others in direct defiance and opposition to that mindset.
On their first day of business, Josiah says that a young mom came in with her kid and went to the children's books section of the store. He and Tân noticed that she was crying, so they went over to see if everything was OK. "I've never been in a bookstore before and seen a kids' book that looks like my kid," she told them. That was the first day.
We then turn to the story of how they came up with the name of the store. Joshia and Tân were throwing out potential names to each other out front on the sidewalk one day before they opened. "Each one of us was coming up with a worse name than the other," he says, half-jokingly. One of them suggested looking at titles from Sun-Ra, a musician they both like. One of his songs is called "Medicine for a Nightmare." It clicked for them instantly.
Then we talk about the growing call to ban books in the US. In my opinion, simply opening for business and turning the lights on is an act of defiance for Josiah and Tân. He goes on to state that they're well aware that they could be shut down and/or arrested every day. He says they get harassing phone calls from time to time, in fact.
We end the episode with Josiah's thoughts about our theme on Storied: San Francisco this season—Keep It Local.
3036 24th Street Sunday 12-9pm / Monday 12:30-9 pm
Tuesday–Thursday 12:30-10pm Friday 12:30-11pm Saturday 12-11pm @medicinefornightmares (415) 824-1761
We recorded this podcast at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery in February 2025.
Photography by Mason J. (third and fourth images by Jeff Hunt)
