Ask any one of the scores of people packed into the Lit Crawl after-party at the Hugo House last night what their favorite part of the evening was, and you'd hear a different answer every time. For such a well-attended event—hundreds of people spread all over Capitol and First Hills—it's funny to realize that every single person's Lit Crawl was utterly unlike everyone else's Lit Crawl. Someone told me that the Eimear McBride reading at Elliott Bay Book Company was incredible—that hearing McBride read from her novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, in her own voice was enough to convince them to buy the audio book version. Someone else discovered a couple new favorite poets at the Poetry on Buses reading at Vermillion. Someone else—a writer who attends a lot of literary events and described herself as "very jaded about readings"—told me the event sponsored by Hedgebrook was an intense experience, just one excellent reading after the other. Rebecca Brown and Elissa Washuta both earned some new fans.

At the party, people got very drunk, talked about writing, and danced to country music played by the Drop Shadows. I learned about a couple of new and exciting literary journals started by young and hungry writers. Someone explained that Jamaica has a very healthy beekeeping community. The partner of a memoirist lamented the fact that their dirty laundry might one day go public. It was the kind of room where drunk people wore cowboy hats shamelessly, but they were also happy to tell you that they've been on a real Shakespeare jag lately. Nothing was pretentious and everything was fun.

My Lit Crawl started at Sole Repair, where I attended the launch party for the excellent new work-themed issue of Floating Bridge Review. Guest editor Elizabeth Austen hosted the reading, which included poems about careers ranging from crab fisherman to teachers to beekeepers to a cashier at Safeway. One poem included rules from a guidebook for young teachers from 1915—"you may not marry during the terms of your contract," and "you may not dress in bright colors"—and another poem was about a severed finger at a sawmill.

Later in the evening, I'd end up at the social justice–themed reading at Office Nomads, where city council member Kshama Sawant talked about the importance of art in social justice, introducing a slate of readers including novelist Sonora Jha and Stranger Genius of Literature Maged Zaher. Jha read a sequence from late in her novel Foreign, about a widow who must take up farming in a village stricken by an epidemic of suicides. Zaher announced how honored he was to share a stage with Seattle's only socialist council member, announcing that he is a "Marxist," although he claimed to subscribe to a "nihilist" flavor of Marxism. His poems blended the language of revolution with the banality of the office job, as he wondered "how to survive without a keyboard" and concluded that "I'm angry but I'm going to lunch." Sawant led the room in a brief Q&A afterward, where the readers dealt with questions about how to convince workers in Seattle that they share more of a struggle with poor workers internationally than with the very wealthy in America. Zaher struggled with the reality that "art is made from a privileged position." That observation made some people in the room squirm.

But if you had approached me at the party at the Hugo House and asked me what my favorite part of Lit Crawl was, here's what I'd have said: the second event of the night, a work-themed reading at the Pine Box, started off as a pleasant-enough event. Jennifer Longo read a funny introductory chapter from her debut novel Six Feet Over It, about a young woman who works as a gravedigger at a cemetery. "Who said your first book is always where you kill your parents?" Longo asked, "Was it Shakespeare?" But the reading that blew me away was (former Stranger writer) Lindy West, who read "the first draft of the first chapter of my future book that I'm working on." West was effusive in her pre-reading apologies, saying the chapter "doesn't have an end," and explaining that it "references things that happen elsewhere in the nonexistent book."

But goddamn. I've been a huge fan of West's writing for a long time, and still nothing could've prepared me for this reading. The passage, about a vicious Twitter troll who masqueraded as West's recently deceased father, ranged from funny to bleak to angry to vulnerable to strong with every sentence. She mused about whether there's Twitter in heaven (probably not, she concludes, because if there's Twitter there, it by definition would not be a paradise) and she tells us about her mindset at a time when "I was eating 30 rape threats for breakfast." West was in tears, and so was half the room. The catharsis, when it came, was not a pat conclusion—no magic wands are waved, no hurts are quickly healed—but that made it somehow feel even more satisfying. Even if you're a fan of West's, you've never quite read anything like this from her. In the mass of milling humans after she finished, before I moved on to the next reading, I overheard at least two people make the same joke to West about how she needs to hurry up and finish the book so they can read it. I respectfully disagree. Writing this good is worth the wait.

So another Lit Crawl has come and gone. For me, this was the most consistently enjoyable of the three we've seen in Seattle so far. But there's room for improvement, too. Part of the fun of a lit crawl is the transgressiveness of it, the fun of readings happening in bars and other venues where readings don't usually happen. There could be still more coloring outside the lines, a little more imagination in the acts than just a lineup of three or four readers and a host. I'd have loved, for instance, to attend a reading at the newly reopened Egyptian Theater, hopefully incorporating literary film adaptations somehow. Or a musical act blended with a reading at one of the clubs in the area. And while it's fun running from venue to venue with other people holding Lit Crawl programs in their hands, the festival could make those in-between times a little more fun, maybe with impromptu readings on street corners or literary signage. The APRIL Lit Crawl, for example, featured a reader sitting in a little red wagon who read an essay to the crowd as they wandered from one reading to the next, co-opting the sidewalks into a literary parade. Lit Crawl succeeds in activating non-traditional spaces as literary hangouts, but think about all the possibilities that could unfurl if literature really, truly took to the streets for one night.