Tough, savvy 100-mph lyrics? Raw, toothy stories? A serious chance of tattoos, tube tops and bar brawls? All likely at the legendary all-girl spoken word show Sister Spit which, after a five-year hiatus, will take its word-wielding mistresses of poetry and storytelling across the country for a comeback tour, Sister Spit: The Next Generation.

Sister Spit was founded in 1994, by local writers Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson, as a weekly, all-female open mic show in San Francisco. In the early ‘90s there were open mics every night of the week in San Francisco, but Tea and Anderson found that even in a very queer and very female city, most of the nights tended toward “intensely straight dudes who liked to tear off their shirts and holler macho poems about all the bitches they screwed,” Tea says. If there were female performers at the events at all, they were “slow-strummin’ guitar girls whining about their boyfriends.”

The city seemed to lack a place where a serious female writer could bring an intense or vulnerable topic to an audience that would be sensitive and respectful enough to give it the attention it deserved. So Tea and Anderson set out to give San Francisco a more female- and queer-friendly stage, a place for the voices of daring and unconventional women, where both performers and audience members could feel comfortable, support each other, and most importantly, have an ass-kicking good time.

Sister Spit set up shop at Blondie’s Bar in the Mission, where on the first night, their open-mic sheet could barely accommodate the number of performers who’d signed up. As expected, queer and female writers in the city had been dying to perform, and they jumped at the opportunity as soon as the right venue opened up. Sister Spit stayed at Blondie’s for a while then moved around a bit, eventually finding a home at the Coco Club in SoMa.

The original Sister Spit

Regardless of venue, Sister Spit’s open mic packed in huge crowds of supporters who cheered them on and bought their zines to help keep them going. It worked: Over the years, the “Spitters” hosted such luminaries as Eileen Myles, Mary Gaitskill, Bambi Lake and Beth Lisick at their legendary shows.

By 1996, however, open mic lost its focus. “The girls with the acoustic guitars took over,” Tea says, “so we quit.” Sister Spit took a break, and Tea went on tour playing drums for a punk band.

"I thought, ‘I bet Sister Spit could get a better audience than this,’ ” Tea says. “Not everyone likes atonal, poorly played punk rock, but who doesn’t like to crack up and have insane stories told to you?”

These days spoken word isn’t as popular as it was in the ‘90s, but Tea still expects this year’s tour will draw a good crowd. They’ll have an audience of fans who caught the original show and a new crowd of those who either didn’t know about Sister Spit the first time around or were too young to come to the shows, she says.

“Back then we were known for presenting female performers who didn’t sound like anybody else, who had wildly unique voices, shameless stories and hot fashion – girls who were as dedicated to making literature their life as they were to making their lives worthy of literature. And we still have those performers,” she says.

For the Next Generation tour this April, Tea will be joined by award-winning author and original Sister Spit member Eileen Myles, who will read from her latest collection of poetry, and veteran Spitter Ali Liebegott, who will read from her newest novel about a young lesbian pancake waitress, The IHOP Papers. Also on board will be five new twentysomething writers and artists Rhiannon Argo, Tamara Llosa-Sandor, Robin Akimbo, Cristy C. Road and Nicole J. Georges, all recently published in the anthology, Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writings, edited by Tea. Tea will emcee the show and read excerpts from her recently published first novel, Rose of No Man’s Land.

For more on performers, tour dates and cities, visit sisterspitnextgen.com. For more Michelle Tea, check out her monthly Radar Reading Series at the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch or her monthly Radar Salon Series at the San Francisco Harvey Milk/Eureka Valley Branch Library. She makes cookies for the reading and a savory snack for the salon.

Poets and writers deserved to experience the same glamour and adventures as bands did, she decided. So she and the rest of the group took Sister Spit on the road in ’97 with a national tour: The Sister Spit Rambling Road Show.

The Rambling Road Show toured yearly from ’97 to 2001, with a different group of female performers and writers in the van each tour. On the road, Tea says the show was, for the most part, welcomed and embraced just as the local open mic was. “It was the best to travel the country in a van full of insanely interesting and creative girls,” she says. Apart from a near-arrest for disturbing the peace and an incident involving an airborne mustard bottle, Tea says, “It was the roving slumber party of my wildest dreams.”

This year Tea brings Sister Spit back in part to promote the anthology she recently edited, Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writings. Just as she’d done with the original Rambling Road Show, for this tour she chose five names out of the 22 contributors to the anthology from a hat to determine who’d be on board. Since the spirit of the tour seemed akin to that of the original Rambling Road Show, she decided to join these writers with some veteran spitters who’d recently published books themselves and call the tour Sister Spit: The Next Generation.