(Sister Spit reads tonight at Hugo House at 8pm. Tickets are $20, and worth every penny.)

Michelle Tea and Dorothy Allison have spent an awful lot of time sleeping on strangers' basement floors. Tea cofounded Sister Spit, originally an early-'90s all-female open mic, with Sini Anderson at a time when spoken word was, as Tea said in a phone interview, "hot and not cliché yet." The open mic spent several years grounded in San Francisco, during which time Tea had gone out on tour with her amateur punk band. After living out of her van with bandmates as they rambled across the West Coast for a month, Tea told Anderson that Sister Spit should try the open road. "If my shitty punk band could go on tour—and we sucked—then we could bring Sister Spit on tour," she told Anderson. "Sister Spit is so much more universal than a band."

The first Sister Spit tour in 1997 was a financial shitshow and a logistical nightmare. Partway into the tour, the van irreparably broke down at midnight on the border of Alabama and Mississippi. "Oh shit, we can't fuck this up," Tea thought. "Eileen Myles has trusted us with her life." The group had to split up. Some writers went on ahead in a cargo van with no seats, an illegal but necessary move. Everyone else got into the "little soccer van" that writer Tara Jepsen's stepmom offered. Throughout the month, the ladies would ask to make long-distance calls from the strangers' houses where they were staying, contact the promoter in the next city, open up their worn road atlas, and say, "Okay, we're in Athens, Georgia—how do we get to you in Virginia?" By the time the artists got back to San Francisco at the end of the month, they had made enough to give everyone $80, which, according to Tea, was a total shock; she was surprised there was any money left at all.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Allison experienced her own chaotic tours...

(Keep reading.)