Networking Aloud has unique open mic take at Old Capitol Books.

An open mic event like Networking Aloud is an invitation to witness the amazing scope of human experience.

Co-host and sometime programmer Janice Rocke says it’s different from Rubber Chicken Poetry Slam at East Village Coffee Lounge, or her own literary events every last Thursday at Juice n’ Java.

Networking Aloud goes down the second Tuesday of the month, around a big table at Old Capitol Books, like a scene from the Iowa Writers Workshop.

A featured writer gets 15 minutes to read, then anyone who signs up gets seven minutes to read their own work. Critiques are not allowed.

“You get applause, you get an audience,” Rocke says. “If you’ve written something funny, you get laughs.”

She’s going to read this Tuesday from her autobiographical fiction manuscript.

“In the late ’80s and early ’90s I was a stripper and heroin addict,” she says. “I lived in Pacific Grove with my husband and would commute to San Francisco’s Mitchell Brothers O’Ferrell Theatre.”

One regular is a transgender woman who Rocke says is writing more personally in light of political battles over gender.

“She’s talking about men trying to make laws, relating to them having grown up in a male body,” Rocke says. “And there’s this empathy in her work for women, having become a woman. She blows us away.”

About 15 years ago, Pat Hanson began the Writers’ Roundtable at Thunderbird Bookshop in Carmel. When the fabled bookstore closed, she started an open mic at Alternative Cafe in Seaside. When they folded, she moved it to Morgan’s in Monterey before finding a home for the last three years at Old Capitol Books.

They get six to 20 participants/attendees. Kristina Baer is the featured author on July 12, and will read from her fictional memoir Minerva’s Fox, dealing with academia, infertility and identity.

The featured writer June 14 is Patrick Fontes, reading from his book Maria’s Purgatorio, about an attractive but lost Latina punk rocker named Maria looking for a surrogate family in the summer heat of 1980s Fresno. “Expect sex, drugs, violence and speaking in tongues,” reads promotional copy. “Lots of fights,” adds the author about the punk rock scene, which was visited by bands like The Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. He says he’ll read from one of the more tender passages in which Maria remembers tending a garden and cooking with her abuela.

But Hanson says the open mic segments are like flying blind: “It’s a total surprise.”

NETWORKING ALOUD is 6-8pm Tuesdays at Old Capitol Books, 559 Tyler St., Monterey. Free. 601-9195, 581-0375.