Despite its utilization of tech tools, 15-year-old Narrative magazine, one of the first digital literary endeavors, is based on a primitive urge: Tell me a story. On a rainy night last week, supporters of the magazine gathered at the Presidio in Traci Des Jardins’ Arguello restaurant to do what storytellers and story-recipients like to do: Eat (tacos) and drink (margaritas), sit shoulder to shoulder, and listen.

The program began with congratulations for Narrative co-founders Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks for 15 years of “stories, essays, poems and art,” said board member Bridget Quinn, “so much more than a literary magazine ... a free library available to everyone.” The crowd included writers who’d been published in Narrative, editors and, of course, financial supporters.

“Our dream,” Jenks said, “is to put forward worthwhile work and let the work speak for itself. ... The editor’s role is offstage, as it should be.” Poet Paisley Rekdal introduced George Saunders (“If you’re ever feeling really good about yourself, you should be asked to introduce George Saunders,” she said), then Saunders introduced Tobias Wolff, 2019 Narrative Storyteller Award honoree. “There are artists you admire not only artistically, but also morally. ... His art is informed by a fundamental decency of spirit.” Saunders described Wolff as “in a small group of writers who see America as the wicked and ecstatic dream state that it is. If there was justice in the world ... this would be a political rally and Toby would be running for president.”

“And I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that I’m running,” Wolff said a few moments later. Painting himself as both old-fashioned (“I still put the word ‘online’ in quotes”), he expressed gratitude for the digital medium of Narrative, in which “things that I love are being projected more widely.”

He ended by reading a portion of a new novel, the audience rapt as the prose embodied a point he’d made, that literature allows you to “enter into the inner life of another human.” It reminded me of a conversation earlier, at the reception, between the honoree and Nancy Shelby, a founding member of the theatrical company Word for Word, which has performed some of his works.

In response to his query about their latest project, she said they were working on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” at which he smiled and started quoting, with ersatz grandeur: “The many men, so beautiful!/ And they all dead did lie:/ And a thousand thousand slimy things/ Lived on; and so did I.”

Someone wisecracked about the “thousand slimy things” and politics, and Wolff responded, quite seriously, that the written word allows the reader to “be someone else, to see someone’s world.” As to those in power, “I wish they were readers,” he said.

At the Friday, May 17, commencement ceremonies, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presented honorary doctorate degrees to John Adams and Bernard and Barbro Osher, a perfect combination of recipients that’s a model for survival of the arts.

Adams, of course, is the renowned composer who toils in the fields of music; the Oshers, of course, are the benefactors whose generosity makes dreams of such toils possible at the Conservatory.

Former Chronicle reporter Julian Guthrie’s been around town and on magazine covers with her new book, “Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley’s Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime” ... and whew, she’s hoisted not only a heavy load but also a long subtitle. At a gathering at the Modernism West Gallery this month (co-hosted by Silicon Valley magazine), she appeared with the four women on whom the book focuses. (In homage, gallerist Martin Muller opened an exhibition of art by women — Laurie Lipton, Judy Dater, Naomie Kremer and Elina Anatole — that will remain at the site through July 7.)

The women told stories about breaking into tech, each eventually triumphing. But it’s the tiny details that always speak to me. Cracking open the book to a segment about Theresia Gouw, who was at Accel when she first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, I read that he handed her a business card that read “I’m CEO, Bitch.”

Guthrie and Sonja Hoel Perkins, one of the women in her book, are scheduled to be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View at 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 28.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING

“I told my mother where I’d be. I told my psychiatrist, too.”

Woman on cell phone, overheard in Berkeley by Margaret Kendall

Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, 415-777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik