Guest blogger Arleen Williams: Writing at Louisa's

Seattle is a city replete with readers, writers, and coffee shops. In many of these coffee shops, writers meet on a regular basis to do timed-writing practice, a style of shared and supportive writing first promoted in 1986 by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones.

Some of these writing groups are open to anyone interested in stopping by with pen and paper to give it a try. Others have a set membership and shared culture of writing and sharing work. These are not critique groups. Instead, they offer a sense of community in what can be a lonely profession. And the best part? You can start your own group anytime, anywhere, by inviting other folks to gather at a designated place and time to write.

The following piece first appeared in an anthology titled Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers, published by one of my writing groups in 2010.

Writing at Louisa's

The room hums with creative energy as I rush into Louisa’s Café & Bakery five minutes late. Diners sit chattering at the scattered tables along the outer walls of the room, the hum of music barely audible over the clattering of pots and pans from the open kitchen. But as I join the group of writers at the center tables, it is not those sounds I hear. As I sit and open my own notebook, I tune inward, listening for my inner voice. Instead I feel the whispers of other voices. the voices of my fellow writers, the voices of their characters fill the air, their stories surging from head to hand, from pen to paper.

We gather twice a week, year after year, to bleed our stories, ink onto paper. We write and share these stories, knowing we are supported and nourished by the experience. The timer is set at two-thirty and sounds at three o'clock. For thirty minutes stories float through the air and find rest on blank pages. Stories that must be told because silence kills, because truth and art free our souls.

We are a fluid mix of Seattle writers, young and old, female and male, experienced and first-timers, published and still-to-be. What we share is the desire to find voice and to express our soul in words. We play with language to record or create lives and worlds that, prior to that moment when pen grazes paper, live only in the diverse worlds of our individual memories or imaginations. We come to Louisa's, we scribble our stories, real and imagined, and we breathe life into them.

When the timer jolts us back to present time, we share the words we have written, each voice unique—some soft, smooth, and soothing, others deep, rough, or halting. We laugh, we cry, we get embarrassed, and we find the support we need to pull us back each week to scribble more words in what seem at times to be nothing more than illegible ink stains. We return each week not for any illusions of notoriety, not even for the dream of publication, but simply because the voices inside our heads will not be silenced in any other manner. Those voices demand to be heard, so we come together and give them life—our stories intertwined in the gentle scratches of pen on paper at Louisa's Café & Bakery.

* * * * * * * * * * * * 

Arleen Williams is the author of three books: Running Secrets, Biking Uphill, and The Thirty-Ninth Victim—all written in Seattle coffee shops.

Day 4, Barbara: Sometimes File is the only way to unscramble Life

I just can’t stand it anymore.

The snowpile of receipts, bills, coupons, bills, catalogs, bills, business cards, bills, letters, bills, newspapers, and bills that my desk has become. That’s spread  somehow to my coffee table. Kitchen table. Dining room table. And we’re supposed to be shooting for a paperless world? When it spills over onto the sofa or the bathroom countertop, it’s time to act.

It’s time to file.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

For me, that means hauling out the pocket folders, labelmaker, stapler, Sharpie and highlighter, hanging files, and shredder. And the Gripper bags and the outsized garbage can from the laundry room. No ordinary trash receptacle will do. That cute little basket my daughter once labeled with a History subject sticker in her college dorm room, which I’ve repurposed for my home office all these years, won’t serve today. No, this is a job for Hefty and Rubbermaid.

Bring it on, baby. I roll up my sleeves, clear the decks on a folding picnic table, and start separating the sheep from the goats. Paid bills in this stack, unpaid ones in that. Tax-deductible receipts for the business, over here. Personal, there. Receipts from Starbucks, Coldwater Creek, Walmart (oops, that ream of paper’s a business expense), Chuck E. Cheese for grandson’s birthday party, trash. Receipts from the liquor store, debatable. Maybe under Deductible/Medical.

One time when I’d used up every available flat surface in the house I had to resort to the patio table for sorting. Everything was going fine until I ran in to catch the phone and an afternoon shower blew in. The piles got drenched. I read somewhere that you can reclaim wet books by freezing them, letting the dry air eventually suck out the moisture. Two months later my son came over to help cook dinner. “Mom, why you have these, um, stacks of receipts in the freezer?”

And about all those dead-tree records in the first place, you might ask. I am a committed citizen of the digital era, after all. I am dedicated to online bill pay. Much neater than dropping an old-fashioned check into the black hole of the USPS. But if someone’s going to charge me money, I want them to request it in a more tangible manner than a few pixels that might disappear into the spam ether and leave me with no reminder a due date ever existed. I’ve also wondered, when given the opportunity to “Go Green!” and get my confirmation by email, how it’s supposed to help if I have to print it out on a full sheet on my own printer?

Fundraising appeals, alumni newsletters, book catalogs, One-Day-Only Sales, invitations to gallery openings and community theatre and pet adoption days . . . I meant to see if my schedule and purse could accommodate them, all those weeks ago, I really did. Now they’re consigned to the Circular File.

The archaeological dig progresses, each layer of slick circulars, each tiny, crumpled scrap of thermal roll peeled back to reveal the shards of my existence. I expect at any moment to come upon a Plainview Point or a pre-Columbian midden. Yep, that bad. I hope I do not unearth an invitation to some friend’s wedding that took place last month. I did, once, uncover an unrecognized sender’s nondescript envelope that, when opened, contained a twenty-dollar check. “Congratulations on being awarded Honorable Mention in our writing competition.” Well, that ought to teach me.

Soon I can see the wood surface of the kitchen table gleaming through. By the time I’m down to the home stretch, I’ve located my missing silver earring, a dollar bill (bonus!), and a flyer promoting a “Get Your (Second) Act Together” empowerment seminar for women. Yesterday.

Too bad. It’s History. And File has neatly transmogrified to Life again.

Day 3, Kay: Is the Paragraph Ranch a real place?

Happy Friday from the Paragraph Ranch.

I've had several folks say they'd like to visit the Ranch and have asked me if it's a real place. That's a good question.

The “home place” in the novel The Paragraph Ranch is loosely based on the West Texas farm where my family lived until I was six years old. It was a ramshackle place my parents received as a part of their cotton farming lease.

But for a kid it was pretty amazing. I’m the youngest of four children and each morning would watch the older three walk down the dirt road to the bottom of the hill, open the gate, and wait for the school bus.

If it was arctic outside--and I mean it had to be arctic--my parents would pile all four of us into the single cab of the pickup truck and ride down to the gate to wait for the big kids' ride to school.

The half mile to the bottom of the hill wove through mesquite trees and cactus and split-wood fenceposts that were piled up in the shape of teepees. Fertile ground for a toddler's imagination.

Now, all that's left on that hill about ten miles south of Snyder is part of the windmill, surrounded by rolling, wooded terrain that’s been put into the CRP program (if you’re not from Texas, Google it).

But the white frame house, barn, peach orchard, dirt-floored storm cellar, and cow pen made from rusted box springs live again in the pages of The Paragraph Ranch.

On a more conceptual level, the Paragraph Ranch is the place in my mind that sparks my imagination and fuels my writing.

I'd love to hear from writers and readers about the places that you have known and loved that now live only in your memories.

Day 2, Barbara: The Hectograph Duplicator

I imagine every one of us has a memory of how we got started writing. My co-author of The Paragraph Ranch, Kay Ellington, remembered the time in fourth grade when she launched a handwritten newspaper. (I, in fifth grade in a different city and state that same year, created an illustrated book about a dog and announced my plans to be a children’s book author.)

So as long as we’re digging back into ancient history here, I’ll share. This is from a memoir-in-progress, Editing Elsie:

. . . . . .

I tell Cat about publishing my first work for nothing when I was in kindergarten, in an edition of a dozen copies. A clandestine enterprise.

My mother owned, for use in her club activities, a neat little device called a Hectograph Duplicator. It consisted of a metal pan the size of a coloring book, filled with a beige-colored jelly that, when you pressed a special waxed paper onto it, yielded an image that would transfer to other pages.

I was mesmerized by the machine. There was something organic and fleshy about the gelatin layer, with its reverse-image tattoo bleeding beneath the skin, that was irresistible to touch. You mashed it and it wiggled slightly. It had a not-unpleasant chemical smell.

I observed carefully how my mother rolled the dark-blue sheet into her typewriter, clattered out the recipes or bowling league schedule or whatever, then pulled out the finished master and laid it gently across the gelatin-filled pan. When she lifted it up it left behind a mirror image of her typing. She would sometimes let me help smooth out the white pages that she laid one by one over the inked surface to pull a series of positive impressions, moist and bruise-blue.

One morning when my mother leaves me home with Doris I steal to the hall closet and spirit away the Hectograph to my room. I labor all day writing out a poem on one of the magic pages, leaning hard on my pencil to make a good transfer. I smooth the master out on the gelatin surface the way I have seen my mother do. I lack her deft touch in lifting the copies up, however, and as I mash each piece of tablet paper into the tray my stubby fingers make little gouges in the duplicating surface. To make matters worse, when I finish printing my edition, ready to be folded into little booklets, I realize I haven’t learned how to erase the master image.

In a panic, before my mother returns home, I shut myself in the bathroom and turn on the hot water full force. I plunge the pan under the faucet to wash off the ink. I watch in horror as the gelatin melts away. The likelihood of getting caught solidifies to absolute certainty. All I can do is return the tray to its closet shelf, empty.

I never do fess up, though I’m sure Mom figures things out when I give her one of the blue-inked booklets for Mother’s Day.

. . . . . .

I’ve told you mine—now it’s your turn. How did you write your first story?

PS  Wanna make your own hectograph? Here's how.

Day 1, Kay: The Working Writer’s beginnings

I have always written. In the fourth grade I took a piece of notebook paper and created The Mudville News, drawing pictures and writing stories about the people at East Elementary. My classmates really liked it, but I couldn't keep up, producing all those copies by hand.

If only I'd had an iPad back then.

Despite my passion for prose, upon graduation from college I quickly succumbed to pressures to abandon my assistant editor's job at a trade journal for something more practical. It was the ’80s; everyone was getting an MBA and getting rich. I took a job in sales.

Ad sales at a newspaper kept me sort of near the world of words, but that's like saying living in the Gaza Strip promotes multiculturalism.

I rose through the ranks of the business side of newspapers, from ad sales to circulation to promotion to marketing to online, and, finally, to audience development, working for Cox Communications, Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group.

But I dreamed of writing screenplays and books. Fifteen years ago I threw myself into learning how book publishing worked. I went to workshops. I read how-to guides. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I received hundreds of rejections. I got an agent who promptly couldn't sell my book. I put the writing aside. For weeks. Months. Sometimes years.

In 2013 I renewed my commitment to learning how the craft of writing worked. I read 22 current bestsellers in three months, and I improved.

My coauthor of The Paragraph Ranch is a great writer and knows all about style and craft. I write from passion and have learned a few axioms along the way. I have much more to master. But together we’ve come up with a novel that readers seem to enjoy.

If we can do it, so can you — with the right help and the right publisher.

The Paragraph Ranch was published a few days ago by Booktrope Editions in Seattle. Our copies arrived this week, and it’s a thrill to hold the real book in our hands! As we move full-steam into promotions and publicity, we promise to share how it’s going, and how we did it. Follow us at the link on our blog page—and we’ll keep you posted.

The Working Writer

The Paragraph Ranch is a contemporary novel about the writing life that takes place in the very real state of Texas. But the Paragraph Ranch is also a place, both physical and virtual, where writers come together to learn the craft and business. And it’s our nickname for the mental space the two of us have carved out during our years of creating a coauthored book series.

While this isn’t our first rodeo, we continue to discover truths about the changing landscape of books, authorship, and publishing. We think these truths are worth sharing. So come on along with us on the journey!