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.

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