Tacoma has a mysterious, thriving literary scene. You have to know where to look
Writing is often seen as a solo pursuit. Even in romanticized versions, it’s Joan Didion cutting to the detached heart of it in a windowless California room, Hunter Thompson menacing over his Woody Creek typewriter or James Baldwin crafting prose from Paris or New York.
And you know what? Writing is lonely. There’s no doubt. As someone who’s spent a significant portion of my life trying and most often failing to do it well, it’s something I can vouch for. The best thing about the torture of writing — the thing that keeps writers going — is having written. Producing something you’re proud of. Something that matters, to someone, somewhere. The rest is (at best) humbling. Making an honest go will make you feel useless and impotent, unable to put your thoughts into words — and, worse, so unoriginal that no one would care if you did, even on a good day.
Yet, writers, bless their hearts, persist — including in Tacoma.
Jackie Casella is one of them. She’s also the founder of Creative Colloquy, a local literary group that launched in 2014. The idea, at the risk of relying on cliche, one of the art’s greatest sins, was to cultivate and foster what at the time was Tacoma’s largely undefined literary community, on the basic assumption one existed.
Or, to put it another way, Casella knew there were at least a few people just like her — writers, writing, hungry for an outlet — and she hoped there were more.
Casella had recently spent roughly a year as an editor for a short-lived print literary magazine, she told me, and saw signs that a hidden world of local wordsmiths who needed support and feedback existed — a band of lonely creatives in search of connection.
The confirmation Casella was hoping for came fast, she said by phone last week.
It arrived not long after Creative Colloquy — which has now been in existence for nearly a decade, hosting monthly open mic events, featuring local short fiction and poetry on its website and publishing an annual anthology of local writers — pulled off its first gathering.
“Right out of the gate, from the first event, it was like, ‘Oh, we’re not alone,’” said Casella (who, in the interest of full disclosure, contributed to the alt-press Weekly Volcano during my time as the paper’s editor).
“It was exciting to see,” Casella said. “And it just went from there.”
Last week, Creative Colloquy hosted its first lit crawl since COVID-19 shut down the world, featuring a long itinerary of local writers reading and discussing selected works at several well-known St. Helens neighborhood venues, including Doyle’s and King’s Books.
Prior to the pandemic, Creative Colloquy lit crawls — like pub crawls, with words instead of booze — were known to attract close to 100 people, Casella said. Last week’s event drew what she described as a “healthy crowd,” full of new and old faces.
For many, the in-person rebirth of Creative Colloquy’s lit crawl last week marked a return to normal — and perhaps a reintroduction to all things that make the literary group uniquely important in Tacoma.
For many readers of this column, however, the mere existence of a thriving local literary scene will likely come as a surprise.
Unless you’re part of this world, or part of Tacoma’s larger arts and culture community, the local literary scene can be a mysterious and hidden realm.
Christina Vega is an accomplished local nonfiction writer and the force behind Blue Cactus Press, a Tacoma-based publisher that focuses on work produced by local LGBTQ+ and BIPOC voices.
Vega, a former Army linguist with a background in anthropology, is also one of many people within Tacoma’s scrappy literary community who says they’ve benefited from the existence of a group like Creative Colloquy.
“I really got my footing as a writer, and honestly did exactly what (Casella) hoped to create through Creative Colloquy,” said Vega, who uses they/them pronouns and published their first collection of poetry in 2017. “I got connected to the literary art scene here in Tacoma through Creative Colloquy and started performing my work, and I gained a lot of confidence.”
Over the years, Vega’s writing has been featured by Creative Colloquy and a long list of well-known poetry collections. Working as a freelance journalist, Vega has been published by a number of other local publications, including Grit City Magazine, City Arts and the Hilltop Action Journal.
Blue Cactus Press, meanwhile, now has a staff of five employees and roughly 25 published books in rotation — right here in Tacoma, from an office in the Union Club on Broadway downtown.
Vega described Blue Cactus as a “hybrid publisher” that puts out “books and articles and ephemera by folks from historically marginalized groups.”
Equally important, Vega told me, is the emphasis Blue Cactus puts on working with local authors to learn the trade and reap the benefits of their creative talents, in all the forms that can take.
“We make books, we teach people how to make books themselves, and we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, activists and artists of color,” Vega said.
Vega described Creative Colloquy as “a really beautiful launching pad.”
“It really fills that gap where folks who aren’t sure how to get started can connect with folks who are in the industry, or who do consider themselves writers, and just be in community with people who value storytelling and all of the ways that it can affect your life,” Vega said.
“Creative Colloquy lets folks try it out with a very low bar to entry and very low pressure — and very high support from the community.”
According to Christian Carvajal, a Thurston County-based writer whose work includes the apocalyptic thriller “Lightfall” and a decade’s worth of essays, theater reviews, art criticisms and commentary published in local publications, the support Creative Colloquy offers writers of all skill levels is rare.
Carvajal, who has a background in theater and comedy, moved to Olympia in 2008. Finding his footing as a writer in a new backdrop was challenging, he acknowledged. Like Casella, he eventually found a home writing for the Weekly Volcano.
When Casella launched Creative Colloquy, Carvajal was quickly won over, he said.
The regular trips to Tacoma felt like a small price to pay.
“I think there is something about the Tacoma literary scene — if we can be pretentious and call it that — that is very hungry for encouragement and intelligent feedback … along with having some really surprisingly talented writers,” Carvajal told me.
“I’ve been in writers’ groups in four states now, and they all suffer from the same few personality flaws: they’re competitive, they’re insecure, they’re coasting on bravado … sometimes they’re tense. It’s not a lot of fun, ” he continued. “Creative Colloquy was the opposite of all that.”
“I think that’s tremendously valuable.”
This story was originally published October 10, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
