Words From the Cafe: An Anthology - Paperback

by Anna Bálint (Editor), Willie J. Pugh (Photographer)

This is an exciting and unusual collection of stories and poems written by people in recovery. Every Friday at Seattle's Recovery Café, in downtown Seattle, people struggling with addiction, mental illness, trauma, and homelessness came together in Anna Bálint's Safe Place Writing Circle to write and share writing. There they discovered their own unique voices and ways of shaping language to write stories and poems as part of reclaiming their lives. This collection, born out of that involvement, includes a literary range and breadth of human experience that flies in the face of prevailing stereotypes about some of the most marginalized members of our society. These are voices that need to be heard.

Inside these pages we encounter themes as varied as living with multiple voices, and identities; memories of lost or missing parents, moments of nurture and times of madness; celebrations of music and dance, and old neighborhoods; prison life and institutionalized childhoods; growing up with a Holocaust cloud. Writers explore chance encounters with bears, blue herons, ex-wives, people who smile at us or don't, unexpected welcomes, and making peace with the aging process. They discuss waking up in a hospital, sobering up, discovering books as best friends and Academia as a form of therapy. There is humor at every turn in these gems.

In the forward, Killian Noe, Founding Director of Recovery Café, says "The Safe Place Writing Circle is a small, intimate, healing community within the larger Recovery Café community. The level of knowing and being known and loving and being loved that takes place in that "safe place" is nothing short of astounding and transformative. You will catch a glimpse of the miracles that take place in that circle as you read the following expressions, and you will likely experience that you are standing on sacred ground."