Creative Colloquy strives to highlight the South Sound literary community & build relationships based on mutual admiration of the written word.
[Newest] Stories
I wrote a song once about fixing my crown
after being knocked on my ass
literally flat on the ground.
I invite you if you’ve yet to do just the same.
Cause when we pause for a minute
there is no fucking shame
in the abuse we survived or the guilt from the lie
or the advantage taken from us
ancestors of the cry
at the hands of our family or worse
of ourselves.
In November of 2025, Creative Colloquy and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, and the City of Tacoma encouraged the community to submit micro-poetry, 6-word stories, or slogans as a part of our Hopeful Horizons: Climate Storytelling Contest.
The below were selected pieces, written and visual, as selected via blind submission from our editorial committee.
On the morning of November 22, we gathered at 7 Seas Tacoma Taproom to share these bite-sized stories while making zines and rallying around the cause over bites and brew. For your reading (and viewing) pleasure, we present the following…
The last time I saw you, we gathered at the table – plain, round, wooden. Grandchildren wielded crayons. Imaginations impressed turkeys and snowflakes on paper displayed on kitchen walls. Leaves stretched the table, accommodating aunts and an accumulation of ghosts – dead fathers, expired dreams, the old ways. Grandpa recounted stories to rapt cousins.
Flour sprinkled the table. Your deft hands and your grandmother’s wooden rolling pin sculpted pie dough. A disc of cold pastry, with careful rotations, became a jagged edged circle.
You draped butter-speckled dough over the pan – deep, metal, dull with the patina of past pies. Apples met your knife, becoming thick tranches coated with sugar, cinnamon, and lemon.
A flower shaped vent and coarse sugar decorated the top crust, pressed gently over the filling.
The bouquet of cooking apples permeated the room. The dough transformed through heat into crust, past solidifying into future.
We are building up our works again--
The living bringing back to life,
Us dogs lapping up spilled wine.
At one time we had ornamented this world,
But entered into her as nothing;
As an offal pit swept over and become ash,
…
