The Seattle7 group of writers has garnered national attention for their work contributing to literary and literacy communities. The attention has resulted not only in strengthening alliances among the writers working together but also in valuable promotion for their books and writing careers. Seattle7 member Kit Bakke, who has contributed several articles to Writing It Real, writes an account of the group’s beginnings, growth, and success. Her story contains links to projects and literacy groups that will resonate with you as a writer as well as helpful resources for artists’ non-profits and links to over 36 writers you’ll want to read about.

The Seattle7’s energy, dedication and success is sure to inspire you to see what is happening in your community, how you can join in, and create and add to efforts that will strengthen your community and your standing among writers. The Seattle7 is a group that went beyond the usual discussions of how writers might find audiences and whether traditional or self-publishing is the way to go; they started with grass roots projects that utilized their passions and skills in the service of others, and this fed right back into getting what all writers want — the publication of a book. Read on! – Ed.

In 2006, I gave a workshop with Joy Selak, a writing friend from Austin Texas, at Edmonds’ Write-on-the-Sound writing conference. We gave a class on the creative uses of calendar and clock time in fiction. We had way more material that we could cover in our allotted hour and fifteen minutes, but everyone seemed to have a good time. After the workshops, the organizers scheduled a slot for speakers to sell and sign their books. I sat down with my Miss Alcott’s E-Mail next to Seattle author Jennie Shortridge. We chatted about this and that, and she invited me to a monthly coffee she had started with a few other writing friends.

“We meet once a month to whine about the business — our agents, publishers, stuff like that.”

“I’m TOTALLY in!” I said, having discovered in my short ride as a published author that the publishing industry is a rat’s nest of complexity, silliness and hidebound traditions that made no sense at all. (This was 2006 — light-years have passed since then and the complexity and silliness is still rampant, but the hidebound part has been blown to smithereens.) 

So we met. There were just a few of us and eventually it grew to seven, Garth Stein, Jennie Shortridge, Mary Guterson, Heather Barbieri, Randy Sue Coburn, Stephanie Kallos and me. And we had a great time whining and complaining and swapping industry horror stories. We supported each other as we each went through traumas over firing agents, losing editors, having story ideas rejected, seeing the dreadful covers our publisher had cooked up, watching independent bookstores close, seeing marketing budgets and print runs shrink — all those things that make actually becoming an author not nearly as much fun as the frustrated unpublished writer wants to believe.

Finally, after about a year of this sort of thing, we decided it was time to Get Up and Do Something. Enough complaining. Enough passivity. Let’s help readers and writers. Let’s build a local reading community. So, there being seven of us, we dubbed ourselves the Seattle7Writers, bought the domain name, and talked about how to do what we wanted to do.

In a recent interview, Garth Stein answered the question about why the name Seattle7Writers: “The Seattle Writers Guild sounded too strict and formal. And one of our members, Kit Bakke, had been a member of SDS and the Weathermen, so we sort of could lay claim to that…and we all love The Big Lebowski movie.” (You can read a bit more about my rowdy 1960s in Miss Alcott’s E-Mail.)

Anyway, our first idea was to put together book bags of our books, sign them and donate them to various fundraising events for schools and literacy-promoting groups. So we kicked in some money, bought some cool bags with our names on them, along with a logo and our tagline “Read Local” and S7W was launched. As we began to collect and distribute money, we turned to Shunpike to be our fiscal sponsor and to help us through the process of becoming a non-profit corporation in the state of Washington.

Now, a couple years into it, we’ve created a group of about forty “Friends of S7W” who also donate their signed books and receive a bag to donate to the literacy-promoting organization of their choice — so we have almost fifty bags going out every year raising money for literacy related organizations.

Then we decided to hold a luncheon for book clubs, where we’d give a couple talks, hand out a few books and raise money for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program. That went well and gave us our first taste of organizing an event. We got ambitious, and set out to contribute something literary to Seattle’s annual Arts Crush events in the fall of 2010. There are a couple of pictures of some of us here and more on our website.

We called our Arts Crush event “The NovelLive!” It was a huge undertaking. Our goal was to raise money for Writers in the Schools by writing a complete novel in public. We would write on stage at the Richard Hugo House Literary Center in Seattle — “we” in this case being S7W’ers and intrepid friends, taking consecutive two-hour shifts, contributing their time, guts and words to this extravagant project: Kathleen Alcala, Matthew Amster-Burton, Kit Bakke, Erica Bauermeister, Sean Beaudoin, Dave Boling, Deb Caletti, Carol Cassella, William Dietrich, Robert Dugoni, Kevin Emerson, Karen Finneyfrock, Clyde Ford, Jamie Ford, Elizabeth George, Mary Guterson, Maria Dahvana Headley, Teri Hein, Erik Larson, David Lasky/Greg Stump, Stacey Levine, Frances McCue, Jarret Middleton, Peter Mountford, Kevin O’Brien , Julia Quinn, Nancy Rawles, Suzanne Selfors, Jennie Shortridge, Ed Skoog, Garth Stein, Indu Sundaresan, Craig Welch, and Susan Wiggs.

Our every keystroke, backspace and agonizing pause would be projected onto a screen above us, and streamed online. Hugo House donated the space and Amazon kicked in money to support our technical needs. We developed a student-teacher guide about writing and invited classrooms to visit or watch us online. We also designed and sold tee shirts, and then gave the proceeds to another nonprofit, 826Seattle, a terrific homework help and reading/writing organization in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood.

Amazingly, an ebook publisher in New York, Open Road Media, loved our NovelLive! project and is bringing the completed (and, I have to say, somewhat edited — as you can imagine, there were a few discontinuities and loose ends that had to be ironed out) novel to an espresso book machine (or downloadable ebook) near you this May. The title of the book is Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices. We have several book launch events scheduled for the Puget Sound area, all of which appear on our website.

We’re happy with the blurb about Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices:
Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence.

The quirky tenants — a hilarious mix of misfits and rabble-rousers from days gone by — rely on Alexis all the more when they discover a plot to sell the Hotel. Can Alexis save their home? Find her real father? Deal with her surrogate dad’s dicey past? Find true love? Perhaps only their feisty pet crow, Habib, truly knows.

Provoking interesting questions about the creative process, this novel is by turns funny, scary, witty, suspenseful, beautiful, thrilling and unexpected.
Another literacy-promoting approach has been our “Pocket Library” project, which provides books to local homeless shelters and transitional housing units. We collect books from individuals, bookstores and publishers, reviewers and other industry sources, and then sort and deliver them to several shelters around town. So far this year, we’ve stocked their shelves with over a thousand books.

Our Seattle7Writers core group has morphed since our beginning and our current members are: Garth Stein, Jennie Shortridge, Randy Sue Coburn, Carol Cassella, Erica Bauermeister, Maria Dahvana Headley, Kevin O’Brien, Mary Guterson and me. And we haven’t stopped thinking up ideas to promote literacy. As you know, authors are nothing if not persistent, creative and ambitious; and, since our publication schedules all vary, one or another of us always has time to think of new ways to promote literacy in the Northwest. For instance, we wanted to support local independent bookstores, so we set up a Holiday Book Signing at Phinney Neighborhood Center last November, and plan to do it again this fall. We rounded up a crowd of our S7W author friends and Santoro’s Books provided our books for sale. We were a one-stop book fair for a day of free cookies, author talks and signed books for everyone on your Christmas list. It was fun for us, and Santoro’s sold a lot of books, donating 10% to Writers in the Schools.

Readers need writers and writers need readers, and everyone needs a little amusement. We treasure the dialogue between readers and writers, and plan to keep doing whatever fun things we can think of to keep the dance alive. We’d love to hear your ideas — write us at info@seattle7writers.org. And I hope our ideas inspire new ones for you in your communities.