The contributors to this publication write within a group called the Safe Place Writing Circle; it's housed at the Recovery Cafe in downtown Seattle. Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur: "The Recovery Café is a community, built from the heart of a woman named Killian Noe.
"For 10 years Noe....has been the center of this place, which serves those battling drug and alcohol addiction. She greets, she listens, she hugs, she shares, she remembers every name. And she believes in people who have all but stopped believing in themselves."
The Recovery cafe is a true community center. In addition to coffee and food, it offers a variety of classes, including meditation, yoga, dance and résumé writing. It helps people find housing. It helps them recover from addictions. “What I see in every person who walks through this door is someone who has suffered with not just one trauma, but one after another and another,” said founding director, Noe, author of Finding Our Way Home: Addictions and Divine Love. [Seattle Times, September 7, 2014]
Enter Anna Balint, writing teacher extraordinaire. With help from Jack Straw Productions, 4Culture and others, Balint has brought together men and women who might otherwise not have had the opportunity to put pen to paper, to tell their stories--for their own benefit, the class's (they share what they write) and,not the least,those of the reading public who are interested in learning how to pull a writing class together and who value voices of our neighbors in recovery.
Esmeralda Hernandez, one of twenty-two contributors to the anthology: "If you watch butterflies, you will see they only interact in small, short moments of safety."
Balint provides a safe environment in her Friday afternoon classes, as measured by the returning participants - those who show up every week, as well as those who drop in occasionally. Anonymous: "You reached into my dark isolation and urged me out with writing." (from the "Introduction").
For the book's epigraph, Balint calls forth words of poet Taha Muhammad Ali:
... it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's hearts.
Developing a writing class is an art, especially if it develops into a community of writers from different backgrounds, writers who share life stories regardless of where they used to live or where they live right now. Moreover, once one writing group forms, its good will spills over into the larger community - the city - where seeds for fairness and justice are planted and may even be realized.
I share my story, you share your story.
They're not the same story,
but with our stories
we give each other kindness.
- Tamar
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