Creative Colloquy strives to highlight the South Sound literary community & build relationships based on mutual admiration of the written word.
[Newest] Stories
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,
…
The Duchess had molted and emerged anew. Her brown speckled plumage and white belly were displayed like the headdress of a Mardi Gras Indian. After a brief spring, she had found her mate
and was now perched proudly atop a nest of a single candy cerulean egg. She willed the fragile being to life with the trill of her beak. The time of flight was approaching, and she would embark
on her journey from north to south. She listened to the wind gently blowing a soft breeze through her home in Delaware. This year would be a good year for the first-time mother. The Duchess
was prepared for The Great Migration.
Yet, something was immediately wrong. Her egg, though a miracle of nature, would not hatch. It possessed an otherworldly quality. It almost glowed in the morning sun. Most veeries lay three, four, or even five eggs, but The Duchess had laid just one. The Duchess worried about her small family’s ability to take flight in time, but The Duke attempted to soften her fears by reminding her that both of them had taken flight when they, too, were young. He proposed that the egg would hatch just in time for the family to join the other birds.
