The Story of Paris Writers Collective
Written by Natalia Armenia
Images by Raul Guillermo
I would be lying if I didn’t say that the story of Paris Writers Collective starts with my own story, and therefore with the way my parents raised me. My mother gave me the thirst for books, my father made me a dreamer and my grandma insisted I should put my heart into everything I did. If it wasn't for them, I don't know where I would have found those rare qualities and combined them into such an uplifting work.
I studied literature and writing in school mostly because that was pretty much all I did already but the idea of mentoring or teaching people sounded to me utterly intimidating. I knew I wanted to write stories, but was too shy to share my pieces. As time went by, I grew bigger than my timidity and felt an instant urge to read what I wrote, and that completely changed my life forever.
Natalia Armenia, founder of the collective, writing at the Highlander’s Pub
I was then embraced by courage but also naivety. I founded this collective a little over a year ago but it keeps expanding in front of my eyes: either through social media, flyers or just the good old word of mouth. We are now around fifty members from all over the world meeting once a week at the basement of a bar, an alternative school and a traditional Parisian coffee shop in the 5th arrondissement.
But when people first come, they fear.
Being ‘forced’ to write a piece under 12 minutes and then being invited to read it out loud in front of a bunch of strangers is something that perhaps voluntarily we don’t seek to do very often. But just as quickly as the pen flows into the piece of paper, us strangers became a community. It is a safe space. We don’t expect perfection. Most of us don’t even work in writing, but we all, individually and collectively, have a voice that is desperate to knit some intriguing tales.
People from all ages, genders, backgrounds, incomes, and entire universes meet for two hours every week and stop existing to begin to live through their own writing. In poetry week, approachable to many only by its length, tends to be the one genre that people are scared to even speak about. I tried to quickly encourage the members to give it a try and to not see poetry as what Shakespeare intended it to be, but also to accept other poets and writers such as: Bukowski, Pizarnik and Clapton.
Poetry is extremely connected to the senses and during the first workshops we tried to express certain ideas or feelings through the graces of touch and taste for instance. Nature paid a peculiar place likewise and so did orality.
When we did creative non-fiction, I was scared at the idea of them connecting it to traditional journalism or self-help books. I made them read In Cold Blood and Noticia de Un Secuestro to make them realize how creative a writer can be even if they are not allowed to invent or to speak the untruth. We studied Didion and other Pulitzer recipients for non fiction and we wrote detective stories based on true crimes. We analysed photography and other art forms by working with what was in front of us without having other images to rely on, and by forbidding ourselves to lie. We wrote for ten minutes about a tiny simple action (opening jars, folding clothes, cleaning windows) and the amount of poetry that came out of that room had to be read to be believed.
In the short stories module, we were finally able to lie, invent, create, expand, which blocked many of us who were only used to scribbling in our journals. This time we gave each other strong opening lines (in medias res) and we had no choice but to continue writing from another person’s point of view and voice. We dived into character composition and landscape description, and realized how brief those had to be in order to keep the short story, well, short.
Memoir writing was by far the most intense session. We cried, laughed, got angry, had debates, cried again, hugged each other, but above all, we healed. We wrote about our bodies, our life stories, our pain, our lovers, and some more real shit that made us feel naked. We have all been through so many different things but how mesmerizing is it that we all feel each other's pain and joy through writing?
In travel literature, more than taking a trip, we had a hoot. I didn’t want anybody to write about how amazing their trip to Rome was or what were the 10 places to visit in New York. I can easily just google that. I wanted to be amazed, flabbergast, baffled, and boy was I ! We shared stories about travel disasters in Montréal, getting drunk and high in St. Andrews, temporary lovers we met at hostels in Palermo, absorbing stories about language barriers encountered in Paris, problems at bus stations in New Jersey, the most hilarious type of transports in Maputo, random old guys you met at a bar in Adelaide, stereotypes getting real in Barajas Airport, finding yourself lost in Vietnam, getting food poisoned in Pokhara...
Currently, we are working on fictional works only: novel, theatre, writing for film and slam poetry; but is it not rare for every session to take a turn in which we have philosophical debates to fuel the souls of our pieces. We have three in-person groups so far. On Mondays we are all international people, meeting post 9-5 hours and getting to know each other's cultures through our prose. On Wednesdays, we only speak Spanish, and even if not from the same countries, clearly visible through the lack of understanding of some slang words, we can relate to too many things by the cultural abundances and penuries of Latin America. On Thursdays the club is feminist-centerered: women and LGBTQ+ people only, and it is by far the team that debates and tries to deconstruct the most our reality. We are attempting to change it through our writing.
This year was life-changing because of the growth of this collective and for the grace of being able to finally write in person. But we won’t stop there. More groups will be opened in 2022, in English, Spanish and French. But I want to take some time to learn how to write (and make people write) for specific audiences. My intention with Paris Writers Collective, before writing or reading, is for people to see things in themselves - and in life - that they have never seen before.
I want to extend this desire for themed-focused groups: women who have suffered from domestic violence, people in prisons, teenagers struggling with mental health, the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and immigrants and refugees. But before that, I have to acknowledge my own smallness: I need to write more, read more, and investigate more to make those connections, a little more challenging than the previous ones, deeper and ever-lasting.
I leave with so many stories, that I won’t steal I promise, but that probably would never leave me either.
I provide a safe space, tools, themes and prompts.
The rest is just them.
Written in Paris, France
November 2021