BY AVERY GOODSTINE for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 11/16/2026
Creative Colloquy is bringing another year of page-turning literary excitement with the 12th annual Creative Colloquy Crawl. This choose-your-own-adventure style event celebrates storytelling by bringing local creatives together for a prose-filled evening.
On Nov. 10 from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., five spots in downtown Tacoma will be hosting various storytelling performances from local writers, poets, and creatives.
Here is the current lineup: 6:30 p.m. n Women Who Write Together at Manuscript n Voices of the Diaspora at The Grand Cinema n That’s So Gay at The Mix 7:30 p.m. n A show about nothing at Puget Sound Pizza n Radio Theater Live at a TBD venue n South Side Stories at Manuscript n Women of Horror at The Mix 8:30 p.m. n On Air: Conversations about Frank Herbert at Puget Sound Pizza n Noreen and the Unnatural Man at a TBD venue n UWT at Manuscript
After the performances conclude, there will be an after party at Doyle’s Public House at 9:30 p.m. Make sure to check the event website for more details and age restrictions at some venues.
In pub crawl fashion, attendees are encouraged to bounce from venue to venue all evening long.
Creative Colloquy founder and event producer Jackie Fender said the crawl started as a challenge to see how many ways they could “insert storytelling into places that you wouldn’t expect it necessarily.”
“I think stories are just, really it’s how we connect,” she said. “Telling stories is the caveman days of how we passed on oral tradition, how we told people about our day, and how we just become more empathetic human beings and learn about one another that’s kind of outside of our own orbit.”
Fender said it’s important that the event includes something for everyone, so many kinds of genres are included. Oftentimes the same community partners will put on a performance, but it’s always something different.
For example, UWT has participated in the event many times with faculty lineups, student lineups, and a combination of both. Their performance this year is still listed at TBD on the event website.
Women Who Write Together are also a recurring group at the crawl. They are a diverse group of women who get together and write about topics that highlight female perspectives. They are guided by their motto, “When one woman shares her story, another woman feels less alone.”
“The pieces the group writes are tender, funny, badass, and the resulting discussions are rich and spirit-filling,” states the crawl website.
Speak Out Seattle is another community partner that often participates. The group calls themselves “the most welcoming, inclusive, and emotionally supportive poetry space and open mic in Seattle.”
For this year’s crawl, they are presenting Voices of the Diaspora, which will feature six poets from Vietnamese, Latine/x, Persian, Balkan, Tigrayan, and Palestinian backgrounds. They will explore themes of cultural memory, identity, and connection.
Presenters are not given any prompts or themes to follow, creating a truly different experience for every show. Fender said not having a theme “opens us up to what the magic of storytelling is.”
Fender said she would be “doing a disservice” to highlight any specific performers because “they’re all really fantastic” and they all offer something unique.
Another presentation called “a show about nothing” will be “an invitation to explore the unbearable lightness of nothing.” This performance is for ages 21 and older.
The Radio Theater Live performance will be a look into Obscure Studio’s world premiere of “Belgrave,” an audio drama podcast about a supernatural workplace comedy set in a small PNW town.
South Side Stories features three performances from local Tacoma writers about an exploration of the place.
Local creatives Sasha Victor and Michael Haeflinger will be having a live conversation about “Dune” author and Tacoma native Frank Herbert for the On Air presentation at Puget Sound Pizza.
Noreen and the Unnatural Man will be a true crime deep dive into the 1984 Spanaway murder of Noreen McNicholas and the Lavender Scare — a systemic purging of LGBTQ+ workers from the federal government, military, and civil service.
The after party at Doyle’s is one of Fender’s favorite parts of the evening because that’s when she gets to hear about everyone’s experiences and what they took away from the event. Plus, as the facilitator, her job revolves around making sure everyone is happy and the event runs smoothly, so she doesn’t get to enjoy all of the lineups.
“So the after party’s the fun part of, like, I had my own experience that’s always phenomenal, and then I get to kind of live vicariously through other people because they had a whole different experience in the same evening,” she said.
One thing Fender said she’s also noticed in over a decade of the crawl is how many partnerships have resulted from the event. She said many people, whether they met as attendees or they were in a lineup together, have gone on to publish books together, be in performances together, or work together in other capacities.
“I think that there’s just a lot of great things when people come together,” Fender said. “And writing is so solitary. Creating is a very vulnerable solitary act. And I think encouraging folks to connect in community, even if sometimes we’re socially awkward or introverts by nature, because a lot of the writers tend to be, it’s just, it’s the good stuff. It’s what we’re here for.”
