This season’s Nonfiction for No Reason events are Friday, October 11, at Little Saigon Creative, and Friday, November 1, at Northwest Film Forum. by Adam Willems On a gloomy May evening that seemed best suited for introverted lethargy, 60 people shuffled into Common Area Maintenance (CAM) in Belltown. Congregating under the builder space’s lofted ceilings, marinating in its artsy allure, and snarfing down cozy snacks from Off Alley, attendees seemed happy to mingle in a cultural venue that stands out along an otherwise dive bar- and NFT Museum-dominated stretch of Second Avenue. The crowd was gathered for the tenth edition of Nonfiction for No Reason (NFNR), a literary reading series highlighting local nonfiction writers hosted by the event’s founder, Katie Lee Ellison. A foil to the low-energy drizzle pattering on CAM’s large front windows, NFNR offered a dynamic cast that rewarded extroversion and excitement for what Seattle-based writers can bring to the table. Moonyeka, an interdisciplinary artist often found at Jack Straw Cultural Center, kicked the night off by recounting their partner’s woeful experiences navigating medical systems as a trans person. (“Trans healthcare is pretty garbage,” they concluded.) Putsata Reang likened her sexuality to a river running through Phnom Penh. Anu Taranath described her young daughter’s sense of solidarity with an elderly Black couple—the only other people of color at a gospel performance near Seward Park—and their positive reaction to her daughter’s enthusiasm. Kamari Bright presented some spoken and video essays, including an entreaty for strangers to stop commenting on her womb. And Jay Aquinas Thompson meditated on grief and queerness and Catholicism.  Jordynn Paz reads at September’s Nonfiction for No Reason event at Jude’s in Rainier Beach. BILLIE WINTER The event didn’t seem to intentionally carry a theme, but all eight readers focused on identity. With writers sharing work steeped in personal experience, listeners—while eating duck rillettes and sipping wine—risked being the wrong audience to match such vulnerability.  But a mix of sincerity and levity throughout the lineup kept the audience attentive and capable of meeting the moment. Some writers even deftly channeled a range of tenors, including Amy Hirayama, who, to close out the event, traced her lineage via Hawaii to her family’s ancestral hometown on Okinawa, describing the Japanese island’s experiences of colonialism and war—all through the pork and other delicacies she ate while touring the area with her father. Hirayama’s reading was a master class in discussing deeply serious topics through appropriate and sensitive levity.  NFNR was born last year and resulted from a disappointing writers’ convention. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and its 12,000 annual conference-goers descended upon the Seattle Convention Center in March 2023. Every year, these writers, teachers, publishers, and editors assemble in a different city to rub shoulders and catch up on the latest and greatest in literature. In most cities hosting the conference, local literary institutions will kick their programming into high gear, platforming a region’s writers to the industry’s who’s who through offsite readings near the convention centers. In Seattle, a UNESCO-certified “City of Literature,” the conference struggled to showcase a healthy regional literary community.  To Ellison, a Seattle-based writer who grew up in Los Angeles, the Emerald City’s lackluster showing for AWP was an iodine trace for the ails afflicting the area’s writers. She was a fellow at Hugo House—once the state’s largest writing-focused nonprofit and an anchor in the community—between 2016 and 2017. But in 2020, the organization began weathering a financial crisis following allegations of racial discrimination and its executive director’s ensuing resignation, and it’s still struggling to recover. Ellison says the nonprofit’s dwindling presence in Seattle, in addition to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cultural programming, made her feel “totally unmoored” and unsure of where Seattle’s writing community stood. It also meant Seattle writers had few ways to promote their work while a potentially career-altering conference was in town; if the city’s literary institutions were stronger, Ellison thinks she and other local authors would have had a presence at the conference.  Ellison hopes to make NFNR more than just a Seattle thing—she’s already hosted events in Los Angeles and Tokyo. BILLIE WINTER Instead, many of the city’s writers heard crickets. “When I knew AWP was coming here in March of 2023, I was like ‘Are you guys fucking serious? Nobody’s going to ask me to read anywhere,’” Ellison says. “So I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna just do my own [reading], and I’m gonna make it the dream reading that I want it to be.’” The final result of Ellison’s efforts took place at Capitol Hill nightclub the Woods; it was somewhat informally and unintentionally cohosted by the literary publication The Rumpus, due to scheduling and venue SNAFUs. The reading saw more than 100 people in attendance and cast a spotlight on writers like Wolfish author Erica Berry, short story writer Corinne Manning, Portland essayist Katherine D. Morgan, and journalist Kristen Millares Young.  The lineup also featured Anastacia-Reneé, formerly a poet-in-residence at Hugo House and the inaugural Seattle Civic Poet from 2017 to 2019, during the city’s first year of UNESCO status. They overlapped with Ellison at Hugo House and served as her mentor, encouraging her to publicly share her works in progress: a way to get feedback that nonfiction writers often avoid. “As a hybrid writer[-poet], it was freeing reading in a space that was ready for nonfiction but [that was] receptive to humor and very serious things all enmeshed in one another,” Anastacia-Reneé says. “It was a packed crowd, and I saw the bringing together of the community. I read a piece that was in its draft state, and even though I was nervous, I did not feel unsafe.” A sense of propulsion following the March reading—vocal interest from other writers, a seemingly endless list of eligible locals to platform—meant it was far from Ellison’s last, instead becoming NFNR’s inaugural event. Its programming is growing in frequency and scale, but NFNR continues to harbor small but mighty intentions by fostering a sense of writerly community and unabashedly celebrating it, by providing some remuneration to writers, and by offering a forum for writers to promote upcoming work. Or, hell, to even successfully sell something they’ve published. Those last financial tenets aren’t particularly sexy but are especially important in Seattle, where artists, including writers, are struggling to keep up with the city’s rapidly rising cost of living.  Hirayama, for example, who read at the May event, grew up in Shoreline and still lives there. She exemplifies the frustrating chasm between superb skill and material shortcomings that seems to define being a writer in Seattle. She juggles four jobs—roles at South Seattle College, Writers in the Schools, Clarion West, and CAM—to make ends meet. “I think my mode of operating is probably not for everyone,” she admits. Ally Ang, a local poet and editor who previously worked at Hugo House and now makes their income as a grant writer for a reproductive justice nonprofit, performed at NFNR’s second event in 2023. They said NFNR strikes a healthy medium as a noninstitutionalized but reliable space where people are coming together “for the love of it.” “It’s important to not solely rely on institutions that are often beholden to boards of directors or… don’t necessarily represent the needs of the community, and to instead make sure that we are creating spaces that really do represent us,” they say. Ellison is working to slowly transform NFNR into a modest Seattle-based institution, while keeping true to its roots and its small-scale values. She’s taken the series on the road, hosting events in LA and Tokyo, and she showcased writers with Seattle origins—including Anastacia-Reneé—at Book Club Bar in New York on September 12. She’s secured fiscal sponsorship and is looking to land larger grants in 2025; she also wants to pay writers more, and pay herself more. Of the $7,500 Ellison has raised so far that hasn’t gone to venue fees or taxes, she’s distributed $25 to each of the program’s 80 participating authors and paid herself $2,100 for hundreds of hours of work. She acknowledges that that remuneration is far from enough for the writers, and she knows that NFNR is far from sustainable income relative to her output. “A lot of times you have to either choose to be community-based and DIY or extremely polished and extremely beholden to the funders, and I feel like that’s bullshit,” Ellison says. “You can have a really fucking nice thing that also platforms people you’ve never heard and pay them a lot of money… That’s a lot of the motivation for doing this. It’s creating something that does actually do it differently from how we’ve all been told it needs to be done.” It’s not just Ellison who seems doggedly committed to centering literature in Seattle’s future. NFNR participants named a range of spaces to that end—Mam’s Books in the C–ID, Charlie’s Queer Books in Fremont, Open Books in Pioneer Square, Writing Black @ The House—many of which are less than a year old.  “Writers in Seattle really do support each other… which does make me hopeful, despite the fact that it’s really hard to live here as an artist or a creative person,” Ang says. “They keep raising my rent every year, so who knows. But I love living in Seattle, and I want to stay here as long as I can afford to.” This season’s Nonfiction for No Reason events are Friday, October 11, at Little Saigon Creative, and Friday, November 1, at Northwest Film Forum. Find more info at nonfictionfornoreason.com.