Writing in Cafés
Agnès Madrigal
A writer returns to a café to write—Is it still fashionable to do this?, she wonders. Over a cup of coffee, a plate of eggs, and a split-open notebook, she contemplates the characters in the world around her, those rustling about the modest café and those pulsing in her mind and memory. Do these characters understand each other? Do they get along? This text explores some of the possibilities.
I used to write in cafés commonly. It used to be something that someone did. On a weekend afternoon, for example, the writer or the aspirant might go to the preferred nearby café and gather among the disjointed gaggle of mostly unknown others—some writing, too; some reading books or newspapers; some doing other things, like meeting friends or sisters or lovers to chatter over steamy cups of cappuccinos and plates of eggs and cut-up potatoes or club sandwiches speared with a toothpick with a crinkly colored paper decoration.
When writing in a café, the writer sees the real persons around her begin to tell stories, engaging with other persons in her imagination to form a grand party of attendant characters of all sorts. Photograph by Madrigalit
Such a writers’ café, if one could ever call it that, was a place where the writer could drift for a while on the stream of a thought, picking gingerly from the food plate, sipping the coffee until it grew cold, dreaming, imagining of the persons around her various characters, lives, fictional odysseys. These characters included the writer, herself, how she transformed in the make-believe engagements with these others, these persons with real lives, actual narratives, likely so much more complicated and compelling than any she could muster on the open notebook page—for she still wrote in ink then.
Others in her favorite coffee shop did so, also, but occasionally the laptop computer would appear, and, about it, a strange aura of distrust, and maybe even dislike. What was happening there, in that little machine? Was it art? Was it thoughtful? Or was it—sigh—work, carried over from the weekdays, infiltrating the hallowed space of the literary café, if it was ever officially designated as such, if only by those visitors who deemed it so, who quietly shared in the same revelry, in something of the same silent religion.
“Such a writers’ café, if one could ever call it that, was a place where the writer could drift for a while on the stream of a thought, picking gingerly from the food plate, sipping the coffee until it grew cold, dreaming, imagining of the persons around her various characters, lives, fictional odysseys. These characters included the writer, herself, how she transformed in the make-believe engagements with these others.”
—Agnès Madrigal
I return to a café today. I don’t do it so frequently any more. I still like the way it rustles me from my usual writing desk, thrusts me into the space of others—be they seemingly other writers, which is always a bit preferred albeit less and less likely these days—or just the general populace that heartbeats on the streets outside and away from my small, encapsulating apartment. Without these excursions outside, I don’t know how I’d find some of my beloved characters, persons who might appear only briefly as they pass by a sunlit window, or a person who sits intently at a table making a detailed ink drawing of a plastic cube of paper sugar packets (see, for example, “Ink on a Page”).
Many characters are born in these spaces, birthed through the living, the physical bodies that meander and crisscross each other’s paths over and over in the waking world—they are actual, though they alchemize immediately into these new and separate entities. Other characters come from somewhere else. They come from the deep recesses of the mind, of memory, where all sorts of persons—the living, the dead, the remembered, the lost, the previously fictionalized, and the newly imagined—exist and conspire.
“Many characters are born in these spaces, birthed through the living, the physical bodies that meander and crisscross each other’s paths over and over in the waking world—they are actual, though they alchemize immediately into these new and separate entities. Other characters come from somewhere else.”
—Agnès Madrigal
This grand party of one’s own “characters” must exist in a great house of many expanding and collapsing floors; countless rooms with art galleries, libraries, hidden studies, and scattered statuary; exquisite gardens with topiary, glass orangeries, and sparkling fountains; and, perhaps, in some back nook or corridor, a tall-ceilinged and gilt-walled café, where the writers among these varied beings gather and write down stories such as this.