What makes a Creative Café creative?

Just a few reminders here.  The general principle is that the café offers creative practitioners the opportunity to engage with each other and their audiences and offers the general public the opportunity to interact closely with creative practitioners.  

Book-crossing

Customers deposit books they have read and take away ones that others have deposited.

Newspapers and arts publications

The café keeps a supply of these for customers to read.

Book launches and readings

These are held regularly at the venue.

Reading and writing groups

These are also held regularly at the venue.

Arts workshops

These might include creative writing workshops, costume-making, crafts, cooking, art – even life-drawing if you have the right sort of events room.

Talks and lectures

Why here and not a lecture room? The café provides a more relaxed atmosphere at either end of the event.

Writer in residence

A writer in residence can provide advice about writing, celebrate the café in writing, devise writing projects for café customers and subtly promote their own work.

 Café as gallery

The café displays artists’ work and sells the pictures, taking a small commission.

Live music

This could be a formal performance, background music or a group busking.

Just networking

This happens almost without any effort. The café becomes a space where creative practitioners choose to meet. The Creative Café Project supports the small guys but just look at what the big guys do too. Just go to the Media City UK Costa and rub shoulders with the BBC. 

The Creative Café as Part of Free-lance Writing Life

There are a few ways in which the Creative Café Project can help a writer lead a free-lance writing life. Some help the writer to earn money, some help to raise the writer’s profile, some do both and some will raise money eventually.

Advertise all events at the café itself, local libraries, local adult education centres and on your Facebook page. Create your own newsletter  - Mailchimp is good for this – and ask people to subscribe.  

Writer’s surgery

Offer a script surgery. Offer a fifteen minute session free of charge. The writer comes with the script, buys a coffee from the café and you discuss their script with them for fifteen minutes. If you offer editorial services, you can give them your price list.

Raises profile, may lead to payment

Creative writing workshop

Offer anything from a couple of hours to a whole day. This works especially well if the café has a function room. Negotiate with the manager / owner to have the function room for free if the delegates buy drinks and lunch from the café. Charge a modest fee.  If you can’t have the room for free, you will have to charge a more realistic fee. You may get a reasonable charge if you ask for an all-in package – drinks on arrival and / or mid-morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea.

An alternative model is to arrange a course over a few weeks, with each session being up to a couple of hours. You might charge by the session, perhaps making a taster one free.

Makes money straight away but take care to budget properly.

Be a writer in residence

You spend set amounts of time at the café, perhaps spread over anything up to a year. You offer all of what is mentioned here. If doing this on a small scale, you may simply “camp” at the café for a day, chatting to people interested in reading, talking about your books, offering advice on writing and selling signed copies of your books.

Makes money eventually. Raises your profile.

Launch a book from the café

You might make a loss on this unless your publisher agrees to pay some costs. You will need to provide some refreshments for your guests. They may not all buy a copy of your book but they will now be more aware of it.

Makes money eventually. Raises your profile. 

Author readings

Work with a couple of other writers and offer readings, Q & A sessions and sell copies of your books. You can share the costs.  You’ll probably make less on your books than at a single launch – most people will buy just one book.

Makes money eventually. Raises your profile.

Hold a literary salon

Ask the café to put on an evening or afternoon event at a set price. Charge your guests a little more – to cover all costs and perhaps reward you a little for your hard work. Invite all of your writerly / reader friends and fans.  Ask two or three people to come and talk about their work – probably best to ask published writers. Agree to pay them a fee and expenses.  They can bring copies of their work to sell.

My first salon was free of charge but I would like subsequent ones to make a profit for the project. I’m actually going to ask people to donate as they see fit. I’ll tell them what the actual costs are. 

You probably wouldn’t sell any of your own books here. But see my more detailed description of the literary salon on this blog. You can put one of your own into the book swap.      

Do this often enough and it will raise your profile anyway. 

Raises profile. Makes money eventually.

Start a reading group

Perhaps make this a couple of hours long and negotiate for the café to waive charges but encourage members to buy drinks and cakes. Take it in turn suggesting books. Never one of you own. But you can invite your group members to your launch and give them flyers about your books.  Curiosity will probably make members try one of your books eventually.  

Raises your profile. Makes money eventually.

Writing project

Organise a writing project. Arrange meetings at the café. Perhaps you’d like to collect ghost stories from the old town in which you live, for example. Discuss ideas. Offer workshops on the writing. Hold critiquing, editing and design meetings. You become the publisher. You may even be able to get an Arts Council grant for the right sort of project. TheCreative Café Project can help you with the publishing process.

Raises your profile. Makes money eventually.      

The Creative Café as a Networking Space

If we think back to one of the most fundamental ideas behind the Creative Café Project, the replication of the Viennese coffee houses, one of the project’s greatest benefits becomes immediately visible; the Creative Café offers a space where creative practitioners can network.

Accidental meetings

You get quite a good feeling when you go to your favourite café and are open to the idea that someone else just like you might turn up and be willing to talk. Or maybe one of your readers will.  You go there perhaps without too much expectation. Maybe you have your laptop, your notepad or a physical note-book with you.  Maybe you are reading via your e-reader or looking at a newspaper or a piece of flash diction delivered via an app on your Smartphone.  Maybe while you’re there some opportunity will present itself. Of course, staying tuned into Twitter may have the same effect but once in a while it’s good to get out of your garret into the real world. Besides, as both Bach and Balzac discovered, the smell of fresh ground coffee can enhance creativity. Not to mention the cake.

A place for prearranged meetings

Do you need to meet a writing buddy to get feedback on your work? Or do you have a show or an event to engineer?  Maybe you just want to share the woes and joys of the creative life with people who know that life. Sure, you could meet in each other’s homes, or the pub – and remember some pubs can be classed as creative cafés – but meeting in a café is likely to leave you clearer-headed and keeps you on neutral ground. Maybe it’s the coffee / cake combination that provides the lift. The café owners / managers are happy too. The creative process often uses a lot of energy and increases the appetite!

Can we make this happen?

Does this seem a possibility for you? Consider instigating one of the following activities:

·         Sit and read or write in a café.

·         Meet a writing buddy to discuss your work.

·         Invite a group of your fellow creative practitioners for a good old chinwag about all things creative.

·         Organise a meeting about your group project in a café.

·         Arrange with your favourite creative café’s manager to let other creative practitioners, perhaps less experienced ones than yourself,  know that you are there for a half day to give out one-to-one advice about the creative life.

And then let us know how it goes and perhaps be a guest on our blog.       

     

The Owl and the Pussycat, Laugharne

The Owl and the Pussycat, Laugharne

We visited Laugharne in the depth of winter – the third week of January to be precise, during a pretty cold spell. Actually, though, this particular bit of South Wales has a microclimate and compared with the rest of the UK, it was pretty warm and sunny. Okay, there were only a few hours of light, it was a bit muddy in places and you needed to wear boots and a winter coat. The sunshine was there though, and the glorious views we had over the estuary were heart-lifting.  These views of course were shared by Dylan Thomas, whose boat-house home is just a few yards from the holiday lodge in which we stayed and the Owl and the Pussycat Tearooms.

The Owl and the Pussycat is everything a creative café should be.  It serves delicious home-cooked food, usually sourced from local ingredients.  It provides a comfortable seating area as well as the normal café tables and chairs. Small craft items were on sale there when we visited. It was a also clearly used as a meeting point for people who had something to say – and in that sense it matched the Viennese coffee houses,  on which the project is to some extent modelled. It is licensed, so had it been there in Thomas’s day, he may well have visited. It is the sort of place in which I could sit and write.  

The Owl and the Pussycat was most welcoming during our winter break in Dylan Thomas country.  I’d like to welcome it into the Creative Café Project.     

Visit The Owl and the Pussycat Tearooms.        

Vintage Clothes and Time for Tea

I love vintage clothes. Having scoured the shops in Bury, Manchester and Chester for suitable summer dresses all I could find were ankle length sleeveless ones or skimpy cocktail pieces – neither of which were suitable for keeping cool and looking smart at work or for dressing up in a comfortable way on holiday. But when I went to a 1940s weekend on the East Lancs Railway I found two delightful little numbers at a vintage stall. They were almost vintage prices, too.  No more than third of what the chain stores wanted for their impractical showpieces.  And the two dresses – one green, one red  –  have been greatly admired.

So, when I found out that Time for Tea were holding a sale of vintage clothes and accessories, how could I resist?      

I wasn’t disappointed. There were lots of lovely things to savour. I bought a flapper-style beach dress in blue and white with a touch of red. Pity I probably won’t be able to wear it until next year.

The café was buzzing. It was good, too, to drink tea from a real china cup, poured out of a small teapot. They also supplied another pot of hot water and a jug of milk. All for no more than what you’d pay for a cardboard cup of something at one of the big chains.  And then there were the irresistible cakes and the friendliness of the other customers.  
The provider of the vintage clothes was J'ADORE VINTAGE CLOTHING who offer vintage clothes parties pop-up shops in your own home or a favourite coffee shop. They are recommended by Vogue.    

Events and services like these that make these indie cafés really show their worth. It’s what the Creative Café Project is all about.  

Ambient noise and creativity – does journal article explain why the Creative Café works?

Five experiments conducted by Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Amar Cheema and described in the Journal of Consumer Research show that a moderate level of noise “is likely to induce processing disfluency or processing difficulty, which activates abstract cognition and consequently enhances creative performance.”  Put simpler and in our context : as we are distracted from completely logical thought because of the noise we experience in a café, we make way for something else to happen. That something else is more creative.  

The article also tells us that all sorts of noise are actually disruptive to logical thought  – for example white noise (artificially created and containing all the range of sounds that the human hearing system can process) and pink noise that sounds like the general hiss of an untuned television. High levels of noise also disrupt. The latter is not to be confused with loud noise; loudness is a subjective perception. However, as the café user / creative practitioner is distracted by a moderate level of noise, including some white noise, room for abstract thought is created.   

The participants’ creativity was measured by how many unique ideas they generated (experiments 1, 2 and 3) when exposed to moderate levels of noise. In experiment 4 they were asked to come up with as many solutions as they could to a particular problem. In the final experiment, participants’ responses were monitored as they sat in a common room at various times of the day.

The study shows that a moderate level of background noise enhances creativity and a high level disrupts it. Possibly, lower noise level allows more logical thinking to carry on so does not allow for the more creative, more abstract thought. The article also mentions a café as being a natural place for this moderate level of noise.

Tis article offers us some explanation as to why a café is a suitable place for a creative practitioner to work and gives us permission to indulge. I certainly know many writers who like to sit in a café – they claim it makes them feel less lonely than working in isolation at home.  The article, however, seems to point to an additional reason, one of which the practitioners are not aware: that they actually think more creatively there. I often plan in a café and I’m often overtaken by those eureka-inducing ideas that seem to come from nowhere as I sip my cappuccino and tuck into my passion cake. Is the cake and caffeine also important? Many of my writer friends think so. Is that a whole other piece of research?   

One thing is certain: café noise does not disrupt the creative train of thought.  A whispered conversation in a library or an open-plan office can as you can understand the words and you can’t help but listen in. The pneumatic drill outside or the clatter of plates falling and breaking is just uncomfortable. All of this is a matter of common sense. It is the change of the way of thinking in the moderate noise zone that intrigues in this article – and this may just explain why creative practitioners like cafes so much.