By: Natalie Kon-yu

This is a particularly sore subject for me today, as I’ve come back from holiday and there’s no coffee in the house.  Coffee is a ritual for me, a kind for reward for waking up and getting down to work.  It’s something I especially need if I’m writing, not only the sharp hit of it; but making a cup of coffee also gives me an opportunity to step away from the page, to think about what I’ve written , to mull it over in my mind.

There seems to be a natural affinity between coffee and writers; we have a special relationship to the coffee shop or cafe. As part of a mentorship program, I meet with Susan on a fortnightly basis in Brunetti’s in Carlton.  We often order our coffee before we have found seats, and we sip as we talk about writing, about words that have inspired us, as well as the frustrations we encounter. I’m a drinker of espresso – a perilous coffee if you don’t trust the quality of the café – and Brunetti’s being so very Italian, is a good place for this little cup. The frustrating thing about espresso drinking is that it inly lasts a few seconds, I have nothing to wrap my hands around, no warm mug to hold onto or coast on as we continue our chat.  Sometimes I wish I drank lattes so that I could keep the experience of drinking coffee go just that bit longer, but I can’t forego the espresso.

In many ways coffee is just the precursor, the bit that gives us an excuse (and a place) to meet.  What we’re really interested in is the conversation; cafés are a great place to talk about writing.  Look around any café and you’ll see people talking more animatedly than they do in a bar or a restaurant (is it the caffeine?).  A lot of my writer friends meet up in cafes, and a lot of bookshops pop in near cafés.  We’re especially lucky to have a Readings bookshop right near the Brunetti’s where we meet, and many times after we’ve finished our chat, we walk over to peruse the shelves of this fantastic bookshop, high on caffeine and conversation.  This habit of readerly and writerly people meeting up in cafés has been acknowledged by organisations such as Poetry Australia who run a Café Poets Program, which gives writers a place to work (as well as providing them with coffee and tea) in exchange for the writer bringing the café into the writing community in a meaningful way. There was a small, locally owned bookstore in Perth where I used to live, that merged the café and bookshop, and the place was, as you can imagine teeming with writers.  As we move ever forward into cyber realities (or non realities, depending on your perspective) , I’m confident that we will never lose the humble café – we all have far too much to talk about.

Natalie Kon-yu lives in Melbourne and teaches Creative Writing at university.  She is currently working on her first novel 'the list of missing things', with Susan Hawthorne.