Callaescribientes in Mexico City: A Shut Up & Write! Story

By Alina Sidorova and the Calla y Escribe Community

Mexico City is one of the largest and most bustling cities in the world, and it demands that everyone keeps up with a fast pace, spends time on long commutes, and works even longer hours. Finding time to just sit down to focus and write is hard. That’s a big part of what helped Shut Up & Write! become a strong community here.

The Mexico City Shut Up & Write! group has been going strong for over 12 years now, and we have weekly meetups that take us to different cafés and restaurants across the city. Our home base is La Celostina, a welcoming café that has us proudly displayed on their website. They are willing to tolerate us taking over half of their space, as long as we don’t do any events involving confetti. So far, so good.

The group had a good rhythm pre-pandemic, and we were often visited by people passing through Mexico City, while also building a strong core community. We’re especially popular in January, when people are committed to their goals of doing more writing as a New Year’s resolution! Today, we continue to have members from different countries and backgrounds.

The pandemic hit Mexico City with a long, draining shutdown that lasted, to one degree or another, for two years. This was a moment when the community really rallied together. We kept meeting online, half writing group and half emotional support community, and we endured without faltering until we could return to meeting in person, very carefully and with a small number of people.

During the pandemic, another important thing happened. We decided to make an anthology. It took around a year and a half to bring it to fruition, but we still credit the despair of lockdown with inspiring us to get started. We wrote, and then we edited, and then we published.

The resulting anthology, Bajo el Asfalto de Obsidiana or Under the Obsidian Sidewalk, features 11 stories from our Shut Up & Write! community, and it’s a project we are very proud of. The anthology revolves around urban legends of Mexico City and has mostly horror stories tied to the city we dearly missed, even while we were living there.

A variety of projects have passed through our group. While the anthology remains the most ambitious project to date, many members have accomplished different goals. A few have been working on long novels, which they have been writing only on Mondays, in that little space among busy weeks for months and years. Seeing their progress has been amazing! Some people have completed short stories, worked on serialized novels, scripts… A few have come to work on their thesis, and we are even mentioned in the acknowledgment section of a few academic projects! People have come to write hate letters and love letters, journals, comics, business guides, poems, and more.

We meet almost every Monday at seven to chat for a bit. We then write in silence for 50 minutes, with a five-minute warning before the end of the session.

Over the years, we have built a community that has shared many experiences. We have had fun special events, hosting murder mysteries and gift exchanges, but also nurtured a shared camaraderie when faced with difficult life events. Writing is an important way of reflecting, and we have seen this time and time again.

We callaescribientes (shutupandwriters) hope to keep building a community that welcomes new faces and remains a comfortable place for familiar ones. With 10-15 people visiting our group every week, members returning after years of absence, and a shared anthology that managed to hit the publishing stage without a single fight (not even about the title), we are glad to see our Shut Up & Write! group continue to be a little corner of peace where everyone can come together to share the craft of writing. No matter what you want to write, you are always welcome.

Every Monday, we can sit down and spend 50 minutes together with a single purpose, and there’s a power in that. There’s a community in that. And there are endless words, stories, and thoughts to be discovered on the other side of our 50 minutes together.