Each week, four friends meet for coffee and to talk about writing. Dubbed, The Four Amigos, Ken Balsley, Joe Illing, Dave Nicandri and Dick Pust bring unique perspectives to their informal writing group. Experiences spanning radio, newspaper, magazines, blogs and more, they’ve done a lot of work with words. Friends first, knowing one another as they do, made for a great formula when they all found themselves writing about history.
Long Time Lacey and Olympia Connections
Balsley and Illing met at the Lacey Leader newspaper in the 1970s where they both worked. Nicandri also met Balsley there in the 70s while writing his first book on the history of Priest Point Park, later renamed Squaxin Park. Pust and Balsley met in the 80s when Balsley started a radio show at KGY and Pust, with his own well-known radio show, was station manager.
Illing and Balsley started the coffee routine. Nicandri joined the group after retiring, and Pust joined after his KGY show came to an end. Coffee visits shifted toward writing following a talk Pust gave on the history of the Conelrad radio broadcasts to Nicandri’s Tumwater Rotary Club. Conelrad was the spark that ignited Pust’s idea for his book, “AM 1240, Life at a Small Town Radio Station,” which then lit a fire under the group to talk about their writing.
Contributing Experiences and Accountability to a Writing Group
“If you had come here and you hadn’t had something new in a while, they start asking you,” Balsley says.
“We encouraged each other,” Pust says. “I remember Ken leaving a message on my answering machine after he’d read one of my chapters and said, ‘This is great stuff!’ Without that encouragement I might never have finished my book.”
In addition to camaraderie, each brings a different lens when it comes to analyzing writing. Balsley’s background in writing local news, commentary and publishing his Ken’s Corner and the Real News blog, brings a journalistic lens to the group. Illing brings a poet’s appreciation for individual words and phrases. Nicandri brings a history writer and magazine editor’s eye as former director of the Washington State Historical Society and editor of Columbia magazine. His newest book, on which he consulted with The Four Amigos, is “Discovering Nothing: The Evolution of the Northwest Passage.”
Contribution also comes from Darlene Kemery, editor to some of the writers’ books.
“I get so wrapped up in the argument that I am writing about that it all makes sense to me because I’m the one writing it,” Nicandri says. “But I’ll ask these guys, ‘Does it hang together? Can you follow the argument or the story I am trying to tell?’ They would frequently say, ‘This didn’t make any sense,’ or ‘Why did you bring that up?’ On the other side of the equation, I’m more inclined to make grammatical corrections to what other people have done. In the case of Dick’s book, it’s a memoir. I’m in no position to question anything he says in terms of narrative content, but I could say, ‘You misspelled somebody’s name,’ technical stuff. Joe is the best reviewer of the four of us. He sees things that I have missed.”
Getting Lacey, Olympia and Pacific Northwest History on the Record
“I wrote my book because I wanted the people in my book not to be forgotten,” Pust says. “I’m the only living person who was at the radio station when it was built.”
Each knows the local and regional history and preserves it through writing, and each group member has a different calling.
Writing and publishing poetry for years, Illing’s local history focused works include “Olympia,” a historic poem that narrates and footnotes a walk downtown and his video series interviewing area residents. On his blog he narrates his west coast adventures of running away to Los Angeles as a teenager in “Lost in La La Land.”
“My whole goal with it really is to try to tell people of future generations what it was like to be alive today,” Illing says. “I did an oral history TV series, and I called it the ‘Story of Olympia.’ I had people who were older, all had great stories, and I was able to get a lot of them. It was fun to do, and I’d tell my guests before we started filming, ‘History is the skeleton, but people’s lives are the meat and so that’s what we’re after. Stories about what you did and what it felt like in the 1920s when you were a kid and as a prank you blew the trolly off of the tracks, or the great train wreck downtown or what Christmas was like.’”
Balsley’s “Lacey, True Stories of Those Who Built a New City” relays the lives and efforts of influential people involved in building the City of Lacey.
“In my Lacey book, these people were important,” Balsley says, “and I want you to know who they were. If I didn’t write about them, they’d be forgotten. It’s important to know the basis upon which a city was built. These people were the building blocks of creating the city. If they had been different people or had different ideas, the city would be different.”
The talented, local Four Amigos writers have individual talents and special insight into what guidance best helps their fellow writers, their friends.
