Reading, Writing and Growing : Literature: An innocuous storefront disguises the artistry of the World Stage Anansi Writers Workshop, where black writers hone their craft and craft their futures.

Some call it church.

In half-light, the low-back chairs pulled close could easily double for pews. A blue haze of incense drifts overhead, and just above the pump-thump of a string-bass, a wailing brass horn from down the block echoes a ghost of a spiritual.

Instead of passing the plate, though, Michael Datcher, the host and co-organizer of the World Stage Anansi Writers Workshop, collects crumpled dollar bills as participants enter with book bags, notebooks, sketch pads or sheets of stained loose-leaf paper.

Taking seats before the small stage, crammed with a baby grand, a drum kit, a microphone, a music stand, the writers--teachers, students, engineers by day--make final fixes on their work.

A young man, outfitted in black except for his leather jacket and a string of thick earth-tone beads, takes the mike. Opening his red-and-black journal, he squints at the audience. “I do want a critique on it because it’s my first story. And I think it’s kinda wack. Ha!” He twists his face, then bolts through the prose--a biblical allegory. Finished, he looks up sheepishly, into the silence, a whisper of fear in his eyes.

“Feedback!” Datcher shouts. One by one, hands drift heavenward.

“You don’t start out tellin’ people your story’s wack,” poet Peter Harris slices to the bone. “You ain’t even serious about the story. You gotta be serious about the story. You need to take it up a level!”

Datcher hops in: “You need to develop it and believe in it. I know you can ‘cause I know you’re a creative brother. . . . Let’s bring up another knowledge dropper.”

Founded by poet-performance artist Kamau Daaood and maintained by a series of dedicated local writers, the World Stage Performance Gallery has played host for four years to “creative brothers and sisters” interested in not simply honing their craft, but in crafting their future.

“There were no places in our community for artists to gather,” Daaood reflects. “I’m out of the Watts Writers Workshop. I’m a poet myself, but I knew I really didn’t have the time to develop it.” He called on friends--poets such as Nafis Nabawi, Akilah Nayo Oliver; entering the fold later was Anthony Lyons, and now Datcher. “It was a slow start,” Daaood says, “but eventually a drop of water will wear a hole through a rock.”

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If not for Sarah Vaughan’s voice undulating in the back space, Datcher’s ascetic Leimert Park apartment could double as monk quarters. Here, too, the same blue haze of incense hovers in the air.

Against stark white walls rest a couple of chairs and a bookcase littered with literature. The room’s centerpiece is Datcher’s orderly desk, upon which rests a glowing laptop. Dressed in mostly black, Datcher, 26, pauses from his work. A free-lance writer and graduate student at UCLA, he’s seldom far from a pen or a keyboard.

After earning a degree in psychology with a minor in African American studies from UC Berkeley, Datcher (who was born in Chicago but grew up in Long Beach) says, he set out to find a reasonable facsimile of the Northern California literary lifestyle--round tables, workshops, readings for the grazing--when he returned to L.A. in 1992.

“I was going one night (with) my friend AK. . . . . He lives on 42nd and Denker and he’s a young brother . . . a straight-up B-boy, a knucklehead . . . but a brilliant poet and his work is about his life,” says Datcher, leaning back in his desk chair. “It’s hard and full of ghetto-ese. We went to Congo Square (in Santa Monica) one night and . . he’s screaming into the microphone, this really great poem. And no one clapped for him. It was like, really awkward. He was hurt.”

A string of such experiences helped Datcher shape a plan. He wanted to find a place where voices such as AK. could sharpen and resonate--not wither in silence. “There were so few black voices who were presenting themselves,” Datcher says.

His first attempt was to organize a small workshop out of his apartment on Sunday evenings. “I’d break out my salt and pepper shakers, we’d have a little food.” But it was during a visit in 1992 to Leimert Park’s Degnan Boulevard, a culturally kinetic, black bohemian enclave, when Datcher stumbled upon the World Stage--a burgeoning artistic enclave disguised behind an innocuous storefront--offering tight sets of straight-ahead jazz as well as a sparsely attended but faithful writing collective.

For Datcher, who was ready to flee L.A., Leimert Park was the much-needed hook. He moved his living-room session to the World Stage. “It’s like Berkeley all over again, but it’s just a black context.”

Although nowadays most Wednesday nights are standing-room only--so full that sometimes Daaood creeps onstage, mid-stanza, to switch on the ceiling fan--Nabawi (one of the workshop’s early architects) remembers the early months a shade differently: “At one time, Anthony and I would sit in there and look at the clock on the door: ‘Ain’t nobody here by 9 o’clock, we’re splitting.’ But we kept doing it.”

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Persistence, word of mouth and new blood have helped keep the chairs warmed. And it was Datcher’s enthusiasm and dedication to re-tinker the model that took it another level.

“We knew there was something that we weren’t doing,” Lyons says. “He brought in the idea of featuring people. We’ve structured the workshop. That was the magic. He was the third element--the magic we were missing.”

Datcher’s grand vision was to re-fashion the free-styling approach and create--albeit loosely--some semblance of structure. There would be a traditional workshop, a featured reader and an open reading. “It was really just a place to come and read your poetry,” Datcher says, “and the work didn’t really have a chance to grow.”

Poets, novelists, screenwriters, essayists and playwrights take the mike and face a crowd who, Datcher admits, can get as acerbic and irreverent as the infamous audience at the venerable Apollo Theater. Although there are guidelines, Datcher says, “Some people literally get talked off the stage. It gets hot in there.”

The idea is to sharpen the voice and harden the shell, but not gratuitously. Says Datcher: “One of the goals is to share information--to expand the writing community as well as to produce writers who are going to be important voices (not only) in black America, but in America in general.”

Daaood admits to feeling an edge of wariness at first. “At that time, I didn’t have a lot of hope for younger writers, because of the shallowness of the work. But in Michael I saw this new breed of writer that gave me hope again. I especially see it in the women, who go in very deeply and bring out the jewels.”

Much of the inner growth comes from the nurturing posture the organizers assume when leading discussion. And it doesn’t stop Wednesday night after the notebooks are put away.

“We’ve had some young brothers here who’ve come in and their work is . . . young, but we do see potential in them,” Datcher says. “We try to hang out with them socially. We play ball together. There’s a guy . . . he just turned 20 and his work is just amazing. He came by, we played basketball for two hours . . . came back here, wrote some poetry . . . then he went home. He’s going to come by next week and we’re gonna do the same thing.”

Nabawi, too, finds more and more young people writing poetry. “ Not rap,” he clarifies. “People used to bag on poetry. If you read it, you were just an egghead.”

The collective’s intention ultimately “is not only to be a safe haven,” Lyons says, “but to cater to the whole writer. Not only sharing the work but sharing how to get the work through.”

In that effort, still on the sketch pad are workshop-hosted Sunday performances and book signings. Daaood has plans for a spoken-word record label and perhaps a quarterly journal. And Nabawi wants to build a choir of new voices that would include the public school system and other community workshops. “I don’t want it to be all black or all white,” he says. “I want to see an American version of literature--a full range.”

Emboldened by the vivid scope--homeless people and college students, “hard-core, knuckle-headed brothers reading love poetry, the whole nine”--Datcher himself is often floored by the range. “Black people are far from being a monolith. . . . It’s just a wild vibe. One of the goals of the workshop is to create a dialogue among the disparate groups in the African American community.”

Through it all, Datcher says, “I’ve really just fallen in love with black people and the complexity of people’s lives. These are just working people . . . just everyday people who live in the neighborhood who write poetry. . . .

“The black L.A. voice is definitely a voice of resilience. Much of the work is about overcoming struggle or finding beauty in lives that are often difficult to find beauty in.”