At 7:40 p.m. Dec. 7, five young poets and prose-ists ages 9 to 14 waited at Shakespeare and Sons to share works with the gathered standing-room-only, about-to-be-astounded audience of mostly anglophiles.

Clare Wigfall, the organizer of the evening and the three-month writing club from which the words had emerged, took to the microphone to introduce her writers, The Ancient Geeks — so named after British writer Grace Mitchell fortuitously omitted a letter when jotting down her favorite historical period.

The coffee steamer drowned Wigfall out. When the machine was silenced, the microphone crackled, so she turned it off. Then the steamer started again. "Don't buy coffee," pleaded Wigfall, a 29-year-old writer who is completing a collection of her own short stories for British publisher Faber and Faber.

Eleven workshops in which students discussed favorite authors, each other's efforts and their own writings led up to the night of readings and the anthology Discovering the Ancient Geeks, a 60-page volume of collaborations and individual inkings.

In that period, students and teacher drew from authors as diverse as James Joyce and J.K. Rowling, and no one, not even Wigfall, got away with skipping out on homework.

They wrote from memories, created characters, invented dialogues and monologues, used music as a muse, added adjectives, mixed metaphors and sprinkled similes like, well, pixie dust.

"A small creature lies in the table," began Mitchell, the first reader of the night, launching into a dramatic interpretation of her "The Crazy Hazelnut."

After the reading, Mitchell glowed. "I didn't think this many people would turn up, and I'm like, 'Wow,' " she said, while taking a break from autographing copies of the anthology.

Fate brought Mitchell to the group she would go on to christen when her mother, Jane, saw an Internet posting about the writing club. Because the British International School student had composed poems and stories for as long as she could write, Jane signed her daughter up. When Jane dropped Grace off at the first group meeting, the girl seemed "a bit nervous, a bit apprehensive."

But, the proud stay-at-home mom added, "She came out an hour and a half later, and she was buzzing. ... It'll be very interesting in 10 years time to see if she's still writing and she looks back and what she remembers of this time."

Next was Michaela Žaloudková, who read "A Madame for Sure," in which a servant gets some sweet revenge on her employer. Žaloudková, a native Czech, had joined because she wanted an English-language writing club to be a part of when her family returned after a few years in the United States. Originally nervous because she was older than the others, Žaloudková signed back up for the go-round of The Ancient Geeks, which began Jan. 18.

Afterward came Chris Newton, who classifies his age as "mid-to-late-30s" and joined the group with his son, Daniel, in part because the English International School of Prague, where the Geeks meet, requires a parent to supervise after-school groups.

Not that he got out of doing any work — "I just treated him like a student," Wigfall said — and he featured in the anthology and at the reading.

The stories and poems continued: "Here is a jet black typewriter like a big red brick," Daniel Newton wrote in "The Mysterious Typewriter," an ode to a contraption curious to the generation of writers most prominently featured that night at Shakespeare and Sons.

Rachel Davis read "A Fairy's Tale," a poem about a shy fairy who loved a boy named Dave. Then came Ondrej Benes, who read a poem about a ghost town.

The authors took on loneliness and homelessness. They wrote of fancies and first encounters. The boys engaged topics like boogers and burps; the girls covered everything from wedding dresses to basketball. And no matter how many times they'd heard it all before — they'd worked and workshopped collaboratively and collectively for months, after all — they still giggled at each other's jokes and applauded one another's prose.

And then they read one together.

"Of course Homer — he could tell a good story," Wigfall began and gave the bard his justly deserved "fame and glory," before the rest of the gang joined in: "But he wasn't an Ancient Geek!"

And so it went, Oedipus Rex, Pythagoras, Socrates.