Away With Words

Elise and Geneva Lee opened the shop in 2018 and sold up when Geneva's romance writing took off. Bittina Sheen covered a single shift in the holiday rush of 2022, after two staff called in sick, on a ten minute crash course. She went home that night and started talking to her husband Kevin about buying it. They had the keys by January 2023.

Both of them grew up in Poulsbo, and they started the town's film festival the same year they married. The front of the shop is a bathtub of bath bombs, soap and facial masks, with the genre shelves further back, and the lotions, scrubs and candles are all made on site. Kevin picked up candlemaking working at a factory in Georgetown.

His parents Kay and Wray Sheen, who kept a booth at Pike Place for years, supply the ceramics. The books on film section is better than the size of the room suggests. Bittina's own measure of the place: last year, every one of the store's ten bestsellers was a local author.