Seattle has long been known for its writers and bookstores, but in the mid-1990s, the city lacked a literary center.
“There have been many great fledgling writing and reading enterprises in Seattle, and we wanted a place to bring them all together,” said Frances McCue, who founded the Richard Hugo House in 1996 along with fellow writers Linda Breneman and Andrea Lewis.
They chose to name the writing center after Richard Hugo, a local poet, because they felt writers in the region had been overlooked, and wanted to make a place in the city the way Hugo did in his writing. ...