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.
“He wrote about people and places that weren’t in the mainstream, people who were on the fringes,” McCue said. “He brought poetry into the gritty, Seattle landscape.”
McCue is the author of a book on Hugo. She has a prose book coming out in 2013.
Not everyone welcomed the center at its initial location, a mansion in North Capitol Hill.
“The neighbors did not want a writing center in their ‘urban oasis,’ ” said McCue. “They had visions of Jack Kerouac wannabes puking on their lawn. The neighbors were very resistant to people unlike themselves — it was a class-driven outrage.”
The conflict drew media attention, but that ended up being a blessing, because it brought more supporters to the effort, McCue said.
A year later, supporters moved Richard Hugo House to another Capitol Hill house, where it continues to act as a community for writers and readers, some of whom may not know of the center’s namesake.
Richard Hugo was born in 1923 in White Center, just south of West
Seattle. He was raised by his maternal grandparents; his father left the family shortly after Hugo’s birth. Hugo attended public school, including West Seattle High School. In his memoir, he explained that he started “putting words on paper” when he was nine or 10, and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer.
After serving in World War II as a bombardier in the Mediterranean, Hugo attended the University of Washington, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in creative writing.
During his lifetime, Hugo published six books of poetry, as well as three other books. Hugo has been described as a Northwest “regionalist” poet, and was, according to McCue, a hometown hero.
For more than a decade, Hugo worked as a technical writer for Boeing and then took a teaching job at the University of Montana. He died of leukemia in 1982.
Fans of Hugo and his work believe the center has always been a place where he would be comfortable, “which is saying something,” said McCue. “Hugo wasn’t a hipster, or a yuppie.”
Now 16 years old, the Hugo House has hosted thousands of writers and readers for classes and events, but it has also maintained its social justice orientation.
When it first moved to its current location, the house established a partnership with Central Lutheran Church, including having House volunteers serve meals for homeless people at the church.
It also offered free classes to homeless people who attended the meal services at the church, as well as classes for homeless youth living in the neighborhood, on the street or in cars.
Richard Hugo Poems
Neighbor
The drunk who lives across the street from us
fell in our garden, on the beet patch
yesterday. So polite. Pardon me,
he said. He had to be helped up and held,
steered home and put to bed, declaring
we got to have another drink and smile.
I admit my envy. I’ve found him in salal
and flat on his face in lettuce, and bent
and snoring by that thick stump full of rain
we used to sail destroyers on.
And I’ve carried him home so often
stone to the rain and me, and cheerful.
I try to guess what’s in that dim warm mind.
Does he think about horizoned firs
black against the light, thirty years
ago, and the good girl — what’s her name —
believing, or think about the dog
he beat to death that day in Carbonado?
I hear he’s dead, and wait now on my porch.
He must be in his shack. The wagon’s
due to come and take him where they take
late alcoholics, probably called Farm’s End.
I plan my frown, certain he’ll be carried out
bleeding from the corners of his grin.
Pike Place Market
In many tongues, hawkers scream our fingers
off the fruit display. All day, we never see
the rows of lightbulbs shining. Rages faked
by blinding grapes and pears make eating
cosmopolitan. In The Athenian
Negro faces do no better than the white
against the sea outside. A prude might wait
long enough to see the U.S. Fleet pull out.
Voyeurs keep dark islands in reserve.
Behind their eyes, old men are shooting moons
with yellow guns. Solly cleans a carp
with carvings doctors and a thug would envy.