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Richard Hugo House
Hugo House now seems so familiar upon entering, I don’t see it—the little idiosyncrasies from odd building design and low budget: the open, circular floor plan, the upward maze of hallways and stairs, a carpet that looks like the skin of a Shar Pei. These are familiarities I have collected in my heart, not an epiphany that struck me when I first stepped foot inside. There were a lot of people smiling at me. This I remember—that everyone who I saw that very first time I entered Richard Hugo House smiled broadly and earnestly at me. It would be a tragedy if I recalled any memory of Hugo House and did not explain using all five senses, so here it is: Hugo House is quiet in a way that is soft, quiet in a way that invites the small noises of pens and paper, a quiet that is not silence, a quiet that does not forbid speaking, a quiet that is warm. Hugo House has many smooth surfaces, has many different kinds of paper, pens with a solid weight in your hands and light double-speed Bics. Hugo House is a space that invites bodies to be in it. It tastes like nail-chewing of ink-smudged fingers and hyphens-in-all-the-right-places. The smell of Hugo House—the smell of Hugo House is a sacrament: like old books and new paper and ink and graphite and cardboard and that church-smell that reminds you to sit down and shut up because you’re in the presence of the divine. Now I find that I walk in without a pious inhalation of breath, without seeing the newest announcements on the board, and only glancing out of habit at the sign in the bathroom that has been defaced to read “Avoid Pregnancy”. I do not notice these things, not because I love them any less, but because it is my home—I know it upon entering.
How do you come together and share a resource?
The scarcity of writing instruction is a crucial issue in public education: teaching a child to write means, essentially, teaching a child to think, to make choices, and to recognize the power of ideas and language—skills that prove increasingly vital. Hugo Youth Programs provide a year-round and comprehensive approach to creative writing.
The HYP experience isn’t just about taking a class – it’s about belonging to a positive community that is focused upon helping young writers grow as thinking individuals and as artists. As one Hugo youth writer in residence said: “Hugo House is where I claimed my identity as a writer.”
These programs are taught by professional artists (many of them volunteers) – writers who can bring excitement to the art form and act as role models. More than half of Scribes participants in 2009 received full scholarships, two of the programs are free, and the rest are offered on a sliding scale.
Programming includes Saturday writing classes for teens, a free monthly “drop-in” writing workshop (Write-Time), and two two-week summer creative writing camps. A youth advisory panel assists in developing outreach strategies, which include postering, increased social media presence, word of mouth and a bi-weekly e-newsletter.
How would your group use the award money?
Richard Hugo House will expand youth programming to include Saturday writing classes for middle school youth and an additional two-week summer camp session for teens. Write-Time will increase to meeting weekly instead of monthly. Also planned is an expansion to the Hugo House website where staff will publish excerpts from work produced in Hugo Classes for Kids, Hugo Classes for Teens, and Scribes. It is estimated that this expansion of youth programming will bring 400 more youth and teens to the House, a 50 percent increase over 2009. With increasing class sizes and a decreasing emphasis on the arts in public schools, the opportunities for youth to explore writing as an art form are few.
Richard Hugo House is the third largest nonprofit literary arts center in the country. Our mission is to provide writers of all ages and backgrounds with the resources they need, connect audiences to the world of writing, foster the creation of new work and promote the literary arts as a vital part of our culture. To these ends we provide classes, residencies and events for writers and readers in the greater Puget Sound region.
Elizabeth
I love going to readings at Hugo House. This is a great space for art in our city!