From 2001 to 2003 I was a writer-in-residence at the literary nonprofit Hugo House. I was paid around $250 a month. My job was to talk to people in weekly open-to-the-public office hours, teach, and produce events. The house itself, a rambling Victorian in Capitol Hill, was almost always open. People on staff had fluid roles. The accountant might double as a DJ. The grounds manager might staff the merch table. Programming left room for surprises. Some semifamous writer might come out of hiding and give a surprise reading. Drinks were always flowing and you could smoke on the front porch. I was allowed to pay writers and actors to participate in a church-style “revival meeting” in which a woman (artist Kathryn Rathke) gave birth to a live chicken onstage. (It was her chicken that she brought from home.)

In 2017 Seattle was named a City of Literature by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). The Cities of Literature are picked from around the globe and are judged by their commitments to reading and the written word. On the UNESCO website, Seattle comes between Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Slemani, Kurdistan. The selection committee cited Hugo House as part of the win. Modeled on learning centers like New York’s 92nd Street Y, Hugo House is not about admission, college credits, or certificates. Instead, it’s a place to immerse oneself in the act of writing, a place for solitary people to find community. 

But today the institution, founded in the 1990s, is in trouble. You might not know it from looking at its new headquarters in the bottom stories of the glass condo building where the old Victorian used to stand. But you would if, like me, you’ve been getting Hugo House emails the past few years. The ones announcing three new executive directors (acting) in a little over a year. The ones about the finances (bleak). “We thought we’d need to close the doors,” says former board member Gary Luke. 

When the new Hugo House, which is not a house, opened its doors in 2018, I didn’t go in, for nostalgic reasons. But the news kept getting worse. At a different time in my life, Hugo House meant a lot to me. I needed to figure out if it was really as endangered as it seemed, or whether these alarms were signs the institution was finally waking up to the future.

The story of Hugo House is a wider story of Seattle, of how truths that used to be taken for granted in this “most livable” city are now being called into question, of reckoning with the economic and racial fault lines in the tectonic plates underneath the city’s social structures. In 2020, those plates started to shift.  

First came the pandemic, which shut down in-person classes and events. Then when a committee of former students, writers, and teachers delivered a “Letter to Hugo House from Writers of Color and Allies” demanding that the institution “center its future plans” on historically marginalized writers of color rather than “its established white, affluent members.” 

The activists were in a rush. But the snag with their demands, phrased around Hugo’s “future plans” and its “resources,” was that the whole idea of “future” in 2020 was being transformed in real time. The economy had screeched to a halt. Public gatherings like readings were on hold. Wearing masks and waiting for Covid test results were not activities that lent themselves to gala fundraising auctions. The pandemic transformed the idea of community, space, celebrations. So taking cogent action against the old ways was impossible, because universally, globally, the old ways were becoming obsolete.

When I read the letter, I felt like something had been lost in translation. For me, the letter didn’t reflect the Hugo House I knew. The idea of it as closed off, some kind of gated community, rang false. There was nothing aristocratic about it. Homeless people knew they could sleep on the covered porch every night. When morning came, a member of the staff would wake them. Looking back, I see my office hours as a singular teaching experience. I gave free one-on-one classes to an itinerant drummer, a cancer survivor, a man who believed the sun was going to save him. He showed me
intricate, impenetrable diagrams explaining how a sunspot was going to fly into his ribs and burn away the pain in his back. 

While Hugo House felt like a home or a church, welcoming to all, there was also a relationship with Seattle’s rarefied, less-than-welcoming upper classes that brought in money. These were private people. Big-time philanthropists. The kind of wealth that makes people paranoid. They all loved Frances McCue, the founding director who ran Hugo House until 2006. She had charisma. She was a poet and teacher, not part of their echelon. She was a bright light holding the party together and she was some kind of fundraising genius. I accompanied her to parties in mansions—low-lit art pieces in every recess, even in the bathroom. Uniformed staff. Once I was asked to host a special workshop for a circle of billionaire women friends. They were donors, but they didn’t want to be in a crowded class, among the general public. 

Seattle has always operated under a rigid caste system separating the rich from the masses. I grew up with such distinctions, part of an “old money” Portland family. (Our old money didn’t age well.) So, the rich women’s private writing group didn’t phase me. Like most of the folks I encountered during my writer-in-residence tenure, the billionaire students were kind people with stories to tell. Like all the students, they were searching for something. But the impulse to segregate was real and unexamined. 

In early 2021, director Tree Swenson resigned amid the backlash. Soon afterward, Hugo House staff unionized with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Bargaining was tedious and painful. In 2023, The Seattle Times published a story outlining the institution’s struggles coming out of the pandemic. The reader response was swift and heated. “Having shared in its sparkling success with tremendous civic pride and admiration for it,” wrote one commenter, “and then closely following its sickening demise has left me scarred.” Another prayed for Hugo House to “somehow revive itself and its standing in the community.” Another claimed the House had been destroyed by “the howling DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] mob.”

There was an old-timey Pacific Northwest xenophobia in these comments. A sense of invasion. Like, what are they going to take from us next? It was the beleaguered tone of settlers who believe they are now victims of a land grab. Diana Delgado, who succeeded Swenson as director, left after less than a year. 

One of the ironies of the racial reckoning at Hugo House was the silence around the main character, Richard Hugo. Raised in White Center, he was a working-class World War II vet, a narrative poet and western voice who was eventually embraced by the East Coast literary establishment. 

In his work, women are unreal—sirens and muses. The poem “To Women,” for instance, is cringeworthy: “You start it all. You are lovely. / We look at you and we flow.” At the end, the poet is depicted as a cowboy whose frontier dreams are wearing him out. In the last line, in true paternalistic fashion, he grants liberation to the female who started it all: “My horse is not sure he can make it / to the next star. You are free.”

Even as I quote that last line as evidence of Hugo’s sexism, I find it beautiful and hypnotic. The pitch of melancholy in his poems breaks down resistance. Hugo fanatics know certain poems by heart. “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg” is one of his greatest hits. 

“You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down. The last good kiss / you had was years ago. You walk these streets / laid out by the insane.” 

To address the reader with the proposition “Say your life broke down”—that’s a gesture of deep compassion because it includes everyone. Even those who don’t believe their downfall is imminent. Hugo is saying to those people, You could fall, too. Anyone could. 

The old house was built in 1902, and by the early 2010s it was falling apart. The floorboards creaked. Pipes burst on the night of the final pre-demolition party. The water had to be turned off. It was as if the house were sending a signal that it was time to go. The organization was without a permanent home for a couple of years until its new headquarters opened in 2018.

It’s a rainy afternoon as I make my way to the new Hugo House for the first time. I’m skittish, guilty. In the front-facing window, the class catalog is represented in a series of distinct images on individual cards hung in rows, evoking a Chinese restaurant menu. I later learn that the designs are based on ’90s and early-’00s movie posters, and each class does indeed look like a movie you might want to go to. The titles are bold and genre-defying: My Life Has Gotten So Busy, The House of Memory, Reading the Female Gaze, Writing About Death.

 I don’t see many of the old teacher names or much in the way of publishing credits or accolades—a good sign. A New York–centric focus has given way to a more egalitarian system. It doesn’t matter if you were published by one of the big houses. They are falling apart, like any house does. 

Still, the new building doesn’t have the same charm. How could it? Numeric codes are needed to open doors. There are windowless conference rooms with air-conditioning (at the old house, it was always too hot or too cold), and more new desks than I could’ve imagined back in the day, when the writer-in-residence tabletop gave me splinters. While the old house always felt crowded, overrun, the current acting executive director, Pepe Montero, says, “Sometimes I am the only one in this huge space.” 

Montero has been in his position for less than a year, part time, and says things have only just started to settle down. There are meaningful events and classes happening, but the space still has an empty feeling it. Montero is determined to bring the wild spirit of the old house back in this new, air-purified, earthquake-proof environment. 

Born in Mazatlán, Mexico, Montero headed to the US after college and worked at Microsoft as an engineer for 20 years. He was a denizen of the late-’90s Capitol Hill arts scene, interning at Wigglyworld Studios (which became Northwest Film Forum), in demand as a bilingual arts advocate who was also a techie, the sought-after Hispanic board member. 

Montero has intermittently felt “tokenized” by the Seattle arts community. He has no patience for this. As a judge on grant committees, he has waded through miles of multiculturalism buzzwords and acronyms. He frequented Hugo House in the ’00s and, like me, remembers the sense of home—the way that when you walked through the front door, you were already in the middle of something. 

He knows this is a hard journey. But he has energy and idealism to burn. He wants the House to give desk space to small presses. He wants to solve the whiteness problem. “What if readings weren’t all in English?” he asks, leaning across the table. “What if we hosted readings in neighborhoods outside Capitol Hill?”

He describes a House event in June 2024, when poets of different languages were invited to read alongside English-speaking open-mic attendees, in Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. No translation. That night, the music of language was more important than what the words might mean. Montero recalls how a Chinese woman took the mic, reading passionately in her native tongue. “It’s like she was singing.” The audience was transfixed. He didn’t know what she was saying, yet he still can’t get her voice out of his head. Maybe it’s the sound of what comes next.