Welcome to Richard Hugo House

When I was growing up my father told me that if I could write, I could do anything I wanted in the world.

In high school, my father helped me edit some of my class papers. We cut the handwritten paragraphs apart, changed the order and them re-taped them together.  This was the original, pre-computer, “cut and tape” process, which inevitably led to uneven page lengths and fluttering margins, before I wrote the final draft.

He also made cryptic edits, in terse squiggles that flattened into long vague lines, right before he’d fly off for a week-long business trip. Even my mother couldn’t decipher his handwriting, which unfortunately mine now resembles.

When I went off to college, my mother lent me her Royal Quiet DeLuxe Portable  typewriter from the 1940’s. She was worried about my handwriting. I was worried about my terrible typing skills, but fortunately quick-erase typing paper had been invented. I still remember the smell of the old ribbon, the sound of the “ding” when I’d reach the right hand margin and the feel of the chrome lever as I moved the carriage from left to right to start the next line.  

I like to think that I changed a bit of the world with my writing. In the 1980’s I worked to save family owned logging businesses and sawmills in Oregon; in the 1990’s I edited biological reviews that determined which species of salmon were threatened with extinction; and in the last decade I used the Clean Water Act to protect Puget Sound water quality.  I wrote grants, letters to the editor, articles, testimony, legislation and even a bit of poetry.  

At Richard Hugo House we teach people of all ages to write. We provide a cabaret and theater for writers to read their works and readers to experience them. And, at our annual Hugo Literary Series we commission new works from established writers.  
 
If you can write, you can do anything. Go ahead. Write your story. Change the world.

Sue Joerger, executive director