Poet and Hugo House writer-in-residence Karen Finneyfrock celebrates the release of her new collection of poetry, "Ceremony for the Choking Ghost," on Thursday, March 18, 7 p.m., at Richard Hugo House.
Tickets are $10 and are available at brownpapertickets.com.
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Vernal [vur-nl] –adjective: 1. Of or pertaining to spring: vernal sunshine. 2. Appearing or occurring in spring: vernal migratory movements. 3. Appropriate to or suggesting spring; springlike: vernal greenery. 4. Belonging to or characteristic of youth: vernal longings. I always think of red as the first color of spring, showing up in the tiny blossoms on the maple trees, the unfolding buds of rose bushes, the new growth of photinia leaves, flaming scarlet in the vernal sunshine. All definitions are courtesy of Dictionary.com. Example sentence courtesy of Waverly. Word of the Day appears on weekdays and features words taken from books that Hugo House staff and volunteers are currently reading. This week’s series is brought to you by Waverly Fitzgerald, Hugo House finance manager, and features words taken from "Reading the Mountains of Home" by John Elder. |
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Alexis Morley: Once upon a time, a girl from New Mexico decided she wanted to live in the big city of Seattle and chase the dream of getting into publishing, so she packed her beat up Honda Civic and moved there. She heard about Richard Hugo House and decided that was the place for her. KL: Ooh! Then what happened? AM: Well...the girl went on a long quest for an internship, which involved filling out a form and interviewing with three very intimidating Hugonauts. She was awarded the crown of marketing and events intern. Now she defeats the two-headed dragon of obscurity and ignorance at least once a day. KL: What’s so great about Seattle that you wanted to move here from New Mexico? AM: The friends and family I have here. I love having water all around and I love the neighborhoods, especially Ballard. It has the best dive bars, lots of good food, the Ballard Market, the Ballard Locks, good vibes and good thrift stores. KL: What’s been your favorite Hugo House experience? "Cheap Beer and Prose" is another favorite of mine. I’ve gotten a bunch of friends into it, people who have lived here longer than I, which makes me feel really cool for discovering it first. The readers for that series are really good. KL: If you could have written any book that has already been written, what would it be? AM: Anything by David Sedaris. How about “East of Eden” so I could get all the royalties. Every ninth grader has to read that book. KL: Plus James Dean would have starred in your movie. AM: And I would have gotten to meet him!
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Well, it's been a smelly couple of months that we've been graced with the presence of Sasquatch in ZAPP. The first odor we experienced was that of evergreen trees as they decked the zine stacks to give the archive a more woodsy feel. This was followed by the crisp smell of mint and the graceful scent of cheap beer as visitors to our opening night joyfully guzzled down drink specials in honor of our glorious guest. The most recent smell has been a lingering wave of sweat as a sweltering February surprised us all, but that seems to be dwindling down now too. Combine all those smells and the art work celebrating him (or her) and you get the perfect environment for our furry friend. It's sad to think that ZAPP will no longer be adorned with the wonderful art that celebrates Sasquatch, and we would love if you came out tonight from 5-8 p.m. for one last peek at the artwork of David Lasky, Kelly Froh, Max Clotfelder, Darin Shuler and others. Tonight is also "Cheap Beer and Prose," so you can check out the art in ZAPP before heading downstairs to guzzle some beer and share your tales of Sasquatch sightings at the open mic. |
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Gall [gawl] –verb (used with object) 1. To make sore by rubbing; chafe severely: The saddle galled the horse's back. 2. To vex or irritate greatly: His arrogant manner galls me. –verb (used without object) 3. To be or become chafed. 4. Machinery. (of either of two engaging metal parts) to lose metal to the other because of heat or molecular attraction resulting from friction. 5. Metallurgy. (of a die or compact in powder metallurgy) to lose surface material through adhesion to the die. –noun 6. A sore on the skin, esp. of a horse, due to rubbing; excoriation. 7. Something very vexing or irritating. 8. A state of vexation or irritation. Any chance remark that could be interpreted as criticism galled him. He would return to it over and over in his mind, letting it chafe against his self-confidence. All definitions are courtesy of Dictionary.com. Example sentence courtesy of Waverly. Word of the Day appears on weekdays and features words taken from books that Hugo House staff and volunteers are currently reading. This week’s series is brought to you by Waverly Fitzgerald, Hugo House finance manager, and features words taken from "Reading the Mountains of Home" by John Elder. |
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I just clicked the Submit button on my online application for the 4Culture Individual Artists Project grant to support the completion of a first draft of a novel I’ve been writing for almost a year. I have been working on—and struggling with—the grant for more than a month now, but finally, it’s done. If you’re pecking away at the application today or just finding out about it right now, you have until 5 p.m. to click Submit. In honor of completing the grant, I’d like to share some of the many things I’ve done over the last month instead of working on the application. Like many writers and artists, I can be a procrastinator. As Marya Sea Kaminski said in her interview yesterday, maybe it’s because we like the pressure. Or maybe we’re just lazy. 1. Weeding. In the last month, I’ve weeded every flower bed and planter and between each sandstone rock on my back patio (This, for the record, is not an easy task.) I clipped back the blackberry vines growing through my back fence with my bare hands (Not out of manliness, as you might suspect, but out of the sheer hope that I may pierce my fingers so badly that I would not be able to type.) I’ve trimmed my neighbor’s tree that shades over our vegetable planter, and I even dumped a bucket of plant-clippings turned smelly sludge that had been sitting in my yard for almost a year. 2. “How Clean is Your House?” marathon. My wife loves this show; I hate it. But I hate writing grants even more. 3. Cleaned my entire house. If you’ve ever watched “How Clean is Your House?”, then you know that you won’t look at your home the same again. Looking at my kitchen after the marathon, all I saw was bacteria—creepy crawly bits of e. coli and salmonella everywhere—and all I heard was a brusque English accent saying, “Clean this house, you bloody donkey.” 4. Started writing poetry. I hadn’t written a poem since my house was burgled last June and I lost my entire manuscript of poems that I had been working on. (Yes, I backed up! They stole my back-up! MY BACK-UP!) But since I started working on the grant, I’ve written 5 poems. Apparently, if I want to finish my poetry manuscript, I should apply for grants to support my novel manuscript more often. 5. Dog poop. I’ve picked up more dog poop in the last month than I ever have. My backyard smells wonderful, especially with the plant sludge gone too. 6. NFL trade news. Did you know Anquan Boldin is a Raven? Julius Peppers is a Brown? T.O. may be signing with the Bengals? I do—because I’ve spent HOURS chugging through pages upon pages of draft news, rumors and speculation on ESPN.com. 7. The earthquake in Chile. I was up until 4 a.m. one evening reading about the earthquake. Well, I spent the first hour reading about the earthquake, about two hours reading about the possibility of an earthquake happening in Seattle and the rest of the evening fretting about the possibility of an earthquake and hating myself for not having an earthquake preparedness kit at home. Despite my need to procrastinate on the grant, I’ve procrastinated even more on the preparedness kit. I’m not sure what that says about me. 8. Twitter. Did you know Shaq is on Twitter? How about Colson Whitehead? And my favorite local rapper Macklemore? Twitter, by farm, is the absolute best way to procrastinate on anything, I’ve learned. What about you? How do you procrastinate when you have a deadline? I’m curious if I'm the only one. |
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That’s kind of like what happened when I arrived in Taroudant. The last time I’d been there was in 1989, five years after finishing up my Peace Corps stint in Morocco. At the time, five years seemed like a long time. I remember walking into my favorite café and being surprised to find the chief of police, the café owner and two of their cronies sitting at the same table they’d occupied the day I’d left, playing—I swear—the same card game. The police chief looked up when I came in, nodded and remarked, “Eh, eh, eh, fin radi?” (Where have you been?)—as if I’d been gone a few weeks instead of five years. During that visit, I ran into a few of my former students, caught up with some old friends and left Taroudant much as I’d found it when I first arrived in 1981. Fast forward twenty years. Once again I returned to Taroudant and within five minutes I thought my head was going to explode. Whatever delusions I’d had about change coming slow—if at all—to places like Taroudant were dispelled the instant I walked down the street where I’d once lived—and was unable to recognize my own front door. Was it the one over by what was now a driving school? Or possibly the one between the patisserie and the cell phone shop, neither of which had existed in my time? Or maybe it was part of the block that had been turned into the Hotel Atlas. There didn’t used to be a Hotel Atlas. Even more shocking—the streets were paved! Every last one of them. And where there had once been long stretches of blank wall, or mud corrals for donkeys and chickens or an olive oil press, suddenly there were rows of shops—many of them selling cell phones, or offering internet services. PlayStation 2? In TAROUDANT? The place where I used to buy my vegetables had been turned into a motorcycle showroom (Hondimoto anyone? They promise “Japan High Technology”). The main square, Place Asserag, was completely lined with tourist shops and cafes—I could barely identify the one I’d once frequented; it had remodeled itself and now looked more like a Euro-snack bar than my beloved Moroccan café. It had even switched out the old squat toilets for sit-down models—no doubt for the benefit of the tourists (of which there had been practically none when I lived there). I spent my first day feeling deeply unsettled and even a little put out. How dare this seminal place in my life change one iota from how it had once been! I kept searching the faces of passersby, wondering if I might run across a former student—but realized I was looking at kids who are in school now. My students would be in their forties. I went back to our hotel and lay down on the bed, hyperventilating. Everything had changed! This wasn’t my Taroudant anymore! But when I woke up in the morning and took a stroll around the ancient city walls that have stood since 1076, I realized that my time here—those three short years—were no more than a tiny blip—a slight hesitation, really—in the span of centuries that separated then from now. The city itself had risen and fallen and risen again many times within those walls, and generations of people far more connected with it than I had faded unremembered into the past. I guess Thomas Wolfe was right that you can’t go home again; at least, not if you expect to still find the Bruce Springsteen posters on the wall and the PRIVATE: KEEP OUT sign on the bedroom door. But if you’re willing to admit that the new wallpaper isn’t half bad, and hardwood floors really are an improvement over that red shag rug you insisted on when you were sixteen...well, it may not be home anymore, but it’s a nice place to visit. So B’salaama for now, Taroudant. May we meet again, someday, Inshallah!
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As the winner, Leslie receives a cash prize of $500 and opens for essayist Phillip Lopate, poet Emily Warn, actress Marya Sea Kaminski and Seattle rockers Happy Hour Hero at Laws of Attraction next Friday, March 19, at the University of Washington's Kane Hall. About her poetry, poet Ed Skoog, the final judge of the competition, says, "I am most charmed by [her] suite of poems, which speak in an mid-evening voice about deterioration and heartbreak. The short lines are packed high and tight like a convoy of long-haul trucks heading out of town." Wow. Get your tickets today, so you can see Leslie read, and check back here the week after Laws of Attraction to read Leslie's poems yourself. |
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We recently checked in with Emily about her upcoming appearance at Laws of Attraction on Friday, March 19 (Tickets are available here, if you haven't picked yours up yet.) Here's what Emily had to say: Hugo House: Soon you will debut a brand-new piece at Hugo House; could you tell us a little bit about it? Emily Warn: I wrote three types of poems—about love, about the contrast between the Laws of Attraction as a New Age term and a scientific term; about the attraction a mythology can exercise over some artist’s imagination that it seems to have volition. The most difficult to write were the love poems. I found they required honesty, intensity and focus, acting as counter forces to my intellectual tendencies, which came to seem like distancing mechanisms. HH: Most writers we invite to create a new piece of writing on an assigned theme say no. Why did you say yes? EW: 1. I’m not afraid of failure. 2. I knew I’d have company not in failure but in the vulnerability of reading a piece or pieces to an audience for the first time. 3. Imagining a real audience as opposed to an imagined audience changed how I write, giving more emphasis to the speaker, tone and rhetorical devices. 4. My last book "Shadow Architect" on the Hebrew alphabet was a self-imposed assigned theme so I kind of knew the process—that I’d end up throwing away a lot of poems that seemed too manufactured with the confidence that poems in my voice would arrive. HH: Could you tell us a little bit about your process—how you approach writing something new? EW: To write something new, I have to put it together differently, kind of like using stucco instead of cedar shakes, or mustard instead of mayo, or imagining talking to people in a cab instead of from a podium. I have to work against my impulses or what I think a poem is. EW: Buttons, the family dog, who had a preference for a certain kind of pickle—kosher dills which I slipped to her under the table. HH: What inanimate object exerts an irresistible attraction over you? EW: Vespa scooters. (Is that a suicidal wish?) Also donuts and computer solitaire, but I don’t think those things count as inanimate objects.
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1634 11th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122
206-322-7030
Open Hours:
Monday-Friday: 12 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday: 12 p.m. - 5 p.m.
ZAPP's Open Hours:
Wednesdays: 4-8 p.m.
Thursdays: 1-5 p.m.
Saturdays: 1-5 p.m.
Alexis Morley likes to sneak into the Hub when I’m not looking, boot up the volunteer computer in the very back, the one that overlooks Hugo House’s roof and the Richmark parking lot, and write quietly until she catches me talking to myself. She’ll finish up as marketing and events intern on the same day as 
Courtesy of Owen Curtsinger
Do you remember the fateful day you went back home to visit your parents and discovered they’d turned your bedroom into a sewing room, or a study or just “the spare room”? The posters were gone, the shag carpet, and suddenly it wasn’t your home anymore. 
We are proud to announce that Leslie Fried is the winner of the New Works Competition. 
As far as poets go, Emily Warn is royalty. She was the Webby award-winning founding editor of the 
