Not every city is blessed with a literary non-profit center like the Richard Hugo House. If ever there existed a starting point for aspiring NW poets, it’d be here, with a Hugo House reading, class or workshop. At Dark Sky Magazine — our upcoming poetry interviews will center on Seattle’s place on the literary map — we’re presenting poets when they arrive, and watching them when they go next. Recently we jumped into the fray, and talked shop with Richard Hugo House staff member, Kate Lebo. — Lori Huskey
Dark Sky Magazine: Tell us about the Richard Hugo House. How big is the staff, does everyone write, how did you become involved?
Kate Lebo: First, the boilerplate: Hugo House is a literary arts center. We host classes, events and residencies for writers. Now the details: we’re situated in a creaky old Victorian house that over the years has been an apartment complex, a funeral home, and a theater company. We offer creative writing opportunities beyond academia and we think genre fiction, like speculative fiction, mystery novels, etc. can be literature (and a heckuva lot of fun to read).
My favorite rooms in the House are our Cabaret — a literary performance space with a bar and cabaret-style tables — and ZAPP, an archive of over 20,000 zines.
Our staff is small ( just 12 ) and we get the job done with the help of 50 or so volunteers at any given time throughout the year. All of us are artists in some way or another. Most of us are writers. Our Executive Director and Facilities Manager are both drummers. There are a couple visual artists among us too.
When I moved to Seattle in 2005, I purposely rented an apartment within walking distance of Hugo House. As a newbie to the city I knew I wanted to be where the action was, and as a young writer you can’t get much closer to the middle of all things literary (on the West Coast, at least) than Hugo House. I volunteered for a year, then joined the staff as volunteer coordinator. Now I’m the registrar too, which means that if you want to take a class at Hugo House you should call me.
DSM: What’s the most creative way you’ve gone about fund raising?
KL: Every Hugo Literary Series event has a theme, and Emily, our bar manager, comes up with drinks to match the theme. This October’s event was called “Truth or Dare.” She almost featured a We Dare You to Donate to Hugo House Martini, cost: $10,000, but didn’t for no good reason I can remember. Maybe she didn’t have enough cash in the till to make change for a $25,000 bill. Is there such thing as a $25,000 bill?
DSM: How necessary is it for a RHH staff member to be a writer?
KL: Not necessary at all. Membership with Hugo House is more about being a part of our community than being a writer, per se. Readers and lovers of books, even if they aren’t writers, fit right in.
DSM: What is your favorite Richard Hugo poem?
KL: I can’t remember the name of my favorite poem, so I’ll tell you the book it’s in: 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. It’s out of print but you can find it at used bookstores sometimes. White Center and Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg are deservedly famous, and I love the title of the poem What the Brand New Freeway Won’t Go By. I recommend The Triggering Town to anyone with ears to listen. The Real West Marginal Way, his memoir, will make you fall in love with Hugo if you haven’t already. Death and the Good Life, his mystery novel, is flawed but fun to read, particularly if you’re going on a road trip through Montana.
DSM: Have you ever read the entire works of any poet?
Celan Is Up To Reason
KL: Nope. Particularly with poetry, I don’t like to pig-out on one particular author. I don’t have the stomach or the attention span for that much poetry at once. If I was assigned the entire works of one particular poet, I’d hope it was Jack Gilbert, Marie Howe, or Paul Celan. Gilbert and Howe because they tend to write in narrative, complete sentences that defy expectation. They write poems that somehow physically feel good to read. Celan because I don’t need to understand his poems to appreciate the look and feel of them.
DSM: If you could go ice skating with two living writers who would they be?
KL: I can ice skate about as well as a turkey can fly, so I’ll go ice skating with any poet who will sit on the sidelines and share secret sip of whiskey with me.
DSM: How long have you been writing?
KL: The writing of Still Life with Babysitter started with the line “All day your hearing eye rides/the cat through the kitchen.” It sounds arbitrary, but isn’t. I was describing what I saw in an abstract painting. I can’t remember the name of the painter, but I know he’s local — raised in a house on NW 90th street and currently living in a house on NW 93rd. This mattered to me as I wrote. I encountered the painting in an ekphrasic poetry class at Hugo House taught by Erin Malone and Kary Wayson — two of my favorite poets. Because I was responding to visual art, the poem took on a snapshot quality. The narrative relationship between images isn’t immediately clear, and may only exist because they’re next to each other, the way a collection of snapshots, randomly shuffled by time and shoebox storage, tell a story. The “boy” in question was a drawing of a male figure on top of a cat, with a crudely drawn eye connected to his ear by a black line.
I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath at the time because I was preparing to perform her work for Dead Poets’ Society, an event my co-worker and I organized for Hugo House last April, so her influence is all over this poem. Particularly the line “I am no more your mother,” which I stole outright because it sounds great. Say it aloud. You’ll see what I mean.
Still Life with Babysitter
by Kate Lebo
Little boy, today’s lesson is not a test:
Pretend you are a bird
in the lower part of a pine.
Describe the child in the grass
who would open you
like a gift. In fifty words
state the nature of baseball,
brown bags and dogholes.
Diagram the spirit of the lawn.
The first draft of morning
shines in panes on the table,
cleans my glass with its gaze.
Glaze of red wings, of branchless leaves,
your hands catch balance.
Throw it back to me.
All day your hearing eye rides
the cat through the kitchen, knocks
knots in the walls.
Their parade of yellow curtains laughs
like water.
Through your paintings’ nailholes
I see your childhood rooms:
carpet, creak and cupboard.
Through their nailholes your paintings
see us: two rooms
of milk and marker.
Little boy, you will be big.
On that someday, I hope you call
to remember the afternoon
I taught you to use the telephone.
Around your mouth a ring of freckles
beckons snow.
I am no more your mother than the month
of November or the pines
in your mother’s backyard.
____________________________________________
Kate Lebo was raised in southwest Washington by two Iowans and a bunch of vigilant daycare employees. She graduated from Western Washington University in 2005. Now she lives in Seattle, where she works for Richard Hugo House, a literary arts center. You can find her poems in Crab Creek Review, Smartish Pace, Filter and Knock magazines. To read more about Kate (and her tasty homemade pies), visit her blog at Good Egg Seattle.
