September 28, 2007

Doug Nufer just told me that Eleventh Hour Productions has closed shop. Brian McGuigan has posted the e-mail sent out by the board.

This has been a particularly brutal year in Seattle for grassroots lit arts (Raven Chronicles ceasing publication, Red Sky Poetry theater melting away, Richard Hugo House closing ZAPP for a year?) but Eleventh Hour has somehow made it for ten years, about the same age as Richard Hugo House, SubText, StringTown, and seemed like it had become a more or less stable institution.

Eleventh Hour was initially founded for the Seattle Poetry Circus. And then later renamed Seattle Poetry Circus the Seattle Poetry Festival (as it became more serious.) The festival was rooted primarily in the performance and slam styles of poetry, but the festival made a deliberate effort to bridge the various modes of poetry being practiced in Seattle. Experimental poets from SubText, MFA-types associated with the University of Washington, and anyone else practicing under the loose umbrella of poetry was encouraged to apply and was often given billing and space. The festival occurred in a number of places. I remember going to a place in Belltown (COCO) during one of the early festivals and it was a kind of loud blend of poetry, slams, and rock bands of indeterminate genre. It was chaos and kind of great and did serve the function of bridging the various poetry factions in Seattle. The festival grew but also suffered some sets backs after the brief dot-com collapse and recession in the early 00s, to an every other year event. It also grew to include venues such as Benaroya Hall Music Center. Of this year's festival, John Marshall in the Seattle PI wrote "The first revival in 2005 was a modest success, but this weekend's second revival seems to promise a giant leap beyond."

Eleventh Hour also worked on other events such as Reel To Reel at the Speakeasy and last month's Meter and Madness readings following ACT's production of First Class.

Eleventh Hour managed to survive the departure of departure of is founders, Noel Franklin and Bob Redmond. In 2000, Noel moved to Arizona and has since returned to Seattle. Bob worked with Judith Roche on literary programming at One Reel for Bumbershoot and is now working on both literary and visual arts programming for One Reel. In recent years, writer Linden Ontjes has been the primary person keeping things going, and Jennifer Borges Foster contribued a ton of hours to 2007's festival. (She's now left for a residency in the Azores.)

The announcement on their web sites, says, "We are closing the books on Eleventh Hour."

June 9, 2007

More changes at Richard Hugo House under managing director Lyall Bush. Bush recently evicted the last of the small presses and literary magazines renting space at Hugo House. The literary arts center will replace the tenants with two theater organizations.

Richard Hugo House is a community writing center in Seattle that was founded to provide support and shelter to writers. It is one of a handful of centers like this around the country including The Loft in Minneapolis, Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, and The Writing Center in Bethesda.

As a nonprofit literary center, Richard Hugo House provided inexpensive space in order to support the perennial unprofitable business of producing printed books of poetry and magazines of literary essays. The displaced renters are Floating Bridge Press, publishers of the annual poetry anthology of Washington State Poetry, Pontoon and the seventeen-year-old literary magazine, The Raven Chronicles.

In the days after her eviction, Phoebe Bosche, the long time managing editor and co-founder of The Raven Chronicles, looked at her options in terms of where to move the magazine and decided it was time to end the publication of the magazine.

She forwarded me this text which will appear in issue one of volume 13:

This year, many paths merged into one, seeming to point in only one direction: time to say goodnight and put the print edition of Raven to bed. On May 14, 2007, the new U.S. postal rates went into effect, meaning, for us, a 200 plus raise raise in the cost of sending magazines bulk mail to subscribers and contributors. Then the inevitable happened, vis a vis office space. We've been grateful to Hugo House for providing reasonably priced office space to a few nonprofit literary organizations (and in the beginning, community organizations), like Raven. We've been at HH since the beginning, 1997: ten always-changing years. Now, Hugo House wants to change direction and offer office space to resident theater groups, so we have to vacate the premises by the end of 2007.

The Hugo House Programs Director, Alix Wilber, points out that Hugo House is giving Floating Bridge and The Raven Chronicles seven months to find new space. In addition, Alix Wilber points out that the theater residencies are actually part of Hugo House's alignment with their mission in order to support playwrights and provide a venue for their work.

Notice to the Floating Bridge and The Raven Chronicles come on the heels of Hugo House restricting access to the writer's Hugo Writer's Fund from a revolving application process for a community held resource to a quarterly grant awarded by Hugo House. At the same time, Hugo House ending their support of the SubText reading series, ending one of the longest running series at Hugo House. SubText brings an out of town "experimental" writer to Seattle on a monthly basis and provides an unassuming, unpretentious stage for self-described "difficult' writing, which naturally does not have a wide audience. SubText is now located at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford.

Wilber points out that although Hugo House is able to support a lot of work, they can't support everything. "We currently give away about $10,000 in space and about $4,000 in cash honoraria every year. (We hope to be able to give away even more in the future but we're not there yet.)" This works out, Wilber figures, to between 50 and 70 co-sponsorships a year, and about a quarter of those are event series.

Hugo House is a community-writing center on Capitol Hill in Seattle that was founded to provide access to all writers in the community and to support community based literary arts. It was founded in the mid-1990s by Linda Breneman Jaech, Andrea Lewis and Frances McCue.

Note: Alix Wilber was kind enough to send me a nice e-mail correcting some factual errors or just rhetorical oddities. I've updated the post. The main ones: 1) I thought Cranky was renting space. They weren't. 2) Well, my headline says (still) "evicted" when technically Hugo House is evicting them, but with seven months notice. So it is a kind of gentle eviction. 2) Playwriting is a "literary art" and not a dark art. 4) The old revolving Hugo Writer's fund was painful to administer. The new one: less painful. Thanks, Alix.

Related:

Richard Hugo House: Break It Down
Hugo House is fixed. The social experimental is over.

Open Office Hours
I saw about three writers a week while at Richard Hugo House. In the two years I saw just over a hundred and fifty writers.

April 19, 2007

At a bizarrely controverisal party/fundraiser in Seattle last weekend, editor and co-founder of Clear Cut Press, Matthew Stadler, announced that he was turning over the reigns to his business partner Rich Jensen and leaving the small publishing company.

[...]

The second series of the press (due to start coming out this fall) will include "Bruce Benderson's gothic travel memoir, Pacific Agony, commissioned by Clear Cut and being published simultaneously in French, by Rivage (Bruce is the only foreigner ever to win the coveted Prix de Fleur); newcomer Danielle Dutton's groundbreaking S P R A W L, a prose poem that jams Lisa Robertson's intelligence and music into a Jane Austen-ish scrutiny of the manner of being in those new landscapes we continue to call suburbs."

Reported by Chas Bowie in The Portland Mercury.

March 28, 2006

Diana George's first book, a chapbook called Disciplines, has just been released from Noemi Press. Gary Lutz has said of Diana George's work, "Rigorous intellect and line-by-line virtuosity do not often coincide in a writer of fiction, but Diana George is an exquisite exception. Her sorrowing exactitude and heart-wrung originality make Disciplines a sublime, truth-haunted debut." George is also a very, very funny writer which comes as a shock listening to her precisely constructed fiction. When I've heard her read the audience seems puzzled first by what they are hearing and gradually realize it is okay to laugh; perhaps they can't help themselves. George will read from her new book at Richard Hugo House on Capitol Hill in Seattle at 7:30 p.m. (1634 11th Ave; 206-322-7030) on Tuesday April 18th. After the event she will leave on a boat for an island in the San Juans to blow an NEA grant on writing more prose.

Corinna Wyckoff's excellent stories have been accepted for publication by University of Illinois/Other Voices Books. The collection is tentatively titled, The Wrong Place in the World and will be released in early 2007. She has published short stories in Other Voices and The Clear Cut Future and an essay in Best Essays Northwest. Corinna currently teaches at Pierce College in Lakewood, Washington.OV Books is a new fiction imprint from the fiction only journal in Chicago, Other Voices. The press is dedicated to publishing collections of stories.

March 26, 2006

Shoot the Buffalo functions partly as a reflective critique of the bohemian counter-culture lifestyle, offering a cautionary example of living life in such a free-wheeling way. But this heart-breaking story ends on a sense of hope as we see Aldous making those first steps away from his upbringing and becoming his own person and willing to take on all the things his parents tried so desperately to avoid in those woods.
--Hebdomeros Blog, Washington DC and Baltimore.

Hebdomeros presents one of the few (maybe only?) comprehensive lists of literary events in Washington DC and Baltimore. He also writes about the travails of being a writer in the crack between DC and New York. Both cities have long, standing small presses, writers, and bookstores. Baltimore has Atomic Books and Normals. Washington DC has The Writers Center. The other blog in Baltimore is Lizzie Skurnick's Old Hag, a blog with hardly any information about Baltimore but a churlish charm and sometimes disconcerting obsession with New York publishing fads.

The Too Beatiful, the blog also mentioned Shoot the Buffalo recently.

October 27, 2005

Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger writes about Trapdoor 62 and a bit about the "mysterious" goings on at Richard Hugo House.