“O-Rama, O-Rama, O-Rama!” shouted three excited volunteers, as they blew whistles to indicate that it was time to move on to the next session.
“Good Lord that was fast. I just got into my groove and here they go shouting that it’s time to go to the next session,” I complained to Leah, the cheerful women sitting next to me. Leah and I are both aspiring fiction writers who decided to attend the annual Write-O-Rama event at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.
Named after poet Richard Hugo, the Hugo House is a historical 16,200 square-foot Victorian house located in the Capital Hill area of Seattle. Richard Hugo was born and raised in the White Center neighborhood of West Seattle, a suburb of Seattle, Washington. After completing his volunteer service in WWII, Hugo earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Washington. Hugo wrote several books of poetry and an influential book on creative writing called “The Triggering Town.” A known regionalist, Hugo’s work celebrates the towns, landscape, and people of the Pacific Northwest.
In 1998, two years after Seattle writers, Linda Breneman, Andrea Lewis, and Frances McCue, proposed creating “an urban writer’s retreat,” the Hugo House officially opened its doors to the community and has become a popular center for writers to meet and build audiences for their work. The founders named the center after Richard Hugo because “they needed to make a place in the city the way Hugo did in his writing.”
During our chat, Leah and I discovered we had a lot in common. Although we now live in different parts of the city, Leah and I both grew up in West Seattle. We had both taken a sabbatical from creative writing and were eager and half-afraid to delve back into prose. We both felt Write-O-Rama would help us reconnect to the world of letters.
Write-O-Rama is a full day of various one-hour workshops taught by Hugo House writing instructors. The event allows participants to sample some of the courses offered by Hugo House, try different writing forms and genres, and share their work in a supportive environment.
Another similarity that Leah and I shared was that we were both attending the “Instant Fiction” workshop taught by award-winning novelist Robert Clark.
Leah and I grabbed our purses and notebooks and traipsed down the short hallway to the library where we were greeted by nine other Write-O-Rama participants. Most of them smiled nervously or nodded as we entered the room, but a few scowled and tried to project the image of a “tortured artist.”
During the one-hour intensive, Mr. Clark instructed us to randomly select a postcard from the three dozen he brought in and create a short story based on the image (freewriting exercise). We had 20 minutes to complete the task. This is where Leah’s and my similarities ended. The words appeared to flow freely from Leah’s pen unto the paper. I, however, stalled and stuttered. I knew what I wanted to say, but my thoughts would not transfer to paper. My sensory and motor skills misfired. Five minutes before time was up, my brain and hand reconnected but I was unwilling to share my two paragraphs with the group.
Instead, I sat and listened to the creative genius and emotional depth my fellow Write-O-Rama participants demonstrated in their literary pieces. Five things immediately sprung to mind: shock, awe, disbelief, jealousy and motivation. I was in shock, awe, and disbelief that the individuals in that room could write such incredible prose in such a short timeframe and I was jealous that they had “the gift”. I was also motivated to become more disciplined to write regularly.
Mr. Clark reminded the Write-O-Rama participants of two important facts: “writing is incremental and builds up over time” and “writers need a safe place to hone their skills and get feedback on their work and there’s no better place to do that than at the Richard Hugo House.”
Richard Hugo House is a literary arts center that supports and nurtures writers of all ages and backgrounds. Thousands of aspiring and established writers from all over Washington State have attended classes and events at Hugo House. Hugo House is a supportive community that is grooming and growing talented local writers.