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Hugo House's Writer's Residency - Urban Immersion: A New Kind of Writers’ Residency (published in Artist Trust's Journal, Spring 2004) Brian Goedde has been living in the cramped but quaint confines of a small cottage for the past nine months, working on various writing projects, attacking an aggressive reading schedule, and trying to avoid too many distractions. While this focus might sound familiar to artist residencies you’ve read about or experienced, Goedde’s locale is far from the pastoral countryside. More accurately, it’s amid the maddening crowd. Nestled in between luxury condos, the Millionaire’s Club, senior citizen low income housing, a community p-patch, and the constant buzz from nearby Elliott Avenue, Goedde has taken up residence for the past nine months in one of the last three remaining single-family residences in the entire downtown Seattle corridor. Along with nonfiction writer Brenda Bell, Goedde (author of The World Is Yours: The Geography of HipHop) was selected to inaugurate Richard Hugo House’s urban offshoot to their Writers in Residence program (a more faculty like position at Hugo House’s Capitol Hill literary arts center. This new experiment in urban living and creativity is an ongoing partnership between the Seattle Parks Department and Hugo House to effectively transform three recently restored historic Belltown cottages (first built as cannery-worker housing in 1916) into living quarters for two writers and an adjacent community center. The writers (chosen from an open application and selectionprocess) assume full-time residence for six months to a year (Goedde and Bell will reach a year in July) and pay only $200/month in rent during their urban immersion. The third cottage will be finished and open to the public and neighborhood residents as a community center later this summer just in time for the arrival of the new Writers in Residence. “Most residencies are out in the woods and embrace a traditional notion of the sublime,” offers Goedde, a writer engaged with a constellation of subjects, including hip-hop, the culture surrounding professional sports, and contemporary labor issues. As Goedde puts it, rather than placing artists in an idyllic setting where they’re invited to work in relative isolation, the Hugo House has created an entirely different kind of rejuvenating experience. “While ‘residency as retreat’ is a wonderful thing and much needed,” says Goedde, “it doesn’t necessarily promote writers’ engagement with society. Our living down here the past year has put us right in the thick of things and created a really unusual civic dialogue. And when there’s a place for people to come sit down and read a little bit about the residency program, the history of the site, and maybe check out a book or come to a reading, it will only increase the dialogue,” says Goedde. As an integral part of their residency, both Goedde and Bell have offered office hours to anyone interested. In order to better accommodate other writers, both residents have taken to meeting up with interested writers at a mutually agreed upon café in the neighborhood. Goedde has also gotten involved with nearby organizations like Casa Latina, a community non-profit organization that provides assistance to the more than 1,000 (annually) Latino immigrants that congregate on Western Avenue in Belltown in order to negotiate daylabor. “I’ve been teaching a drop-in class one day a week over there and plan to write something about the experience in the future. It’s difficult in a sense because being there in my class means you didn’t get work for the day, so it can be a challenge but a worthwhile one.” Goedde has also swapped a shift in the soup kitchen at the Millionaires Club up the street for access to their laundry room. “All the groups in the neighborhood have been really cool,” says Goedde. “When we first moved in one of the local newspapers did an article on the residency and really seemed to be stressing the potential danger of living in this particular part of Belltown. I guess because of the large homeless population, but we haven’t had any problems,” says Goedde. “I’ve had some guys sleeping on my porch once or twice but that’s about it.” This adventure in civic dialogue may very well become a permanent partnership when the project is up for approval by the City Council later this year. And Goedde, for one, hopes that it happens. “It’s been a great experience and I’ve gotten a lot of work done,” says Goedde. “The more people know about the program, the more impact on the neighborhood in the future.” When I ask what he thinks about the idea of bringing in writers from outside Seattle (both current residents are local), Goedde guesses that will happen soon. “As far as I know, writers can apply from all over. And that would be a great way for a writer to get introduced to the city and vice versa.” |