Welcome to Richard Hugo House

Hugo House now seems so familiar upon entering. I don’t see the little idiosyncrasies from the odd building design and low budget: the open, circular floor plan, the upward maze of hallways and stairs, a carpet that looks like the skin of a Shar Pei. These are familiarities I have collected in my heart, not an epiphany that struck me when I first stepped foot inside. There were a lot of people smiling at me. This I remember—everyone I saw that very first time I entered Richard Hugo House smiled broadly and earnestly at me.

It would be a tragedy if I recalled any memory of Hugo House and did not explain using all five senses, so here it is: Hugo House is quiet in a way that is soft, quiet in a way that invites the small noises of pens and paper; it is a quiet that is not silence, a quiet that does not forbid speaking, a quiet that is warm. Hugo House has many smooth surfaces, has many different kinds of paper, pens with a solid weight in your hands and light double-speed Bics. Hugo House is a space that invites bodies to be in it. It tastes like nail-chewing of ink-smudged fingers and hyphens-in-all-the-right-places. The smell of Hugo House—the smell of Hugo House is a sacrament: like old books and new paper and ink and graphite and cardboard and that church-smell that reminds you to sit down and shut up because you’re in the presence of the divine. Now I find that I walk in without a pious inhalation of breath, without seeing the newest announcements on the board and only glancing out of habit at the sign in the bathroom that has been defaced to read “Avoid Pregnancy.”

I do not notice these things, not because I love them any less, but because it is my home—I know it entering.

           Hannah Wood, 2009-2010 youth writer-in-residence