FAQ

We are at 1634 Eleventh Avenue on Capitol Hill, on the corner of Eleventh and East Olive.

Public transportation: Hugo House is a short walk from the Capitol Hill light rail station and the First Hill streetcar (Broadway & Pike-Pine stop), and within a half-mile of many buses, including routes 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 43, 49, and 60. 

Parking: Multiple pay parking lots are available nearby. Street parking is also available but not guaranteed. The garage beneath Hugo House is for tenants only.

Our building is an accessible space and fully ADA-compliant. If you have access needs we can assist with, please contact us in advance and we will be happy to help.

Captions are available upon request for all our online classes.

Sign language interpretation is provided for our main stage Speaker Series events, Hugo Literary Series and Word Works. We are working to get make sign language interpretation available for more events in the future. If you would like sign language interpretation provided for a specific event, please contact our team.

Our aim is for Hugo House to be a barrier-free learning environment. If you have suggestions about how we can improve, we welcome your input.

Please see our COVID-19 Health Guidelines page for more details.

Sure. We’re always willing to answer questions about classes via email or over the phone. Just tell us a bit about your writing background (or tell us if you’re just getting started!) and about what kind of class experience you’d like, and we can assist you from there.

Contact us.

Classes in our course catalog are meant for adults unless otherwise marked or included on our Youth page. If you are a minor who would like to attend an adult class, please contact us to receive a waiver to be signed by your parent or guardian certifying that you understand adult content could be discussed in this class.

Generative means you’ll be generating new writing, either in class or at home between classes. Workshop, on the other hand, means you’ll be bringing in work to be read and critiqued by the instructor and your writing peers. Don’t worry—this isn’t as scary as it sounds. It’s an integral part of the writing process that will end up giving everyone ideas for revision that might not have come up in typical writerly solitude. Plus, critiquing others’ work is often even more valuable to your progress as a writer than having your own critiqued.

A reading class is just that: reading. However, our reading classes often stray toward looking at the craft of the works being read, rather than the typical lit-class analysis of, say, the American Dream in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. Instead, you’ll probably be breaking down the sentence structure of “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Most of our other classes are intended for a range of levels, from very beginning writers to very advanced. If a class is designed for a specific level of experience, it will be noted in the course description. For more information on class levels, see About Our Classes.

As long as you have the desire and drive to be a writer, we want you here and in class! Our best advice to beginning writers is to take a class in an area of writing that interests you most, such as a class on characters for fiction or a class on line breaks for poetry. Despite focusing on a smaller area, you’ll learn a lot about the overall genre by doing so.

There are two reasons a class may be missing. First, we close online registrations on the day the class starts. Please call us at 206.322.7030 if you’re still interested in registering, and we can let you know if there is space available. Second, it could mean the class was cancelled due to low registration. We recommend registering for your class more than five days before it starts to help prevent these cancellations.

It’s our goal to make our classes as accessible as possible. Every quarter, we offer classes with sliding-scale tuition options that allow students to pay what they can for the class.

Asynchronous classes are perfect for students that need flexibility!

During an asynchronous class, instructors release new lessons once per week. Students then have one week to complete that lesson and any accompanying coursework. You’ll learn as much as you would in a traditional class but with the flexibility to work at the best times for your schedule!

While there are no live sessions, asynchronous classes are still a lively and rigorous experience. Async classes are not static lessons but an adaptable and energetic community space. Be ready to work in a collaborative environment, giving and receiving feedback on your writing, participating in discussions, and growing your writing practice in a way that works best for you.

Asynchronous classes take place through the website Wet Ink. Students receive an invitation to the class and to set up a Wet Ink account on the start date of the class. Each week of the class, a new lesson will be available through the Wet Ink portal. Classes close two weeks after the end date, and students receive an email containing their content from the class when it closes.

Besides a pen and paper, Hugo House itself doesn’t require anything. However, your teachers will email you ahead of time if they’d personally like you to bring in a work sample, laptop, etc.

Additionally, we recommend all students check our current health and safety guidelines to stay up to date on any vaccination/negative test and mask requirements.

Tuition credit from cancelled registration expires after one year.

Most classes are offered at a general and member tuition rates based on instruction hours, with Hugo House members receiving a 10% discount on classes fewer than six sessions.

Early bird discounts are available during the first two weeks of registration and apply to both general and member tuition rates.

To help provide financial accessibility to our class offerings, some classes each quarter are offered with a sliding-scale tuition model, allowing students to pay what they can for the class. For these classes, tuition increments starting at $5 and going up to 125% of the standard pricing will be listed on the page.

Hugo House will only process refund requests that are submitted 5 business days or more before the class start date. To request a refund, log in to your account, go to “My Account,” select the “Orders” tab on the left-hand side, click the appropriate order, and request a refund for your specific class. Administrative fees apply. Please see our full refund policy here.

Class sessions may be recorded if a session falls on a holiday, or if a student has access needs. Class recordings are not guaranteed.

We do not tolerate racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic or any other oppressive behaviors, regardless of who commits them. Please check out our full community guidelines by clicking here. If an instance of community guidelines are violated and not resolved within the classroom, students may let us know by filling out the student incident report.

Classes may be cancelled if less than the minimum number of students are enrolled within ten days before the class start date. If Hugo House needs to cancel a class for any reason, students can choose between receiving a full credit toward future classes or full refund.

We are currently not accepting new event proposals as we implement a new event system. We will update our website with new information about event hosting as soon as we are accepting proposals. Thank you for your patience!

Actually, many of our events are free! Some events like Literary Series, Word Works, and a few other programs throughout the year include paid tickets that are posted on the individual events pages on our calendar.

Find events.

Hugo House does not offer refunds on ticketed events. If your ticket(s) are for an event in our Literary Series or our Word Works series, you may exchange your ticket(s) for another event in the same series and season. However, refunds will be given in the case of tickets to events that are cancelled or postponed by Hugo House.

If you would like to request a ticket exchange, please contact us.

Hugo House members receive discounts on events and classes, as well as a slew of other membership benefits! Additionally, members provide vital support for Hugo House’s mission to help writers at all stages of their writing journey. Read more about membership benefits.

Hugo House accepts donations to our annual fund throughout the year. Contributions of all sizes allow us to continue to provide access to quality writing classes, events, and experiences for all. Please consider making a donation to Hugo House today.

If you’re interested in contributing your skills, Hugo House accepts volunteer applications for a variety of roles, including event support, administrative tasks, and more. Learn more on our Volunteer page.

Learn about all the ways to support Hugo House here.

Thank you so much for your interest in sponsoring one of our events or programs! Please reach out to us at welcome@hugohouse.org. 

Writing groups are composed of fellow writers in a fairly serious relationship together—a relationship that is rarely formed via a blind date, and one that may be much more complex than any romantic relationship. We haven’t found a good way to facilitate these matches quite yet, but we’re working on it!

You’re looking for a small group of people who read your work in a critical, respectful way with exciting insight. You’ll typically find these people in a classroom. When someone understands or challenges your work in a constructive way, you won’t want to let go of them. And hopefully they’ll feel the same way about you. Keep in touch with these special writer friends, have coffee, take it slow.

We can’t, but our writers-in-residence are very helpful in advising writers on how to find an agent or send out manuscripts to various publishers. We also offer classes on publishing, book proposals, and finding an agent.

Definitely! We might even feature it. Let us know.