Storied cottage program writing its final chapter

Raccoons rustle under the well-worn floorboards. Naked guys walk through the neighboring P-Patch. Strangers peer into the windows, or just bed down on the porch.

It's all part of living in the Richard Hugo House "huts" — two former cottages that have housed a selection of the city's writers for one-year stints since 2003.

They not only labored over their writing but served as caretakers, teachers and chroniclers of the changing Belltown neighborhood.

It's changing again Tuesday, with the demise of the Hugo House program itself. Seems it's the victim of a governmental morass involving liability, insurance, maintenance; the black-and-white issues that always seem to get in the way of the most colorful artistic endeavors.

And so Cienna Madrid, a reporter at The Stranger; and Storme Webber, a poet, will be the last two writers-in-residence at the cottages, tucked into the Belltown P-Patch on Elliott Avenue.

The cottages are the last of 11 built in 1916 as part of a group of dockworker houses. Each 400-square-foot cottage has a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom and a kitchen.

Madrid, who is working on her first novel, about a serial killer; and Webber, a poet working on a memoir and a performance piece, will be allowed to stay through the winter to keep the city-owned houses from being vandalized.

But Hugo House — a nonprofit on Capitol Hill that provides resources to writers and readers — is bowing out of its attachment to the cottages. (Its other residency program, at the House itself, will continue).

"It's [been] an interesting legal agreement down there that I'm not sure I understand," said Susan Joerger, executive director of the Hugo House.

She tried anyway: In order to continue renting out the cottages, Hugo House would have had to assume risks and duties that it just can't afford. In addition, Hugo House could only offer month-to-month rental agreements with the writers, giving them little long-term security.

"It was just all these things that added up to it not being a good fit for us," Joerger said.

When the program started, it seemed the perfect extension of the Hugo House's mission. The city of Seattle invited the nonprofit to find writers to live in the cottages at a low rent in order to strengthen the artistic diversity of Belltown. For their part, the writers were encouraged to offer instruction to the community at places like Real Change, Casa Latina and the neighboring Millionair Club.

When he moved in September 2006, Cody Walker painted the whole place, "as a way to take possession, I guess, " he said. "I did feel like a caretaker, like someone who had been given an important charge."

Outside, he picked up used hypodermic needles and sandwich wrappers, and talked to passers-by about the history of the place. Inside, Walker finished his first poetry collection and was elected Seattle Poet Populist.

Once, he was hosting a picnic outside when a man walked naked through the P-Patch — twice.

"The first time I just told him to put his pants back on," Walker said. "The second time I said, 'Dude, this is the world; you can't walk around naked.'

"Was I right? It seemed a weird thing to have said."

Still, he said, living in the cottage was one of the great privileges of his life.

"I had what every writer wants," he said. "A room of one's own."

Bob Redmond, founder of the nonprofit public-arts program Essential Arts, lived in one of the cottages from September 2005 to June 2006.

"The place was pretty filthy when I moved in," he said. "So I will always associate the scent of Simple Green with the cottage."

Redmond moved in with "wild" ambitions: Write three or four novels and a poetry collection. Research a dissertation on the nature of public art. Finish a play.

Instead, he studied haiku, tutored students, worked a day job, read and wrote. He made friends with the homeless people and gardeners who tended the P-Patch, and saw the addicts, prostitutes, senior citizens and hipsters intersect in the garden "with varying degrees of generosity and understanding."

"Sometimes someone would sleep on the porch, or outside my window," he said, "and I could hear them breathing in the night."

In her time in one of the cottages, Madrid has given readings more than a dozen times around town, and written about 80,000 words.

"It bums me out," she said of the program's end. "On top of having the space to write, you get an incredible boost from a community like Hugo House supporting you."

Redmond hopes the city can rework the permit agreement to keep writers somewhere in the city.

"Putting writers — by nature a kind of historian — at the intersection of so much change seems to me an invaluable project," he said. "Writers provide an eyewitness account of crucial but ephemeral moments."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

She would sing to the sunflowers.