Constant Reader

There was a communal morbid, rubbernecking curiosity at the
outset of the Hugo House’s “Road Trip” presentation last Friday. It was
the first major House event since September, when Lyall Bush suddenly
departed his position as executive director, and it was the kickoff

for this season of the House’s Literary Series, featuring
nationally renowned authors reading on a theme, which Bush helped
found.

Earlier in the week, the House announced its new interim executive
director. His name is Cory Sbarbaro, and he comes from a
nonprofit/executive background, not a literary one. Sbarbaro has been
involved with nonprofits like the Pacific Northwest Nonprofit Executive
Leadership Institute and the United Way of King County, and he is
generally described as enthusiastic and efficient, and very capable on
the money side of things. Unsurprisingly, Sbarbaro, whose job
description includes finding his own replacement, did not speak
at the reading.

Instead, House program director Alix Wilbur introduced readers and
told the audience about what she considered one of the most exciting
new House programs of the year: porta-potties in the back parking
lot to make up for the few public bathrooms in the House. Wilbur
was funny (“Here at the Hugo House, we take the ‘not’ in
‘not-for-profit’ very seriously”), excited, and mercifully brief in
introducing the readers, which made the event feel more casual than
past readings.

Aimee Bender took full advantage of the casual feel. Her
piece—about a young woman traveling with a boyfriend who loves
awkward public sex for the feeling of “things just pushing against
the perimeter”—felt more autobiographical than her other work.
But Bender is one of America’s greatest fantasists, and the fantastic
crept in at the corners—the narrator feels an attachment with
dozens of other women through the masses of wadded, moist paper towels
thrown into a trash can at a rest stop, and a creepy young girl’s face
smooshes through the tiny squares of a tennis racket like the
monsters in The Abyss.

Wilbur introduced Bender with a
popular quote from an L.A.
Times review of one of her books, one that claims Bender is like
“Hemingway on an acid trip.” It’s a terrible quote and not very
accurate; even in this atypical reading, any blurber worth his or
her salt could tell you Bender reads like a magical-realism Raymond
Carver without the alcoholism and suicidal tendencies.

Marie Howe is a great, meticulous poet—”I write about a book
every 10 years,” she explained—but her formality was a weakness.
A few poems, especially a tribute to her late friend, the poet Jason
Schindler, were affecting, but Howe felt a little too New York City for
such a casual affair. “I don’t ride the subway,” she huffed while
introducing a poem, “Woody Allen didn’t ride the subway. Jackie O
didn’t ride the subway,” and you could almost hear the sound of a
roomful of hundreds of Seattleites salivating at the idea of an
efficient public transit system.

But the real star of the night was Matt Ruff, who read a prequel for
an unproduced TV show of his own creation, an X-Files–type
show about two black travel writers exploring Jim Crow–era
America called Lovecraft Country. The protagonist mistakes books
by H. P. Lovecraft for
romance novels—”There was no love

in these tales, or even women”—
and reads
Dracula even as he accidentally wanders into a sundown town.

Like much of Ruff’s work, it pulsed with genre, referencing Philip
Marlowe and pulp novels, but the research and reality that serve as a
base for the story—there really were travel guides describing
safe passage through America for Negro motorists in the late
’40s and early ’50s—made his story an unintentional companion
piece for Bender’s. It felt like a television show from another
universe, but just enough reality intruded to remind us it was
true.

Ruff’s piece was the one everyone was discussing as they wandered
into the House’s cabaret, where trays of macaroni and cheese and BLTs
and a keg of free beer waited for them. Even out back, by the swinging
plastic doors of the Honey Buckets, you could feel a kind of mass
exhalation about the future of the Hugo House. After all that worrying,
everything, it seemed, was going to be just fine.