Ready has been the managing director at Richard Hugo House for two years. She's worked for Hugo House, in one capacity or another, for eight. She's explaining why she recently gave her notice. Her last day will be May 24. A search for her replacement is underway.
"What is my thought about being a human being in the world right now? Either I have to invest a lot of my time and figure that out, or follow somebody else," she says. "You follow someone else's system or you create your own, I guess."
The system she's creating involves an unorthodox combination of schooling in psychology and massage therapy. She's interested in the ways the body and the mind are connected, an interest that arose in part out of a recent battle with cancer.
"It's just--I never stopped in my life. I never slowed down, and [the cancer diagnosis] let me slow down. I had some time and some space. And it just made me think of my life and realize that it has a limit, and to think: What do I want to do? I started studying psychology. And all my interests are moving that way.
But
I love Hugo House. But I can't do both things. I want to just go and learn a bunch of stuff and study, and it's hard to do that if your mind's divided."
Ready first came to Hugo House, the multidisciplinary literary arts center, as a volunteer. She was working at the time with homeless kids ("When I first moved here, when I was married"--she says, smirking, because she dates women now--"I had just seen Streetwise, a documentary about homeless kids, and I don't know, it just really affected me") and brought them to Hugo House to teach them how to make zines. "One of my favorites was by these two kids who had train-hopped all over the U.S. and so they made this zine of all the places they train-hopped."
Ready was hired to write grants for the organization, and then she was the development director for a while, and then she went back to writing grants and working with young people part-time ("family reasons"), and then she became the programs and education manager, and then managing director. There isn't anyone else at Hugo House who's held a wider variety of positions than Ready has.
"I really like the [Hugo House] staff… and I liked having a more central role in getting to shape the organization," she says. "And I had a cool office."
