DINING AND
WRITING
ERIC ACOSTA INTERVIEWS JEANNE HEUVING AT LITTLE THAI IN THE U DISTRICT TO DISCUSS HER UPCOMING BOOK, “CRYPTA,” AND REFLECT ON HER KEYSTONE ROLE IN SEATTLE LITERARY COMMUNITIES BOTH PAST AND PRESENT
WRITTEN BY ERIC ACOSTA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHONA KASINGER
Last November, I was asked to help curate and produce La Sala's Día de los Muertos event "Enflorar," which featured current local writers responding to writers from Seattle's literary scene who had passed.
La Sala is an organization that supports Latine/x artists of all disciplines, connecting the
m together, helping in financial or professional development, as well as creating arts experiences that center Latinx artists. They're a really great organization that I've worked with over the last few years, and they've been instrumental in connecting me to the Latinx arts community in Seattle. La Sala's part-time executive director, José Luis "Pepe" Montero, is also the current director of Hugo House.
For Enflorar, I was asked to find a lineup of writers, and I worked with award-winning and Seattle's inaugural Civic Poet, Claudia Castro Luna, to create a list of Seattle writers for this lineup to respond to. I was given a list of obvious names: Richard Hugo, Octavia Butler, Theodore Roethke, et cetera. Claudia and I wanted to find lesser-known authors, and focus on historically marginalized people and communities. I did some heavy digging, which got me focused on learning more about Seattle's creative history, learning in the process about Seattle authors of decades past.
Part of the Enflorar lineup was teacher and poet Nadine Maestas. I love Nadine: She says whats on her mind always — always — the super sweet personification of "no fucks given," and she is so fascinated with language and poetry and fracturing the borders of these things. Nadine is the real deal. After the event, we were talking about her place in Seattle's literary history, which led me to do an interview at her home over a next-level cheese and snack spread. During that long conversation, it became clear that Jeanne Heuving was a major player in Seattle’s writing scene, and should be my next interlocutor, bringing me to write this piece.
Using experimental writing to channel grief is one of the reasons why Jeanne remains such an inspiration for my writing.
Jeanne was my thesis advisor at the UW Bothell MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics program. She founded the MFA in 2012 and served as its first director. And she was the 2022 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her most recent books are Mood Indigo (selva oscura), Brilliant Corners (Chax) and Indigo Angel (Black Square Editions). Her newest book, Crypta, is forthcoming from selva oscura press this year.
Crypta was written in response to the passing of Jeanne's husband last year. Jeanne was married to designer, visual artist, and poet James Reed. Crypta is a series of six-line poems, with the same beginning and ending lines in square stanzas, little crypts of memory and emotions.
Using experimental writing to channel grief is one of the reasons why Jeanne remains such an inspiration for my writing. She is good at taking a colossal subject and, rather than paring it down, she shifts the reader's focus and perspective so that the object becomes holdable without losing any of its immensity. The little crypts of poems, immersed in the openness of the page, also bring to mind Jeanne's deep connection to visual art. Jeanne is not a language poet, but she does allow those explorations to influence her work, and it's an example I try to follow.
During my thesis year, Jeanne and I met every few weeks at her home to talk about poetry. James was there. Her cat was there. I would say "Hi" to James. I remember the afternoon sun against the table, the large canvases overlooking the dining area. She's a far-out thinker, and always encouraged me to fully explore the connections I had to my writing. These meetings at her home made me feel like a writer, and also got me into those whose writing still inspires me. I think the lessons I've learned with her are so dug in that they're still ringing out.
“I have time in Seattle in every single decade.”
Jeanne and I met for this interview at Little Thai in the U-District, a basement-level establishment with a cool fish tank: really quiet and relaxed, food is moderately priced and good. We ordered panang curry to share, iced coffee for me, and tea for Jeanne.
I was so anxious and starstruck that I don't really remember the food at all. And in every positive way, Little Thai is more vibe than culinary bombshell. It's not in any way corporate, or stiff. Definitely not a chain, and I love bringing people there because it's what a restaurant should be: affordable, good mellow lighting, straightforward food, and all about the people you're with. Little Thai feels good — something about walking down into the place — sitting below street level, cozy and tucked away from the oppressive over-stimulated human static of the Ave. I've had dates here, meetings with friends, creative meetups. It's just a good conductive container for being with others.
Jeanne and I talked primarily about the way the literary scene has evolved since the seventies, her involvement with the Subtext reading series, and how both of these helped her create the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at UW Bothell.
I have time in Seattle in every single decade. In the 1970s, I lived in a house called Hotel Universe. It was a shifting group of people and each group brought their own mood and modality. The house became a collection of strange things on the wall. They were primarily visual artists. I was disconnected from writers, cast off as an experimental writer in a very lonely boat.
It was a different world. I rolled around in visual art scenes because they had galleries and were public. But the literary world was really tucked away except for just a couple of people. If you weren't famous you wouldn't be asked to read. I'm talking about really famous, like if you weren't Roethke or David Wagner. Hugo House started and it was the first venue that was committed to writers. And before that there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The exception was any kind of scene. Whereas now, there's just much more of a scene. It's partially the internet because you can advertise. But the internet wasn't really that active until the 2000s. There was no way to get the word out. There wasn't the same sense of participation.
It was a very dull and non-active scene. There wasn't that much going on in Seattle that interested us. I mean, there was Hugo House and Jack Straw, so I went to some of those things, but really the whole experimental thing was very marginal, even when we were starting the MFA. It's not marginal at all now. A lot of people now do what we were calling experimental then. We were sort of the first wave in Seattle.
Contrast the before to the now. The Seattle literary scene following the early pandemic years is, in many ways, flourishing. Despite skyrocketing prices and the closing of venues and cultural hubs, there are multiple regular reading series, so many open mics, and an increasing amount of cross-disciplinary events.
My initial research has begun to show me that Seattle's literary scene was pretty small up until the ’90s. Its experimental scene was equally small. A number of groups came and most have gone: Ze Whiz Kidz, And/Or, Invisible Seattle, Red Sky Poetry Theatre, Subtext, the Northwest Spoken Word Lab (now Cascadia Poetics LAB), Breadline, and Margin Shift. There’s also a big spoken word and slam history here that I have yet to fully uncover. And throughout all of this are our various music scenes, and an avant-garde sound community.
Longtime players Jack Straw and Hugo House are still producing events. Hugo House is a non-profit organization started in 1997 with a goal to create a center where writers can be connected to each other and the art form. Jack Straw Cultural Center technically started in the ’60s, as one of the country's only community-sponsored radio stations, and when their frequency was sold, they began a journey focused on providing artistic connection, resources, and hands-on arts and cultural activities in a variety of genres. Its writers program was formed in 1997.
Aside from these two cultural institutions, Seattle's scene is full of new reading series: A Space Inside’s Open Mic Nights, Bloodsugar, Nonfiction for No Reason, Other People's Poems, Poet-s, __Poetry Lab, Poetry on the Ave, Smoken Word, Speak Out Seattle, The Living Room, The Poetry Seance, and Unpoetry. Some of these have parent venues, and a little bit of funding; they’re all artist-run series focused on creating spaces for the many different writers in Seattle. What I find most unique is that, because of these series, local writers and performers are aware of each other. What we have now is more of a coalition of creatives, and that might be a growing trend. As an artist in this city, it feels like this time is special, and after talking with Jeanne, I think that's true.
When I really started getting involved was in the '90s with Subtext, which was a reading group that then developed itself into a reading series. I was doing experimental writing but there wasn't any knowledge or place for it, particularly not in Seattle. Not in any place I knew of. Then I suddenly met up with this group and I was immediately included, and they were reading the stuff I was interested in.
When Subtext got established there weren't places for anyone to read, hardly, but it was totally like we were the margins. Totally marginalized. And I was so grateful to be part of this reading group. For the first time in my life, I was asked to read. And here I was in my forties. I mean, I was just doing this thing on the side and I didn't know who to relate to.
The Subtext reading series started as a reading group, and then evolved into a regular monthly series. There was no official leadership, but the series was originated by local poets Robert Mittenthal, Nico Vassilakis, and Ezra Mark. In addition to these three writers, curators for the series included experimental musician/poets Bryant Mason and Herb Levy, and poets Laynie Browne and Jeanne Heuving.
Subtext was a free monthly event that featured one local writer and one from out of town. It was first held at The Speakeasy Cafe, one of the first internet cafes that also hosted music and art events. Subtext readers received a nominal fixed amount, and visitors received an additional small travel stipend. They invited primarily West Coast writers, which kept artist costs low. Subtext did this with no funding and no budget, survived primarily through donations and door sales, and ran for almost 15 years. The key to this success was their format and consistent event frequency, which created a regular space for like-minded artists to convene.
This is primarily how things are done today: funded by those who run it, and hosted by a venue free of charge, with both hoping for audience and participation. Most local artists receive less in order to provide more income for the touring act. Consistent funding is rare, and unreliable. What keeps a series going, and a community together, is consistency.
That's why I think this history is so important now. Artist-run series without donors or institutional funding operate at a very delicate balance that is dependent on the working artist. The increased cost of living in Seattle unbalances the art ecosystem by putting pressure on venues to generate a large amount of sales, ultimately causing easy-access venues to shut down. This economic pressure also applies to the artists, who are either working too much to be able to attend shows, or simply are unable to afford a door cost.
“I think one of the reasons
I was invited to start the MFA program
was the administrators
could actually see it was
connected to something.”
A fire in 2001 closed the Speakeasy cafe and Subtext moved to Hugo House, and that went well until Hugo House started to charge them for the space, which led them to be part of the opening of the Wayward Music series in Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center. Many series recordings can be found online through the PennSound audio archive.
It was a new experimental scene and people were just happy to get their work exposed, so for very little money we got big names to come and read. Many of the readers that came to Subtext also read at UW Bothell. I was on the faculty of UW Bothell, so I could get some funding for writers to come, but they really were excited to read for Subtext. It worked both ways because we created a scene at Bothell. [Faculty member] Joe Milutis and I slowly educated our colleagues that there was this other experimental writing scene. My reading series at the University of Washington Bothell was the "Writing for your lives" series, and it was committed to experimental writing. We started that in the mid-2000s. And then it was replaced by the MFA.
What places Jeanne as one of the centers of the current iteration of the Seattle literary scene is her creation of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at UW Bothell in 2012. UW Bothell MFA graduates are contributing so much to the momentum of the current Seattle writing/art community. I've been generating my series Unpoetry since 2022. Emily J. Mundy created the Poetry Seance, which was one of the first new reading series to come out of the pandemic. Carson Thomas is curating events and group art shows at The Space in Columbia City. Amy Hirayama, co-director of Common Area Maintenance, has helped lead CAM's programming and cultivated new organizational collaborations.
I think one of the reasons I was invited to start the MFA program was the administrators could actually see it was connected to something. And I said "Yes, but only if it could come with ‘& Poetics,’” because that would be aligned with experimental art. We were conscious of having to make something work at the university that some people would find too rarefied. But now — this is the poetry movement that began in the '50s and '60s — everyone does it.
I knew that if the MFA had '& Poetics' it would be experimental. Poetics is more emphasis on thinking about it rather than just doing it. It usually means that people are trying to reach out of the constraints of language on the page, or language by itself. What's good about poetics is that it matters how you write the poem, what you think the poem is, and what you think about the relationship to poetry and a larger community of people.
We have a very full creative history in this city, and I'm coming to realize that a lot of the major players and movers are still here, but if Seattle morphs even further into a city where those who participate in making its literary and artistic culture can’t actually survive, this history is at risk. So as Seattle's art scene surges into its future, I think part of being in community is recognizing and documenting its history.
Subscribe to the CHUM News Newsletter to keep updated on the future release date of CRYPTA, Jeanne Heuving’s upcoming book.
Interviewer Eric M. Acosta is a chicanx poet, musician, filmmaker and event organizer living in Seattle, WA. His newest collection of poetry "Celestial Dentist" is set to release in October through Idle Hands Press. He runs the monthly multidisciplinary performance series Unpoetry. His works may be found at www.printcopiesavailable.com and www. unpoetry.net. Or find him on IG @bottle_meat.
Photographer Chona Kasinger is a Seattle-based editorial and commercial photographer, born in the Philippines and raised between Metro Manila and the Pacific Northwest. Her work focuses on environmental portraits and narrative-driven images for publications and brands, often engaging with history and identity.
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