A Literary Salon at the Hugo House and Amanda Knox

A literary salon is a gathering in which a host brings people together to listen to and talk about prose and poetry, typically with the people who wrote said prose and poetry. This last Wednesday I had the opportunity for the first time to participate in one, at the Hugo House in downtown Seattle.

The Hugo House is a non-profit community center for the writing community of Seattle. It has a number of programs for new writers and it is a great institution for the local literature. This was my first time at their new location: the Hugo House used to be in a previously residential house in a somewhat improvised fashion, but now they occupy the ground floor of a new building in Capitol Hill (the "bohemian" neighborhood in Seattle and quite an appropriate location for a writing community center) in a much better setup.

In addition to a small bar, various small rooms for writers and lots of bookshelves, there is a small theater, the Lapis Theater. "Collections: a Live Magazine", the literary salon I watched, was hosted in it. The salon occurs once a month and it brings local writers to show their poems, read short snippets of prose and be interviewed by the host.

I have to say that I really liked the texts that were read as well as the poems. They were quite varied: some were Science Fiction, some were about old Seattle, some were about the times we are living through. The fact that they were being read by the authors meant that you could actually grasp what the authors wanted to emphasize. Since this was my first experience at a literary salon, I have to say that I very much appreciated listening from the author a piece of text that he or she wrote.

Finally, in addition to all of the above, one of the writers was none other than Seattle native Amanda Knox. For those who don't know, she is the American exchange student that was falsely accused of a murder in Italy in 2007, and spent four years in an Italian jail until she was finally released and allowed to return to the US. Since then, she became an activist for unfairly accused people, a writer and, on occasion, a standup comedian. That's what she did at the salon: she presented a small snippet of her standup routine. She turned out to be really funny! As she said, she became famous for reasons that she never wanted to, but now she's making the best darn lemonade out of the lemons she got.

To sum up, it was a great night of literature in which I also got to meet a famous Seattle native. Not bad for a Wednesday night!
















Location: Seattle, WA, USA

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