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AN EVENING WITH
FRANCES MCCUE & MARY RANDLETT.
Part travelogue, part memoir, part literary scholarship, “The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs” traces the journey of Frances McCue and photographer Mary Randlett to the towns that inspired many of Richard Hugo's poems.

Richard Hugo visited places and wrote about them. He wrote about towns: White Center and La Push in Washington; Wallace and Cataldo in Idaho; Milltown, Philipsburg, and Butte in Montana. Often his visits lasted little more than an afternoon, and his knowledge of the towns was confined to what he heard in bars and diners. From these snippets, he crafted poems. His attention to the actual places could be scant, but Hugo's poems resonate more deeply than travelogues or feature stories; they capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so vital in any consideration of place. The poems bring alive some hidden aspect to each town and play off the traditional myths that an easterner might have of the West: that it is a place of restoration and healing, a spa where people from the East come to recover from ailments; that it is a place to reinvent oneself, a region of wide open, unpolluted country still to settle. Hugo steers us, as readers, to eye level. How we settle into and take on qualities of the tracts of earth that we occupy - this is Hugo's inquiry.

Returning forty years after Hugo visited these places, and bringing with her a deep knowledge of Hugo and her own poetic sensibility, McCue maps Hugo's poems back onto the places that triggered them. Together with twenty-three poems by Hugo, McCue's essays and Randlett's photographs offer a fresh view of Hugo's Northwest.

Frances McCue will be joined by Gail Fleming, Jim Scullin, and Joni Takanikos in readings from "The Car that Brought You Here..."







About Frances McCue.

Frances McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle , where she is writer-in-residence at the University of Washington 's Undergraduate Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of “The Stenographer's Breakfast,” winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize.

"At first, the fences I climbed were geographic. I moved from the east coast to San Francisco and then Seattle. Later, I moved to New York for a year and back to Seattle again. Last year, I lived in Marrakesh. I leapt from place to place, each time, because I wanted to investigate the other side of things.

There are other fences too. There’s one between poetry and prose, one between academic scholarship and creative non-fiction, many between disciplines within a university, and a big fence between the lawns of the university and the streets of the actual city.

I’ve spent my life going back and forth, writing my way from one end to the other, and loving it."
-- Frances McCue

About Mary Randlett.

Mary Randlett has been photographing the Northwest for more than fifty-five years. She is considered one of the major figures in Northwest art. Her works are held in at least forty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. Born in 1924, Mary's career in photography has spanned a period of sixty-five years. At the age of eighty-four Mary can still be found spending long days in the dark room.

"Mary Randlett's photographic vision of the Northwest is big-hearted, intricate, tender, and fully inhabited by the animals, tides, forests, mountains, and spirits that dwell there. What others may take for granted, Randlett sees as quintessential: overcast days with endless and often exquisite variations of gray clouds, raindrops on puddles, dripping branches, and distant shafts of sunlight breaking through the cloud cover. She is steeped in the history of the Northwest and its many art forms.

Mary's images are a visual record of the Northwest at its most pristine and poetic. During her many years of finely tuned observation, Randlett has learned to take the time to ponder the essences of what she sees--the curl of a bird's drifting feather, a water strider not quite breaking the surface of the water, fog ascending a hillside, the moment a pond's surface turns to ice." -- Mary Randlett: Landscapes, inside cover jacket, University of Washington Press, 2007.

About The Literary Series.

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and the Hedgebrook retreat for women writers have partnered to create a program that brings together writers and book-lovers. The Literary Series offers intimate conversations with bestselling Hedgebrook authors and a chance to see local artists bring excerpts of the authors’ works to life in short, staged readings.

Stacie Burgua (WICA Executive Director), Amy Wheeler (Hedgebrook Executive Director), Deana Duncan (WICA Production Director), Vito Zingarelli (Hedgebrook Residency Director), Jason Dittmer (WICA Director of Marketing), M. Louise McKay (Hedgebrook Director of Donor Relations & Fund Development)


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