Frances McCue

Thirty-six of the most interesting writers in the Pacific Northwest came together for a week-long marathon of writing live on stage. The result? Hotel Angeline, a truly inventive novel that surprises at every turn of the page.Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence.The quirky tenants—a hilarious mix of misfits and rabble-rousers from days gone by—rely on Alexis all the more when they discover a plot to sell the Hotel. Can Alexis save their home? Find her real father? Deal with her surrogate dad’s dicey past? Find true love? Perhaps only their feisty pet crow, Habib, truly knows.Provoking interesting questions about the creative process, this novel is by turns funny, scary, witty, suspenseful, beautiful, thrilling, and unexpected.

Timber Curtain occupies a space between ramshackle and remodel. It starts with the demolition of a house—Richard Hugo House, the Seattle literary center where Frances McCue worked, lived, and mourned her husband. From there, McCue’s poems spiral out to encompass icebergs, exorcisms, the refugee crisis, and the ethics of the place-myths we create for ourselves. The speaker is plainspoken, oracular, wry, indicting, and hopeful. Like the Seattle skyline, poems erase and recombine into a landscape forever saturated with ghosts. Several poems will be central in McCue’s upcoming (2018) documentary Where the House Was.From “The Wind Up”:The city erasing itself and the buildingwhere I find you, if I could find you,comes into focus, then out. I’m pointingto the site where you worked, the once-wasplace. In that gesture, a person couldfeel local. I could stand outside that shopand look up to where we loved each other.Frances McCue is a poet, writer, teacher, and arts instigator. From 1996–2006, she was the founding director of Richard Hugo House in Seattle and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Washington. She has published four books, two of which have been finalists for the Washington State Book Award in History/General Nonfiction, and another of which won the 2011 Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Currently, McCue is producing Where the House Was, a documentary film about the demolition of the Richard Hugo House building in Seattle.

Known for both her landscapes and portraits, Mary Randlett began documenting iconic Northwest artists like Mark Tobey and Morris Graves in 1949. In 1963, Theodore Roethke asked her to photograph him in his Seattle home--hers were the last pictures taken of the poet before his death, and they garnered international attention. In addition to Graves, Tobey, and Roethke, Mary Randlett Portraits includes renowned artists Jacob Lawrence and George Tsutuakawa; writers Tom Robbins, Henry Miller, and Colleen McElroy; arts patrons Betty Bowen and Richard Fuller; and more.Randlett’s portraits are known for their effortless intimacy, illuminating her subjects as few ever saw them—something noted by many of those whom she photographed. The portraits are accompanied by biographical sketches written by Frances McCue, which blend life stories and reflections on the works with Randlett’s own reminiscences. McCue also provides an essay on Randlett’s life and professional career.Randlett’s photographs represent an artistic and literary history of the Pacific Northwest. No other book brings together these important historical figures from the rich past and present of this region. A curated collection of ninety photographs from the more than six hundred portraits she took of Northwest artists, writers, and cultural luminaries, Mary Randlett Portraits documents the region’s artistic legacy through one woman’s camera lens.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5MZ6fRwfzU

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.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. 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.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8_W1FZn06w

Frances McCue's brave and bold stenographer, required to "take dictation" from the dictators of her world, roams these poems with a lively eye and a devotion to record keeping. She transcribes her orders dutifully, but she turns to imagination and memory to save her from the literal. In translating the real, she finds the magical, and she orders these magical spheres in remarkable ways.