Kristen Millares Young reads at Cheap Beer & Prose, Richard Hugo House, March 21 2013. Photo credit to Sarah Samudre.

I’ve turned to The Stranger for arts and culture events in Seattle since I moved here eight years ago. So it was with unseemly amounts of satisfaction that I read Paul Constant’s kind endorsement of the Cheap Beer & Prose reading I gave on March 21st with Nicole Hardy, Anca Szilágyi and Corinne Manning at Richard Hugo House.

We are, ahem, “an especially exciting lineup of fresh new faces in Seattle fiction.”  Our Annual Ladies’ Night reading was raucous, as it should be: we were “vetted for maximum entertainment” of a crowd that laughed, cried, clapped and stood in the aisles.  If you want to see me read a sex scene, check it out on the Hugo House YouTube channel, thanks to Samudre Media.  Sweet!
And here’s a back-slapping bear hug for Brian McGuigan, who made it all happen.  A fellow writer and performer, Brian recently wrote an excellent Salon essay about his childhood dream to be a mass murderer.  Instead, he became marketing and events director at Hugo House.  He’s the kind of guy who brings people together to celebrate literature with $1 cans of PBR.  He made a successful reading series, and then he made me part of it.  I’m grateful to him and to Hugo House.