Rendezvous Reading Series

Name: Rendezvous Reading Series

Date: 1991 – 2004

Produced by: Matthew Stadler, Frances McCue, Rebecca Meredith, Novella Carpenter, Paula Gilovich, Rachel Kessler, Matt Briggs

Location: Presented by discounted space at The Jewel Box, the Northwest Film Forum, and Richard Hugo House, among others over the years

Link: “The Bratty, Catty Reading Series” in The Stranger by Traci Vogel

Description: The Rendezvous Reading Series was founded in the early 1990s by Frances McCue and Jan Wallace to create a bridge between the grassroots poetry scene at venues such as the Red Sky Poetry Theater and the University of Washington’s academic circuit. Novelist Matthew Stadler joined as a curator in 1992. For most of the life of the series, The Rendezvous Reading took place in the Rendezvous Tavern’s Jewelbox Theater. A well-known writer would read with an emerging local writer. Readers included James Purdy, Robert Gluck, Lynn Emanuel, Tom Spanbauer, and Mark Doty. In 1998, the series passed to Novella Carpenter, Paula Gilovich, and Rachel Kessler and moved for a time to Northwest Film Forum’s Little Theater. There readings moved to thematic readings including a reading of JT Leroy’s first collection of stories. In 2001, when Paula left for Chicago, Novella for Oakland, and Rachel for The Typing Explosion, the series passed to me where I presented authors such as Charles d’Ambrosio, Rebecca Brown, Cynthia Hartwig, Michael Byers, and Gary Lutz. The series ended in the 2004 when I began working on Writers-on-Work at Richard Hugo House.

Novella, Paula, and Rachel published an anthology including work from many of the local contributors to the series in 2002, The Rendezvous Reader: Northwest Writing, which along with the anthologies Clear-Cut edited by Nico Vassilakis and Good To Go edited by Daran Lud, Alice Wheeler, and Jim Jones provides a broad overview of fiction and poetry produced in Seattle in the 1990s.