It was Dr. Robert Lucid, emeritus professor of English, who came up with the idea of a Writers House. “What was great about this concept and about this project was exactly the fact that, in a sense, everybody could ‘live’ here,” he observes on a CD that was put out for the 10th anniversary. “That’s somewhat of an ecclesiastical idea. You have the church, which is the house, and everybody lives there when they’re not back in their own place.” According to Lucid, Writers House has become something of a “cooperative collective,” in the spirit of the academic experiments of the 1960s.

Part of what makes the house unique is the very fact of its creation, Filreis explains. “[Penn] is the only institution I know of which is both prestigious enough to do something for an intellectually underserved constituency and could permit it organizationally” because of its decentralized nature, he says. “At most institutions, someone’s around saying, ‘That’s mine. You can’t do that,’ or ‘Why didn’t we think of that, so let’s do it in a big way. Let’s create a building and that will take 10 years, let’s have committees work on it, let’s run it through faculty governance.’” At that lumbering pace, ideas grow cold. “The Writers House is hot.”

Since its opening, Kelly Writers House has hosted appearances by more than 2,100 writers and poets, grown its staff from two to 20-something (counting work-study students), served as a model for two undergraduate hubs centered on innovation and community service (Weiss Tech House and Civic House), drawn more talented writers to Penn, and changed the lives of many aspiring wordsmiths.

One such testimonial came from Tahneer Oksman C’01, who walked out of the LSATs and gave up her law-school plans after attending a luncheon with Dorothy Allison at the Writers House. The novelist had told the group of aspiring writers about her niece “who had gotten lost in the fray,” becoming a teenage mother and serving jail time. “Dorothy Allison looked at us and said, ‘I believe there’s a book that can save everyone and someone didn’t do their job. Someone didn’t write the book that would save my niece.’ That sold me,” Oksman said. “Pretty much everything fell into place from there, and it never would have happened without that experience and the many experiences I had afterwards at the Writers House.”

From its inception Writers House has been shaped by the students, faculty, staff, and alumni who serve on its planning committee, known as “the Hub.” Through monthly meetings and an active email listserv, the large, loose-knit group generates ideas and reviews proposals about the use of the House, and has “opened the doors to other innovators,” Filreis says. But it was the provost’s and president’s offices that sponsored the house, Filreis is quick to note. “It took the central administration [saying], ‘We believe this is what Penn does best, and we’re going to help you do it.’”

Ron Daniels, Penn’s current provost, wasn’t around for the birth of Writers House (Stanley Chodorow was the provost then and Judith Rodin CW’66 Hon’04 was president), but at the anniversary celebration he lauded “the coursing energy … the passion, the aspiration” it exudes, calling it “an indispensable part of our intellectual community.

“When I’m here it gives me the sense I should leave it all behind to take up writing—give up law, give up academic administration, budgets, capital campaigns,” joked Daniels, drawing a mock protest from Filreis. “My own fantasies aside, I love the idea of the Kelly Writers House—an upstart literary hub, the product of imagination, collaboration, and volunteerism [that] has in 10 years simply become a capstone for the Penn community.”

In the early days, its prospects were much less certain, Filreis says. “It would have been easy for the medical school or Wharton or even Arts and Sciences to say, ‘We need that space. What are they contributing to the bottom line here? Nothing—they’re a bunch of writers.’”

That uncertainty did produce an aura of excitement, however. “When we first went into the Writers House, it really was a house of possibility,” recalls Shawn Walker C’96, who postponed a Thouron Fellowship to serve for a year as the first resident coordinator. (Now a midwife who writes about the politics of childbirth, she returned from Norwich, England, to attend the celebration.)

“There was wallpaper peeling off the walls, old dusty furniture, and a bunch of really excited students, faculty, and staff members,” she says. “We had so many discussions over email, [writing] the mission statement and deciding what type of program [it should be] that it became this sort of vortex of creativity. Before we knew it, there was a whole month’s worth of programming.”

Part of Walker’s job was to actually live in the house, which was patrolled by a cat named Lucid (after Bob Lucid). “The project was so all-consuming,” she explains. “I really had to be on site because I was locking the place up at three in the morning.

“Several times the budget seemed to [dry up],” she adds, “but somehow money seemed to come from somewhere, and we’d bring in another speaker or writer.”

The turning point was a significant gift from a Penn trustee and former English major, Paul Kelly C’52 WG’64, to support the renovation of the house. (The project’s architect was Harris Steinberg C’78 GAr’82.) Kelly remembers the first time he was lured there: “They had a student jazz group in the front room and brownies cooking in the back and coffee on the table. I could see what was happening, but I was a willing subject,” he says. “It had that certain combination of Greenwich Village coffeehouse and salon-like atmosphere” that he found appealing. (Though Kelly couldn’t make it to the May celebration, he sent the House a fitting anniversary gift—a new coffeemaker.)

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