Dave Eggers' 826 Center Comes to D.C.

Washington, D.C.’s budding young writers will have a new place to practice their craft and prepare their heartbreaking works of staggering genius.

826, the network of youth-focused writing, tutoring and publishing centers founded by Dave Eggers, is setting up a new site in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood at the site of a former Score! writing center, the Washington City Paper reports. Construction on the new center began last week and 826DC hopes to open its doors for field trips, workshops, drop-in tutoring and other creative juice-cultivating services in September.

Like all the 826 centers, 826DC will feature a wacky storefront (Valencia’s is a pirate-supply store, Chicago’s a secret agent gear shop) to sell fun themed wares and serve as a means of financially supporting the creative happenings. “The Museum of Unnatural History” will sell, among other items for the budding crypto-biologist, “Confused Wood and Existentially Distraught Wood (from the makers of Petrified Wood).”

826DC’s first books of local student writing are already available: Get Used to the Seats, a guide to life, love and surviving high school by the students of Woodrow Wilson and Cardozo High Schools and The Way We See It: Complete Coverage of the Nation’s Capital From the Inside Out, a series of writings about D.C., also by Cardozo students. 826DC deputy director Joe Callahan told the Washington City Paper the center’s next large-scale book will focus on immigration.

Community interest in the writing center is also growing; 826DC is on the hunt for fall interns (unpaid, but fulfilling!) and volunteer orientations are booked through November.

For more information, check out 826DC’s website, CapitolLetters.org.

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