Humstone & Beck shine a light on Sunrise

Mining town of Sunrise during its heyday

From Sarah Ligocki at the Wyoming State Museum:

The history of Sunrise, the southeastern Wyoming mining town, will be brought to life by Mary Humstone and Sophia Beck at a presentation on Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. at the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne.

Humstone and Beck’s talk, "Remembering Sunrise Mine and its Community: Portrait of a Company Town," is presented by the Wyoming Humanities Council and sponsored by the Wyoming State Museum Lecture Series.

From 1899 until its close in 1980, the Sunrise Mine was the principal source of iron for the Colorado Fuel and Iron plant in Pueblo, Colorado. In addition to the mine itself, the company built and maintained a company town at Sunrise, which at its peak had an ethnically diverse population of more than 500 people, including Italians, Hispanics, Greeks, Japanese, Poles, Scandinavians, and British. Having conducted oral interviews with former residents of Sunrise, Humstone and Beck are able to present the history of this community through personal stories and contemporary photographs.

Humstone, a research scientist at the University of Wyoming, along with her graduate students, conducted extensive research of Sunrise and successfully nominated the property to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Beck, the office manager for the UW American Studies, grew up in Sunrise and has a personal connection with many former Sunrise residents.

Humstone and Beck’s presentation is offered by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities through its 2010 Humanities Forum. The Wyoming Humanities Council provides public humanities-based programs in partnership with local organizations and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The event is free and open to the public. The Wyoming State Museum is located in the Barrett Building, 2301 Central Avenue in Cheyenne. For more information about this and other State Museum programs, please call 777-7022.

Bill Boycott on Kulak's Woodshed Jan. 21

Lander musician and Wyoming Arts Council roster artist Bill Boycott will be performing for a live podcast from Kulak's Woodshed in L.A. on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 21. For details and times, go to http://www.kulakswoodshed.com/. For more info about Bill, go to http://www.buffalobillboycott.com/

Here's some background info about this very unique venue in N. Hollywood, Calif.:

Kulak’s Woodshed is an acoustic music listening room, created for singer/songwriters who perform live on the world wide web in an intimate 49 seat listening room and video recording studio

We serve no food or drinks, and we have nothing to sell.

We are a labor of love, music, and community created in 1999, operated by volunteers and funded by audience donations.

The artists who perform here range from emerging independent talents to
number-one hit writers and Grammy winners.

"Bite-Sized Poem" by Paisley Rekdal

Guy Lebeda of the Utah Arts Council sends this "Bite-Sized Poem of the Month" by Paisley Rekdal. Paisley directs the creative writing program at the University of Utah in SLC. When she was teaching at the University of Wyoming, she won a 2002 Wyoming Arts Council creative writing fellowship.

Here is this month's "Bite-Sized Poem" from Utah:


Swallows
by Paisley Rekdal

So ignorant of the world I think it’s pleasure first

that makes them dip hallucinatory arcs
across this foggy, close-cropped field
and not the insects wet legs kick up:

here, and almost here, these

sharp darts that stop me in my tracks: poised, senseless
to their direction skimming
just below, the lingering white

only they see through and negotiates where I

am less than a stone to them, less than a flea
in the dun bellies flashing under a slick blue back–

Wings clip the brief air between us,

scythe the sweet middle where sea mist

seeps its yellow curls, the step ahead and behind me blurred
to the same cold capacities:

somewhere a twist of fence, a scar

of ragged earth a truck tore open
to work itself free.

Dark shank of hair
gleaming in the wet, skin frozen to the bone,

a pair of deer feeding at the wild
last hedge of raspberries.

To see Paisley perform this poem, follow this link:
http://www.nowplayingutah.com/profile/detail/596

B.J. Buckley poem in The Cortland Review

Even though she's lived in Montana the past few years, B.J. Buckley is always -- at heart -- a Wyomingite. B.J. is a Cheyenne native who received a 1989 WAC creative writing fellowship and was on the WAC roster for many years. She was one of the featured poets in the 2003 anthology Deep West: A Literary Tour of Wyoming.

B.J. sends word that The Cortland Review has selected one of her poems, "Rapture," for the May issue.

Here's the magazine's announcement:

The Cortland Review presents new poems by Fleda Brown, B. J. Buckley, Graham Burchell, Robert Danberg, Pat Daneman, Martin Jude Farawell, Elisabeth Frost, Regan Good, Robert Grunst, Luke Hankins, Bethany Schultz Hurst, Dan Lewis, Terri McCord, Jim Moore, Steve Myers, Soham Patel, Emmy Roulette, Niko Sonnberger and Naqueyalti Warren; new fiction by David Burke and Grant Arthur Flint, and David Rigsbee's review of Gibbons Ruark's newest, "Staying Blue."

You can read B.J.'s poem, and listen to her reading it via podcast, at http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/43/buckley.html?ref=nl0509

Happy birthday to us

The WAC's wyomingarts blog turns two on Sunday, March 1.

The first post of 1,863 was on March 1, 2007, about the National Endowment for the Arts' $10,000 grant to Young Musicians, Inc., in Evanston. That's 900-some a year, with posts made every working day and some weekends. Over time, we've grown better at this job, especially when it comes to posting photos. Now we just have to figure our videos and podcasts. We're now on Twitter (see bottom of right sidebar), which gives us yet another e-venue to promote the state's artists and arts organizations.

The blog has its roots in the weekly Wyolitmail e-mail newsletter I wrote and edited from 1999-2006. Later, my former colleague Liliane Francuz started Artmail for visual artists. We discontinued both of those in late 2006, and replaced them with wyomingarts and a new full-color quarterly print newsletter, Artscapes.

Please e-mail us your news and events listings and photos. We'll put them on the blog. Often we pick up news from blog posts for Artscapes.

Thanks for joining us on the blogosphere.

---Michael Shay

PODCAST OF POETRY OUT LOUD FINALS

We recorded the finals of the Wyoming Poetry Out Loud competition March 10 in Cheyenne. To listen to a podcast of the event, go to http://wyoarts.state.wy.us/poetryoutloud.htm