%s1 / %s2

Playlist: Peter Hoag's Portfolio

Caption: PRX default Portfolio image
No text

Featured

Welcome Lauren Korn, New Host of 'The Write Question'

From KUFM - Montana Public Radio | Part of the The Write Question series | 29:00

Sarah Aronson interviews the new host of The Write Question, Lauren Korn.

Lauren_korn_small

Lauren comes to TWQ with plenty of experience: among a host of bookish positions, she's a former Fact and Fiction Books bookseller, she's the current Director of the Montana Book Festival, and she's had her page-turning fingers dipped in journal editing, managing, and design. She holds an MA in English from the University of New Brunswick, where she studied poetry before returning to her home state, Montana. 
In this conversation, former host Sarah Aronson asks Lauren questions about her poetry, her experience on both sides of the publishing world, and her future plans for the show. Lauren reads from a selection of poetry from her Master's thesis. 

https://www.mtpr.org/programs/write-question

The Write Question - A Corner of Space and Time

From KUFM - Montana Public Radio | Part of the The Write Question series | 28:58

Jean Belangie-Nye, Aaron Teasdale, and Ben Ferencz discuss their book, "A Corner of Space and Time: Lee Nye's Eddie's Club Portraits."

Joe_molatare-byleenye_small About the Book:

From 1965 to 1973, unheralded Montana photographer Lee Nye created a portrait series of hardscrabble men and women from Missoula, the university town featured in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. A spirited artist who ran with Kerouac and the Beats, he worked as a bartender at Eddie’s Club, a blue-collar bar downtown near the railroad tracks. Nye shepherded the bar’s patrons into an alley out back and captured their portraits in natural light on a Rolleiflex medium-format camera. His darkroom prints soon lined the walls of Eddie’s and oversaw its transformation into one of the American West’s great cultural melting pots, becoming a favorite haunt of writers and poets Richard Hugo, James Welch, Edward Abbey, Allen Ginsberg, and many others. The bar is now known as Charlie B’s and Nye’s original prints still stare back from the walls a half-century later. Until now, it was the only place this original body of work could be seen.

A member of the Beat Generation and a driving figure of the Missoula Renaissance of the 1960s and ‘70s, Nye’s force of personality and artistic commitment catalyzed the city’s nascent creative scene. Writers and poets were captivated by the passionate and profane man behind the bar and lens, and Nye became a leitmotif for many authors. Three titans of Montana writing, Jim Welch, James Crumley, and James Lee Burke wrote him as a character in their novels. Poets Ed Lahey, John Holbrook, Madeline DeFrees, Dave Thomas, and others penned paeans to him and his fabled portraits. Over time, Lee Nye became a local icon. 


About the Authors:

Jean Belangie-Nye is an artist who has worked for over 50 years in photography, collagraph printing, and enameling. Lee Nye’s wife and partner for 35 years, she is the owner of Nye Imagery, Ltd, with Nye’s daughters Amanda Nye, Aleta Nye, and Alexia Jackson. She spent many hours visiting with Eddie’s Club patrons and many more in the darkroom with Nye. She taught for 42 years, the final 30 at Lolo Elementary School. When not writing poetry or working on photography and printmaking, she chairs the Bitterroot Trail Preservation Alliance, and volunteers at Missoula’s art and historic museums and Travelers’ Rest State Park. She lives in Lolo, Montana, where she can be found hiking and spending time with her partner, Michael Nile.

Ben Ferencz is a designer, producer, and teacher from New York who now resides at the foot of the Mission Mountains in northwest Montana. His work blends cultural influences from the cities and mountains for an eclectic group of clients. His passion for book design formed early in his career while helping create books for MTV, Phaidon, and the Missoula Art Museum. He is an instructor at Rocky Mountain School of Photography and an affiliated faculty member at the University of Montana, School of Business, Department of Management and Marketing.

Aaron Teasdale is a writer, photographer, and editor who lives with his family in the hills outside Missoula, Montana. His great grandfather was a timekeeper for the Great Northern Railway in Essex, Montana. Another great grandfather was a railroad worker for the Great Northern Railway in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, who was eventually fired for pulling a .45 revolver on recalcitrant passengers with no tickets. His grandfathers weren’t photographed by Lee Nye, but were of the right mold. Teasdale’s work has appeared in dozens of magazines and books, including National Geographic, Sierra, and others. His writing has won numerous awards, and in 2016 he was named Travel Writer of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers.