MISSOULA WRITING COLLABORATIVE
PO BOX 9237, MISSOULA, MT 59807 www.missoulawritingcollaborative.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: TEACHING LITERARY COMPETENCE, CRITICAL THINKING AND CULTURAL AWARENESS THROUGH CREATIVE WRITING.

Missoula Writing Collaborative (MWC) teachers are professional writerspeople who have made writing their lifes work. They have written and published many books, poems, stories, essays, and articles, receiving prestigious awards and prizes for their work. MWC Artistic Director, Sheryl Noethe, whose most recent collection, Grey Dog, Big Sky (FootHills Publishing, 2013), won the High Plain Award in 2014. Honored with a Missoula Cultural Council Achievement Award in 2004 for her area teaching, Noethe was named Montanas Poet Laureate in 2011. MWC Executive Director, Caroline Patterson, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University and has received fellowships from the Montana Arts Council, the San Francisco Foundation, as well as the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. She published a story collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge in 2017, and her work has been anthologized in Montana Noir (2017), Bright Bones (2018), and A Million Acres (2019). Her novel, The Stone Sister, will be published in September 2021. The school year of 2019-2020 was unlike any other for the Missoula Writing Collaborative, because of the novel coronavirus. In fall 2019 through March 2020, we hosted 12-week writing residencies in every Missoula County Public School fourth grade, supported by government and private foundation grants. We also funded writing residencies for third-grade through high school-aged children in the greater Missoula area. These include locations ranging from one-room schoolhouses to large multi-level classrooms throughout western Montana. Since 1994, we have brought creative writing to more than 46,000 children in thirty-one schools in western Montana. Beginning in March 2020, when Montana schools were shut down, For January 2020 to May 2021, MWC received a $30,000 grant for its residencies on the Flathead Reservation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. In 2018, the MWC was also awarded a Montana Center for the Book Prize, as well as a Library of Congress State Literacy Award.Beginning in March 2020, when Montana schools were shut down, MWC writers had to pivot our programming. Writers made poetry videos, poetry packets and created Zoom classes in order to serve rural, urban, and tribal classrooms. We also created poetry exercises for parents and kids who were sheltering at home, with poetry activities for kindergarten through fifth graders. In April 2020, we did online poetry activities for parents and children, include a poetry scavenger hunt along the Clark Fork River, an activity for kids creating poet-tree in their home, as well as posting student poems on Facebook daily. MWC Writing Residencies: In addition to serving nine Missoula public schools, one Missoula middle school and one high school, the tendrils of MWC extend northeast through Ovando, Potomac and Seeley-Swan schools; northwest to Arlee, Pablo, and St. Ignatius schools; and south into Lolo, Florence-Carlton, Victor and Stevensville schools. Our writers in residence have taught poetry to nearly 2,225 children in 2019-2020. Our writers completed anthologies and conducted readings for 34 schools in locations ranging from school gymnasiums to the two-room school located above a cow pasture (the Woodman School), the Hanging Art Gallery (the Arlee Elementary), and the Burns Street Bistro (the Lowell School). In addition, students from Lewis and Clark, Russell, and Rattlesnake elementary schools read on Montana Public Radios Pea Green Boat. MWC currently posts Monday poems featuring student work on our Facebook page. We also completed an overhaul of our website. Reservation Work: With the support of existing and new grantors, MWC was in six schools on the Flathead Reservation, including elementary school classrooms in Arlee, Charlo, Pablo, St. Ignatius, Dixon, and Ronan. When schools were open from September through March, student readings at each school were well attended by teachers, parents, and community members. We also worked with Ballet Beyond Boundaries to bring international ballet and folk dancers to Ronan and St. Ignatius schools, where student watched dancers, then wrote poetry, which they read to the dancers. Words with Wings: Our summer camp, which started in 2010, had its most successful seasons in 2019. The camp in 2020 was very small, in comparison, because of COVID-19. We had a total of 23 campers 8 to 13 and 9 ages 14 to 17. Because of COVID, we had to cap our classes at 10, we all wore masks, and we held classes outside as much as possible. A Students wrote poems with the Museum of Art & Culture and river poems with the Watershed Education Network. Our week-long teen writing workshop for ages 15 to 17 continued and students wrote music and poetry together. All students performed their work on Montana Public Radios Pea Green Boat. Our final reading was held at the Reinhardt Peony Garden. In October, we mailed students their final anthologies and have posted many student poems on our website. Fiscal Sponsorship: MWC continues to be the fiscal sponsor for Free Verse, a highly effective program where writers teach writing to kids in juvenile detention centers in Montana. In fall 2019, Free Verse won a $2000 book award. Community Workshops: MWC hosted The Writers Room on March 7. It was a very successful live events, where community members could take a workshop from MWC writers in downtown Missoula for a nominal fee. The event featured lunch with a writer discussing, writing techniques and an evening cocktail hour at Goodworks in downtown Missoula. We also expanded this to several multi-week courses that were held on Zoom because of the pandemic. These were very popular. Our fall intensive workshop on November 7 with one-day and multi-week courses in enrolling now, but seem to have a healthy enrollment. Community Events:In fall 2019, we had a Poets Eat Quiche luncheon fundraiser, featuring poet laureate Melissa Kwasny. We had reading from student poets and parents of poets. It was our most successful luncheon ever. We did not do one in 2020 because of COVID, but will be back next year. As part of National Poetry Month in April, we hosted many activities.

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