The Art Box

The Art Box - Episode 74 - The Art Box - Ten-Minutes with Johnny Trujillo

Meet Johnny Trujillo. junior at Virgin Valley High School, Mesquite, Nevada. Recent recipient of an Emerging Artists award from the Virgin Valley Artists' Association, Johnny carries a 4.0 GPA, is an amazing artist and soccer player. The Art Box is looking forward to chatting with Johnny through the coming years. Thank you Eric Wordal for hosting this episode. 

The Art Box - Episode 73 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - The Breakfast Club

Join Linda and Steve as we interview some amazing artists at breakfast over the course of the week. 

The Art Box - Episode 72 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Calves in Bathtubs, Angry Roosters and Mortuaries - Open Mic with Glenn and Eddy

On Day two we attended an open mic session and enjoy an amazing array of Cowboy Poets. 
If you have a heart you are going to love this episode.
We nabbed Glen Bair, from Ephrata, Washington for an interview along with his wife and one of his favorite daughters. Glen brought the audience to tears with his rendition of the "Calf in the Bathtub". Read more about Glen at: https://columbiabasinherald.com/news/2018/sep/06/ephrata-cowboy-poet-set-to-perform-at-quincy-2/
Next up was Eddy Christensen from Riverton, Utah and he enthralled us with a couple of his poems and left us with bad dreams about roosters and deep consideration before you rent a room in a mortuary. Thank you for your poetry book Eddy!

The Art Box - Episode 71 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Legends of Poetry - Meet Waddie Mitchell

An honest-to-goodness cowboy who became one of the leading lights of the cowboy poetry movement, Waddie Mitchell knew of what he spoke long before be became a recording artist. Waddie was born Bruce Douglas Mitchell in 1950, and he grew up on a ranch near the Ruby Mountains south of Elko, Nevada. Living in an area not wired for electricity and where TV and radio reception was poor at best, Mitchell's father and the cowboys he worked with entertained themselves with stories and songs influenced by Western lore that had been passed along for generations. Young Mitchell absorbed their tales and became a full-time working cowboy at the age of 16. In his late teens, Mitchell joined the Army, and he was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, where he put his skills to work breaking and training horses for the U.S. Cavalry. During his hitch in the Army, Mitchell picked up the nickname "Waddie," from an old slang word for a cowboy.
After returning to civilian life, Mitchell moved back to Nevada, where he got married and raised five children while working on ranches, dreaming of someday owning a spread of his own. Mitchell developed a local reputation for his poems about the life of cowboys and their slowly disappearing lifestyle in the American West. Discovering he was one of many writers keeping the cowboy's oral tradition alive, in 1985 Mitchell helped organize and appeared at the first Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The event was a success, attracting over 2,000 people, and it became an annual event. It also sparked Mitchell's interest in performing, and soon he was doing readings throughout the Southwest, which proved to be more profitable than ranch work. Mitchell's big break came when he was invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson; he initially turned down the appearance, having never seen the show and having no idea who Carson was, but he was persuaded to do the show and went over well enough that he came back for three more appearances.
In 1992, Mitchell was signed to Warner Western, the Western music branch of Warner Bros. Records, and released his debut album, Lone Driftin' Rider. A mix of classic cowboy tales and original poems from Mitchell set to musical accompaniment, Lone Driftin' Rider was a critical success, and Mitchell would release two more albums through Warner Western, 1993's Buckaroo Poet and 1994's The Bard & the Balladeer: Live from Cowtown. Warner Bros. folded Warner Western in 1997, and in 1998 Mitchell re-emerged on the independent Shanachie Records label with the album Live. Shanachie released A Prairie Portrait in 2000 and That No Quit Attitude in 2002; the title track on the latter album was written for the 2002 Cultural Olympiad and inspired by the Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah that year.
By this time, Mitchell was an award-winning poet and published author who balanced his successful literary career with his work as a cowboy. (His writing had also allowed him to buy the ranch near the Ruby Mountains he'd long dreamed of.) In 2005, Mitchell struck up a new recording relationship with the Western Jubilee Recording Company, an outfit that specialized in Western music and poetry. Western Jubilee reissued the 1998 album Live in 2005, and Sweat Equity followed in 2014. In 2017, Mitchell released Cohorts & Collaborators: Songs Written with Waddie, a collection of tunes Mitchell had written in tandem with Western musicians, including Sons and Brothers, Jon Chandler, Pipp Gillette, Brenn Hill, and others.

The Art Box - Episode 70 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Skunks & Cowboys - Our Mesquite Local Poet Russ Westwood & Day Two Wrap-Up

Russ Westwood was born in Moab Utah. He was raised on a mink ranch, but spent a lot of time around horses and rodeos. He is a retired Firefighter/Paramedic. He has served as the director of the Mesquite Western Roundup for several years and performs regularly in their shows. He is an active member of the Cowboy Poets of Utah. He recently won a Championship Buckle at the 2019 National Cowboy Poetry Rodeo in Abilene, Kansas.  He writes some of his own poetry, but also performs the works of several of his favorite poets. Russ and his wife Marge reside in Mesquite Nevada.rwestwood13@gmail.com

The Art Box - Episode 69 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Day 3 Opening & Marianne Thomas Strums and Sings for Us.

As we ready for our busiest day we start with a review of our schedule and then we got lost and an angel called Marianne saved us, then graced us with some song. Sit back and enjoy as we frame up our day and listen to some music.
You can find out more about Marianne Thomas at:
www.mariannesongs.com

The Art Box - Episode 68 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Hiking, Poetry, Rocky Mountains, Being Nice - Meet Doris Daley

Delightful is how we would describe our time interviewing and being entertained by Doris. 
"If cowboy poetry was fresh milk and the cream that rises to the top was the very best, then Doris Daley would be very rich and very fattening." So says renowned cowboy ambassador Waddie Mitchell about an Alberta ranch girl whose love of wordsmithing has made her one of North America's favourite western poets, emcees and western humorists.  Born and raised on a family ranch in the foothills of Alberta, Doris's authentic, sparkling poetry has taken her to campfires large and small, to highways, roundabouts and gravel roads throughout the west, and to concert appearances with the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Saskatchewan Opera Company. With a performance career spanning more than 20 years,  Doris is a frequent performer at corporate and community events, Christmas parties, private parties and cowboy poetry gatherings. 
Learn more about Doris at: https://dorisdaley.com/
 
 

The Art Box - Episode 67 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Consummate Entertainer at Making People Happy with Song - Meet Juni Fisher

Fisher was raised in a San Joaquin Valley, CA farming family, and was active in 4-H and FFA. While studying Equine Science at the College of the Sequoias she rode horses for customers and was captain of the college horse show team. She rode sale pens for extra money at a local livestock sale and earned honors at Intercollegiate and Quarter Horse shows. During college she began singing big band standards in a dance orchestra to pay for horse show entries.
 
After college she apprenticed training cow horses, preparing snaffle bitters, hackamore and bridle horses, and won the IARCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity Championship in 1981. She followed up with Reserve Champion in the Hackamore in ’82. In 1983 she topped the Monterey Classic Bridle horse Sweepstakes while working on a cow calf operation and running a roping arena. If there was a campfire gathering with music, Juni was there with her guitar. In 1984 she moved to Santa Ynez, CA, to train cutting horses.
 
A Santa Ynez area band asked her to play rhythm guitar and sing, and in time she was playing L.A. area clubs with a country dance band that also played western and cowboy music. Juni’s ability to ride at speed across the hills landed her with a position as a professional “whipper-in” with a foxhunt club in Tennessee. After that, point to point racing, steeplechasing, and horse trials took the place of cow horses, while she honed her songwriting skills among some Nashville’s finest writers. 
Her first Western release, “Tumbleweed Letters” (1999) reached Monterey Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival director Gary Brown in 2003. With his encouragement and endorsement, Juni shifted to music full time. 
 
In 2012 she returned to the cow horse world by winning the NRCHA Celebrity Cow Horse Challenge at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity in Reno, NV, and began successfully showing a cutting horse reclaimed from another trainer’s throwaways. Fisher purchased a weaning Quarter Horse filly to raise in 2014 and is preparing to show that young horse at cow horse events when she’s not on the road.
Fisher has penned songs recorded by Rex Allen Jr., Joe Hannah (Sons of the San Joaquin,) Ranger Doug (Riders in the Sky,) Kristyn Harris, Devon Dawson, Judy Coder, Notable Exceptions, 43 Miles North, and others, and her songs have been in award winning film soundtracks. She added “Author” to achievements with her debut novel, Girls from Centro in late 2018.
 
Learn more about Juni: https://www.junifisher.com/
 

The Art Box - Episode 66 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Paying it Back with Prose. Love and Hard Work - Meet Mandy Smoker

We were so delighted when former Montana Poet Laureate Mandy Smoker agreed to sit down with us for an interview.  Mandy is the living embodiment of "pay to forward" with deep involvement in education for the underserved, her deep feeling poetry and now children's books.
She describes the transmission of a poem as “rigorous juggling.” Carefully, she twines language, fuses vocabulary and in the process of enlightenment, words are threaded, deleted, stacked, and rotated. Bit by bit, a full, rich poem of understanding, love, and freedom prevails.
“I’m hard on my poems and I’m a pretty vigorous reviser,” says Smoker who often writes under the moniker M.L. Smoker. “I’ll begin to write a poem and after it emerges, I’ll go through them line by line. I don’t feel as if I’m constructing a poem. At first, it’s more like the words are coming out. During the revision process, I will go back and wear a different hat and a different set of eyes and see it all through a different lens.”
Poetry, she says, is like a spring, the watering of seeds of joy, an escalating connection that is alive at the moment in the world with her, a pattern of life that radiates out in all directions.
“I never really know when the feeling will come to put a new idea out in the world. There’s never been any expectation, and it could be sporadic. There are times when I will write poetry because I’m feeling stable and grounded, and other times where there has been heartache and difficulty in my life.”
Expression and Empowerment
A member of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes, Mandy was born in 1975 on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and moved to California when she was in elementary school, graduating from high school in the San Joaquin Valley. She describes her earliest memories of writing as analogous to the sound of a bell penetrating deeply into her cosmos.
“Since I was young, I’ve kept a journal… I’d write stories and create plays in elementary school. I loved writing as an expression of myself. It’s always felt like the right thing to do and has made me feel empowered. In fourth grade, I wrote a play and had my best girlfriends come over and we set up a stage and had props and we rehearsed our lines, and we won the school talent show. I felt strong and capable – and it was fun.”
One of her earliest primary writing influences was California-born Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck (1902-1968).
“I was introduced to John Steinbeck in middle school, and I made such a surprising connection to him and his voice. His style was unique to me. As I got older, I realized that my father’s side of the family from was Oklahoma and my grandparents left town and came to California during the Dust Bowl. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ became personal to me, a connection to my grandparents’ migration, and their transition, and it gave me a window into my relationship with my grandmother that was unexpected.”
Another seminal influence, but for almost entirely difficult reasons, was Native American novelist and poet James Welch, who was born in Browning in 1940. Welch, who died in 2003, is considered a leading author of the Native American Renaissance of literature.
“My dad starting giving me Welch’s books,” says Mandy. “I went to high school in California and his novels were a way to connect back to Montana. My dad used Welch as an example to prove that Native people could write, too, and he would say, here is one of the best examples of that. He was from Montana and described the places that I knew, and that was transformative for me. As I got older I began to get more interested in poetry. James Welch’s ‘Riding the Earthboy 40’ became my bible and I read it a thousand times. He was a huge factor in my development as a writer.”
She earned a BA at Pepperdine University and an MFA at the University of Montana, where she received the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. She also studied at UCLA, where she received the Arianna and Hannah Yellow Thunder Scholarship, and the University of Colorado, where she was awarded the Battrick Fellowship for excellence in poetry writing.
“In high school, I was drawn to journalism and in college I steered to literature. When my mom passed when I was 23 years old, I began communicating with her through writing, and some of that writing later became poems that are part of my collection. Then, I thought that I should study poetry and dive in there.”
Free Verse of Identity
Mandy composes free verse poems in which she opens her heart and accepts all her Native American blood ancestors with their good qualities, their talents, and also their weaknesses. Her spiritual relatives and blood relations are all part of her. She is them, and they are her. She does not have a separate self.
“Identity is a big part of my work,” says Mandy. “Being a Native woman and knowing my history and knowing so much about the place where I come from and my ancestry, my family, and my home, I can’t separate it from anything that I do… My poetry is fully present, and it’s who I am, an Assiniboine woman at the core, and it’s where I create and function from, and a really strong orientation and source.
“Poetry is a vulnerable time and place and act, and I’ve done it in the hopes to reclaim part of my own story and family history. I’m making something possible that was not possible for my ancestors or even my own mother.”
She is the author of the poetry collection “Another Attempt at Rescue” (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). With co-Montana Poet Laureate Melissa Kwasny of Basin, she co-edited “I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights” (Lost Horse Press, 2011).
Mandy makes her home in Helena, where she works in the Indian Education Division of the Office of Public Instruction. She says that juxtaposing family, work, and poetry has been a particularly sensitive task this past year, and that lately, when she has set aside a time to write, what has come out has mostly felt stilted. Still, she is shrewd enough not to force it. Seemingly workable phrases will drift into her mind at the most awkward times, like when she is sitting in the car or entering a business meeting. Patiently, she accepts each and every snippet as a signal of fortuity.
“I wish that I were more disciplined, or that I could make it a regular process. For me it’s never been the expectation that I could write poetry daily or do it a few times a week, but it is something always more sporadic. I can’t predict the conditions for inspiration.”
What makes Smoker work so engaging is that she so eloquently transfers into words the grace and ease and openness of her heart.
“Poetry is definitely vulnerability,” says Smoker. “Poet Greg Pape once said to me before a reading (as encouragement) that I should go back to the moment that I wrote the poem and when it emerged, and said that that would allow me to feel that poem again. I still cry over a poem, even ones that I’ve read a thousand times. Poetry is the essence and spirit of being opened up and raw.”
Purchase her children's book Thunderous at: https://www.amazon.com/Thunderous-M-L-Smoker/dp/1948206463/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KVAVOKW2GVZ7&keywords=m+l+smoker+thunderous&qid=1677211638&s=books&sprefix=m+l+smoker+thinderous%2Cstripbooks%2C123&sr=1-1

The Art Box - Episode 65 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Poet, Quilter, & Entertainer - Meet Yvonne Hollenbeck

We fell in love with Yvonne when she described herself on stage at the Opening event as a rose between two thorns. She was a busy as a South Dakota Rancher during branding, but we somehow managed to get her to sit down with us at the Art Box. Such a sweetie, Linda and I were blessed. 
A little bit about her.
Poet, Quilter, & Entertainer
Yvonne Hollenbeck performs her original poetry throughout the United States, captivating audiences in her wake.  She is one of the most published cowgirl poets in the West and is not only a popular banquet and civic entertainer, but also co-writes songs with many western entertainers. Yvonne also pens a weekly column in the “Farmer-Rancher Exchange” and writes articles about life in rural America in various publications throughout the West.
Historian
A three-generations-old family ranch is home to Yvonne and her husband, Glen. Together they raise angus beef cattle and quarter horses.  More specifically, they live 30 miles from Winner, South Dakota, and 50 miles from Valentine, Nebraska, the closest towns with a post office, fire department and grocery store.
South Dakota Ranch WifeYvonne's poetry reflects everyday experiences that arise while sharing the range with Glen and their neighbors. However, a fleeting moment or simple event may also stir her pen to action. Mostly humorous in nature, her poems take a turn toward the serious side, especially the stories of her mother's and grandmothers' lives. From homesteading to the present, Yvonne often writes about women on the ranches of the Great Plains.
"Patchwork of the Prairie" and the Fabulous Feedsack Era.
In addition to her presentations of cowboy poetry, Yvonne's programs entitled "Patchwork of the Prairie" and "The Fabulous Feedsack Era" are two of the finest presentations in the heartland. In "Patchwork of the Prairie", Yvonne shows her collections of family quilts, spanning 140 years, including her own prize-winning creations. 
"The Fabulous Feedsack Era" is a historical presentation regarding feedsacks, the fabric of choice especially during the Great Depression, in which Yvonne displays actual vintage feedsacks, items made from them as well as quilts made from feedsack scraps. Poetry about quilts and quilters is presented throughout both trunk shows, which is enjoyed by men and women alike! 
And throughout the presentations, you will see power-point photos of the quilt makers, their homes, and items of interest to both programs. Both programs are included on the rosters of Humanities programs for both the States of Nebraska and South Dakota.
Yvonne's web site: https://www.yvonnehollenbeck.com/