The Spring 2007 Art Source contains highlights of this year's Native Creative Development Program grant recipients, a special 20th Anniversary Timeline, a report on our fabulous Annual Benefit Art Auction, Programs and Information Services updates, as well as the following feature article, and much more!

Become an Artist Trust member and Art Source will be mailed to you four times a year.

Feature Article:

Excerpt from "In Pursuit of Wisdom"
by Frances McCue, 2003 Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) recipient

In search of Richard Hugo, a poet dead twenty-five years now, I’m driving through Montana, visiting the towns he wrote about. I’ve been to a dozen places and before I head back to Seattle, I need to get to Wisdom, a town Hugo came to in the 1970s, a place that triggered several poems, including “Letter to Kathy from Wisdom,” in which he writes that Wisdom was “where we came lovers years ago to fish,” and “Letter to Reed from Lolo.”

“It was all about fishing,” Annick Smith, a filmmaker, writer and friend of Hugo’s told me, and I could see now that Hugo was my version of angling. I want to find him, the great headwaters to the poems.

Wisdom is a town barely alive. It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday and the only cars parked by the houses are cars or trucks that nobody could start anymore. I take a right, off the main road, and drive a block before it becomes dirt. On my left are log cabins, one-room things hulked together with chinking the color of margarine. I park the car and get out to walk. Above each doorway of the little cabins hangs a number, and a little porch sticks out—two posts and a shed roof. Had the cluster been a motel or a brothel?

Further up and I’m back into town, the main drag where I park in front of a trading post with a half-naked Indian girl painted on the turquoise facing of the building. Next to that is a café and across the street is the Antler Bar. The writer Bill Kittredge told me that “Hugo went to that bar in Wisdom and it was filled with taxidermy. The thing that scared him was that all the heads were pulled off. Just wire sticking out of all those elk and moose.”

I opt for the café rather than the Antler Bar. A friendly woman comes over and I order coffee.

“Ever hear of this guy?” I ask, holding up Hugo’s “Collected Poems.” “He wrote about Wisdom.”

“No kidding?” she says. “Wonder if my husband knows about him.”

“He says in one of the poems that there was a murder here, long ago. Look at this.” I point out the lines from “Letter to Reed from Lolo”:

…heading south for Wisdom where the white man killed his wife…

“Well, look at that,” she says.

After she brings over my coffee, a man comes into the restaurant and the waitress says, “Hey Guy, this lady has some poems about Wisdom.”

I show them to him. “Do you have a library here?” I ask. “I could make sure you all have copies of them.”

“The library is locked and nobody has the key,” the waitress says.

Suddenly, I feel like I’m living in Hugo’s “triggering town,” his description of the place where all poems started for him.  A line simply constructed, syntactically and in spirit was just like one I’d loved in Hugo’s book The Triggering Town: “The graveyard is ignored and overrun with weeds.” The library is locked and nobody has the key.

“Well, Sharon might,” says the man.

“Oh yes. She probably does. You go and tell Sharon that Joni and Guy sent you over to fetch the key to the back of the community hall,” the woman says.

“Is that the boarded-up white building a few doors down?”

“That’s it,” Joni says. “Sharon is at the petroleum station, right over there.” She points across the street.

I thank them and pay for the coffee. I take a piece of strawberry rhubarb pie to go. On the other side of the street, I walk into the gas station. The woman at the counter looks at me.

“Hi there. Joni and Guy sent me. Do you have the keys to the library?” I ask.

“Don’t have no library,” the woman says. “Don’t know about no books.” I look down at the counter and there’s a handmade sign. It says, “Real Americans only.”

“Are you Sharon?”

“Nope. Sharon’s at home making soy candles,” the woman says. “Ain’t a library in this town.”

“Maybe in the back of the community building?”

“Doubt it,” she says.

I buy some gas and a bottle of water. On the way out of the station, I see a stack of oil cans. On top is a little board with candles on it. “Sharon’s soy candles” it says.

Of all the towns, Wisdom is the one with the triggers Hugo would still cherish. I felt more myself there, more of an outsider and more of a person who loves books, than anywhere I’d gone. Wisdom was a place where “wind pours in… leaving false fronts what they seem.” It was a town I could write about, a place that was finding its way inside me. After all, I’d come all the way to Wisdom and the library was locked. No one has keys, I sang to myself, the words hovering there, suspended by language and the beating of my own heart. Somewhere out there, Hugo laughs. “The library is locked and nobody has the keys,” he says over and over, walking toward the Antler Bar.

The whole essay, In Pursuit of Wisdom, will appear in the Summer 2007 issue of Tin House Magazine.