Dear Butte is the former home of beloved Butte writer Edwin Dobb. Ed wrote many of his centennial pieces in this house on Walkerville hill. As our friendship developed since the early 2010’s we always thought this home would be a wonderful place to host resident writers. Ed sold me this house in the summer of 2015 with that mutual understanding. I then spent a number of years rehabbing the 1894 miners four square cottage to its original vintage condition. Ed has since passed away but the dream of a writers in residence program in Butte became a reality.
Dear Butte and the sister non profit, Working Quiet, were formed in 2018. We have been hosting songwriters, prose, poetry, nonfiction, journalism, and more at the residence since January 2021. Our model is simple, providing a solitary, comfortable, no cost workspace to the resident, in return the Dear Butte resident will host any form of community engagement that fits their area of expertise. We have offered live music performances, author readings, poetry readings, and writers workshops.
Dear Butte also partners with our local community radio station KBMF where residents are interviewed live on air. Traditionally the conversation is a ‘get to know you’ and residents share a reading of their work or a song they have been writing during their stay. Dear Butte is a word of mouth success story, each round of open applications grows in interest by would be residents all across the U.S. We hope to continue to grow, allowing more placement for residents over the years as well as expanding our community programming to reach more of the city of Butte, MT.
Director of Dear Butte and Working Quiet 501 c3
Christy Hays Pickett
Butte, MT
Butte, MT is a town of roughly 33k people sitting atop the continental divide in south western Montana. Butte was once the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco at the turn of the 19th century due to the massive lode of copper found in its granite mountains and the subsequent extraction that created immense wealth and industry. It is a town of staggering history and architecture, a post industrial city that is continually finding its footing since it was named the first superfund cleanup site by the federal government in 1984. Butte residents are generous, tough and hard scrabble folks. Wonderfully unique and caring and uttery prideful in their community.
There is a wealth of information about this city, here are a few examples I enjoy.
‘Pennies from Hell’ by Edwin Dobb
My Story
Christy Hays Pickett – Founder and Executive Director, songwriter, writer, historic preservationist, community radio manager, community organizer, alderperson for Walkerville, MT.
Kathleen McLaughlin – Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian, McLaughlin’s reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China. Blood Money is her first book.
Natalie Storey – Natalie Storey’s fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Fiction Journal, Whitefish Review and others. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Fulbright scholar, high school English teacher and waitress, she now lives in Butte, Montana.
Amanda Fortini – Amanda Fortini has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Paris Review, New York, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate and Salon, among other publications. She has worked as an editor at Mirabella, The New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana. Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing and Best of Slate, and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at UNLV’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for The New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.
Matthew Haynes – Matthew R. K. Haynes is a State of Idaho Writing Fellow, Lambda Literary Fiction Writing Fellow, Lambda Literary Fiction Writer-in-Residence, 50th Year Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Writing Fellow, and Moulin e Nef France Fellow. He earned his M.A. in Fiction and M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Boise State University. His work has appeared in several anthologies and journals including West Branch, The Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, Hawaii Pacific Review, O’iwi, Native Literatures, Yellow Medicine Review, and The Florida Review. He has been a finalist for the The Iowa Review Award, Faulkner Award in Fiction, Writer’s Digest Award in Nonfiction, Glimmer Train Award for Short Short Fiction, Tennessee Williams award in Fiction, Tobias Wolff award in fiction, and The Florida Review Editor’s Prize in Fiction. He was runner-up for the ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award and a semifinalist for the ScreenCraft Cinematic Novel Competition. His work has been considered for adaptation into film by Netflix producer 21 Laps Entertainment. His novella, Friday, was released from Anaphora Literary Press in 2015.