Working Quiet 501c3
Working Quiet, established in 2018, is a nonprofit organization that oversees the Dear Butte writers in residency program. Our mission is to provide writers and songwriters from all disciplines with a peaceful workspace, and to eliminate class elitism in music and writing by offering donation-based programs to our community and free residency spaces to our resident writers.
Working Quiet Board Members:
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 work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Fiction Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and many others. She is a former high school English teacher, peace corps volunteer and Fulbright scholar. Natalie lives in Butte, Montana, and is at work on her novel about the psychedelic renaissance while employed at the Butte Local Development Corporation.
Matthew Haynes – Matthew R. K. Haynes is a State of Idaho Writing Fellowships, Lambda Literary Fiction Writing Fellow, Lambda Literary Fiction Writer-in-Residence, and 50th Year Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Writing 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, SOMA Literary Journal, O’iwi, Native Literatures, Fringe, Yellow Medicine Review, and The Florida Review. He was been a finalist for the 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 21 Laps Entertainment. His novella, Friday, was released from Anaphora Literary Press in 2015. Matthew is a writing professor at Montan Tech University.
Christy Hays Pickett – Christy Hays Pickett is the founder of Working Quiet and the Executive Director of the NPO. Christy spent many years as a professional touring singer-songwriter. She has released six studio albums and worked out of Austin Texas for 13 years. Christy purchased and lovingly renovated the Dear Butte residency house in 2015 and has been facilitating writers and musicians in Walkerville since 2021.
The board has long-term plans to expand our programming and provide more residency spaces and opportunities for creative individuals. We aim to collaborate with the Butte-Silver Bow School System to engage more young people in our programs. Working Quiet is working on an Irish Writers Exchange for 2025. We hope to provide a modest salary for our Executive Director to allow more focus on future goals and creative programming for the community. We also aspire to offer stipends for residents during their stay in Butte. We believe that securing funding through grants, public donations, and volunteer hours is achievable given the positive impact we have on our community.
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.
Dear Butte also partners with our local community radio station KBMF where residents are occasionally 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.
Butte, MT
Butte, MT is a town of roughly 33k people sitting atop the continental divide in southwestern 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 hardscrabble folks. Wonderfully unique and caring and uttery prideful in their community.
‘Pennies from Hell’ by Edwin Dobb
