Tending to Place: Art, Reciprocity, and the Road with Mary Welcome

On this episode, meet Mary Welcome, a multidisciplinary cultural worker and rural avant-garde artist. 

For close to 20 years, Mary's life and creative practice have radiated out from her hometown of Palouse, Washington, toward an immense web of rural communities and partners across the continent. Few artists in our field articulate both a sense of deep respect for local community and a belief in the generative detours of life on the road as well as Mary does.

Along this journey, Mary has created some of the things we expect on an artist's CV, like national and international exhibitions, installations, and publications, but has also followed her own unique path. Serving as an artist in residence with the Washington State Department of Transportation, and as a post office portrait photographer for the United States Postal Service.

In the last decade, the urban-normative arts & cultural field has slowly turned its attention towards what we at Art of the Rural call “the rural condition.” These efforts by institutions, philanthropies, and the media often either reaffirm a preconceived set of assumptions or are extractive spectacles that further mystify what it's like to actually live beyond the city.

Mary's work provides a powerful antidote to this compulsion through long-term attention and care for land, culture, and history, and ultimately the tethers of belonging that hold our communities together.

Resources

• Episode transcript
• Mary Welcome’s website, Instagram, BlueSky, LinkedIn
• God Bless the USPS
• Places & Events Mentioned: Woodpecker Archives, Slippery Gulch 2025, Palouse Newspaper & Printing Museum
• Publications & Authors Mentioned: Ray Bradbury, “The Happiness Machine”; Swift Lathers, Mears Newz; Terry Tempest Williams; Loren Eisley; Mary Oliver; Jorge Luis Borges; William Least Heat-Moon; Roger Tory Peterson; adrienne marie brown
• Shows Mentioned: Pee-wee as Himself (2025)

We are grateful to folks across the country who have made tax-deductible contributions to Art of the Rural to make this conversation possible, and to the Ford Foundation and Good Chaos Foundation for their support of Art of the Rural’s media programs.

Transcript

Episode Introduction

Mary Welcome: The relationship with place is like what will feed you for the rest of your life. And so like pay attention to it and tend to it, and let it tend to you in return.

Matthew Fluharty: Hello, and welcome to the Art of the Rural Podcast. I'm Matthew Fluharty. On this podcast, we gather with artists and culture bearers from across rural America and Indian country to encounter their creative and cultural vision. To hear new stories about life beyond the city, and to be inspired to bridge divides across the places we all hold Dear, if you enjoy this conversation, please join us at Art of the rural.org where you can also subscribe to our newsletter featuring resources, gatherings, and lots of links to exciting creative work happening across the country.

You can also find us on social and on Substack at Art of the Rural. We are grateful to folks from across the country who've made tax-deductible contributions to Art of the Rural to make this conversation possible and to the Ford Foundation and Good Chaos Foundation for their support of Art of the Rural's media programs.

Today's guest is Mary Welcome, a multidisciplinary cultural worker and rural avant-garde artist. For close to 20 years, Mary's life and creative practice have radiated out from her hometown of Palouse, Washington, toward an immense web of rural communities and partners across the continent. Few artists in our field articulate both a sense of deep respect for local community and a belief in the generative detours of life on the road as well as Mary does.

Along this journey, Mary has created some of the things we expect on an artist's CV, like national and international exhibitions, installations, and publications, but has also followed her own unique path. Serving as an artist in residence with the Washington State Department of Transportation, and as a post office portrait photographer for the United States Postal Service.

In the last decade, the urban, normative arts and cultural field has slowly turned its attention towards what we call at Art of the Rural “the rural condition.” These efforts by institutions, philanthropies, and the media often either reaffirm a preconceived set of assumptions or are extractive spectacles that further mystify what it's like to actually live beyond the city.

Mary's work provides a powerful antidote to this compulsion through long-term attention and care for land, culture, and history, and ultimately the tethers of belonging that hold our communities together. So without further ado, please sit back, get comfortable, and enjoy this conversation with Mary.

Interview

Matthew: Welcome, Mary. Thanks for your time today.

Mary: Yeah. So happy to be here.

Matthew: Yeah, thanks. I've been really excited, uh, for our time together and looking forward to all, all the avenues and back roads as conversation will go down, uh, and our time together here. And I've been looking forward to it in part because I've been dwelling on the fact that very few artists have covered the miles and been with the range of rural communities that you've been with across the last decade or so.

And you know, your work is work that's gone from sort of like the socially engaged art practice, uh, those early years in rural places. If we think back to the 2000s and 2010s you know, through the cultural awakening, to rural of the Trumpers, by art institutions, by the media, and by support structures.

And kind of threw into this moment, now into this very, very uncertain present for non-urban communities and cultures. And I know we really could record a whole series of podcasts about that work, about the connections and the relationships, uh, that really powered it and all the lessons, uh, that came through it.

And I'm really grateful that we can begin today with this conversation. So I'm wondering, as a way to open our time together, how you frame the story of your personal journey and how that journey has shaped your evolving creative work.

Mary: Wow. Okay. Where, where to start. Thanks for that, that great intro. I got a bit distracted right at the beginning, and you started talking about the miles. 'Cause I realized, I was doing some calculations this year. I'm pretty sure I hit my millionth mile, and that's, you know, that's maybe a story for another time, but I'm pretty sure I just crossed that threshold more or less of having driven, um, a million miles back and forth across the country with myself, with myself as pilot.

But sort of the story of driving and visiting and moving through a landscape in that way, I'd say definitely stems from growing up in a military family. Both my parents were in the army. Um, so, you know, we moved every two to three years. And you move with all your things. So that moving was also based in a car or two cars, depending on what our family was managing at the time.

And so a lot of my childhood was spent, you know, in the backseat of a car, um, for days on end driving from a place where we lived to a place where we were going to live or driving from a place that we now lived to visit family in other places. And I feel like that action of learning to look out a window was, was taught to me in a very, like, early unintentional and non-passive way.

Um, for, you know, for as far back as I can go in my memories. I feel like, you know, I have these very early memories of like riding in a car and my mom making up a song to like teach us our new address so we would know where we lived in this new place. And I would like memorize these songs with our addresses while looking out the window at a landscape that I was going to become familiar with.

So that was, that was all very formative. When I think about the things that I'm still doing, I'm like, oh yeah, I am still driving around in a car, looking out the window, thinking about places I've been, thinking about places I'm going, thinking about places where people live and work and, and build lives for, for themselves.

I think the practice of it has probably changed so much for the general population over the years. When I was riding in the car, it was like. Before phones and screens. I usually had a book. We were a very like, map-oriented family, so like we would like go to the AAA and like get all the maps of all the states, and I would sit there and follow along on the map as we drove.

So there was a lot of like orientation and learning about place while I was on the road. Um, because learning about places, how you can build belonging in a place, too. So there was often a lot of anticipation about like, who I was going to meet and would I fit in, and how would it feel to live in this new place, and what would it change about me to live in a new place.

So like I've got enough hindsight now that I'm like, oh, oh yeah. So much of that has shifted into my practice as like a socially engaged, multidisciplinary cultural worker who travels from place to place. A lot of times with those same questions like, are they gonna like me? Is it gonna work? Like, what's it gonna look like?

And all of that time on the road between commissions and between places is really, I think, where I've always gone to do my processing, where I've gone to like find myself and like find my footing, and center myself in sort of this like multi, multi-place, multi peopled practice I've built.

Matthew: I mean it's so powerful to think about your contemporary creative work and that bridge all the way back to those really early formative uh, memories and relationships with the map, with like the landscape moving out outside the window and with that sense of expectation about like being.

Being with community, engaging with new community. I mean, if I remember correctly, you went from that point, and at least at first, you didn't major in art, right?

Mary: No, I didn't. I didn't.

Matthew: When you think yourself, how do you thread that line from like that, those really early transcendent experiences to like what you've done in the last summer? Like what was that process of education like for you to get to the point where you were doing this work?

Mary: Let me see if I can create a bit of chronology around it.

You know, I think, I think one thing that you learn when you're, when you're growing up in the kind of itinerant life that, that I had in a military family and on, you know, living up until high school, I was also like living on military bases. Was it place? Like place is not necessarily like the vessel for belonging.

I think that that's like something I was socialized very differently about. Like, 'cause the place is a thing that's always changing and so like belonging is created through relationships. Belonging is created through acts of service. Belonging is created through engaging the people that you are situated next to.

Because in, in those itinerant communities as well, it's like the population is always changing. So that is like ongoing work of knowing one another and welcoming one another and saying goodbye to one another in all of these like, staggering patterns that happen over and over again. And so I didn't really think about place as like a thing that stayed still.

And I got much more attached to like the stories of place and the stories of people as the thing that builds identity. And if we're going to talk about storytelling, uh, I think the best, the best example of storytelling is, is religion, which is like the story that makes you believe in God. The story that like makes you want to do better or like adhere to some kind of moral code or set of values.

And so I was really interested in like how religion affects communities and how stories build religions. And so yeah, I went to school for religion. I studied the stories of the saints and a lot of like early, early Christian texts is where my specialty is. 'cause I was really interested in that genesis of community and myth and storytelling and then how those stories are like shaped, used, abused.

I think that's a very like, complicated. Complicated conversation we can get into. But I'd say like, that's where it started. So like, my background is in religious studies, and I approach it I think very similarly to how I approach community work. You know, what are the stories that this community is telling themselves?

What is the stories, what are the stories that this community is telling others? And like, what are the stories that will inspire transformation in this place? Or what are the stories that will like, create identity and stability, and health for a place. Um, and so like the storytelling, I think is where I'm, I'm very attached to like learning more about people in places, so I can understand like how we can tell the better story together.

Like how we can tell the story that helps us tend to one another. So you probably wanna know how I got to art. It's like, did I leave that out? 'cause I don't know if I have an answer for that question.

Matthew: Do you feel it's significant to talk about the “how you got to art” part?

Mary: I don't really know. I feel like, I think that that's what everybody always, I think that's what everyone always wants to know.

Like how did you become an artist? Like, and then especially like, how did you become an artist that does the kind of things you do today? Because it's not necessarily a traditional art practice. And it, it is a bit difficult for me 'cause I can honestly say I'm not sure. I think I've just tried to make my way in the world.

In a way that suited me, I guess, like, like I tried to follow my natural proclivities in like where, what kind of places I wanted to be, like what kind of person I wanted to be, what kind of belonging I wanted to feel. And somehow this is the practice that shook out of there. But I don't think I ever woke up and was like, today I'm going to be an artist, and I'm going to figure out how to be an artist really.

Well, it was, it was always kind of a one foot in front of the other, and here I am.

Matthew: Yeah, there's not like a really clean artist statement about like, I'm now transitioning from religious studies to socially engaged artwork. Yeah,

Mary: No, it just, it just happened. It just happened. I, you know, I have always been kind of freaky.

I've always been eccentric and interested and, you know, pursuing things that interest me. And so like I had, I feel like I've probably always had a creative practice of some sort, but I don't even know if I called it an art practice, you know, until, you know, my twenties and then I stopped doing what most people would consider a traditional art practice and have been doing what I'm doing now since, but there wasn't, I don't think I could point to a fork in the road.

I think it feels like more of a web in the same way that the road became the place that connects people. The road became the thing that connects places,  and it's like an infinitely forking path, and it's a place of return, and it's a place of circular motion. And so I kind of just followed, followed that feeling of, of centering myself in these interstitial moments on the road between places I was interested in, and built a practice that suited that.

Matthew: Yeah. I wonder if we can dwell on one of those projects for a moment because I, something that kind of rises to the surface for me and just kind of hearing this journey. I think in particular, even from that attention, you know, to studying religion, this idea that stories can be uncovered, they can rise up, there can be spaces for folks to collectively tell stories together.

There's so many projects to talk about, but to talk about God Bless the USPS. Which is certainly one of, I mean, personally, one of my favorite projects out of, out of the many that, uh, you've been working on over the years, it's also been a project that has received a good bit of national press and attention as well.

I wonder if there's a way in to kind of continuing this thread and thinking about your work with, uh, the postal service here. And I'd really love just to read this portion from your own writing about God bless the USPS as the last vestige of a communications commons. The social relationships formed within and through the United States Post Office are unique and complex intimacy and institution collide in the rural post office, which often serves as the social fulcrum both publicly and privately of remote communities.

Rural communities rely on the post office as critical space for community news, both by word of mouth in the conversational space of the counter, and through bulletin boards for local announcements. Many rural communities are hours away from a metropolis and depend on the post office for regular delivery of essential goods, such as medicines, equipment, seeds, newsletters, and family correspondence.

The small town postmaster is also a necessary community mediator being one of the few citizens that knows and interacts with every resident. So I, I love this text and all of the other texts on, um, on the website that you've created here for how it sort of rolls alongside what is essentially just this beautiful, sprawling kind of geographically encyclopedic panorama of rural post offices, you know, so this very human language is situated alongside what feels like kind of an infinite view into all, all of the rural post offices or many of them across the country.

So Mary, I'm really interested in how this project came into being. Both in terms of the genesis of it as an idea, but also the process, because I know from, from spending time on your website, this is work that you refer to as being a life's work, you know, so that has kind of a really powerful, kind of continual resonance if I think about just like what, what you've been doing and what you're gonna be continuing to doing.

So how did this project emerge for you?

Mary: I'm trying to decide how far back to go. I've got the, like, the memory Rolodex in my mind, kind of shuffling back and back and back and back and back and back. I'd say, I'd say Genesis, early, early Genesis is a background, um, in correspondence, again, like being in a military family, like the way to keep in touch was.

Writing letters. You know, we weren't making long-distance phone calls from the landlines, like when I moved away from friends or when friends moved away from me. Like we, we stayed in touch the best we could through postcards and letters. So like, I've always had a, a very deep awareness of the relationships that can be built in that.

Really slow motion language, kid to kid. I'd say, I'd say the correspondence was like exactly what you would expect of kids writing to kids. It feels like summer camp letters. But I also had a teacher in third grade. My third-grade teacher was very, very impactful to me as a student and as a person. And he's someone that maintained a correspondence with me, which was really special.

So I had this, this teacher mentor that I wrote to and wrote letters to because he didn't move. He stayed in one place. So like I never lost track of his address, but I would write letters to him, you know, starting from third grade all the way up to my high school years. And then, you know, and, and we continue to write letters, and it's more sporadic.

So I had, I had this relationship that was held together by a few letters a year that would come to my house or that I would send out through my mailbox. I didn't think about the post office, so I thought about the post office as a network and a web. And a series of people that passed my letters across the country and got them to a safe place.

I didn't think about the post office in as a building, I think, until I moved to Palouse. So when I started living in Palouse in my early twenties, I lived downtown on Main Street in a really messed up little apartment that was directly next to the post office. And anybody that lived downtown was assigned a post office box.

So instead of me having a mailbox that I would check, or a mail carrier that would bring my mail to my door, I, for the first time in my life, was like going to the post office next door too. Retrieve my mail and to send my mail. And that was a really new experience for me. And I think that's where I really got incredibly enchanted by the relationships that were also built through me sending my mail.

Like I remember the first, the first postmaster I became friends because I tend to write a letter when I am good and healthy. I'm writing a letter every day to one of the many different people that I keep in touch with. But I would like write my letter, and I would go to the post office, and I would buy my stamp for Mitch.

And then I would have Mitch hand cancel my envelope, and then I would put the envelope in the mail. And like one day he was like, you know, you could just buy a book of stamps. Like, you don't have to buy, you don't have to just buy a stamp at a time. And I was like, I know, but I like seeing you. And he was like, all right, cool.

Just wanted to make sure you knew. And that's also where I was getting information about what was happening in the community through the bulletin board, running into other neighbors with post office boxes, like learning who had the post office boxes near mine. So there was a lot of these like social micro interactions that were happening in the building of the post office as a rural person in a rural place that were just kind of blowing my mind that like this very institutional building on Main Street was actually housing so much of the social connection that I needed as as a new person in town, which was really cool.

Like I said, I, I do have a lot of people that are very precious to me that I would say I rarely spend time in a day-to-day world with, but that I've kept up decades long correspondences with writing letters has always felt like the way I've preferred to process what I'm seeing and what I'm feeling.

It's like, it like slows things down in a way that feels really healthy for me, and it feels really nice to like be in a slow-motion conversation with someone over years and years and years and years. I think there's a lot of learning that happens there. So people's next logical question is usually like, oh, well then where do you, like if you have these people you keep in touch with, like how are, how are you in correspondence when you're on the road, if you're on the road?

So much a year two. And that's this other really enchanting thing about the post office, which is called general delivery, where you can receive mail at any post office in the nation just by writing the name of the person that is to receive it, and the words general delivery and the place, and the zip code.

So I started, I had some very long stretches of work away from home, and I started receiving my mail, general delivery at like, just like a spin of the globe. I would like point to a place on a map and be like, yeah, Young America, Indiana, send me mail there, or Roundup, Montana, send me mail there. I think that's the way I started exploring these other post office buildings.

Like I became so familiar with my post office in Palouse, and then I realized that I could have relationships with other post offices too. Like for one summer in Michigan, I drove to Lamont, Lamont, Michigan. Every day to pick up my mail because every day I had a letter waiting and every day I had a letter to send.

There were a lot of postcards in my life at this time, and so you better believe that the two people that worked at that post office knew everything about that relationship as well. 'cause it was just all right there out in the open, on the counter, on the back of a postcard. Um, and so the, the very, like the first portraits that I took.

The first portraits that I took of post offices for God Bless the USPS, the very first one was of Palouse on the day that I was leaving for work somewhere else, um, because I wanted to have it with me. And then I started documenting the post offices where I was also picking up my mail. And so it started as a, oh, I'm picking up a letter from someone here.

Let me take a picture of the building. It was like a, a short, kind of like three-week run of that. And I was like, whoa, these buildings are all so different. This is so interesting. Like, like my first, I think I was getting, I was supposed to be getting a letter somewhere in Montana, in a small town, or it might have been one of the Dakotas.

It's fuzzy now, but I remember calling ahead because I forgot about the time zone, so I knew I wasn't gonna be able to get to the post office before it closed. Oh, I remembered it was an Ipswich. So I called the Ipswich post office and I was like, Hey, I have some mail coming for me. And they're like, oh yeah, Mary, welcome general delivery.

I was like, that's me. I'm not gonna get until like seven or eight at night. Like, and I'm not staying the night, I'm just passing through. And they were like, oh, that's no problem. We're gonna give it to, um, you know, Cindy at the Apple Foods and just go through the grocery store on your way through town, and you can pick it up there.

Matthew: Wow.

Mary: So it's like this kind, like, you know, in another, in another time somewhere in Minnesota, I wasn't gonna get there in time. They're like, oh, we're just gonna drop it off at the golf course. They're open till 11:00 PM you can pick it up there. So there was like all of this community networking that was happening as well as I was trying to like, track down my mail at these, you know, far flung place that I had just kind of like chosen by pointing to a map.

And it, yeah, it became, it became such a rush. It became such a goose chase and a scavenger hunt, and a treasure hunt. And like, not only was I picking up a letter from someone. I was also experiencing these postal employees and the communities that they operated in, and being exposed to all of these different architectures that exist within postal buildings.

And as I tried to research about some of these places that I had picked up mails when I realized that there is no, there is no archive of postal buildings. We have incredible records about when post offices were started and when zip codes were assigned, and like the ways the names have changes, and every postmaster that's ever been appointed, and we have no record of post office locations.

So it became, it became, it felt very imperative to me. I was like, well, I'm driving around anyway. I'll become the post office portrait photographer. I will make it my life's work to make a portrait of every post office in the United States of America, which seemed, I don't know the word for it. I. It seemed like an enormous extravagant performance of endurance, and I liked that feeling.

I liked that it would probably take me my whole life to photograph all of these post offices, and I liked that. I was like creating a record of learning about place along the way. I liked that it filled every single mile of every single drive with like a, a search and some wonder and some curiosity.

And I like that it meant that I never drove the same way twice.

Matthew: And along the way. And this is what we see through looking at the photos, you know, that you saw online, is that you encountered this kind of mind-boggling architectural diversity.

Mary: Mm, absolutely. Yeah.

Matthew: Like I'm looking right now online at a diagonal Iowa in that office.

Mary: Oh. And it's diagonal. It's like leaning. It's beautiful.

Matthew: Yeah. Donaldson, Minnesota. I mean these buildings could not be more different, you know? And I think something that in your writing about this project that you really kind of underscore is. Both the architectural diversity, but how there is a quality of improvisation across many of these structures.

Mary: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that's, and that's I think where the focus shifted for the, from the more ambiguous like every post office in America to like, oh no. What I'm really interested in is, is rural post offices, like the rural one-man post offices that are absolutely critical to the community, like this is extremely critical infrastructure.

No matter like what kind of technology we invent, rural places, we'll still need their post offices for a variety of reasons. And I think because of that, rural places steward their post offices differently. Often times the buildings, I think I recently learned it's like almost 70% of post office locations are rented in the community.

Like the post office only owns a pretty slim percentage of the buildings they operate out of. And you can recognize the ones they operate out of because they do fall into these, like architectural, so there's a, there's more uniformity in them because they were like built by the post office, and they're owned by the post office.

But in so many rural places, the post office is a tenant in the community. So it is paying rent to a building owner, and it is functioning in the best way it can, you know, it's created the infrastructure within that building to operate as a post office. And then like the stewardship of the building belongs to the community.

So you're gonna see some really interesting window dressings and you're gonna see some really interesting like architectural variety and the way that maintenance is addressed in these, in these ways where people are working with what's available to them instead of within a specific municipal national municipal code.

So there's, yeah, it's like my favorite kind of post office is, is gonna be the kind. That really reflect the place that they're in, where you can like see evidence of the people that use that post office, and you can see evidence of the landscape or evidence of the industry. Like I love, I love when I can get a picture of a post office with like some tower and grain elevators or like a giant water tower at, or like a logging truck, like where you can understand the industry of place.

Also, just by taking that repetitive, similarly framed photo of every post office I come across, I'm actually learning so much about the context of that place from those photos.

Matthew: These photos really resist the idea of thinking about the USPS as a bureaucracy, too. There's something so human about these photographs.

Mary: Yeah, and I think, I think folks forget that, that like, I mean the U, the USPS is an absolute marvel in the fact that it works. I think it's the second. Most efficient mail system in the world, and we are second only to like England, which is like the size of New Jersey or something. Like, it's, it's pretty amazing that it works so well.

It's incredible that like the, the government imperative for the USPS is like a privacy and affordability. Your communication is protected from the moment that you send it to the moment that it gets where it's supposed to be going and belongs to the person that you sent it to. Like, it is the last place where we have privacy, and it's also like their mandate is affordability.

So like the fact that we can send, send a letter across the country that is passed, you know, it's like sorted by a machine, but then it is passed from hand to hand to hand. It is a, it is a people-powered process for less than a dollar is incredible for less than a can of Coca-Cola. You know, it's, it's really.

An amazing and precious thing we have, and it is a thing that we're gonna lose if it's not stewarded. I, I feel like the use of it is important and the care for it is important because it is not, it is not a thing we will get back if it's taken away.

Matthew: It seems like there is such a thread of civic practice that animates, uh, so much of this work.

And I'm just curious like what, both, like what does civic practice look like for you in rural communities? I mean, the post office is such a beautiful example of that, um, but like what are the projects kind of come to mind with that as a starting point?

Mary: I guess we can start by like trying to talk about what civic practice is.

When I think about civic practice, I think about it as a practice that is embedded within a community. So much of what a public thinks about when they think of art with a capital A is. The studio with the closed door, the making work in private and then exhibiting it in public, usually in some kind of cultural institution, like a gallery or a museum.

And that is not the place where I would put a lot of my work. I think I had, I've had, I, I know how to work within those systems, but I prefer to work outside of those systems. And, you know, I'm gonna use one of my favorite phrases here. Like what? The cap, the opposite of the capital A art is what I would call like capital A actual art, uh, which is like the work of the people, the practice of the people, you know.

And, and I throw and I throw it around in. In a funny kind of way, but I also really mean it, like I'm talking about actual art. I'm talking about like art that is of place and of people and with purpose and like, and like with devotion. Um, and so I think a civic practice involves making work that's usually like responding to community need, but also like in collaboration with community, it's going to address an issue or a topic or a need that the, the environment with within which you are situated has expressed wanting to collaborate on.

You know, it's like a reciprocal invitation that's happening. Civic practice me also involves like building structures and frameworks for continuing to address whatever that need might be. So it does, it is opposite of work made in a vacuum. It is work made very specifically and usually very, very hyper locally and with a lot of shared stewardship.

Matthew: I love this framework because. It logically suggests that actual art works with actual communities in a way that is authentic and human-centered. Which, I mean, as we have seen, whether it's the media or honestly whether it is much other contemporary practice that is looking at non-urban places often by folks who don't live in those communities, it can often be really disingenuous and straight up extractive, you know, like you're looking at a place, you know?

Mm-hmm. Like as if you're walking through a hall of mirrors. So your work working with mm-hmm. Actual communities in that way that a letter is handed from a postal worker to somebody standing outside their house. What are, what are some of those communities? You've been in so many, but like what, what are some that just really kind of emanate outta that space for you when you reflect back on the places you've been?

Mary: Well, in terms of civic practice. I'd say, I think one that tends to resonate with people is the few years that I spent working with the Washington State Department of Transportation in the same way where we can think about the postal, the postal systems as an institution in a bureaucracy. I think we can often think of our.

Transportation systems are dots as an institution and a bureaucracy. And I spent a few years embedded within the Washington State Department of Transportation with my collaborator Kelly Gregory. And that was what we kind of wanted to unlock, like how, how to work with and collaborate with something that is very much like a state agency, a a an institution, a network that needs to work, but that network is made up of people – like it's just people.

It's it's neighbors that are located in these different places all across the state doing the work of keeping our transportation systems running, of like keeping our roads functional. And that's really what we dialed into over our years of like research and collaboration with them was like the work that we made at the end of that residency ended up being about the maintenance workers that do live in these rural places. Like the only way to get to these rural places is by the road, and the only way to get there on that road is by the road functioning. And so the people that steward those roads are also the people that live in those places. And so we developed a series of really, really local newspapers from three different regions in the state and within the region with like one specific staff within one specific shed within the region.

And like learning about what their day-to-day was like, um, learning about like how the weather and the environment and the, and the like social systems and the politics of that place, like affected their work. And then being able to like represent those stories, those very specific stories through these small artists designed, uh, newspapers that then were distributed within those specific communities.

And so for us, a lot of that work was around, how do we make this work human? When most people see, you know, I'm doing it, I just drove across Montana at 25 miles per hour because there were, so, there was so much road construction, but like that's all people work and like it also, it also needs to be seen, like we need to carry a degree of like curiosity into the process so that we don't dehumanize these systems that are keeping us all afloat.

That we all need to be stewarding. Right? So that, so that's a civic practice on a statewide sense. Like that was my challenge, was how to work and to create connections, create person to person connections on a statewide level. I think you can, I think where I prefer to work is on a really, really local level.

When I think about the place where I live and the ways I participate in the place that I live, the places where I work, and how I participate in those communities over years and years and years. And I think that's also that's also like where I try to point, um, young and emerging artists is like, where are you practicing and why?

And like, how, how can you pay attention to that? Because this context is so critical to us making actual art. Like we have to understand these contexts that we're practicing within. And like you've gotta live in a place that loves you back. Like you have, you have to live in a place that will love you back.

Like you, the relationship with place is like what will feed you for the rest of your life. And so like pay attention to it and tend to it and let it tend to you in return.

Matthew: I think that's medicine that our culture really needs in this moment. Like, I'm surprised by just like the terms this conversation has taken, even in terms of how I kind of orient myself just to the body of work that you've created and that you've co-created with communities.

One of the qualities that is like most moving to me. Is both like how, how, you know, visually and conceptually striking it is how it catches can catch a person off guard and help them see something in a new way. But it comes out of consensus, you know, and this isn't a, doesn't have need to be a macrocosmic invitation to dissect the culture as it is right now.

But like, what, what feels really significant is that like, out of that, um, ethic of consensus in these projects, actually something really radically subversive is taking place, which is raising up that quality of actual art and actual community and the platforms through which those folks who are an intimate connection with a place and with the region can express themselves without filters, with their own, their actual lived life.

And it just seems like, you know, I think we're in a moment where culturally this work could really teach us some things.

Mary: Yeah. And that like curiosity is cool and. Being earnest is everything. This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Um, like I read a book that I read every year with the seasons is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

It's like one of my favorites. And there's, it's a, it's a collection of short stories that were published over years and years and years in a magazine. So it's more of a gathering of these stories. But there's one. Called “The Happiness Machine.” All of these stories are taking place in a small town in Illinois, but this neighbor like really wants to bring like happiness to his beautiful wife and his and his community.

And so he like builds a happiness machine, and when you go inside of it, you are so happy. It's like every dream comes true. You're like living. You're living out your like deepest fantasy and it takes him all summer to build it, and he like builds it, and he is like proud of it, and everyone wants to come use it.

And it just ruins everyone's lives because once they get in the happy Miss Machine, they come back out, and they don't like anything that they have. And that reminds me so much of the relationship people have now. Like all of us in some way or another have with these pocket computers, like they've become these like global happiness machines that are like giving you your dopamine, giving you attention, you know, it's giving you all of this, and it stops you from like building those things into your day-to-day.

Like when you spend all day looking at things that are happening in other places and wishing you were there. Like you stop being present to the place where you are. And so I think about that a lot too. And like, what's the right medicine for that? You know, for me it's, it's. It's, it's driving, you know, driving is my medicine.

Um, being, being a person with a promise of return is my medicine. Coming back to places, anding relationships is my medicine, and the like long stretches of road in between.

Matthew: Yeah. And even just to think about recent history, like you've spent the summer on the road traveling, I mean, at least, at least as I understand it, pretty much almost from coast to coast, north and south, up and down and all around, um, you know, with various rural communities and orgs and residency sites, you really have seen so much of the country and likely more than the vast majority of other folks on this continent.

And when we were talking before the podcast, we kind of reflected on that. And you said something that I thought was this. Like a really profound window for what you've just been sharing. Um, you know, you said the rest of America is not as conceptual to me as it is to most people, which feels like it's really embedded, that that's really like kind of a different articulation of what's embedded in that Ray Bradbury story.

Like to see the country not as a concept. I feel like we are really invited in this particular moment to think about a country, a region, and a community as a concept, really as a disembodied thing as opposed to heart and love and blood.

Mary: Yeah. I mean, it's all just people. I mean, it's, it's so much more than people.

It's, it's the environments and all the creatures and the weather. I mean, yeah, there's context everywhere, but I think when I said that I was. I was thinking about these conversations that I have with folks around, um, around what they're afraid of. And I think in our ex, you know, turbulence is kind of the word that I've settled on for how my year has been so far and how my travels have been.

But it's also, I think a lot of how people are feeling like there's just a lot of turbulence, um, emotional turbulence, political turbulence, all of it. And like that's become fairly normalized. And I think because of that, the othering has become so normalized. I think like, like when I'm reading an article about somewhere else.

In any kind of newspaper for the most part. I can usually imagine that place because I've been there, and I can usually like think of someone that I know there, and I can think of what they do as their job, and I can think of who their family is, and I can think of who their friends are. And so like when I'm reading media, I am actually connecting it to like a very physical, present relationship.

And I don't think that's what's happening for most people. And that's, that's kind of what I'm learning is that like other people are reading the media and whatever is not their community becomes the other, becomes the enemy, becomes the fantasy, and now becomes the fault, which is like so harmful. Like I think fantasy and fault, like share the same corner of harm that is perpetuated in conversation, fantasizing about a place.

You know, like I think people do this when visiting. Quite often, like a way to be a bad visitor is to like engage the fantasy of a place like, oh, I'm gonna move here because it has this, this, and this, and it's perfect for these reasons, and I'm gonna do these things here. And I think we saw a lot of that during COVID with like folks, you know, leaving, leaving the city and engaging a pastoral fantasy where they really just brought their whole life with them and relocated, which is very different from visiting responsibly.

And when I think about visiting responsibly, it does not involve a fantasy. It involves looking around and saying like, who built this? Who lives here? If I were to live here, how would I contribute to it? Like that's just not how our conversations are wired anymore, I think. I think the internet has like created a national fantasy of both good and evil for whatever side you're on.

And so like the rest of the nation just becomes a concept for you to toy with, whether it's, whether it's your fantasy or whether it's the fault. I think that's something that I try to hone in on when I'm talking with folks about this, like how destructive both the blaming and the fantasizing are to not only the places that you're fantasizing about, but also the place where you do live and that maybe you're not paying attention to anymore.

Like, how is your place built? How is your place maintained? How are you participating in, in both the pros and the cons of living in that place? Like, like I think the polarities need so much more neutralization and that will give us culpability in it. Again, that will give us the power to like make change again if we stop blaming an other like this.

This conceptual notion of someone else's fault.

Matthew: Samaria, I know that your hometown is Palouse, Washington. How much has Palouse taught you about those qualities?

Mary: Golly, um. Yeah, all of it. You know, I learned a lot about how to engage place and create belonging from, you know, living on military bases and moving all the time.

But I learned everything about staying power. I think from living somewhere like Palouse, being exposed to all of these different people of all of these different histories and backgrounds and, and relationships and watching their relationships expand and contract and be okay, like allowing for things to change.

Was a really powerful thing for me to see, especially as a young person living in a town of 900 that I did not grow up in, like being privy to, like looking at the ways friendships expand and contract and, and still maintain care even though they can look different the way people get together and fall apart, but like can still maintenance a community.

Relationship. And I think that comes from there being this incredible ethos for stewardship in Palouse that like, if you want to feel belonging here, then take care of this place. Like, put whatever skills you have into good use. Make yourself, make yourself of, of service to the sum, because like, that's how we spend time together.

Um, and that's something that both felt very familiar to me, but also also like very, um, very evocative of what was possible for me in my lifetime to like, to like have a lifelong relationship with a community that would hold me with an open hand that would, that would like allow me to come and go and to like bring what I could to the table when I had enough to share.

Matthew: Yeah. Palouse is a teacher.

Mary: Yeah.

Matthew: So Mary, I know you've been traveling for the entirety of the summer. And I'm just really curious, given just like the quality of attention and engagement that you have, um, you know, what have been some of the markers, some of the memories, some of the images, uh, big and small, like from, from your various journeys this summer?

Mary: Oh, great. Great question. I'm gonna get to do a little bit of time traveling and map traveling in my mind. I'll preface it. This is something that usually only folks in palous know about me, but like, I get really scared before I leave on a trip. I'm like, I'm usually very excited about everything that I'm doing, but I'll have this like hour of like, true and like horrifying terror that like, I'm not gonna come home.

I am very, very afraid of like leaving and not coming home. So like that's something I have to work through every time and it's always fine. Everything's always okay. But I'd say this trip in particular, I had a lot of anxiety 'cause it was my first, you know, actual kind of big trip after the recent election.

I was really kind of anxious about like how all these other places that I care about how they were doing, how it was going to feel on the road. And so I was, I was like really grappling with all of that right before I left, knowing I'd be gone for a lot of unknown miles. And I should have known that feeling was coming from a feeling of turbulence.

Like I should have, I should have known that that's what it was. I was like, oh, it's just gonna be a bumpy ride. It's gonna be fine. It's just gonna be really bumpy. It's like, and it has been, it's been an extremely turbulent summer in terms of weather. Like the weather I've encountered on this recent round of trips, which is a time when I am usually traveling, has been like no year I've ever seen before in terms of like, the massive sense of the storms and like the truly inclement weather that I have encountered.

Like, I'm someone that always has an eye on the weather. I will map to accommodate the weather. You know, I'm, I'm used to paying attention to the weather, but I have been like, I have had storms on my heels the whole trip, which is stressful and like under a lot of car troubles. Like my, the latch on my pickup broke right before I was supposed to leave.

So I was run and I was running late anyway, and I went up to my friend Jeff's house to see if he could fix it. And we like, looked at it, and he was like, you know, it's easily fixable, but I don't think it's a big deal. And I was like, cool, I gotta get on the road. So I got on the road, first day in, I locked my keys in the truck.

Which is bound to happen, but like, like this is, this is like within the first thousand miles. And I was like, whew. All right. Okay. Mary, buckle up. And I don't, have you ever been to Chugwater, Wyoming? Well, when you do think of me, because that's where this happened, I had like. I don't like, I keep my keys in the truck.

When I'm at home, I don't lock anything. And so I'm not used to having to lock things. And so I was trying to be like, oh, don't forget to lock your truck because all of your things are in it. And I locked my truck with my keys, right where they belonged in the cup holder. I was like, well, man, what do I do now in yet another place without like phone service and where I don't know anyone?

And so like, this was my introduction to this round of work on the road. I was like, all right, well I know what to do. You know, you buy a six pack of beer, maybe a pack of cigarettes, and you start walking and you like, look for the kind of person that can help you break into your car. And then you give them those items, which is exactly what I did.

You know? And so, and, and so like the problem was solved I think within 30 minutes I found someone that could get into the truck. We got the keys, you know, I made my trade, and I said, thank you. And I like still got to where I thought I would be by nightfall. And that was like the good reminder of like, yeah.

It's fine out here. You know, it's like people to people, like, I think I could have probably talked myself into a real tizzy if I had been any other kind of person in that environment, but I was like, no, there, there will be someone that will help. I just have to go find them and have to make sure that, that I can say thank you.

So, yeah, a lot. I feel like sometimes being on the road feels very independent and feels very lonesome in a good way. And sometimes on the road, it's very turbulent and it feels very interdependent. And so this was a trip of a lot of interdependence. I ended up needing a lot from a lot of people that I didn't know very well because of extenuating circumstances.

And that's like a different kind of learning that I have to do in terms of like, oh yeah, like you can't actually solve. Any of this on your own this time around. So you are going to like be a good visitor and be a good, be the best guest you ca,n and engage in as much reciprocity as you can on the fly.

So that's how the trip started. I was in Chugwater. I came down to Big Springs, Nebraska, where I am right now to do a few weeks of field work on the Central Flyway, which is a migratory route that comes through the middle of the country with like, truly, truly incredible birds that I can't see at home and that I can't see on either coast.

So I got to spend a lot of time looking at the social and environmental kind of context of the Nebraska Panhandle while being based outta Big Springs. And then went to Lucas, Kansas, for what I thought was gonna be a 10-day residency at Woodpecker Archives to work on personal archiving and documentation and kind of like working on how my practice could become pedagogy.

And that 10, you know, I, on my millionth mile, my truck hit a deer. And, uh, that 10 days became the rest of my summer. So I've been continuing on the road with like rides and rentals, and I was in Kansas longer than I expected. And then up in Minnesota where I saw you for the Rural Futures Summit. Then I was up in the North Woods, and then I was in Montana looking at road construction for a really long time.

Um, I spent some time in the Sawtooths of Idaho, which is a part of the state I had never been to. I had about a week and a half at home to try and talk someone into giving me a ride back to Kansas for my truck. And that was just enough time to put together a bit of a miniature field school that I was calling the big Kansas field trip.

So myself and two other artists drove back to Kansas, um, a few weeks ago stopping at like cultural, an environmental sites through Wyoming and Nebraska all the way down into Kansas with like readings and dialogue and, and a lot of great like learning on the road with other people, which is something that I really treasure, but is actually pretty hard to access.

Yeah. And I am now on my return trip, so it's down in Kansas and I'm back in Nebraska talking to you From here, I go to Slippery Gulch days in Wallace, Idaho, the center of the universe, which is a celebration that only happens every 10 years and involves a drag performance of Swan Lake by the local miners.

That's what's next. And then I'm gonna be home for a week.

Matthew: Mary, thank you so much for all of your time and energy and just like inspiration and knowledge that you've shared across this really beautiful, wide-ranging conversation. Um, as you know, one of the questions we ask at the end of our podcast conversations is a question about inspiration.

Um, so yeah, what is moving you right now? What's inspiring you?

Mary: This is such a fun question. I've been thinking a lot about, uh, I think especially in our world of internet information, I've been thinking a lot about small press work and, um, local newspapers. We do have a newspaper museum in Palouse that is like such a really important holder of local histories.

But my favorite, my favorite small newspaper in the world was written by this guy named Swift Lathers. He lived in Oceania County, which is West Michigan. Um, and for 56 years, he published the world's smallest newspaper. He would, he would write it by like hitchhiking around the county and like collecting stories.

And so like, he would publish once a week and the newspaper is like the size of a sheet of paper, front and back, you know, handset type. And it's like social occurrences in the community, him riffing on the weather, him talking about things he's thinking about, and then him talking about what things other people are thinking about.

And I have quite a few of the newspapers from that collection, and I reread them because I'm like that, that is the kind of art I wanna be able to create someday. Like this super, super local and very consistent lifelong dispatch for a community to reflect upon itself. So I've been feeling very inspired by him and rereading old editions of the MES news.

I recently watched the Peewee Herman documentary. Have you seen it? Wow. Okay. It's a real treat. Um, it's called Peewee as Himself. It's two, two episodes. And what is so special about it and like, what I didn't know is that like Paul Rubins was an incredible documentarian and archivist and collector. And so a lot of this documentary is, is narrated by him shortly before he passed.

But it's, it's accompanied by like. Decades of footage. Like he was making videos as a child and like collecting photos and like, and then collecting the ephemera of the environments that he was growing up in. And so it's a beautiful piece to watch, not only for like the story of a person, but also like the ways that our collections tell our story and like become like these really, really important vessels for storytelling.

So I've, I really enjoyed that. And it's almost, you know, Labor Day is right around the corner, which is my favorite holiday. It's the only one that really, really matters to me. I like that nobody works and everybody rests, and it's like about workers' rights and our, and our right to rest. And so, um, I always celebrate Labor Day as like the full season.

I'll celebrate all of Virgo season as Labor Day by not working. Um, which for me also means a lot of reading. I am usually in Michigan during that time, so going to the beach and reading books. And so I like to read all my Virgo writers during Virgo season. So if you're gonna go to your local library and check out some books from the stacks like this, this is who I'm bringing with me.

All right. Uh, we got Ray Bradbury, Terry Tempest Williams, Loren Eisley, Mary Oliver, Borges, William Least Heat-Moon, Roger Tory Peterson, and adrienne marie brown. These are our patron saints of late summer. Get into them. Let yourself be immersed in the kind of worldbuilding that each of those writers does. Sink into it. Yeah. I

've been doing a lot of like returning to childhood books. I think in when times are as turbulent, un traumatic as they are, it's really nice to return to books that hold personal memory for you, and find some footing there.

Matthew: Mary, thank you so much for your time in this conversation and for leaving us with a reading list for the season ahead.

Mary: Hey, anytime I can always provide a reading list.

Matthew: Thanks. I'm grateful.