I launched an overnight artist residency in a former elementary school in the small town of Mineral, Washington, home to UFO sightings, a fishing lake, an active logging industry, a biker tavern with a weekly meat raffle and occasional karaoke, a historic bed and breakfast, a Lions Club, pastoral views of Mt. Rainier, and lots of gossip about lots of things, including what folks are up to “up at the school.”

The local paper erred on my name in its front-page article “Mineral Elementary Sold to Seattle Woman” and my mis-name — June Dodge — became the residency’s imaginary benefactor offering real fellowships each year. Since 2015, the program has hosted more than 125 artists (mostly writers, but visual artists as well), each of whom has come to stay for one or two weeks at a time. Creative folks are easy to host in that if you leave them alone and feed them, then they’ll get up to all kinds of mess on their pages and sketchbooks and in their heads — which is the point!

I didn’t do it all on my own, but I did shoulder the lion’s share of risk required to launch a from-scratch nonprofit startup, including buying and then managing the building for nine years (with a lot of help from its generous former owner), studying nonprofits at conferences and via continuing ed, securing fiscal sponsorship, designing our culinary program (and often cooking) and hosting protocols, penning grant applications and learning how to fundraise, and partnering with other organizations. We’ve gotten ink in Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, and Seattle Metropolitan. You can learn more about the program right here.