Photos (left to right): Sarah Baugh in a tree at the river beach and Nicole Lavelle at Green River High
Hello Green River.
We’re new here. We just arrived last week from Oregon, in a big, slow, brown van.
It took us a week to get from Portland to Green River, ambling down the Pacific Coast and east across the Great Basin. We camped among Port Orford cedars, walked up San Francisco’s steep hills, stopped into Elko during the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and ate Indian food in Salt Lake City.
But now we’re here. And that’s the most important part.
We hit the ground running on a community-based graphic design project called the Green River News. We’re here for the month of February to create a single-edition newspaper that will be a portrait of this place, a story of this town. We’re collaborating mainly with students from Green River High School, leading workshops during the school day and holding after-school sessions at the invitation of the CHEER (Creating a Healthy Environment and Encouraging Respect) Coalition. We also plan to engage seniors at the Senior Center and children at the Community Center.
Our goal is to make something exciting with the residents of Green River. We hope the project’s outcome will be meaningful and relevant to the people who live here, while also telling an interesting story about the place to outsiders.
Why Green River? We have both been here before, as Fellows with the Epicenter’s Frontier Fellowship program. The time we spent here getting to know the landscape and people made an impression on us. It made us want to return to help find the stories of this place. And so we have.
And so, for the next few weeks, please indulge us! Tell us what you did today. Send us to your neighbor with the interesting collection in his garage. Encourage your kids to come hang out with us after school and make something awesome. Show us your best photograph. Write a letter to the editor (that’s us)—we’ll probably print it. Welcome the high school students that we’ll be sending into the world to query you.
See you around town!
Sarah Baugh and Nicole Lavelle