Editor’s Note: We are excited to share the first post in a new series called “Regional Dispatch.” Fractured Atlas’ membership spans all fifty States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and beyond, and each state, region, and locale has stories to tell about the arts community in which they live. We want our members to share these stories with us and talk up their communities - tell us what’s special, what’s unique, what’s amazing in their corner of the art-making world. First up is Amy Martin, a musician/songwriter/teacher who fills us in on how she ended up “Choosing Missoula” as her artistic home.

PS - if you have something to say about the artistic community in your home town, email Sarah McLellan (sarah.mclellan@fracturedatlas.org) and let her know!

Choosing Missoula:

I cried as I left Chicago. I took the long way - down Lakeshore Drive, through the loop, past all the gleaming buildings, just so I could cry longer, and harder. I was leaving the city I loved, and other things I loved, too, for vague and unsettling reasons. I needed to wander. I needed wilderness. I needed time and space to write, and sing, and think, and play my guitar. I was 26 years old. I was determined not to use the phrase “finding myself.”

Thanks to the gift of my grandmother’s powder-blue Oldsmobile, a little money I’d saved up as a freelance writer, a willingness to eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the kindness of my family and friends, I was able to spend most of a year floating around the West, writing, singing, thinking, playing, hiking and staring off into space. I visited several “intentional communities” (translation: communes) looking for the connection to the land that I’d felt growing up on an Iowa farm. My sister let me crash with her in San Francisco for several months, and I started busking, playing open mics, and eventually got a few small gigs. I sat in cafes for large parts of the day, writing in my journal. I camped on beaches and climbed Half Dome. I was finding myself.

Or maybe I was losing myself. Looking back, that’s more how it feels, like a shedding process. With intense confusion and self-doubt, I was winnowing away at something, eroding a shell I didn’t know I was wearing, trying to get at some pulsing, raw thing underneath. One night in Oregon, at a place called Lost Valley, I finally found the courage to look at it, and name it. I went to a candle-lit yurt where a few people were holding a vigil in honor of a celestial alignment. We didn’t really know each other, but when I whispered, “I’m a musician!” - the first time I’d said that out loud - they  nodded, and hugged me, and listened to me while I sang “How Can I Keep from Singing” in a squeaky and scared voice. Then I went back to my tent, and fell asleep under the dripping pines.

This may have been a great moment to return to Chicago, or San Francisco, or head off to New York City. All places I’d spent some time, and loved. All places where there were thousands of people like me, answering a creative calling, and where world-class art-making was happening in all disciplines, all the time. Instead, I headed to Montana, landed in Missoula, and within a few days, knew I was home. I don’t know how. I just knew I belonged here, and that I was staying.

That was the fall of 1999. Now, twelve years later, I continue to choose this place, this path. I could give you many reasons; the supportive creative community, the friendships that sustain me, the wild places that nourish me, the progressive, civic-minded vibe here. But the truth is, I choose Missoula in the same way that I choose a life as an artist: by instinct. Just because rational arguments can be made for these choices doesn’t mean logic is the true motivator. At the core, I’m an artist, and a Missoulian, because it feels right.

The older I get, the more value I place in this sort of intuitive decision-making. It’s how I write songs, how I teach, how I’m creating my first musical. Show up. Open. Listen. Respond. It’s a lot of improv, and it’s not easy - I like certainty as much as the next person. But I think a big part of my job as an artist is to expand my relationship with the mysterious, the arational. That’s how I stumble upon the invisible threads connecting me to others, to my deepest work, to the places where I can be most useful. It’s the original world wide web, unseen and not fully knowable, and it’s a delight and an honor to realize that it extends everywhere, to all of us. Even to Iowa farm girls and out-of-the-way mountain towns.