As the Artistic Director for the Western Folklife Center, I have the pleasure of working with Programs Coordinator Tamara Kubacki on the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. One of our big jobs of the year involves retreating to the penthouse of the Western Folklife Center (with lots of M & Ms) to create the master schedule for the Gathering.
We remain forever grateful to the person who invented Post-its as we embarked on creating the schedule for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering this Fall. We have been fine tuning our process for scheduling artists and sessions over the 26 years of the Gathering and this highly sophisticated approach seems to work the best for us so far. Our friends at the Northwest Folklife Festival turned us on to this method – their schedule grids cover multiple walls of their offices - and Tamara has come up with a color-coding system that is truly brilliant. Those Post-its get moved around a fair amount before all is said and done, but in the end we hope that everyone is satisfied. We find that in the process of doing this that we get more and more excited about seeing what is on paper come to fruition.
To see the final version of the schedule (which is truly never final until the Gathering happens) visit our website. Or, better yet, just make your way to Elko and experience it in person. We're looking forward to the poetry, the stories, the music, the dancing, the workshops, and good company beginning this Saturday!
See you soon!
Meg Glaser
