To my friends, family, neighbors, and comrades,

Time moves us, who keeps up?

If you’re getting this dispatch for the first time, I’m really happy we met this year! There were so many connective seasons: gatherings and summits and chance encounters, new folks and old friends and a snail trail of small highways and even smaller towns. I’m glad for every chance we had to come together across time and space and memory.

More Parades launched just a little over one year ago, and I can hardly believe all that has happened since that first round of paperwork. I clocked over 30,000 business miles back and forth across the country this year, making circles in the heartland. The truck got wrecked and then fixed by the work of every single one of my friends (ad astra per aspera!); I was helped out, hurried along, hollered at, and heartened from coast to coast to coasting all the way home. I’m constantly reminded, as we say in Palouse: together we are building it.

My neighbor taught me how to use “quickbooks” this year, so I am finally able to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing my own annual report. This is not a joke! After almost two decades of designing and producing annual reports for other non-profit organizations, it was an actual delight to do my own data storytelling and have something beautiful to share with so many of you, especially those that have donated to this young organization. We’re doing the humble hard work of day-to-day resourcing; take a moment to see what you have been a part of bringing into reality. I dare you to read it! Prove to me that your brain hasn’t been fracked into oblivion by the apps! Share it out! Let’s grow the possibilities :)

Available for reading online, and to a select few: in-person print outs available by request at the Palouse Rural Library. 

TLDR? Here’s some top headlines:

• We are currently renovating and building out a rural artist resource center in downtown Palouse 🌾

• We started fundraising to build a local community radio station & provide financial resources for rural touring musicians 💿

• Tune into this Art of the Rural interview for a little bit of lore, Tending to Place: Art, Reciprocity and the Road with Mary Welcome 🚧

• Have you ever heard of the Strange Grange? You gotta come see it to believe it. 🏆

As funding and income and money-in-general becomes so much more scarce for all of us (RIP the penny, among other things), remember that you can keep your coinage out of the mouth of the war machine by making a tax-deductible donation before year’s end. If you don’t have funds to share, go ahead and light us a candle, make a big wish, and know that new futures are possible when we all cash in together.

Tuck into these long nights, stay dry and keep warm, quit your phone, listen to the wind, write me a letter, and let’s make a plan to see one another somewhere along the way next year.

Best,
Mary

P.S. I just released the 2026 secret calendar into cyberspace, go find it!

📚 Recent Top Reads
✎ Emergence Magazine, Volume IV by many excellent contributors, topic: shifting landscapes
✎ They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by Mariah Blake
✎ The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

📻 Current Jams
✺ BBC’s The Dark Is Rising ✺ Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu, ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod 🕯️
✺ Sea of Bliss ✺ Anyone who has come by my library in the past month knows this is the only record I’m listening to 🌊
✺ Old Trails ✺ Raise your hand if you know what a rock jack is, and clap your hands if you brake for post rocks 🪨