Journeys Home Publication Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni/Appalachia Collaboration is the title for a book proposed by Pueblo Zuni's A:shiwi Publishing Company. Through text and images, the book will examine the collaboration between Roadside and Zuni's Idiwanan An Chawe and the bilingual play they created together. The play, Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons uses traditional and contemporary humor, storytelling, music, and dance to tell the story of the agricultural life that once sustained and guided people in Zuni and in the Appalachian Mountains. Central to the book's inquiry will be essays on the Appalachian dialect and the Zuni language. (The Zuni alphabet was created in the early 1970's.) The entire bi-lingual text of the play will be printed. Young people and adults, inside and outside of school and academic settings, are expected to find the book useful. Presently, A:shiwi Publishing is seeking underwriting for the publication.
		C. B. Caudill Store Residency Roadside Theater has received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture/ Forestry Services to conduct a theater residency in east Kentucky. Important to the work will be activities with the C.B. Caudill Store in Blackey, Kentucky. For generations, the C.B. Caudill Store has served as an unofficial community center and repository for local history. Joe and Gaynell Begley, the store's most recent owners, have been actively involved in citizens' efforts against strip mining and other issues that threaten to tear apart their land and people, as well as in fighting for those things that keep a community together and make it a better place, such as helping to establish a library, senior citizens center, and Head Start classrooms in Blackey. For the last thirty years, policy makers, writers, network reporters, and visitors from six continents have made the journey down Kentucky Highway 7 to the store at Blackey to meet Joe and Gaynell. This year, as a result of their ages and of a weakening local economy, the Begleys made the decision to shut down the store as a commercial enterprise and turn it into a history center/living museum. The plan for the store is not just to curate a museum, but to continue to provide a public space for discussion, learning, storytelling, and citizen participation.

HOPE House Residency

This fall, Roadside is conducting a storytelling residency with staff and clients of the HOPE House/Family Crisis Support Services, a professional, nonprofit agency serving six Appalachian Mountain communities in southwestern Virginia with comprehensive services for battered women and their chidren. The project, funded by the Gwathmey Memorial Trust, will lead participants through a series of workshops to uncover and present their personal stories.

Choteau, Roadside Exchange

This year, Performing Arts League/Prairie Mountain Players (PAL/PMP) of Choteau, Montana and Roadside Theater will create two new plays drawn from the stories and music of their respective communities. The companies will tour their new work to each other's home towns in the spring of '98. This rural exchange furthers a relationship begun five years ago by a multi-year American Festival Project in which Roadside was one of the national companies working with PAL/PMP as they created their first original musical play from their community's stories.