The Montrose County School Board has announced that Superintendent Dr. Carrie Stephenson resigned, at their request.

Local playwright and director Marty Durlin is bringing a new musical theater experiment, “Outspoken,” to the Blue Sage Center for the Arts in Paonia. The piece explores nearly 200 years of activism through the stories and words of five women: Lucy Stone, Kate Richards O’Hare, Emma Goldman, Judi Bari and Greta Thunberg.

Sweitzer Lake State Park is undergoing a massive redevelopment and expansion project that will bring overnight camping back to the park for the first time since 1981. Recent land purchases have allowed the park to triple in size from around 200 acres to 600 acres.

“Make this your worst draft.” That’s what Craig Childs will often say to students when they first sit down to write. “We’re creating stuff out of nowhere, so we’re lucky to get a word down on a page. We’re exploring options.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with the popular creative non-fiction author about his own unusual path to a writing career. Our conversation includes:How to invite intuition and surprise into your writing,How teaching writing changes and enhances our understanding of our own process,How a thesaurus, used unconventionally, can be a great tool for when you’re stuck,Creative ways to take words from a page and bring them to life,And how a journaling practice helps inform a writing practice.Craig will be a keynote speaker at the 2026 Grand Mesa Writers’s Symposium in Cedaredge on September 11-13.CRAIG CHILDS is an explorer who brings tales of deserts and ice caps to the page. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including The Secret Knowledge of Water, Atlas of a Lost World, Stone Desert, Virga & Bone, Tracing Time, and The Wild Dark. His books have won numerous honors including the Reading the West Book Award, Southwest Book of the Year, a Foreword INDIES medal, and the Orion Book Award. His nonfiction narratives and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, High Country News, The New York Times, The Sun, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Radiolab. He blogs at Last Word On Nothing. Childs lives in southwest Colorado.

I drove to the bluff overlooking the “Gunny” to process the sad news — news that hasn’t yet been made official — that by October a big portion of the lower Gunnison River in western Colorado will be dry. The official term is “fully dewatered.”Monsoons were supposed to be heavy this year. As I looked down at the river in late August, clouds in the distance appeared almost monsoonal. Wisps of rain streamed out, but they evaporated before reaching the parched ground. It just about made me cry.Below me, the North Fork of the Gunnison unceremoniously trickled into the Gunnison River at a place known as Pleasure Park, a weather-beaten outpost of civilization that’s one of the last best-kept secrets in Colorado.

Life will always contain ups and downs. I often think about it like a trail through the mountains. You can't always be on a mountain top. You have to come back down and spend some time in the valley before you can go back up again.

Colorado is home to several International DarkSky Places, including Paonia right here in the KVNF’s listening area. Naturita, Nucla, and Norwood are part of that growing statewide commitment to preserving natural darkness – and along the Unaweep Tabeguache Scenic & Historic Byway, that commitment becomes visible the moment the sun goes down. If you’ve ever traveled the UTB, you know it’s more than a road. It’s a 133mile ribbon of canyoncountry, redrock walls, winding rivers, and quiet mesas. Highway 141 and 145 carry you through landscapes shaped by deep time - and when night falls, that landscape expands upward. The sky becomes part of the scenery.

KVNF's weekly call-in gardening show. As the Worm Turns is now on Wednesday's @ 5 PM.

Ted Feighan more popularly known as Monster Rally shares insight to his latest album Echoes of the Emerald Sands.