Missoula, Montana among the top 10 towns nationwide for professional artists

Anyone who has wandered through a local bookstore or sat around a Missoula coffeehouse long enough knows that this town is full of writers. Most of us can tick off at least a few in the long list of well-known local authors: David James Duncan, James Lee Burke, Bill Kittredge, the McNamer sisters – the list goes on.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike was saying as much when he called Missoula "the Paris of the ’90s."

Now we have the numbers to prove it.

Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts released "Artists in the Workforce 1990-2005," http://www.nea.gov/news/news08/ArtistsinWorkforce.html a 150-page survey of data compiled from census records. The study is the first of its kind to document artist employment trends across the nation, broken down by cities and states.

By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/articles/2008/06/19/entertainer/ent03.txt