A Line Around Your Thoughts

Support A Line Around Your Thoughts on Patreon! Visit our Patreon community to learn more.This week, Ashley Demoville and Claire Rae Edmo are our guests. Ashley is the Dean of Visual, Performing and Applied Arts at Spokane Falls Community College, and Claire is the college's second sƛ̓x̣etkʷ Artist-in-Residence.

You can catch some of Claire's work at the Here & Now exhibition at SFCC. It runs until February 10, 2026.

Joining us in the Rogue Heart Media studio this week are Eric Woodard and Morgan Marie of Pivot Spokane.

Pivot is the long-running, local, live storytelling series that includes quarterly mainstage events featuring workshopped storytellers from the community as well as more casual, open-mic events.

With Pivot's mainstage event—themed "Rivals"—coming up on January 29, followed by the "Love Stinks" open mic event on February 11, Morgan and Eric came in to talk about what's in store for those.

As founding board members who've been with Pivot since the very beginning, they also share their thoughts on how the series has changed over the past nine years.

We're sitting down this week with Alex Calbick and Tiffany Bubna of Spokane Puppetry, which is a new organization that aims to share their passion for puppetry as a craft and puppets as a creative medium.

This year, Spokane Puppetry's previously ad hoc workshops are now a regular monthly event at both Art Salvage and Spark Central.

The first workshop of 2026 is at Art Salvage on January 10, and the second is at Spark Central on January 17. This month's workshop theme is shadow puppets.

Alex and Tiffany came in ahead of those workshops to talk about how the two of them came together around puppetry and why it's such an exciting and unique art form.

And to help make their case, they brought with them special guests like Kritch Kriggle and Takeout. If you want to see them instead of just hearing their voices, be sure to check out the vodcast.

Happy New Year!

Because of the holidays, we've had special episodes last week and this week. Together they make a two-part retrospective featuring moments from the Lightning Round that closes every interview.

Whereas last week's episode drew from the podcast's first four months, this episode features guests from the latter part of 2025. They include Mel Antuna Hewitt, Preston Singletary & Miranda Belarde-Lewis, Ginger Ewing & Jackie Caro, Charlie Pepiton & Michael Kropf, Olivia Brownlee, Susie Leonard Weller, Darien Mack, Christina Villagomez & Sara Mortier, Karin Wedemeyer and Brett & Rose Noble.

Merry Christmas! As regular listeners know—and as our guests are sometimes surprised to discover—every interview on A Line Around Your Thoughts closes with a Lightning Round.

This is the first of two special holiday episodes that revisit some Lightning Round moments from the past year. The selections in this episode are from ALAYT's first four months.

Featured guests include Troy Nickerson & Chris Jensen, James Lowe, Shelly Wynecoop, Bryan Harnetiaux, Jess Walter, Dominique Betts & Celeste Bidwell Williams, Gwyn Pevonka, Zuill Bailey, Rachel Bade-McMurphy, Jim Mohr and Joe & Sienna Henson.

This week's guest is also acting as our host. He is the lighting designer, photographer and filmmaker turned venue owner, Don Hamilton.

For this episode, Don invited A Line Around Your Thoughts to record at the Hamilton Studio, a former gym and auditorium in West Central that now moonlights as The Listening Room.

Since launching almost two years ago to the day, this roughly 200-seat venue has become a favorite destination for intimate music and theatrical performances — in part because of its great acoustics.

Don gets into the history of The Listening Room, the role that it fills in the community, his longer-term vision for the venue and why he's often comfortable when flying by the seat of his pants.

Thanks to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture for sponsoring this episode.

Additional thanks to Maono for providing one of their new PD200W wireless hybrid microphones as part of their #PodAnywhere campaign. It allowed us to have an entirely cable-free setup.

This episode features Brett & Rose Noble, the husband-and-wife team behind the DIY record label and event promoter 2-2-1 Press.

The now Spokane-based (by way of Illinois) label recently put out a scene compilation titled Beneath the Falls. They hosted the release concert for that back in November.

2-2-1 Press is, among many other things, also the organizer of the upcoming Sonic Solstice festival, which is now in its third year and will showcase 20 bands over two days on December 19 and 20 at the Garland Theater.

Rose and Brett talk about the ethos of DIY, the sounds and sonic influences of the bands on Beneath the Falls, the local punk/indie/hardcore scene as well as scented candles.

After the closing credits, you'll be able to hear the track "Record Skips" by Hayes Noble, who is Brett and Rose's son. His is one of the ten tracks on Beneath the Falls.

Thanks, too, to the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture for sponsoring this episode.

The audio equipment company Maono kindly provided their new PD200W hybrid wireless microphone for this episode as part of their #PodAnywhere campaign.

This week we're sitting down with Karin Wedemeyer, founder and executive director of both the Music Conservatory of Sandpoint and Sandpoint's Bel Canto Opera.

Since its founding in 2009, the Sandpoint Conservatory has grown to the point where it has an accredited, professional staff of around 20 and teaches several hundred students every year.

The conservatory also hosts and organizes events like the North Idaho Flute Festival, the Music Matters! after-school program, concerts by the North Idaho Philharmonia  as well as Bel Canto's vocal performances and light operas.

Karin sheds some light on how this very European model of music education found its way to Sandpoint, why humor is one of opera's best ambassadors and some of the things she misses about German Weihnachtsmärkte.

Thanks to the the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture for sponsoring this episode.

Our guest for this Thanksgiving Day episode is the choreographer, dancer, arts advocate and potter Suzanne Ostersmith.

Up until a few months ago, Suzanne was the chair of Gonzaga University's dance program — a program that she herself founded.

She retired in May after 25 years at the university, but she certainly hasn't been idle since then.

For one, she's been a multifaceted creative force behind Gonzaga's upcoming production of Thumbelina. The original story ballet is based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale and will include young dancers from local studios.

Suzanne also currently serves as co-chair of the Spokane Arts Commission, and on top of that, she's been cultivating a pottery practice. She talks about all those different strings in her bow and shares some insight into how Thumbelina first came about.

Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and a special shout-out to local artist and arts educator Carrie Scozzaro for helping to support the podcast.

On this week's episode, our guests are Sara Mortier and Christina Villagomez, who are tattoo artists based, respectively, in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene.

They currently have a joint exhibition titled Body of Work at the Terrain Gallery in Spokane. It runs until the end of November 2025.

One unique thing about this exhibition is its separation of tattoos from the human body. Instead the artists use silicone objects and mannequins as their medium.

Christina and Sara talk about the choices behind that and the growing acceptance of tattoos, not just in terms of fashion or modes of self-expression, but as fine art.

They also delve into gender biases in tattoo culture, how techniques once used in prison paved the way for a more feminine style of tattooing, plus movies that are actually dreams.

Many thanks to the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture for sponsoring this episode.