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THE LAKEVIEW TERRACE HOTEL became a fixture of the idyllic Front Range town of Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, in the late nineteenth century. Now, in a new immersive installation produced during 2022’s Green Box artist residency, author and bookmaker Molly Rideout is telling the stories of the women who made it run.

“These were women who were divorced, or widowed, or who were divorced and pretending to be widowed, because it was socially easier to say that,” Rideout says. “I’ve always been interested in what it was like to navigate the world as a woman before the right to vote—what was allowed, what wasn’t allowed, and how women found ways to get around those social or legal boundaries. And so for that reason, the stories of these women were really quite fascinating to me.”

Instead of collecting these narratives in a bound volume, the thirty-four-year-old artist from Wisconsin is putting them into the world through a practice she calls “public writing.” Visitors to the formerly abandoned downtown hotel, once a thriving ten-room inn that served meals for up to sixty guests daily, will find nine unearthed stories of its women managers splashed in vinyl script across the front windows. Conjured from extensive archival research, The Managers leverages their accounts into a kaleidoscopic view of the building’s history and heritage, skillfully weaving together the threads of essay, microfiction, and visual art.

Rideout says this discipline-scrambling approach to historical storytelling offers a path for connecting with communities outside the confines and paywalls of traditional literary journals. It’s also, she stresses, in a constant state of evolution.

“This kind of work is always an imprecise work. It’s nonfiction, but I’m working in historical archives on people for whom there wasn’t a lot of historical archive,” Rideout says. “This is the truth as best I know it today. Who knows what I will know tomorrow.”