Made-to-order autumn weather – warm but breezy – blessed the annual Millstream Arts Festival, which attracted thousands to downtown St. Joseph on Sept. 29.
For six hours, visitors strolled up and down the city’s main street and onto its side streets to enjoy dozens of exhibits of arts and crafts, a variety of live music and plenty of food from food vendors.
The arts and crafts included a mind-boggling variety of offerings: paintings, sculptures, pottery, jewelry, plaques, photography, wood products, textiles and even handmade canoes.
Special features this year included a tribute exhibition to the late James Loso, a long-time St. Joseph potter who died a year ago, a series of nine paintings of “Our Lady of Guadalupe” in the St. Joseph Catholic Church’s Gathering Place and an open-mic session for readings of prose and poetry.
Dalman was born and raised in South St. Cloud, graduated from St. Cloud Tech High School, then graduated from St. Cloud State University with a degree in English (emphasis on American and British literature) and mass communications (emphasis on print journalism). He studied in London, England for a year (1980-81) where he concentrated on British literature, political science, the history of Great Britain and wrote a book-length study of the British writer V.S. Naipaul. Dalman has been a reporter and weekly columnist for more than 30 years and worked for 16 of those years for the Alexandria Echo Press.