From Boise Feature: Extra! Extra! Read All About It!
Feature of From Boise
By Mya Parr, April 2026
The Voice Boise Didn’t Know It Needed
Boise has always been a place defined by its small town charm with its ever-growing urban sprawl. In the swirl of growth that Boise is experiencing one woman has built something that feels like a compass.
From Boise, the weekly newsletter and podcast reaching more than 20,000 readers is more than a media project. It’s a living archive, community diary, and a love letter to the city. And at the center of it is founder and writer Marissa Lovell, who didn't set out to become one of Boise’s most trusted storytellers, but did.
All Roads Lead to (From) Boise
“I’ve worked in a lot of different places and done a lot of different things,” Marissa told me as we settled into the conversation. Her route here wasn’t straight, PR jobs, freelance writing, the creative chaos of Treefort Music Hall. But it was the pandemic that shifted her gears.
In early 2020, Treefort postponed its festival for 18 months, taking with it much of Marissa’s freelance workload. “I wanted to write about Boise,” she said. “I had freelanced for news outlets, but I wanted to write about it in my own voice. I wanted it to feel human, not newsy.”
At the same time, she met Nathan Barry, founder of the platform Kit (and a Boise-area local), who had been hoping a local newsletter would take shape. “We went in on it together,” she said. “He helped me build the foundation. Then he basically said, ‘This is how you run a newsletter business. Off you go.’”
She sent that first email out to 250 people on March 30, 2021. “It was called ‘What’s going on in Boise these days?’ Because honestly, none of us knew.”
Within a year, From Boise had 10,000 subscribers. Today, it’s more than double that and is ever growing.
“Boise Didn’t Have Anything Like It”
At the time, no one else was creating a true local newsletter. There were publications like Boise Weekly and BoiseDev, but nothing with the same community-forward, voice-driven, storytelling-centered format.
“I didn’t have a website or a blog. It was just the newsletter,” Marissa said. “Which is still true.”
People quickly understood the charm: a personality-filled lens on their city equal parts history, events, culture, and hidden gems. Something that made Boise… well.. Boise.
The Podcast She Never Planned to Make
The podcast was never part of the plan. In fact, it started with a husband who wasn’t reading her newsletter.
“My husband is an arborist, always driving around,” she said. “He’d say ‘Hey, did you know this thing is happening?’ And I’d be like, ‘I just wrote about that! Why don’t you read my thing?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t have time to read it… but I’d listen to it.”
Marissa laughed. “I thought, okay–how hard would it be to just read it out loud?”
So she did. And From Boise became not only something to read, but something to listen to while driving, walking, or working on trees.
Marissa’s First Law of Motion: A City in Motion, Needs a Good Storyteller to Move With It
When I asked what it’s been like documenting Boise as it grows, Marissa paused and searched for the right way to describe a city in transition.
“There’s this struggle,” she said. “Boise used to have a very DIY, don’t-ask-permission creative culture. Things just happened. Like The Modern Hotel who moved the hotel room beds out, turning rooms into installations, bands playing in the bathroom. That spirit is still here, but the city is more… cityish now.”
Corporate buildings, polished restaurants, accelerated growth. But also new edges of creativity sprouting in neighborhoods beyond downtown.
“It’s not better or worse. Just different,” she said. “There’s still weird, cool stuff happening, but it’s expanding. The perimeter is growing.”
From Boise captures both sides: the nostalgia and the reinvention. Legacy businesses like Stagecoach. New creative projects in Garden City. People who left and returned with big ideas. The old and the emerging, meeting in the middle.
A More Human Way of Storytelling
What sets From Boise apart isn’t only its content, but the way it’s told.
“I love writing about history,” Marissa said. “My readers love it too. But what people really want is connection. Something that makes them feel like they’re part of Boise’s story.”
She dives into archives, interviews locals, and surfaces the parts of a story that feel the most human. “Traditional news stories leave out the coolest parts because they don’t fit the format,” she said. “I want to write the parts that actually make you care.”
Her skateboarding history article is a perfect example. She dug into old Idaho Statesman archives, finding quotes like:
“These kids need to stop what they’re doing and act like adults.”
(“It made absolutely no sense,” she said, laughing.)
The response to that piece surprised even her. “So many skaters reached out just grateful that someone wrote a positive story about skateboarding."
A City That Roots for Its Creatives
Marissa lit up when she talked about the Boise creative scene.
“People think there’s competition here, but there really isn’t–not among creatives. Everyone is generous. Everyone wants cool things to happen here.”
She pointed to collectives like Oldspeak and community meetups like The Write Club, a space for small business owners to work on their business rather than in their business. “People sit together, brainstorm, share advice. It’s amazing what happens in Boise when you ask questions and connect.”
Her own advice to creatives?
Just start. “You cannot plan your way into perfection. Launch and figure it out as you go.”
Ask for help. “People here want to support you.”
Don’t ignore the boring stuff. “Creatives are great at creating and terrible at taxes,” she said. “It’s easier to be creative when the stressful things are buttoned up.”
The Future of From Boise
Marissa has big dreams. Some underway, some still forming.
“I want to grow the newsletter to 100,000 people,” she said.
And she’s experimenting with ways to blend online discovery with real-life experiences. “People tell me all the time they tried something because of the newsletter. I love that.”
More guides, more storytelling, more community building. And someday, her long-envisioned “Just Got Here Guide”, a not-your-typical relocation resource for new Boiseans, stacked with the strange, sweet, and culturally rich stories that make this city unique.
Her Boise, Her Favorites
“Oh, I can never pick just one,” she said immediately.
Sage Brush Collaborative’s Trinket Library,
The Clothesline Art Sale by Commonwheel,
Wandering Treefort with no plan,
Letting the troll out on the way up and down Bogus,
The hidden-in-plain-sight Coffee Life on Franklin,
And, maybe most endearingly, “I love that people here hold doors open for each other. It’s a little thing, but it’s Boise.”
A City Stitched Together By Stories
From Boise is more than just a newsletter. It is a gathering space. A way for Boiseans to see themselves and each other with more warmth, curiosity, and connection.
Marissa didn’t set out to capture a city in transition, but through her storytelling, she’d created something rare:
A record of Boise’s past and present, written with enough heart to shape its future.
