Simone Lazzeri "Nancy" Ellis

Simone (Nancy) Ellis was born in 1952 in the heart of the Tetons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She attended high school in Montrose, Colorado where she became an early thespian, avid reader and realized she wanted to be a writer. She studied philosophy at the University of Northern Colorado and audited law classes at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Simone was drawn to the counterculture of the 1960's and fell in with the Beat Poets and early American Buddhist community established by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in Boulder, Colorado where she attended the first classes of Naropa University. While there, Simone taught writing classes and edited Bombay Gin, the literary journal of Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. It was here that she developed a lifetime relationship with the writer William S. Burroughs who became her mentor and friend up until his death in 1997. Her literary friends and influences included Beat writers, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger, and Diane diPrima, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creely and Edward Dorn, who became a life-long friend and mentor.
Inspired by the works of the “father of underground film", Stan Brakhage, Simone moved to San Francisco in 1979, where she studied film at The San Francisco Art Institute, shared digs for a while with Gregory Corso, and worked on a book of interviews she did with prostitutes called “In the Vernacular,” excerpts of which were featured in Rolling Stock magazine. During this time she met the Japanese American painter Arthur Okamura, whom she married in the early 1980s. They lived in Bolinas, California, a burgeoning art colony in Marin County. While she was married to Arthur, Simone's collection of poetry titled "Rosy Belligerents" was published under the pen name Simone O by Poltroon Press. Arthur did the cover drawing for her book.

After their divorce, Simone moved in 1986 to British Columbia to teach poetry in the schools in remote native communities. She continued writing, published a little magazine for the small town of 100 Mile House where she lived, and thought seriously of becoming a Canadian citizen. Instead, she applied for and got the job as head art critic for Pasatiempo, the arts publication of The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper during the gold rush of fine art in the Southwest. She moved down there and her book, Santa Fe Art, is still considered to be one of the best surveys of southwest art in the 1990's.
Simone later moved to Missoula, Montana to get under The Big Sky and write. She was president of MCAT ( Missoula Public Access TV) where she advocated for free speech and real news. She wrote for the Missoulian and The Independent as a free lance journalist, again covering pertinent environmental concerns, and the arts. Her spectrum of friends had a reach that reflected her open, inclusive, experimental and curious nature. She had a special resonance with The Millennial Generation who could often be found in her living room talking art, politics and activism. Simone was everywhere, constantly giving her support, feedback and encouragement to young and emerging artists. She later became an unofficial den mother to the local youth in her neighborhood in Missoula where she encouraged the kids to express themselves and to overcome their circumstances.

Simone endured many heath complications throughout her life, much of them stemming from a major head injury from a fall she had taken in her early twenties. She died of a hemorrhagic brain stroke on July 18th, 2017 at St Patrick hospital with her loved ones present. Surrounded with gentle, constant compassion and mercy, she was never alone during this time and she passed quietly without struggle. Always the perennial teacher, Simone gave us all a lesson in impermanence we will not soon forget. May You Walk in Beauty, Simone!

A celebration of Simone's life will take place on Sunday, August 6th at The MASC studio located at 1200 Shakespeare Street in Missoula from 6:30-8:30 pm. Please come one and all.