Mary May, author of “Carving the Acanthus Leaf,” has long offered woodcarving classes via Mary May’s School of Traditional Woodcarving. Mary offers membership to an online video school, video courses and video lessons. Now, she’s offering in-person classes in her new school, which overlooks the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri.
For more than 20 years, Mary and her husband, Stephen, lived on a couple of acres in the country on Johns Island, South Carolina. She considered opening a school in Charleston, but the costs and bureaucracy proved problematic. In the meantime, Mary was spending a lot of time visiting her sister, Maggie, who owns Maggie’s on the Lake, a bar and grill in the Ozarks.
“We fell in love with the Lake of the Ozarks area,” Mary says.
As luck would have it, Maggie owned property next door to her restaurant that included a lakefront house. Maggie sold the property to Mary. Mary and Stephen moved to Missouri and now live in the lakefront home, which also offers ample room for a woodcarving school.
The classroom is filled with large windows overlooking the Lake of the Ozarks. A couple of years ago, Mary bought benches at a Grizzly tent sale. She didn’t need them at the time, but thought they’d come in handy if she opened an in-person school someday (they did). They’re hefty and perfect, she says.
The classes are small, with room for about six students.
“It’ll be very personalized,” she says.
This personalization enables Mary to work with students of varying skill levels. In addition to offering a structured class environment, she’s open to including more advanced students who may be working on a more difficult project but need some one-on-one guidance.
“Because it’s a small enough class, I’ll have time to focus on that,” she says. “When you have 15 students, it’s really hard to do that. So this is going to make me a lot more flexible.”
In the future, she also hopes to open her doors to students who want to turn woodcarving into a career and are eager to learn for longer periods of time. The study would be independent, with Mary available to offer help and guidance as needed.
Mary also plans to continue to teach around the country a bit as well.
No matter the format – book, online or in-person – Mary loves teaching.
“It really is very adventurous because you just never know what people come up with,” she says. “Especially during those open classes where people bring their own carvings and their own work to do. It always reminds me of playing a chess game, where you see completely different ideas as you move around the room.”
Mary also loves her beginning courses. These courses are carefully structured, with a large video screen that walks students through the process methodically, step by step.
“It’s amazing how easily they can get through a project that they didn’t think they could get through,” she says. “They pick up a chisel for the first time, and two days later, they’ve carved this. It’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see their excitement.”
You can learn more about Mary’s in-person classes, including her 2026 class schedule, here.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl