In an article in “The Conversation,” researchers Rob MacKenzie and Richard Norby, with the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), shared findings from a recent study published in Nature Climate Change. Their question: How will trees respond to more CO2 in the future?
Their laboratory is a forest in Staffordshire, England. Their equipment, tall pipes that infuse the air with extra CO2. Their samples, 180-year-old English oak (Quercus robur).
“After we increased CO2 levels to what will be the planetary level in the 2050s, trees took more of it from the atmosphere and their wood production increased by 10%,” MacKenzie and Norby wrote.
Several FACE (Free Air Carbon Enrichment) experiments are happening around the world in an attempt to better understand which trees are more likely to thrive in the future. You can learn more about BIFoR FACE here. And you can watch a video about the BIFoR FACE facility here, and a more recent video about BIFoR FACE experiments here.
Tom grew up in Eugene, Oregon. He spent his childhood outdoors knocking around Eugene’s urban forest areas wearing moccasins he made after immersing himself in books on Indigenous American material culture, fly fishing with his dad and cruising around town on his bike with friends. He has an older sister, now a journalist in Boston. His mom dipped in and out of various jobs including full- and part-time caregiving, and working at a marketing firm, an organic food store and University of Oregon’s (UO) Clark Honors College. He remembers watching his dad, an academic librarian who spent his entire career at UO’s Knight Library, tying his own fishing flies and making knives.
The closest public school just happened to be a French immersion school. Learning another language served as a good brain teaser growing up, and now helps him navigate Europe, “in my very enthusiastic French, which may or may not be correct,” he says, laughing.
When Tom was about 8 years old his mom took him to REI. A rock climbing gym across the street had set up a little climbing wall in the store. Tom tried it out.
“And I just got obsessed with rock climbing,” he says. “Until maybe 15 or so, that was my life.”
Bouldering in Wyoming, 1996.
It was the very early days of the Junior Competitive Climbing Association (Tom was member No. 12). He climbed in competitions all over the West Coast, and even went to nationals a few years.
In 8th grade, Tom got into a bad bike crash. With forced time off from climbing competitions he realized how much more fun it was to simply climb outside with friends. He left the pressure of competitions behind and moved on to alpine climbing and backpacking. He helped start a mountaineering club at his high school. And he did several big climbs – Mount Hood, Mount Shasta and smaller volcanoes in Oregon. He also took some big backpacking trips, including a month-long NOLS course in Wyoming when he was 17.
Mount Shasta, 2013.
Tom looks back with a bit of awe at how trusting his parents were, allowing him to head off with friends and adult climbing mentors to climb mountains, take a 12-hour trip to Spokane for a competition or spend the weekend backpacking.
“It was pretty wonderful,” he says. “It showed a lot of trust. I had some really wonderful mentors and learned a lot.”
Dartmouth’s Outing Club & an Education In Timber Framing, Geography & Studio Art
Tom attended Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was given the freedom to create his own major – part geography, part architectural history, part architectural justice, part studio art. He likes to call it “cities and buildings.” Tom focused on human geography, looking at how the built environment affects people, privileging some and criminalizing others. He took lots of architecture studios. Timber framing and the buildings in New England, so different from where he grew up, inspired him. When Tom asked to forge his own path, the deans at Dartmouth simply asked for a proposal.
“That trust of students still inspires me in my work,” Tom says.
To further illustrate this trust, Tom shares a story. In middle school, he took a class at a cycling center and got really into fixing up old bikes. At Dartmouth, he noticed abandoned bikes locked up on bike racks for months on end. After about a year, he decided to liberate them. His intent? Fix them up for friends. While liberating one such bike a campus police officer showed up. Tom explained.
“Yeah, I can tell that it’s abandoned but you can’t just take it,” the officer said.
Long story short, Tom ended up in a room with one of the deans. He braced himself for consequence but was instead met with curiosity. The dean asked him to put together a proposal for a program for abandoned bikes, and Tom did. It included a budget, storage solutions and how they would be distributed via the college’s cycling club. Tom says the abandonment of hard-and-fast rules for trust, responsibility and accountability in that moment was eye-opening.
Tom largely chose the college due to the Dartmouth Outing Club, “which is this wonderful storied institution that started in 1909,” he says. It’s student driven, and nearly a quarter of the college’s students are members. In addition to networks of trails, shelters and cabins, the Outing Club offers nearly every outdoor program you can think of, from water sports, skiing, hiking and climbing to hunting, fishing and forestry.
“It’s just an amazing organization and a real education because, again, the amount of trust and responsibility the adults gave the students was such a gift,” Tom says. “We were put in charge of pretty significant projects.”
An example: The summer after Tom’s freshman year, he and two fellow undergrads were responsible for rebuilding a long stretch of the Appalachian Trail that ran along the side of a mountain in New Hampshire. Dartmouth provided them withacourse called “Wilderness Chainsaw Use,” taught by the U.S. Forest Service, then simply gave them a truck, tools and list of work. That summer they replaced rock steps, rebuilt water bars and built a bridge.
“It was incredible,” Tom says. “I teach at a university now and that would never happen now. Never, ever. And it doesn’t happen at Dartmouth the same way. There’s much more supervision.”
Roofing a trail shelter in New Hampshire, 2007.
Tom dedicated his time to the Outing Club’s Cabin and Trail division, which was responsible for maintaining almost 75 miles of Appalachian Trail (these days it’s less). Responsibilities included maintaining all the three-sided Adirondack shelters along the trail and their associated privies. During a meeting it was announced that the Cabin and Trail club’s Cabin Maintenance chair was studying abroad and they needed a replacement.
“For some reason I raised my hand not knowing anything,” Tom says. “And I got handed my first assignment, which was to replace two outhouses.”
As luck would have it, a man named Ira Friedrichs showed up at this same meeting. Ira wasn’t a student. An apprentice to Jay White Cloud, a master timber framer in Thetford Hill, Vermont, Ira was simply hoping to meet some people and maybe help out with a few projects. He and Tom hit it off, and Ira suggested they timber frame the privies together. Ira taught Tom Japanese timber framing and over spring break they pre-cut two small timber frames for the privies. Appalachian Trail regulations required the outhouses be wheelchair accessible, which meant each structure needed a 4′-wide circle. Despite using 2x4s and 4x4s, the frames were heavy. One of the privies was to be located a couple of miles in on a flat trail. Tom and Ira lashed the timbers to wheelbarrows and carts, hand carried them, and put them up in a weekend, hanging the walls on French cleats. The second outhouse, however, was on top of a mountain.
“And that was pretty brutal because we had to slog through mud and this dude was trying to help us with an ATV but that kept getting stuck,” Tom says. “So we’re skidding these timbers up and it was a disaster. But we got them up there eventually and we kind of bodged it together and it was fine.”
Timber framing, 2006.
Velvet Rocks Trail Shelter, Hanover, New Hamshire, Hemlock, 2007. Built in collaboration with Ira Friedrichs.
Tom fell in love with timber framing. He and Ira timber framed the Appalachian Trail’s Velvet Rocks Shelter, and the summer after he graduated, Tom designed and timber framed a sugaring house for an organic farm. He felled the trees, worked with a local sawyer to mill them and erected it on site.
“That was just a really neat farm-to-table building experience,” Tom says.
An Open Woodshop
While at Dartmouth, Tom also had access to the Student Woodshop, located in Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts.
“It started in the ’20s and the story I heard was some alumnus said, ‘The men of Dartmouth are getting weak and not learning how to use their hands. I’m going to endow a woodshop so that they can remember what it is to be real men!’ You know, some bullshit like that. But the institution has definitely lasted and it’s just wonderful. It’s an enormous woodshop with wonderful tools and a full-time staff.”
There are no woodworking classes, rather the Student Woodshop is simply an open studio. Tom wanted to build a blanket chest so he checked it out. Staff including Greg Elder, director of the Student Woodshop, taught him how to use the tools, how to think about what’s needed to take rough lumber to square, and how to balance hand work with machine work.
“It was just an amazing privilege to have access to that and that just gave me such a bug,” Tom says.
Occasionally, Walker Weed, former director of the Student Woodshop, would come by to use a machine. Reed was a well-known New England studio woodworker who had been featured in Fine Woodworking, “a good legend and guiding light at that place,” Tom says.
Sugar house, built 2008
Throughout college Tom made a bunch of little blanket and sea chests – a lot of machine dovetails, he says. After graduating in 2007, he sharpened tools at the Student Woodshop a few hours a week, giving him full access to the shop. Then, he started getting commissions. First was the sugaring house for the organic farm. Then Jay hired him to help build a small wing onto his house. And a local guy asked him to build a fly-tying desk.
“I just bit off way more than I could chew,” Tom says. “I made this really elaborate crazy-ass thing. The whole base was basically timber framed with all these big wedged through-tenons. And then the top was all hand-cut dovetails on this stepped, Tansu-looking series of little cabinets, all hand-cut dovetail drawers, and I think I asked for what at the time felt like an impossible price and then of course I ended up making about $3 an hour.”
Patmos, Greece, 2008.
During his senior year, Tom learned about a grant from Dartmouth’s art department: An alum had given money so that students could go to Europe and be inspired by architecture. That sounded pretty good to Tom so he applied and got the grant. After graduation he stuck around Hanover for about 10 months then bummed around Europe for three months, stretching the grant as long as he could.
Archival Clothing
Once back from Europe, Tom returned home to Eugene, where he lived for a few years part-time. He took occasional jobs at Dartmouth and traveled, and when in Eugene he worked as a prep cook in a French restaurant, later moving to the restaurant’s coffee shop where he slung espresso for a while. Around this time he reconnected with an old friend, Lesli Larson.
“She was a very influential person,” Tom says. “She loves old clothing, fishing and outdoor clothes, and she had this great blog called Archival Clothing. And we are just really good buds. We’d go on long-distance bike rides and chitchat about all the old clothing and ephemera that she had.”
Eventually, Tom and Lesli decided to make some things inspired by Lesli’s collection and sell it on Lesli’s blog. They found a sewing contractor in the Yellow Pages – T & J Custom Sewing & Design. The owners, Julie and Terry Shuck, turned out to be “amazing folks,” Tom says, and coached them through the conception-to-reality process.
Tom with Terry Shuck, 2010.
First up was a bag. The Shucks asked for a drawing and material, and explained how the pricing would work. Using what he learned about technical drawing in his architecture studios, Tom drew up some pencil fashion plates and sewed some crude prototypes. With that, the Shucks made 20 bags, and Tom and Lesli put them up on Lesli’s blog. They immediately got snapped up.
“We thought, That’s really fun,” Tom says. “And then we just kept doing that. We did a bigger run of bags and a bigger run of bigger bags and we made backpacks and before you knew it we had a third business partner, one of Lesli’s college friends. And we had a full-on company on our hands called Archival Clothing.”
Tom began to look more closely at product design as a career. He applied and was accepted into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, to earn a master’s of industrial design degree. His thesis was on the physical infrastructure of home cooking but his real education, he says, had more to do with the success of Archival Clothing.
Prototyping at Pratt, 2014.
“It was really good timing,” Tom says. “I moved in summer 2010, the peak fever of the men’s heritage trend. Everyone wanted Filson stuff and Barbour stuff and wax cotton this and heavy wool that and that has always been Lesli’s thing.”
Living in Brooklyn, Tom was able to go to New York Fashion Week events and meet with stylists. Archival Clothing did a co-op with Barneys New York. The company was mentioned in The New York Times. Tom met Archival Clothing’s Japanese, Scandinavian and other European distributors. He went to shows in Berlin.
At a New York City trade show, 2013.
“It was a really incredible education and I think I might have learned more doing the Archival Clothing stuff than in grad school just because it was so applied and so immediate,” Tom says. “It was just a phenomenal, and sometimes difficult, education in product design, production and sales.”
Tom says if he had his wits about him he would have been a little more consistent, studying domestic manufacturing of soft goods, for example, versus industrial design.
“One of my many foibles is over-enthusiasm that spreads me a little thin,” he says.
From Office to Classroom
Tom and Lesli are still best friends, but after some disagreements with their third business partner, Tom left Archival Clothing. In 2014 he got a job as design director at Best Made Co., where he was immediately thrown into the deep end, being tasked with designing everything from men’s shirting, outerwear and bottoms to steel storage solutions.
“The founder might have an idea for something and then with relatively limited marching orders I was responsible for making it happen,” he says.
He also learned some valuable lessons.
“I definitely had my share of fails where I just overpromised what I thought could happen and I had to learn a lot about being realistic in industry production and maybe not trusting everything that everyone says all the time,” he says. “I’m a very trusting person by nature and that definitely bit me in the ass a couple of times. But it was a great education, some super nice folks and I learned so much.”
About a year in, Tom was feeling burnt out. He was spending 50 to 60 hours a week in the office, in front of a computer. He missed making. So in 2015 he quit and teamed up with a friend, Anthony Zollo, to build custom furniture in New York, France and Sweden. Then, after six years in New York, he moved back to Oregon.
“I was ready to be somewhere with some trees,” he says. “Somewhere I could have a car and get out to the sticks a little bit better.”
Duck hunting, 2012.
Motorcycling, 2017.
Elk hunting, 2021.
Tom was building fences and decks while contemplating his next move when an Archival Clothing contact who worked at UO reached out and said that one of their product design adjuncts had just bailed. They wondered if Tom would be interested in teaching a studio in the upcoming term.
“One thing led to another and in no time flat I was teaching full time,” Tom says. “It was just an immediate fit. It just felt right.”
Teaching Studios, Building, Research & More
Timber framing, 2014.
Cedar Pavilion, Portland, Oregon, 2018.
Teaching wasn’t entirely new to Tom, who had taught a number of timber frameing workshops in upstate New York, Oregon and California. After teaching just one studio at UO, he remembered how much he loved it.
“The students were so inspiring and awesome and the conversations were exciting and challenging – it was just an immediate good feeling.”
And while he always has side projects, Tom has been a career instructor ever since. In some of his classes in UO’s Product Design department, Tom introduced students to woodshop tools, teaching them how to use jointers, planers and table saws, and how to think critically about the tools and materials so they can design accordingly. The goal of these classes is not to crank out expert woodworkers but to teach process and materials, resulting in future designers who are more comfortable navigating different aspects of their career. Tom also taught students how to use industrial sewing machines, how fabric works and how to design bags and garments. Students would sew pouches, cases and totes, learning how to work though different seam constructions and how different materials function in different applications. In advanced studios, students tackled a single subject for the entire 10-week term.
“Last term I taught an advanced studio and I had students design headlamps,” he says. “And it was a great one because there are so many tiny details to attend to.”
The studio starts broad, with concept design and Tom asking questions: Why make this? There’s a lot of stuff in the landfills, do we really need this? Where does this fit in? He taught the students how to think critically about intuitive functioning, how to easily communicate multiple settings and how to make special considerations for niche users, such as runners. Students explored their concepts via sketches, models and technical drawings that become more refined with time.
Because of Tom’s professional background in soft goods, he frequently taught garment and bag design studios. Frustrated with the plastic Janome sewing machines in UO’s sewing studio, Tom helped build out a more legit lab with industrial machines.
This year a tenure-track position at UO’s satellite campus in Portland opened up, and Tom applied and was hired. The campus is home to fourth-year undergrads as well as two-year master’s students studying sports product design. Tom’s focus will be on soft goods, such as garments, shoes and bags.
“I’m really excited about it,” he says. “It’s going to be a big shift. I’ve been dating my partner, Karen, for two years now and we’ve been long distance. She lives in Portland. So I’m very excited to be finally moving in with her. And I’ve got a ton of friends in Portland because I’ve spent a lot of time up there. I’m very comfortable in the city so I know what I’m getting into. It doesn’t feel as scary as a move might be otherwise.”
When applying, Tom put a lot of thought into his proposal for his research project and how it might relate to the UO’s institutional hiring plan, which was focused on health and human performance, as well as environmental responsibility.
“I was applying to this program in sports product design but I wanted to come at my research at a really genuine angle,” Tom says. “I couldn’t say I wanted to design football cleats because that’s not my thing, it’s not my world. I would love to work with a student who is designing football cleats and I think I could do that very well, but myself?”
A love of outdoors has been the straight stitch in Tom’s life, something everything else has stemmed from, sometimes in surprising ways. Tom rooted his research proposal in ultra lightweight backcountry travel design concepts that could translate to other situations, such as wildland firefighting.
“That’s such a high-risk, high-demand, super-necessary job and those firefighters carry so much stuff,” he says. “Even if we could reduce that pack weight by just 10 to 15 percent, that would make a huge difference toward their health and human performance. But it’s all pretty new. I’m starting in the fall and we’ll see how the research goes.”
Designing for Lost Art Press
Tom had been following Christopher Schwarz and Megan Fitzpatrick’s work from afar as an enthusiastic woodworking for quite some time. While working at Best Made Co., Tom cold emailed Lost Art Press and said they were interested in selling Lost Art Press books online and in Best Made Co. stores, perhaps reaching a slightly different audience. The books sold well, particularly Christian Becksvoort’s “With the Grain.”
In 2015, while driving across country in his move from New York City to Oregon, Tom stopped in Indiana and took a class with Chris at Marc Adams School of Woodworking. That was their first time meeting in person. They got along well.
“We both like to bullshit and drink beer,” Tom says.
Tom noticed that Chris was wearing this great French chore coat. He told Chris to hit him up if he ever wanted to make chore coats.
“And that was it,” Tom says. “I’m not good at selling, being pushy with my services. I think that’s all I said. And maybe a year later he hit me up and was like, ‘Hey, let’s make a chore coat.’”
Together they produced a limited run of chore coats at a factory in Oregon. It’s still the favorite item Tom has designed for Lost Art Press.
Measuring a chore coat, 2018.
“They were so nice,” Tom says. “That was the first round where we used this really, really fancy and horrifically expensive Japanese reverse sateen moleskin, which is this really lovely fabric. And the factory did the run and then they changed the pricing on us. Producing clothing is always very challenging. But the sales were great and we produced well over a thousand coats for Lost Art Press.”
These days he and Chris have focused more on workshop accessories, in part because workshop accessories don’t come in different sizes.
“I think it was a surprise for the Lost Art Press folks to see that 5 to 6 percent of the clothes just come right back,” Tom says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, guys. Sizes. Busts and arms and shoulders. It ain’t like a book.’”
Sew Valley in Cincinnati makes the plane and pencil pockets. Tom worked with Megan and Chris to not only make sure each pouch would function properly but that it could also be produced within Sew Valley’s capabilities.
“That’s such a big part of designing, just understanding what machines your suppliers have and therefore what kind of operations they can do with those machines,” Tom says.
Tom also enjoys designing bandanas for Lost Art Press.
“I love doing the hankies just because it’s a different prompt every time,” he says. “Chris and I will generally chat a little bit on the phone and then I get to doodle around and it’s just a fun way to get lost in some illustration and do something that just feels a little free. And the vendor we work with does a beautiful job. One Feather Press makes really nice work, really great printing and high-quality material. They just do a really nice job.”
Tom says the profit sharing Lost Art Press does with its authors and designers is unheard of.
“It’s so easy to work with Chris and Megan because they trust me and that is rare as a freelance designer, to be trusted,” he says. “And they are always down to try something and if it doesn’t work they’re like, ‘Cool. We tried it.’ No one is ever upset when we don’t achieve maximum profitability on something. It’s just a really special organization to work with. Chris walks his values in a way that I’ve almost never seen before. And don’t tell him I said that because he can’t take a compliment. It’s insane. It’s remarkable.”
A Shift
Tom is spending this summer getting his house in Eugene ready to rent and going on a couple of backcountry motorcycling trips in Oregon.
Motorcycling, 2024.
“There’s just so much public land, mountains and desert and forest here in Oregon that it’s just a great way to get around and see some cool country,” he says.
He also has a couple backpacking trips planned, and a trip to Ireland with his family to celebrate his mom’s birthday, who is from an Irish family but has never been. Karen, his partner, is really into fishing, so there will be a lot of that as well. And then Tom will move to Portland. Work starts in August, as he helps facilitate a campus move.
“It’s going to be a big year of change and I think it’s going to be really positive,” Tom says.
Matt Cianci’s mom was reading a book in her living room, having just put Matt down for a nap upstairs, when she saw his 4-year-old body fly past the living room window and crash into the ground. She screamed, jumped up and threw open the door. Matt was in the bushes, a blanket tied around his neck, smiling.
“Mom, I can fly!” he said.
Matt laughs.
“That about describes me,” he says. “Always testing the limits of things. I guess you could say I’m a curious person with a vibrant imagination. I’m not a follower of the crowd.”
“My mom holding me when I was a wee babe … a well-placed hammer and peg toy in my lap!” — Matt
Matt was born in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. His parents met in college in the 1970s, married, had a daughter in 1976, Matt in 1977, then moved to a suburb northwest of Chicago.
“I have the two greatest parents in the world because they are the two people I look up to more than anyone,” Matt says. “I had an exceptionally privileged upbringing, for a very simple reason. Anytime anything ever goes wrong in my life, I just have to take a moment and ask myself, ‘What would my parents do?’ And it’s never steered me wrong.”
Both of Matt’s parents have master’s degrees. Matt’s father is a biomedical engineer and his mother is a clinical social worker. When Matt was a kid, his mom stayed home, raised the kids and was (and is) a social justice warrior, says Matt, working with the greater Chicago chapter of the National Organization of Women, promoting the Equal Rights Amendment.
Matt, 6 or 7 years old. “In the woods (always!) and with the required makeshift tool belt and plastic screwdriver/stabbing implement.”
Always creative, Matt enjoyed drawing and playing with Lego bricks as a kid. At 6 years old he started making things out of scrap wood in his dad’s workshop. His grandfathers had workshops, too. One was an engineer; the other, a welder who worked for the United Automobile Workers at a General Motors factory until he was 75 years old. Matt’s ancestors were old-world Italian stone masons.
Matt loved to make guns out of wood (ironic, he says, giving his views on guns today) because his mother refused to buy him toy guns. But she couldn’t stop him from making them. Over the years, the guns became pretty elaborate.
Woodworking, Matt says, has always been a solitary activity.
“My dad preached nothing. He just showed everything. I don’t remember doing anything with my father, but he still taught me so many things because he did them and I just watched. Many of my values I’ve gotten from him that way. Just seeing what he did, whether it was getting up and going to work every day or how to deal with people or be a parent. He was more passive that way – classical modeling.”
When Matt was 10 years old, his dad was transferred and the family moved to Massachusetts.
“I had some social upheaval and I kind of struggled for the new few years.”
Academically, he did well – never a straight-A student but Bs without having to work too hard for them. He enjoyed writing and in high school, he wrote a lot of poetry.
“I’m a rather pensive, melancholy kind of person. So as soon as I started having any interaction with girls, it turned into romance drama. So that was good fodder. It brought out the tortured poet in me,” he says, laughing.
When he was around 12 years old, he started playing guitar.
“The band ‘in vivo’ likely playing for an empty hall with just the other bands and girlfriends watching (I’m far left).”
“From that point forward, my life focused on my band, playing the guitar and my girlfriend,” he says. “Then I got into metal and I started wearing all black. I was kind of a metalhead – you know, the tortured angry suburban white kid. But I really didn’t have anything to be angry about. I looked for targets of opportunity to put my angst out on.”
In high school, Matt started tinkering with guitars in his dad’s workshop, Eddie Van Halen-style. And then he was accepted to Providence College in Rhode Island.
“Nobody even suggested that not going to college was an option,” he says. “It was just what you did.”
“My college thrash metal band, ‘Sorrows Path’. I’m with glasses in the middle row, right (note the bleached hair … no wonder I’m bald).”
The college education was great, Matt says, but there were a lot of things he didn’t like about it. And by his sophomore year, things came to a head. He failed just about every class he took. He felt as if he was just going through the motions. He lacked purpose.
“I wasn’t happy,” he says. “I’ve always struggled with ups and downs. And I was like, ‘Something doesn’t feel right. What do I really want to do with my life?’”
In a magazine, he saw an ad for a guitar-building school on the West coast. He tacked the ad above his desk – a dream. But not all dreams come true, or at least not as envisioned.
“I stayed in school. I stumbled my way through college. I graduated with a degree in social work and I kept tinkering with guitars.”
Building Guitars & Furniture
After graduating in 1999, Matt and his then-girlfriend moved into an apartment in Providence. He had a job (in social work – vocational rehab), paid rent, was doing all the things adults do, but he still longed for something more. With time, he recognized the itch, the need to work with his hands. So he taught himself how to build guitars from scratch. And he fell in love with it.
Matt’s girlfriend at the time worked at Brown University as a research assistant. Matt says they were dirt poor. But they needed furniture. So Matt taught himself how to make furniture, too. Within a couple years, Matt, 25, and his girlfriend saved up enough money to buy an old house, and started rehabbing it.
“That was, essentially, how I learned woodworking,” he says. “Just trial and error. I didn’t really have any instruction and I didn’t read woodworking books.”
Every once in a while, Matt would get his hands on a copy of Fine Woodworking, and use it as a guide. But money was tight and more often than not, holding it while standing in line at the grocery store, he couldn’t justify the price. Around 2003, Matt remembers seeing an ad for a Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw in the back of Fine Woodworking. He wanted it.
“One of my early guitars. I made this one in 2002. It now hangs in my shop and I play it regularly.”
By now, Matt was well-versed in power tools, building furniture and beautiful guitars out of mahogany and curly maple. Next up were side tables for his bedroom. With the Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw heavy on his mind, he decided he was going to build two Shaker-style end tables in curly maple using only hand-cut joinery.
But at the time, the dovetail saw was $120. There was no way he could afford it. So he went to a big box store and bought a $10 saw. Now he had a blade. He scrounged together some scrap wood (curly maple), scrap metal and toilet bolts. And he made his own backsaw.
“And that’s when I learned to file saws,” he says.
In an old tool catalog, Matt found a one-page article titled “How to File Your Saws.” By now he had discovered eBay and he used it to buy a setting device. Following the tool catalog instruction step by step, he sharpened his handmade saw and used it to cut the dovetails in the two Shaker tables.
Around this time, both of his grandfathers were clearing out their workshops and Matt inherited a bunch of their hand tools. He continued building furniture for his house – a corner hutch, a table, an ottoman, a desk. Struggling to drill a deep hole through an exterior wall, he used a brace and bit for the first time, and was amazed by its torque and speed. He bought saws on eBay for a few dollars each, and practiced filing them. He quickly fell down the rabbit hole, he says, and he was happy. Until 2006. That was the year he and his girlfriend of eight years ended their relationship.
“My world got turned upside down,” he says. “I had to put all my tools into storage.”
An Intermission, a Tiny House & the Return of Woodworking
Matt’s ex-girlfriend bought him out of his half of the house.
“I walked away with this big wad of cash, which I had never had before,” he says. “And I’m not going to lie, I frivolously spent a good chunk of it.”
Always the guy with a girlfriend, Matt, now 29, had never been single before.
“I got back into playing guitar in seedy bars. I was not doing constructive things with my time or money. But it was just an absolutely wonderful experience I treasure because I needed to be on my own and just be young.”
Having realized how dysfunctional his relationship was, and the number it did on his self-esteem, Matt embraced his freedom.
“I just kind of went nuts and indulged myself,” he says.
About a year later, in 2007, he decided he needed to stop blowing his money on guitars and rounds of shots for the entire bar. He was living in an apartment, but wanted to put money back into a house. He found one pretty quickly, a 600-square-foot ranch in Warwick, Rhode Island.
“I fell in love with it because it had the most perfect, dry, sound basement I have ever been in,” he says. “And at that time in my life, basements were where all the good stuff happens. I remember going into this basement and thinking, This is the perfect blank space for my existence. And the upstairs was nice too – it had all the stuff you needed – but I was subterranean at that point.”
Matt bought the house, built out a nice basement workshop and started a part-time business making furniture on commission.
“Well, I say business, but I’m probably flattering myself because in business, you’re supposed to make money,” he says, laughing. “I remember building these pieces of furniture and essentially charging people for the lumber and, like, a little bit of money for me. I remember building this one lady this all-solid cherry desk. And I still love that desk. If I ever found that lady I’d offer to buy it back from her. I remember charging her $400 for it and the lumber cost me $300. I am such a horrible business person. I really am.”
Matt still worked full-time in the mental health field and most of his early customers were colleagues.
“You feel bad saying ‘This is going to be $2,000.’ Because these people, who are essentially your acquaintances or friends, they’re not going to pay that. Because, who the hell are you? You’re not Sam Maloof, right? You’re just the guy who has decided you’re going to be a furniture maker. I did that for a little while and literally lost money. Because I also justified all these purchase for tools and such. Well I have to buy this mortiser because I’m a professional furniture maker now so you’re taking in maybe $1,000 and spending $2,000. So that was silliness.”
But Matt was happy. He had his woodworking, his day job, another part-time job, and he was single – for a while. Around 2008, Matt had a whirlwind six-month romance. And for the second time in his life (the first was with his ex-girlfriend who he shared a house with) he bought a ring. It didn’t work out. But then, in 2009, Matt met Angie, now his wife, at work.
(An aside: Matt liked the idea of dating people at work, thinking it would be less work. “I would not – would not – recommend that to anyone,” he says. “Especially having an affair with your boss.” Matt laughs and says he hopes that if there’s anything folks take away from this article, it’s that he’s not your go-to guy for romance advice. “I did everything wrong. But the one thing I got right was that I met my wife at work and it just worked out.”)
Matt says he didn’t know Angie was going to be his wife at first.
“But she says she knew instantly,” he says. “We dated three months and she was like, ‘Hey, do you want to get married?’”
She even bought a ring. Matt said yes, and asked if she and her daughter wanted to come live with him in his “teeny-tiny little house” in Rhode Island. She did. They got married in 2010.
“I’m madly in love with my wife,” he says. “We’ve been married 14 years.”
Matt and Angie, 2010
Marriage gave Matt’s life a purpose and focus he hadn’t had before.
“It calmed me down and just made me grow up,” he says.”
And with that newfound focus, the saw bug came back.
The SawWright
Matt started writing a blog called The Saw Blog. People took to it and began asking him questions about saws. And then they started asking him to sharpen their saws.
“I was like, ‘You’ll give me money?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ And I was like, ‘OK!’ Again, not a good businessman.”
One day, in 2011, Mark Harrell, founder of Bad Axe Tool Works, called. Mark wanted to focus entirely, at least for a little while, on making saws. But at the time, he also had a sizeable sharpening repair business.
“He tested me,” Matt says.
Mark asked to buy a tuned-up saw. He wanted Matt to show him what he could do. And if was good, Mark said he’d send Matt all his sharpening work. So Matt took an old saw and fully restored it – polished it up and sharpened it.
“Now I had never seen anyone sharpen a saw,” Matt says. “I had never owned another saw sharpened by somebody else. But I thought I’d do my best and send it to him. And he loved it.”
And that was the start of Matt’s saw-sharpening business.
“I became a professional saw doctor and it really blew up,” Matt says. “And I figured out how to pay myself a good wage for what I was doing.”
Matt also began getting invitations to teach saw sharpening at woodworking schools around the country, which was welcome additional income. Coming full circle, Lie-Nielsen also invited Matt to teach.
Matt came up with a name – The SawWright. He was sharpening saws and still working full-time, but now he wanted to try his hand at saw making.
“My prototype for the carcase saw I made for sale based on Smith’s Key. The backdrop is an article I wrote describing the history of Smith’s, as well as my design and building process.” — Matt
In 2012, Matt and Angie had a son, Francis. Matt remembers sitting in the hospital room and creating the layout for a website to sell custom-made saws while Angie and Francis slept. He started making backsaws based on an early 19th-century pattern he found in Smith’s Key. He contracted with a machinist to mill the backs. He wrote about his process in the Society of American Period Furniture Makers annual American Period Furniture Journal. And he sold them through his site.
In 2013, two big things happened. Angie and Matt had a daughter, Phoebe, and Matt decided he wanted to make saws full-time. So he took a leave of absence from his full-time job.
“And absolutely hate it,” he says. “I was in my shop fricking 12 hours a day in the basement making saws, and I was fricking miserable. I was just longing for human interaction.”
The full-time saw-making gig lasted a few months, and Matt went back to his old full-time job. It was an itch, he says, that he simply had to scratch to get it out of his system.
“Similar to when I was doing furniture, I didn’t know how to price things,” he says. “Sharpening and repair? I can do that. There’s something about the psychology of it. I know what it’s worth and I know what people will pay and it works. When it comes to making things, apparently I just will work for nothing.”
Today, sharpening and repair remain his niche.
“I like doing it part-time and I like having my day job where I can work with people because even though I hate people, I need them. I am a social animal. I’ve found my balance.”
In 2013, Kevin Ireland, then publisher of Popular Woodworking, called Matt while he was driving home from work. (Matt has always worked in Massachusetts and lived in Rhode Island. It’s a long commute – an hour and a half each way – but he loves the distinct separation of the two.) Kevin wanted to know if Matt wanted to make a DVD. Matt could hardly believe it.
“Here this magazine flies me out, treats me kind of like I’m a celebrity, we’re filming – it was surreal,” he says. “It was great.”
They made two DVDs – Build a Custom Backsaw and Super Tune Your Backsaw – in just a couple of days. It took a while for Matt to come to terms with the idea that he knew how to do something so well, other people would be willing to buy a DVD to learn from him.
“To me, the whole thing is like people want you to come teach them how to tie their shoes,” he says. “I don’t mean to sound like a pompous sort of expert but saw sharpening to me is kind of a mundane thing. It’s very challenging for people, I get it, but to me it’s not this complicated thing like, ‘Hey, I’m going to impart this wisdom to you that no one else can.’ I figured it out in my basement and if I figured it out, anybody can do it. I’m not that smart or talented, God knows. So it was just surreal.”
To this day, Matt is still surprised by recognition and publicity.
“Me and my love today (my wife’s in it too) lol!” — Matt
“I get to wake up every day and have this reasonably comfortable life because people have this faith in me to sharpen their saws and pay me really well for it,” Matt says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky to be able to do that. I’m grateful I get to live this way. I’m not saying I’m famous or a big deal, but it’s kind of like a dream come true. And I love it. And it’s really afforded me the ability to raise my family. If it weren’t for this, I would be doing something else that is not as fun, not as rewarding and certainly doesn’t pay nearly as well, which would put a lot of demand on my time and sanity. So it’s been cool.”
A Book, 9 Years in the Making
Matt has known Christopher Schwarz for more than a decade, via the occasional email, meet up at a woodworking show, or saw sharpening job. Around 2014, Chris needed a technical editor for a new Lost Art Press book by Andrew Lunn about making saws. He called Matt.
“I was like, ‘How much do you want me to pay you to let me do that?’” Matt says. Chris hired Matt (and paid him).
“I got to read and edit this whole thing. It was such a cool experience and a privilege and amazing. There’s so much wisdom in it. As a saw maker, I really loved a lot of it – he got so much of it right.”
But the book was never published. Andrew quit making saws and exited the woodworking world entirely.
Matt thought a lot about that unpublished book, including the last short chapter at the end that provided a brief overview of how to file a saw. One day, Matt asked Chris if he’d ever like to publish a book just on saw sharpening. Chris was interested. He asked Matt to write up a detailed outline and a sample chapter.
“I had this running theory: If I can teach, I can write a book,” Matt says. “I have this idea, I think, of what people need to know. And I have a lot of experience with what people struggle with when they start sharpening saws. I wanted to put that in a book to get more people to be able to do it. Because if they want to try, there’s nowhere else to learn it.”
In the 1980s, Harold “Dynamite” Payson wrote a short book called “Keeping the Cutting Edge: Setting and Sharpening Hand and Power Saws.” But Matt wanted to do something different – lots of macro photography, close-ups of important steps. A book that would have saved him from ruining 20 to 30 saws when he was starting out.
Matt wrote an outline and sample chapter, and sent it to Chris.
“He’s like, ‘Great. Let’s do it. I’ll send over a contract,’” Matt says. “And I was like, ‘What? I didn’t figure you’d say yes. Shit, now I’ve got to write a book.’”
Matt signed the contract in 2015. Then spent nine years writing the book.
“I think I know how to write,” says Matt, who does a lot of technical writing on policy and regulation in his day job. But he struggled with taking something that is such a huge part of his everyday life and putting it into words. At first, he was writing a chapter a year.
“I edit myself to death,” he says. “I will go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I have written this book 10 times over. There are entire versions of this book that no one has ever seen.”
In college, Matt took a writing class that he loved and there he learned the importance of efficient writing. His professor would say, “Don’t say in 10 words what you can say in six.” So Matt knew his first attempts, meandering and laden with fancy language, needed work. He’d edit, turning 1,000 words into 150, saying the same thing but clearer.
“But that process for me is not fast,” he says. “It takes forever to do and that’s the loop I was stuck in.”
A few years in, the bones of the book were there, but Matt considered it only half done. He also had another obstacle: photography.
“Chris, he’s a freaking genius, right?” Matt says. “He’s just this incredibly smart, talented person. And I was like, ‘So Chris, what about the photography?’ And he’s like, ‘You can do it. You can do it with a digital camera.’ And I’m like, ‘Chris, I don’t even have a smartphone. I don’t know what a digital camera is.’ But he convinced me I could do the photography.”
Chris sent him a list of things to buy along with a how-to photography guide he gives to writers. But the whole process felt daunting to Matt. Every once in a while Matt would check in with Chris, worried about how long the book was taking. And Chris would always give him words of encouragement: “It takes as long as it takes. You’re doing fine.”
One day, Matt was teaching a class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking and ran into Mike Pekovich, creative director of Fine Woodworking. Matt and Mike had become friendly over the years and Mike knew Matt was working on a book. At one point, he asked about the photography. Matt told him he was trying to do it himself but so far he hadn’t figured out which end of the camera faces the work. Mike laughed and offered to teach Matt photography.
“Talk about privilege,” Matt says.
Mike underlined the importance of the book Matt was writing. And the only payment he wanted for the lesson was making a good book with pictures. So Matt went to Mike’s house and spent an entire day in Mike’s shop learning not only the technical aspects but also composition and lighting.
However, Matt found it difficult to find the time to replicate the process in his own shop. Another year went by and Chris, while talking with Matt about some saw sharpening, asked about the book.
“And I was like, ‘Chris, I’ve got to be honest with you. I have gotten one-on-one, day-long, private instruction from Mike Pekovich on how to do photography and I still can’t do it. I can’t make time for it. This book is going to take me another 10 years to do the photography.’ And then Chris, just casually in his Chris way, goes, ‘Well you know, I could just come up there and shoot all the pictures for you in a day or two.’ And I was like, ‘What?’”
In summer 2023, Chris drove up to Rhode Island. Matt created a shot list for every photo he needed and spent a few days on prep work and staging. They shot the whole book in two days.
“It was awesome,” Matt says.
Matt also got to spend time with Chris in a way he never had before.
“I got a better sense of his vision and what the business is like. And he’s just an amazing person. He told me his business model is to essentially take care of as many people as he can in his life. Now I understand so much more about why he does what he does. And it’s not charity with him. He just means it in this really profound way. He’s like, ‘I’m going to find all the talented people that I can and if they have things they want to do that I can help facilitate I’m going to use whatever resources and privilege I have to help remove the bullshit so that they can be creative and prosperous in a way that he has been able to.’ I was just like, ‘Wow. That’s really fucking cool.’”
Wrapping up the photography lit a fire under Matt. And although Chris never put Matt under a deadline, he said it would be great to publish the book within a year.
“I just buckled down and every free moment I had, nights, weekends, I just sat on my porch and wrote,” Matt says.
“It’s been totally surreal,” Matt says. “I just have to kind of pinch myself. I started sharpening saws on a lark 20 years ago because I was literally too poor to buy a tool I wanted and here I am, 20 years later. I wrote a book and people pay me to do this for them. I’ve gotten to meet all these amazing people and just spend time with people who are so talented and smart and just can’t help become more talented and smart on your own just because you’re with them. And that’s pretty cool.”
Business Insider recently released a video on India’s shellac industry with amazing footage of how it’s made. You can watch it here.
While we think of shellac as a finish, it’s also used to coat candy and pills, preserve fruit, make bangles and more. Learn how the Kerria lacca insect secretes lac and see how it’s harvested using methods that originated 3,000 years ago. Follow along as the video highlights careful steps in production and watch as workers use their hands, feet and teeth to stretch large sheets of shellac. This video packs a lot in 10 minutes and is fascinating to watch.
Andy Glenn is the author of the newly released “Backwoods Chairmakers: In Search of the Appalachian Ladderback Chairmaker.” He found more than 20 of them and earned their trust then, beautifully and authentically through words and photos, told the stories of their lives and their work, which has been handed down through generations for more than 200 years.
Andy and his sister, Mary Jo, helping their grandpa, George Fike, with a new set of cellar doors.
Andy grew up among fields of corn and soybeans on patchworked land so fertile that in 1808 Ohioans named it Richland County. His grandfather George Fike lived in an old Victorian farmhouse on about 150 acres in nearby Ashland Twp., Ohio, and had a wood and metal fabrication shop, where he worked on anything needed for the house and farm. Andy’s grandfather Lawrence Glenn was the town milkman in Ashland County, Ohio. In his basement shop he would turn old milk crates into boxes and small gifts for family.
Mary Lou and George Fike with Andy, on a rocking horse that Grandpa George made.
Projects Andy made as a child with his grandfather, Lawrence Glenn.
Andy’s family – parents, both teachers, and a younger sister and brother – lived on 11 acres. His mother had horses. Each year his father would raise six to 10 head of black Angus beef for neighbors or community members who put in an order. Andy participated in 4-H and had sheep. They had dogs.
“It was just a wonderful time,” Andy says.
Although Andy fed animals in the morning and evening, and helped care for the farm, he says he grew up surrounded by Amish and Mennonite families with children that “could run laps around me with their knowledge of things.”
Andy loved sports. He played baseball, soccer and basketball, and his parents encouraged it all, from a young age through high school.
“They’d sign me up for the local travel teams and we’d travel around the state and out of state. Now that I’m a parent, I realize how committed they were to providing opportunities.”
In the summers Andy worked as an extra set of hands for his best friend, Troy’s dad, Phil Perry, who ran a carpentry crew. Andy and Troy would spend many late nights in Phil’s basement shop, building things.
“And if we had questions, Phil would come down and give us some guidance,” Andy says. “Show us how to run a router, safe ways to run a table saw.”
Andy’s Uncle Galen made him this blanket chest as a high school graduation gift.
Andy attended Walsh University then transferred to The College of Wooster his sophomore year as a business economics major. He also helped coach his high school’s freshman boys’ basketball team, not minding the hour drive each way. He loved his college experience.
“College always seemed like it was going to be what I did,” Andy says. “My parents were the first to go to college and they really encouraged me to go to college. I suppose I was a bit short-sighted – I knew I was going to go to college but I didn’t necessarily know what was going to happen after that.”
From Business to Building
The table Andy made for his wife, Sarah, as a wedding gift.
Shortly after college graduation, Andy married his high school sweetheart, Sarah. His wedding gift to Sarah was a dining table, built in Phil’s shop. Together they moved to Boston, where Sarah, a classical violinist, attended graduate school at the Longy School of Music, just north of Harvard Square in Cambridge. Andy took a job as the business director of a small Christian high school, where he also helped with the basketball teams and coached JV soccer – a team made up of players who were fulfilling the school’s sports requirement, which made the whole experience fun but also absurd at times, Andy says, laughing.
“I thought the job was perfect,” he says. “It married my interests, my degree and my faith. I thought it would be a perfect job. And it was a nice job. But after a short time there I thought, I’m not in the right setting.”
Andy and Sarah lived in a small apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Andy remembers one day coming home and showing Sarah his hands. They were smooth – not a single callus in sight.
“I just kind of realized I was chasing numbers all day and then I would never catch them and then we’d come back the next day and chase them again. And I was just kind of out of place.”
“I loved every moment of it,” he says. “Just to be surrounded by all these people who are passionate about furniture and excited about it in much the same way. It was a wonderful two years.”
Andy particularly loved the instructors, including Dan Faia, still a close friend and mentor, and Alex Krutsky, who recently passed away.
“Alex was just the most charming man and he had a real ornery sense of humor,” Andy says. “One day I came in first thing and I was doing a glue-up. I had clamps everywhere. I was sweating and moving and it wasn’t going well and I was getting anxious. And Alex, he came up the stairs in the bench room and came over the way he did and had this little smile on his face. And he just goes, ‘The reason we use clamps is so we don’t have to hold the wood together with our hands while the glue dries.’ It was a joke, but it was just perfect in the moment because I was failing miserably and he wasn’t there to help, but to add a little joke. And he would have helped me if I needed it. Now, at least once or twice a week, I pick up a clamp and smile about Alex.”
Six months later, a live-in caretaker position opened up at NBSS. Andy and Sarah moved into a little, quirky, third- and fourth-floor apartment inside the school, and Andy served as caretaker for five years.
“Everything about it was fun,” he says.
For five years Andy managed the old buildings, attending to triggered motion sensors, water main breaks and sewer fires. A job perk was using open space as he pleased, as long as he remained somewhat unseen. This provided him shop space to build. During this time Andy also taught some classes at NBSS and worked part-time job at a furniture repair shop called Second Life in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
During this time Sarah was working for the Boston Symphony’s education department. Their daughter, Ruby, was born in 2011. Ruby’s nursery was a large closet (they previously used it as an office) in their NBSS apartment. Fourteen months later their son, Francis, was born. They loved Boston but they always knew they’d eventually leave. With two kids, they decided it was time.
To Maine, Kentucky & Back Again They moved to Maine, a place they always hoped to call home, and Andy spent time dropping off résumés at various shops. He found work at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast.
“It was a very fun job but it was a J-O-B, right from the beginning, because it was all new to me,” Andy says. “People think of wispy shavings on wooden boats but it was really like grinding fiberglass off tugboat refits. It was a dirty job, fun, but dirty.”
Several months later a custom commercial cabinetry shop (Phi Home Designs – the name has since changed, now Hay Runner) called him with an opening. He was the go-to furniture guy, working on projects that passed his bench. When there was no furniture work to be done he’d help out the cabinet crew, which, he says, was enjoyable and eye-opening – the materials, approach and methods were all different. He stayed on for about three and a half years.
In 2017, a position opened up in Berea College Student Craft’s woodcraft program, and Andy and Sarah thought it might be nice to live closer to family for a bit. Andy applied, was accepted, and they moved to Berea, Kentucky.
“The college was a totally new experience for me,” Andy says. “Being a woodworker in academia, that made my head spin for a little while. But the actual job was great.”
As the Director of Woodcraft, he worked with students all day, teaching them how to make the college’s craft and furniture items.
“Each year, a number of people came into the woodshop who had never woodworked before and I got to guide them through their first woodworking experiences,” he says. “And a number of them, you could just see it – they loved the shop and they’d come in on their off hours and you could just see that build and grow.”
Former students will reach out to him from time to time, with photos of walking sticks they recently made or news of how their career in woodworking, born in Berea, is going.
During this time Andy was also tapped to help get The Woodworking School at Pine Croft, formerly the Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking, owned by Kelly and Teri Mehler, back up and running.
“Kelly and Teri were very kind to our family from the moment we moved into town,” Andy says. “Kelly was working with the college with the possibility of selling the school, selling his property – I just kind of knew of it. And then the college did purchase the Mehler’s place, and as we were getting the school started up again, that’s where my role came into play.”
But as much as Andy was enjoying his work, Kentucky didn’t feel like home. He, Sarah and the kids all missed Maine. He remembers one day he and Sarah were driving around Berea, searching the radio.
“After scanning all the stations Sarah said, ‘I wished we lived somewhere that had a classical station.’ That resonated with me,” Andy says. “Our local stations played mountain bluegrass – which is beautiful – but no classical, and in that moment it felt like we were misfits for the place.”
So in 2021, they began looking for a new place to settle. The housing market at the time felt impossible. But then, serendipity: With a better understanding of what Andy and Sarah were looking for, their Realtor wrote and said her parents’ house, which wasn’t on the market yet, seemed like a good fit. Andy and Francis took a road trip to Waldoboro, Maine, and saw that it was a perfect fit.
Andy’s shop.
“It’s an old cape, 1859, and there are projects, nonstop projects on this place, which is why it was in our price range and why we could get into it,” Andy says. “And just the amazing providential piece of it was that he had built this shop space in 2013. He was a boatbuilder, so he had a few boats in there, but it was a board-and-batten shell. And I’ve been able to keep building it out ever since I got into it.”
Today the kids are enrolled in a small school. Sarah, a creative like Andy, works a couple of different jobs, and Andy builds chairs, makes custom furniture, sells chair kits and teaches. It works.
Until recently, Andy would put time into “Backwoods Chairmakers” in the morning, “the best time to write,” he says. “It’s just been in the last few months that that hasn’t been on the front of my mind and the back of mind at all times.”
He’s in the shop for as many hours as he can be, at least until mid-afternoon, depending on the day. The flexibility is a gift, allowing Andy to end his workday as late as 6:30 p.m. or as early as 2:30 p.m., to pick up the kids from school and take them to various activities when needed. Saturdays are typically a half day of work.
“The rhythm and the way it’s going right now works for us,” he says.
Andy also enjoys being on the road and teaching.
“I get a lot of joy from teaching in the sense that there is a connection when working with people who have their own goals, who are getting started in the craft or who are excited about a new project or skill,” he says. “I get to participate in that experience.”
On Building a Book
For about a year and a half Andy traveled to chairmakers’ homes. He’d visit, take notes, with permission record interviews, then come back home and write as much as he could about the visit and the experience.
“I was obviously and clearly an outsider visiting these chairmakers in Appalachia,” he says. “I kind of knew that right from the beginning. What I didn’t know was that Lost Art Press and this book idea really carried no weight. The chairmakers were intrigued by it, but it was fairly abstract.”
He learned some things along the way, including the necessity of a doorstep explanation versus a phone call from states away.
“The first couple of chairmaking visits I’d get all my gear out, right as I was getting out of the car,” he says. “That was the wrong approach because we didn’t have any rapport. Slowly I learned I needed to get out and we needed to just sit and talk for a while. And then the chairmaker could size me up and size up the project and decide if and how they wanted to contribute. And from there we could get going.”
He wanted the chairmakers to know that he wasn’t writing a quick one-off story with a photograph attached. Rather, he was going to be in touch again to make sure he got things right, to make sure he was telling the story fully and correctly.
Newberry and Sons. Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee.
“Usually, as we would sit and talk at the beginning, we’d reach a point where the chairmaker would say something along the lines of, ‘Well, we better get going if we’re going to do this.’ And that was my signal that it was time to work,” he says.
At first Andy had a collection of essays that didn’t relate. But once the traveling came to an end he was able to look at the essays as a whole and find commonalities, forming the book’s structure.
He also noted different themes: design, family, contemporary building methods, marketing.
“Each maker kind of had these threads that they emphasized,” he says.
Once he identified them, Andy would tug on those threads during the writing process, and call each chairmaker to follow up with questions along those lines.
He also looked for repetition. Every chairmaker mentioned dry rungs and wet posts, and as such, Andy had written about dry rungs and wet posts a dozen times. So he began paring what had already been said to make the stories more interesting.
Turning in the manuscript and photographs to Lost Art Press prompted a bit of withdrawal.
“That book was with me daily for years, and now it doesn’t need me anymore,” Andy says. “But I loved the travel piece. The appreciation for those chairs took me places that I never would have traveled to without this project. It took me into communities and into back lanes and to meet people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. So there was just always an excitement around it, around travel and meeting other people. And it always felt like we had chairs as our commonality and we’d always come back to an appreciation of these chairs. That gave me a great place to start from as they shared their messages for making.”
A New Way of Thinking about the Intersection of Work & Life Although the book is complete, it’s still very much present in Andy’s daily life.
“I know it’s affected my work,” he says. “I’m by no means an Appalachian chairmaker but I can see the influence. I’ve been thinking about this every day for quite a while now. So it can’t help but permeate some of the work I’m doing. I loved meeting these people who made chairmaking, woodworking craft, furniture making, a part of their life. And it really changed how I quantify work.”
Andy used to think of work as part-time, full-time, 40 hours a week.
“Their lives had none of those parameters around it,” he says. “For a number of them, there were times to make chairs and then there were times when other things were more pressing. And that might mean because the shop is cold in the winter and so winters are for other things and recharging. And in the spring you make chairs. Or it gets really hot and so the summer is for gardening and other work and in the cooler periods you get into the chairs. So I stopped considering it as part-time, full-time, and I just started looking at it more as a part of life.”
Some examples of Andy’s work.
In addition to chairmaking, custom furniture builds and teaching, Andy reads a lot. He enjoys photography. He deeply appreciates the wildness, quietness and ruralness of Maine. He appreciates long nights by the woodstove.
“Our kids are at an age where they’re quite active and we’re about with them,” he says. “On Wednesdays I’m a goalie for a co-ed soccer team. Everyone here is like, ‘Oh, hockey!’ And I’m like, ‘No, soccer,’” he laughs.
He also finds that time spent in his shop and teaching complement each other wonderfully.
“I do love working in the shop by myself,” he says. “But after a stretch of that I want to teach. I want to be around other energy, other ideas. I enjoy that I get to teach and share and then come back to the shop and recharge, explore some new ideas and then go back out and teach again.”
For the first time Andy plans on teaching some classes in his shop, this spring. The 40′ x 30′ building has two floors. Currently the second floor is being used for storage as he outfits the first. He’s built walls, installed lighting and electricity, and he’s starting to get benches and machines, things he’s been acquiring since moving back to Maine, in place. Although he’s always had a bench, even in his apartments, he’s been spoiled, he says, due to the access he’s had to the shops everywhere he’s worked.
“I have more ideas than money,” he says, laughing. “I know, that’s everyone. I see how this will all come together in the end. I just keep working on it step by step.”
As of this writing Andy’s working on a custom timber-frame style bed out of large beams of red oak. And he’s working on a chair – he’s always working on a chair, either for himself or someone else.
“I really just love the process of making a chair,” he says. “Everything about it from the idea to the physical process of handling the materials, splitting it out, shaving them if I’m making a greenwood chair, all the way to putting the finish on and seeing how that chair comes together at the very end. I just really enjoy making, I think.”
Andy says he’s always been drawn to something chairmaker Curtis Buchanan said about 15 years ago.
Andy’s family – Andy, Francis, Ruby and Sarah.
“He just described his work and how family is close by and important to him, and how his shop is behind his house and how everything is kind of linked together and intertwined, and I found that appealing,” Andy says. “I enjoy having the shop behind the house and being able to work from home. Other things are more important but the shop is right here for work where it fits. And sometimes that’s more hours out here, sometimes it’s less. It’s just here as it needs to be.”
