Category: Profiles

Chris Schwarz suggested I invite Helen Welch to be interviewed for the Lost Art Press blog. “She is a “[bleep]ing badass,” he wrote. “A tool nerd. Funny and sharp as hell.” So I wrote her by email. She sent back the following reply.

“If nothing else (other than saving lives), this lockdown has given us all a chance to do stuff we wouldn’t normally do. Things I’ve discovered during this time:

“I hate sourdough.

“I do not like to work from home. A one-bedroom apartment is no place to make the kind of mess I enjoy in the workshop.

“Practicing my golf swing indoors has aged the fixtures and fittings.

“The homemade wines I made two years ago are now drinking well. A rare case of serendipity.

“Danish is a very odd language but I’m enjoying the challenge.

“Videoing myself is a special kind of torture, only topped by having to edit the damn thing. Gruesome. Likewise Zoom, Skype etc.”

Then she said sure, she’d be happy to do the interview.

I knew I was going to enjoy our phone call.

Most woodworkers familiar with Helen know her through the London School of Furniture Making, which she founded and has operated since 2013. “It’s nowhere near as august as the London College of Furniture,” she laughs, acknowledging the similarity between the two names. Woodworking schools pride themselves on a range of qualities, from their size and diversity of course offerings to their cultivation of individual students’ skill in artistic design, or their faithfulness to particular historical traditions. The London School of Furniture Making is tiny, with just four benches, which allows Helen and her fellow instructor, Sam Brown, to give each student an extraordinary level of attention. Course offerings are varied in terms of topic and duration, aimed primarily at amateur makers. Short courses build specific skills; project courses offer opportunities to put them into practice. Beyond this, students can pay a daily fee to come in and simply use the benches and tools, as well as pick her brains. If the London School of Furniture Making were to claim a special niche, it might be that these characteristics make learning there unusually customized and accessible.

Helen started the school after decades of work in the trades. She was born and raised in North London, where her father sold film (the kind for cameras in the pre-digital era) at Boots, a nationwide pharmacy chain. Her mother had a variety of jobs that included work in a perfume factory but spent most of her career in retail sales at John Lewis, one of Britain’s best loved department stories. Helen’s older brother, Maurice, is a passionate photographer who’s all about electronics and gadgets.

At the age of 11 Helen made a conscious decision to go to a girls’ school. “I didn’t want to have to fight for my teachers’ attention,” she explains. By the time she entered sixth form (senior high school in the United States), the school had become co-ed. In 1984, as she was preparing to take her A-Levels in biology, chemistry and business studies, she says, “all my fears about being overlooked came to fruition. I was simply exhausted from the struggle, so I left.”

Later that year she returned to the school to attend a careers fair, most of the offerings at which were “not interesting, just banks and boring things, not what I envisaged doing…” But as she wandered around the booths, a couple of people at a tiny stall in a corner called out “Come chat to us! If you’re not doing anything, why don’t you come and work in our woodwork-cum-training college?” Why not? she thought, and jumped right in.

The business was a collaboration of four people – two men and two women – who shared a shop in the north London area called Kentish Town. “Splinter Group was a training center which carried out woodworking jobs in the local community,” she told me. “I was paid £25 per week as part of the government’s Youth Training Scheme.” The shop was a large space with an eight-bench hand tool room and a separate machine shop, all on the first floor (which we in the States refer to as the second floor) of a Victorian-era light industrial building. The work entailed a mixture of teaching/learning and making. “If it was wood, they did it. They would bring their trainees on site as well as building in the shop.” While working there Helen made a set of stairs; a complicated play frame for a children’s play center; a table and shelves, and a toolbox for the tool set they gave her.  “I remember thinking it was quite a good mix of skills and different woodworking projects. It gave me an idea of what was possible — there are all sorts of things I can make with these skills.”

After about six months at this cooperative shop, Helen spent a year doing a variety of work, “including making some fake French antiques for a guy I met in a pub.” She worked in building maintenance for a local women’s center and ended up applying for an apprenticeship in carpentry and joinery with Camden Council, where she spent three years – one year in building maintenance and repairs; one year of renovation and restoration on jobsites; and one year in a joiner’s shop making windows and doors. She earned her City & Guilds Certificate in carpentry and joinery in the late 1980s, specializing in (of all things) building forms for cast concrete structures, a skill she hasn’t used since. As soon as she had the certificate, she left the council job. “’This is a three-year prison sentence which is now up,’” she remembers thinking – “three years of misogyny and racism. I have very few happy memories [of that time]. It was tiresome, but I worked hard to not let it scar me.”

Helen took a job as a building inspector for the Building Control Department in Camden and then Islington, where she worked for five years. As someone who had worked in the trades, she says, “I realized there was a split between the people who came in from university and those from the trades. I quickly made friends with the ex-carpenters and the ex-plumbers. We were more collaborative when working with the chippies (Brit-speak for carpenters) on site, whereas some of our colleagues just wanted to read the letter of the law. [The work of building inspectors] is more of a problem-solving exercise,” she says, alluding to the kind of considered and constructive approach that anyone in construction or remodeling appreciates. She sums up that experience as “five years of interesting developments in my understanding of construction and the legal side [of that business].” But in the end, she felt “I was too young to be trapped telling people what to do. I missed being back in the workshop making things.”

So she took herself off to the London Metropolitan University (formerly the London Guildhall University/London College of Furniture, and before that, Shoreditch Technical Institute) to study guitar making. “I had a fantastic three years there,” she says of that time, which allowed her to develop her skills at a far higher level. She graduated from the program thinking “Wow, this is amazing – and there’s absolutely no career in it!”

Being a determined individual in need of income, Helen started making built-ins and doing carpentry. She had no shop; she worked in people’s homes. “[It was] me, my van and tool kit. Me constructing things on site. It worked for a good number of years.” Her business came exclusively by word of mouth. Her customers were mostly married couples with a couple of kids, “quite well-paid people in their mid-30s who’d just bought their first proper house and wanted to have some built-in cupboards.”

She supported herself by means of this work, without a shop, for about 10 years, starting around 1994. She had a typical complement of trim carpentry tools: a portable Festool table saw (made up by fitting her track saw into a table), a jigsaw, planer, power tools, and used a couple of “trestles” (sawhorses) topped with a sheet of plywood for a bench. “Not a lot of hand tools,” she says, then throws in: “When I think about it now I wonder how did I manage to last 10 years doing that? Eight-by-four sheets of MDF. Hateful!”

As a side gig ever since completing her training in lutherie she taught part time at London Metropolitan University, City and Islington College, Women’s Education in Building and The School of Stuff, to name a few – some evening classes, sometimes one day a week. She enjoyed teaching but she still had no intention of doing so in her own set-up.

Around 2004 Helen finally got a workshop in a space shared with a fellow who went by the name Bob Smoke (not his real name); he made props and designed special effects for film and television. Although she describes it as “an enormous hangar of a place which was freezing cold in winter and hot in summer, never comfortable,” the new work situation gave her the opportunity to retrieve her better equipment from the storage unit where she’d been keeping it, and to make more interesting things than painted built-ins. Jobs still came entirely through word of mouth.

By 2010 she’d decided it was time to commit to what she calls “a proper workshop.” She looked around. For £600 a month she could get a place that wasn’t much bigger than the living room in her apartment. But for £750 she could get something much better: a shared workspace in a complex of industrial warehouses built around the 1970s in Tottenham, North London, that’s home to 15 cabinetmaking businesses. She went to see the couple of guys who had the space to let, Alistair Williams and Joe Ridout – they run a furniture and cabinetmaking company – and she ended up renting the space. Since then, she says, “I really haven’t looked back.” When they moved into a bigger unit she asked if she could take on a couple of students as a new venture – “something sustainable that makes me feel like I’m having a good time…something that will not give me sleepless nights and leave me feeling resentful to[ward] customers.” She found that there were lots of people eager to learn, people who valued her flexible set-up. Her fledgling venture grew, and she decided it was going to be a school. Happily, Joe and Alistair were and still are very supportive.

Most students find her through the school’s website. Classes have been cancelled since mid-March. She’s spent her time at the shop alone streamlining things and improving ergonomics – much-needed improvements to what she calls the previous “controlled chaos,” while also “playing with my tool kit, as opposed to the school’s. I’m a tinkerer.” The last thing she made was a solid silver plane, just for fun. “I wanted to try my hand at jewelry, working with precious metal clay.” After firing you end up with 99 percent pure silver.

Most other businesses in the building have been carrying on as usual. For those doing custom furniture and cabinetmaking, there’s plenty of space to keep the recommended distance from others; for teaching detailed hand skills, not so much. She hopes to resume classes in June.

— Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work

Along with her colleagues at Fine Woodworking magazine, Associate Editor Anissa Kapsales decamped from Taunton headquarters in Newtown, Conn., to her home in Upstate New York this March. Her office for the past several weeks has been her kitchen table, which she shares with her children, ages 9 and 10. Each has a designated area. She works, they study.

For fun they’re conducting an archeological dig in the backyard, complete with tape to keep curious (if imaginary) visitors a safe distance from the site. A couple of years ago the family dog, Bongo, killed an unlucky groundhog. After scolding Bongo, Anissa dug a grave and buried the deceased. Now that her kids have to get their kicks at home, she figured digging up the bones and putting them back together would be a creative educational venture.

The youngest of three siblings, Anissa grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., where her father, George Kapsales, was a mechanical engineer. Mr. Kapsales designed production lines for Dana Perfumes, a cosmetics company that produced fragrances such as “Canoe,” “Ambush” and “Tabu.” In the evenings and on weekends he tinkered in the family’s basement or on one of his many jalopies, and Anissa liked nothing better than to hang out with him while he built furniture or components for major home repairs, a portable black and white TV always on in the background. “To this day,” she says, “I love the background sound of football games, and the smell of second-hand smoke. He was never without a cigarette.”

Anissa’s mother, Anastasia Kapsales, has spent most of her career as a master seamstress who had a designer jeans store in the ’80s, at the height of the designer jeans movement, and alterations shop. “She could make anything, all the way up to wedding gowns,” Anissa says. “She’s a fantastic seamstress. She still works now, in her 80s.”

As soon as she had her driver’s license, Anissa made a habit of visiting her father at Dana Perfumes, where they’d have lunch together. “The building was just super cool,” she says, “built in the early ’60s, so the architecture and office furniture were fantastic. It had a lot of glass and a giant ‘D’ sculpture in front.”

Whenever his employer was getting rid of stuff, George would take it home and put it in the basement. This is how the Kapsales family came to own such diverse artifacts as “a giant photocopier,” speakers, rubber and cork bottle stoppers and a collection of leftover balls from roll-on deodorant. Because you never know when a 6′-long commercial stainless steel lab sink from 1979 might come in handy.

Anissa and her now-former husband grew up in the same town and went to the same high school, though they didn’t know each other at the time. They met when she visited the outdoor outfitters shop, where he happened to be working, to buy a pair of hiking boots. Over the intervening years she’d worked a variety of jobs – lifeguard, waitress, bartender, juvenile detention center guard – and continued college, majoring in English with a specialization in creative writing/poetry. After attending a few colleges, including the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the University of Colorado-Boulder, Anissa finally graduated from East Stroudsburg University in 1999 when she was 30, and moved to the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York, where her partner was living. She took a job as manager of the rental shop at Hunter Mountain ski resort and did a brief stint as a rock climbing guide. They bought a 1915 house in a small town in the Hudson Valley and settled into married life.

Planning to become a teacher, Anissa started work on a master’s in education through SUNY-New Paltz. At the same time, she taught eighth grade full-time at a public middle school in the Bronx, a 90-minute commute each way, to generate income while her husband built up his outdoor guide business. Describing the school, she says, “There were armed guards at the door. It was pretty rough. I had about 35 kids in every class. There were some really bright kids, some troubled kids. For a first-time teacher, it was trial by fire. You really got put in the hot seat fast. It was an intense environment to walk into having only substitute-taught. My principal and vice principal were super supportive, strong New York City women. But in the end, you’re in the classroom yourself with 35 kids. They were tough. It was a challenging environment.”

Nicholas and Despina Barounis, Anissa’s maternal grandparents

Anissa’s father died in February 2002. Devastated, she quit the master’s program and couldn’t bring herself to go back to teaching in the Bronx. “I just kind of didn’t work for a few months,” she says. But her grief, which was inextricable from her memories of those years in the basement with her father, sparked an epiphany. One day as she awoke from a nap, it popped into her head that she had a friend, Sandie, whose neighbor, Eric Keil, was a woodworker. (You can see Eric’s work on Instagram at @baldmountainwoodworks.) She thought: “I need to ask Sandie if she’ll talk with Eric about taking me on as an apprentice.”

“I just knew,” she recalls.

Sandie asked. Eric said yes. Anissa spent a few months working with him. “He was fantastic,” she says. “So smart. He had been had been in Fine Woodworking; he’d worked with Mark Schofield. I knew there were woodworking magazines out there but didn’t really know specifically about Fine Woodworking until I worked with Eric in the summer of 2002.”

That fall she took a job teaching sixth-grade English and ancient history at a Quaker school in Poughkeepsie. “I was able to run with both subjects at the same time. I learned the history part as I went. It was all really interesting. Ancient Greece, ancient China, Mesopotamia. All the religions. I was able to do an English curriculum that tied into them and then we would tie current events into them. It was really fun.”

The school had a shop; one of her fellow teachers suggested they take a Shaker hall table class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking. That summer, they did.

Bob Van Dyke, who runs the school, shared this memory, which conveys Anissa’s tendency to deflect attention while also playing around with her friends’ heads:

“Anissa and her friend Jeremy took my week-long Fundamentals of Furniture Making…. The two of them were great to have in class — lots of fun. Jeremy was especially funny. The last day of class we were having lunch on the picnic tables behind the school. Jeremy had gotten a birthday cake for Anissa – “Happy Birthday Anissa” written on it – candles, the whole bit. He had us sing Happy bday to her. The whole time she kept saying – “but it’s not my birthday, it’s not my birthday!” He kept at it, and we all had birthday cake and Anissa kept insisting the rest of the day that it was not her birthday. No one believed her….”

The class led to a deeper exploration of the craft.

“I was obsessed with it at that point,” Anissa says. “Working with Eric had opened up so much more than I realized was possible in woodworking. In his shop I learned how to use a table saw! Until then I did everything with a circ saw and my dad’s radial arm saw. It was my first real exposure to hand tools and sharpening. And Eric’s refined design sensibility inspired so many new ideas and spurred a lot of research into everything woodworking. I started to get why my dad was so meticulous. But Eric was doing it professionally at a caliber beyond my dad’s.” Inspired to explore the craft more deeply, she applied to the College of the Redwoods (now the Krenov School), where she completed a one-year course.

In 2006, Anissa was getting ready to graduate and thinking about what she’d do next. She knew that Fine Woodworking was based in Newtown, within driving distance of her home in Upstate New York. While looking for postings there (they weren’t hiring), she found an ad for an editorial position at Fine Homebuilding. “I’ve had my own property since I was 21,” she thought. “I’ve done woodworking. I can just get the job there and maybe I can jump over to Fine Woodworking.” She did the edit tests, went to Tim Snyder, senior editor at the time, and interviewed with the entire Fine Homebuilding staff. Rob Yagid (now editorial director) was interviewing at the same time. “The process took one-and-a-half or two months. Snyder called me and said ‘We’re going forward without you, but I know you’d be a really great fit at Fine Woodworking, so with your permission I’d like to forward your résumé over to the editor at Fine Woodworking.”

He passed all of her information on and she went through the tests and interviews all over again. “It was late August,” she continues. “I was on the phone with Michael Hurwitz, trying to persuade him to let me be his shop assistant, when the call came in from Asa (Christiana).” Two months later, Anissa did her first shoot involving a flight out of town, with all the scheduling, rental car, hotel and equipment schlepping such travel entails. That trip was to my shop; Mike Pekovich came with her to show her the ropes.

As it happened, Newtown, like the Bronx, was a 90-minute commute each way from her home. For the first year and a half, she commuted four days a week. Since then, she has switched to spending three days a week on the Taunton campus and two working remotely.

Anissa had her daughter in 2009 and her son a year later. She worked at Fine Woodworking through both pregnancies but left in 2011, when her son was one year old. “I had a 90-minute commute and two infants,” she explains. “It was just too much. I wanted to focus on my children.” She tried taking the children to shoots, breast pump at the ready, but for that plan to succeed, her husband had to accompany her and keep a close eye on the kids. “What you have to give changes when you’ve had kids,” she says. “That never jived with my work ethic.”

While she was not on staff, she freelanced for Taunton’s special-interest publications. I had no idea what had become of her, when one day, at an airport, I happened to spot Arts & Crafts Furniture on a magazine rack. I cracked the cover, and there she was, with an editor’s note. She also edited several other special interest publications, including the tool guide – work she enjoyed for its challenges. “You have to re-edit the articles to make them fit,” she explains. “It’s the problem-solving part of the puzzle that I really like.” Kind of like putting a groundhog skeleton back together from a pile of bones.

“I’m not office job material on the whole,” she says. “But I’m able to function in this job and love it because it’s so different all the time. It’s so creative, and the people I work with – we’re such a great crew right now. It’s such a joy to be working with people in creating this thing that goes out into the world and allows other people to create things.”

When Asa stepped down in 2014, Tom McKenna became editorial director. She’d worked for him on the freelance gigs and he made clear that he would love to have her back on staff, should a position open up. “Yeah, I would really consider that,” she remembers thinking. A job became available in late 2015. Both of her children were in school (kindergarten and first grade, respectively). She was getting divorced. The timing was good. She accepted the position.

The work at Fine Woodworking has changed over the years. There are fewer staff members today than when Anissa started the job. There’s significantly more digital content, such as podcasts and blogging. The basics, though, remain the same: She works with authors to hone article proposals; meets with fellow editors to discuss the concept and art direction; gets a manuscript from the author and generates a shot list. She collaborates with Creative Director Mike Pekovich to fine-tune the article’s focus and determine which props should be on hand for the shoot. And then she travels to authors’ shops for photo shoots, which have taken her all over the U.S. and Canada. (She currently has some articles lined up with Aled Lewis in Wales.) In addition to working on feature articles she’s the editor of the Designer’s Notebook and Handwork departments.

“Coming back after four years, I was ready to throw myself right back into it,” she continues. “I was so excited to be back at the magazine. I pitched this wall unit article and had all this stuff going. And then, bam! It was about a month and a half before I was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer.

“The radiologist was not good at hiding his emotions. I knew. I already knew it was cancer even before getting the biopsy. The surgeon called and said ‘Come in right now.’ I was on my way to the office. I stopped the car and emailed Tom. He was great through the whole thing. It was just really hard. At first, I didn’t tell anybody but Tom at work.

“People handle it differently. I needed to process all of it. I couldn’t just instantly jump into surgery the next week. I was diagnosed in mid-January and didn’t have my surgery until mid- to late-March. For those two months, I was just working and taking sick days and going to appointments and figuring things out.

“I kept things pretty quiet, but as people found out everybody was just amazing. The HR people were super supportive. As I got closer to the surgery date, Liz Knapp and Betsy Engel said, ‘I don’t know if you know this, but I know a couple people who… Would you like to talk to some people who have been through this?’ There were three people in the company I ended up talking with. It was immensely helpful to be able to speak with these people, to talk about what they chose to do and how they handled everything.

“People outside of Fine Woodworking did that, too. There is this unspoken club. You don’t want to be in it, but once you’re in it you’re grateful for the support. And I had health insurance. I was glad that I had the support I did from the people I work with in terms of logistics. I felt so bad, because I’d left Fine Woodworking after two maternity leaves and then I was back with cancer.

“That’s what cancer does for you. It’s that hidden gift. You know that things are out of your control and you just have to give it up. You make the best decisions you can for yourself. You cannot rely on doctors and nurses and health insurance companies to make those decisions for you. This was the second time in my life I realized ‘You have power.’ I knew I was on the right path. I just slowed down and made these decisions for myself. I gathered information and took care of my kids and did my job and took time off after my surgery; it may have been two months. And then started chemo in July. I was going back and forth to the city for appointments and treatment. I switched from Sloan Kettering to an oncologist in the Hudson Valley who managed to be an oncologist in an artistic sort of way. She listens and thinks outside of the box and does things differently. I knew that was the right choice, too.”

Anissa had chemo every other Wednesday, was off the rest of the week and went back to the office on Monday. “As the end of the four months got closer, I was really tired. I just plodded through it.”

Almost a year to the day after finishing chemo, she ran the 2017 New York Marathon.

“But then I tore my meniscus in the middle of the marathon!” she adds. “But I finished. It was just slower! And ended up with knee surgery in March of 2018.”

Her running partner, Judy (in the pink top, above), has been a close friend since the two of them had their kids. Entry to the marathon was by lottery, and Judy hadn’t won a place, even though they’d applied together. Those who didn’t get in could buy a place by raising money for designated causes, so to honor her friend, Judy did a breast cancer fundraiser. “She had yard sales, a gofundme site through the breast cancer group and sold socks that said ‘I love boobs.’” Between them Judy and Anissa raised $3,000 or $4,000. They ran the marathon together.

“Fine Woodworking has seen me through a lot,” Anissa continues. “A divorce. Two kids. Cancer. It’s been a steady in my life for 13, 14 years. And this crew! We’re just very even. Very funny. There’s no drama. We don’t acknowledge big things in an overt way, positive or negative. If we do, it’s so subtle, or low key. It’s a really healthy place to work in terms of drama and emotion. A solid place with solid, good people.

“One of my biggest regrets when my dad died is that he didn’t get to meet my kids,” Anissa says. “And he wasn’t around when I got this job. We were really close and I loved building things with him. He was so meticulous, and I was so young and impatient. I just wanted the bookshelf finished, or the box we made finished. And he would say ‘No, you have to do it this way.’

“He would want it done the right way, and I would say, ‘Dad, can’t we just throw this thing together?’ And now I get why he persisted. The fact that he died prior to me getting into woodworking the way I did and being able to show him the magazine and talk to him about the magazine… I’m sure if he were still around he would be making things from the magazine all the time. Hanging out with him was what got me into woodworking.”

After her father died, she photographed his basement shop to document it. “I still have the weird stuff he would bring home from work,” she says. She took it to a storage unit for a while, then moved it into her own basement, along with his tools and woodworking machines, a way to keep him close.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work”

And here’s an update on the archaeological dig:

May 2017.

I’m on my way to Handworks, a renowned hand-tool woodworking event in Amana, Iowa. After seven hours of interstate driving I know I’m getting close when the GPS directs me off the highway into a residential area with a modern nursing home complex that seems to occupy an entire block.

Hmm. Not the Amana I expected – the one with quaint German-influenced architecture and century-old barns. According to the GPS, my destination is just around the corner. I turn, only to find myself on a lane that dead-ends in a corn field.

I’m too tired for this. Screw it, I think, frustrated to the brink of tears. I hardly know anyone who’ll be at this event anyway; I’m turning around and going home. But as I retrace my steps to the highway I spot a car heading in my direction and flag it down. “Take this road,” the driver tells me. “You’re almost there.”

Sure enough, a few miles on I spot a sign confirming my arrival. A friendly pedestrian points me to a gravel parking lot, where I spot an Orthodox priest – long beard, flowing black robes. He seems to be directing traffic – like you do when you’re an Orthodox priest.

So went my introduction to the brothers Abraham. Father John and Jameel are best known to woodworkers as the force behind Handworks, which is held roughly every two years, as well as Benchcrafted, a business that produces Brunhilde-level woodworking benches, smooth-running vises designed with as much care for how they look and feel as for their holding power; old-fashioned hinged seats that bolt to benches (or kitchen islands) and swing out of the way when not in use; scrapers and other tools; and a range of ironic stickers based on vintage cigarette cards.

Over the next three years I got an inkling that there was more. Father John dropped the occasional crumb about vegan cooking or Doc Marten boots. Jameel shared pictures of his lutherie and furniture on Instagram, along with posts about driving his niece Emilia to Taekwondo lessons, or teaching her and her brother George to flatten a Roubo benchtop with a jack plane when they were both in grade school. The brothers Abraham were clearly a couple of characters. I was itching to interview them for this blog, but they demurred.

Three years after we first met, they finally said yes. When I caught up with them by phone, they were eating Cheez-Its.

“With Cheese Whiz,” one of them added.

Asked about the nature of their days at this point in the coronavirus pandemic, they respond: “We cook and eat. Go to church. Drive old Porsches (inexpensive old ones that anyone who buys a Honda Civic can afford). And – what’s the other thing? Oh, Benchcrafted.” In other words, they’re as engaged as ever in running the business that is their livelihood. “To pay for car parts. And food.”

They also spend time with three of Father John’s children who still live at home: John (25; in the background I hear Jameel shout “You’re asking your younger brother how old your children are?”), George (16) and Emilia (15), the last two home-schooled. The fourth, Sophia, is recently married and lives with her husband.

Roots

Father John and Jameel were born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where their Abraham forebears landed after emigrating from Lebanon and Germany more than a century ago. Their story is a classic of 20^th-century American success born of hard work and honest living.

Their grandparents on the Abraham side married in the 1920s; their grandmother worked for Quaker Oats, their grandfather for a meat processing plant. After several years they opened a small grocery store where both worked after their factory shifts. A few years later, they’d saved enough to start buying rental properties. Their daily routine became: work on the rental properties before “work”; work at the factory; run the grocery after their shifts; then work some more on the apartments. Eventually their grandfather became foreman at the packing plant; because there were so many workers from Czechoslovakia, he learned to speak Czech, in addition to English and Arabic (his native language).

Their father and uncles grew up in the rental property business, as did Father John and Jameel, though they came along at the end of it. From the property business they learned the basics of construction, including electrical work and plumbing. They also gained an appreciation for the value of hard work and the vagaries of human experience.

The properties were rented to low-income tenants and were located in the same neighborhood where Grandpa and Grandma Abraham lived. Even as their grandparents aged and became more financially secure, they remained in that neighborhood.

“It was very colorful,” Jameel reminisces. “Old turn-of-the-century houses, frozen pipes in winter,” to which Father John adds “Us getting up at 1 a.m. to thaw frozen pipes because the renters really enjoyed the mix of hot water and open windows in winter.” Their grandparents paid the utilities, so renters felt at liberty to leave the windows open; the cold air sank and froze the pipes.

Jameel shares an incident that reveals their grandfather’s character. “We also had sleeping rooms with a kitchenette and a bed – for single men, like construction workers. A lot of these guys were drinkers; they’d spend their pay at the bar, then come home, sleep it off, and repeat the next day. Grandpa gets a call from one of the renters: ‘So-and-so is throwing a fit. There’s big trouble. You’d better come over here, Abe.’ Grandpa goes over; Dad is with him, probably eight years old or so. Grandpa Abe says ‘What’s going on?’ The tenant says, ‘Get outta here! I’ve got a gun. I’m gonna kill you.’ My grandpa was fearless. He said ‘I know you; you’re not going to do something like that.’ My grandpa had the key; he opens the door and talks the guy down. It stuck with me because nowadays guys would call the police. Everybody in town loved him. People would come up to us for years and say, ‘Your grandpa was the greatest gentleman ever.’”

“My grandfather was kind of like the Godfather but without the violence,” Father John elaborates. “He engendered that kind of respect. Routinely over the next 30, 40 years, governors, senators, politicians would eat at their table. He was so even-keeled. He had a reserved charisma. [Our grandparents] ate dinner at the White House [when Carter was president]. And they were nobody; they really were.”

Father John also learned a lot at an early age about running a business. He was taking care of bookkeeping in his teens, in addition to much of the remodeling as the properties changed tenants. “Probably the most important thing my grandparents imbued in my father, and in us, through him,” he says, “was that there was really no difference between people. They treated these renters exactly the same as the senators and politicians who would eat at their table.”

He offers an example. “The back door to the house entered into the kitchen. My grandma, her day was occupied from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. with cooking. People would come to the door to pay rent and they would be let in, and they would be fed. So we grew up in that environment. We never thought anything about anybody. Everybody’s the same. Treat everybody well.”

“The Golden Rule,” Jameel chimes in. “My grandparents would make sure every tenant had a turkey at Christmastime.”

Their grandfathers on both sides were “serious post-WWII hobbyist woodworkers.” Both had shops where they spent a lot of time. “Grandpa Abe, being very frugal, would build elaborate fret-sawn church furniture for our church out of BC plywood,” Jameel says. “He would slap a coat of golden oak stain on it and walk away. It was full of soul but pretty awful furniture. It felt like #80-grit sandpaper. We still have a piece of his in our church. He never bought a piece of hardwood in his life. Grandpa Sam did the same, but he made stuff out of hardwoods.”

On visits to their maternal grandparents’ farm, Grandpa Sam would have them build

a clock shaped like Iowa, which he would finish with pour-on epoxy, or a cutting board shaped like a pig. “’Now, you boys,’” he’d tell them, “’don’t you go near that deer sculpture or that clock,’ because the epoxy took three days before it stopped being sticky like a fly trap.”

The Church

In 1987, when Father John was 18 and Jameel 13, their church lost its longtime priest. There was no one to take up the mantle. Their father had been a chanter, as had his father before him. “Dad said ‘I’m going to step up to the plate and be ordained and be the pastor of our church,’” Jameel recounts. “Our life changed a lot. We got way more involved in church. I got really interested in Byzantine art. In the Middle East, Russia, Greece, North Africa, Egypt and Italy, there’s a rich artistic history of decorating the walls of churches with mosaics, frescoes, etc. In the Orthodox Church you cover every square inch with art representing everything from Adam to the resurrection and beyond. It’s a timeless tradition. Anything that relates to the spiritual life of the church can be depicted in an iconographic representation.”

Jameel took up sketching. “I would look at prototypes in books and try to copy them, get

a feel for the style. Fast forward to when I was 17 or 18; when FJ got married, we all went on a trip together to California. We stopped in a monastery on the way back. The [monks] earned their income by painting murals on canvas and installing them with glue on the church walls. They had a huge wall with a giant Schedule 40 PVC tube on the top that they attached the canvas to. They had a winch – like a bass boat winch – so they could roll it up and work on different parts.” He has the same set-up in his home studio today.

He continues to describe the impact of that visit to a California monastery. “It was like a thunderbolt. I wasn’t interested in the iconography for spiritual or religious reasons at first. What captured me was the colors, the stylized nature of it; the look of it always appealed to me. When I went home it was only later that it really sunk in. Two or three years later it hit me and I decided I really wanted to try it.”

Father John and his wife had enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Rapids around 1989 to study art. They lived in married student housing. When Jameel was ready for college, in 1992, he moved in with them. “It was free rent,” he says bluntly. He enrolled in a Russian linguistics class, thinking he’d become a translator; he’d been a straight-A student in Russian at high school. At college, though, he says he hated the Russian class; the one subject he loved was writing. He skipped a lot of classes but is quick to note that he wasn’t just blowing things off. “That was when the spark of painting took hold. I built an easel and spent hours in my bedroom painting. At the end of the semester I thought ‘I’m just going to go home and paint until I get decent enough to see what happens.’”

When Jameel dropped out after that first semester he was joined by Father John and his wife. They didn’t see how they would make practical use of their art degrees other than by teaching, which neither wanted to do. The brothers briefly attended the Ringling Brothers Circus School in Florida, hoping to become trapeze artists. “But we were too fat,” laughs Father John. “You know, the tensile strength of 3/8″ cable can only handle so much. You put two Abrahams on that and there’s gonna be shrapnel flying.”

Shortly after the circus school adventure they launched their first business. It was still the early ’90s, and there was a serious shortage of candles in the Orthodox church, which only permits the use of beeswax candles for ceremonies. As a metals major in college, Father John had built a prototype for candle-production equipment. “We figured out that we could probably make a living making beeswax candles,” he says. “In ’93 we officially started Mount Sinai Orthodox Church Products. We named it after Mount Sinai because of the burning bush and candles and fire…. Technically, we still do it.” Around the same time, Father John’s first child, John, was born and he decided to be ordained, following in his father’s footsteps.

Woodworking

The brothers’ involvement with their church is also largely responsible for Jameel’s immersion in fine woodworking. “My serious interest in woodworking sprang out of practicality,” he says. “We needed furniture for our house and our church, and we couldn’t afford it. The carved elaborate Greek-style church furnishings are astronomically expensive. I bought a V-tool and made some basic things out of birch veneer plywood. Right away, dad introduced me to a guy here named Gary. I went to his shop and commissioned him to build a pair of doors for the church. At that point the spark in me for fine woodworking was kindled; within a year I was working for him and building some pretty nice furniture.” Jameel was about 22. “At the end of one day he handed me a book: A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” It was a pivotal experience.

At this dramatic moment in our conversation shouting erupts on the other end of the line. Like any good kid tattling on his brother, Jameel informs me “He’s eating ham!” and turns to Father John. “Don’t eat ham when Nancy’s on the phone!”

“I fell down the rabbit hole,” he continues, ricocheting back to business. The Cedar Rapids Public Library had a good woodworking section, with 11 volumes of technique articles by Fine Woodworking and back issues all the way to FWW No. 1. He checked them out in rotation, repeatedly, and read them from cover to cover. That, he says, was his education in woodworking.

He spent every minute he could in the shop, practicing techniques and sharpening his tools. His shop at the time was half of a garage, his first workbench a repurposed beauty salon countertop with a wash basin in it. He removed the mirror from the back of the cabinet and replaced the original counter with a piece of particleboard.

Benchcrafted

Around 2001, Jameel had a friend who needed a gift for his sister’s wedding. He had an idea for a product, a Magblok – a strip of hardwood with an embedded magnet, a safe, attractive way to store knives or woodworking tools with sharp edges. Jameel made the first Magblok out of rosewood or cocobolo and his friend gave it to his sister.

“I’d been painting the walls of our church with murals since about 1994,” he says, “and I’m about 75 percent done with it. By 2005 I had realized that as long as I was painting for someone else, for money, I wasn’t painting for our church. I needed to come up with something to earn a living that would also allow me to paint for our church in my free time. Why don’t we try making some of these Magbloks?” Because the wooden strip would be small, they could afford to make it out of something special with a high per-board-foot price without having to charge a lot for the product.

It was Father John who came up with the name “Benchcrafted.” In 2005 they launched the website. Their candle business had become so successful that it allowed them to start the new venture. They got good press. Sales increased.

By now, Jameel had become an accomplished woodworker. Not only was he building furniture (Morris chairs, tables, beds, full kitchens); he was also making ouds – short-necked string instruments played throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa and parts of Europe and Asia. One night while surfing the net he came across Chris Schwarz’s blog post on the Roubo bench. He wrote to Chris and said “I’ve been woodworking for a long time. I’m really impressed with your work and your approach.” He was ready for a better workbench but couldn’t find a vise he considered worth buying. So, following Chris’s example, he looked to history for a guide. “I dove into the patent record, and the first vises we made emerged from that. In 2008 I made my Roubo workbench, which I still work on every day.”

That year they made three vises. Jameel was blogging about making ouds, so he started blogging about the workbench build as well. “The opposite end of the spectrum!” he acknowledges. “People were following me and said, ‘Hey cool vise. Can I buy one?’” A retired tool and die maker was making them for Benchcrafted out of his garage. “It just kept going. The original product, the Magblok, which had nothing to do with benches or vises, eventually evolved into a business making benches.”

Handworks

Also in 2008, the first Woodworking in America took place. It was held at Berea College in Kentucky; the event was hand tools only. The stock market had just crashed, the economy had tanked, and everyone was nervous about the future. “Chris [Schwarz] and the others at Woodworking Magazine came up with it,” recounts Jameel – “a conference for boutique hand tool makers. We didn’t have vises to sell. We borrowed space from Ron Brese, a plane maker. This event was like … there was electricity in the air. Everyone we’d been talking to came down. It was tiny, it was intimate. Roy Underhill was there.”

As time went on, the character of the biennial event changed. There were machines, jigs, laser-cutting equipment. Instead of its original location in the rolling hills of central Kentucky, it now took place in a convention center, “a big concrete bunker” Jameel calls it. “It had no charm.”

They wrote to the people at F+W Media, who organized WIA. “’Listen, there’s a place called Amana, Iowa. There’s an old barn there with a great vibe. If you’re going to continue this you should have the event at the Festhalle. We don’t have any personal interest in this other than we love it.’ We sent pictures, we shot a video. We basically handed them Handworks before it was called Handworks: ‘This is the future of hand tool woodworking. This is it!’ They basically said ‘No, thank you.’”

About four years later they’d pitched the idea to Konrad Sauer, Raney Nelson, Chris, Megan Fitzpatrick and a few other close friends. “Everybody was enthusiastic. Our guiding principle was – here’s how Handworks is: ‘Hey, Konrad, you wanna come to Iowa and hang out in a barn for a weekend and talk about tools?’ That’s what it is. Chris has had our backs the whole time.” The rest of the exhibitors were 100 percent on board. They held the event in 2013, 2015 and 2017. The next one is scheduled for this September.

Father John and Jameel organize the event, contact prospective vendors and speakers (and request their help in publicizing the event), plan who will go in which building, accept freight deliveries of tools and other products that have to be shipped and then deliver them via forklift to their respective buildings and so on. At first they did the artwork for the event posters themselves, but they’ve had the last two designed by Steve Thomas, an artist in Minnesota. As for the venue, it’s a quaint historic village with drool-worthy old buildings and a spectacular timber-framed barn. Who strings up all those lights? I ask. “They’re up all the time,” responds Father John. “Amana has festivals in the barn and rents it for weddings, so it’s ready.” They split the rental charges among the vendors.

“Handworks as an entity does not exist,” Father John explains. “It doesn’t make money, it doesn’t spend money.” He and Jameel run the minimalist website, which informs visitors where and when the event will take place and asks them to sign up.

Most of the work is in logistics, then sweeping up everyone’s shavings when everyone else goes home. “And cardboard!” adds Father John. “From books at the Lost Art Press booth! Hey, why don’t you clean up your crap next time?!”

– Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work

“Chromosomes have nothing to do with your abilities or potential in a woodshop.”
— Barbie, of Barbie Woodshop

Among the first questions posed to any woman in woodworking seems to be: “How did you get into this?” Followed by: “Was your father a woodworker? Your husband?”

In Megan Fitzpatrick’s case, anyone familiar with her whip-smart writing about her home restoration exploits might speculate that her involvement in woodworking began with her interest in restoring old houses. She’s lived in old houses her entire life — first an Arts & Crafts cottage; then, when she was 7 or 8, her family moved into an antebellum farmhouse in Louisville. Amazingly, that property still had its original smokehouse and summer kitchen. Because it was more than a century old, she says, “it always needed work.” But her father “wasn’t terribly handy.” So, no, she didn’t get started in woodworking because of her dad; nor was it really because of old houses. Rather, she arrived at wood through words.

“I was brought up to be an academic,” she says. “There was no question that I would have to go to college,” though she doesn’t recall being pressured to pursue any particular course of study. A longtime fan of Dave Barry and Richard Des Ruisseaux, humor columnists for the Miami Herald and Louisville’s The Courier-Journal respectively, Megan wanted to be a journalist. “When I got older,” she adds, “I realized humor was pretty much the hardest thing to write.” She enrolled in undergraduate studies at the University of Cincinnati, which had no journalism major. “So I got a degree in English Literature instead.”

Those who know Megan as an erudite and entertaining woodworking instructor, author and editor may be shocked to learn that she failed out of college. “I was so busy having so much fun working for the school paper, The News Record, that I never went to my classes — except for the few I liked. I was asked to leave.”

Needing income, she took the kinds of retail and service-industry jobs that gave many of us our start — selling clothes at Banana Republic, serving customers at a coffee shop. The first glimmerings of a break came in the early 1990s, when she was hired as a clerk at The Cincinnati Post, a position that involved “doing whatever you were told: go pick up donuts, go to the printing plant. We would get the papers when they came off the press and bring them back for the writers and editors. We ran things up and down stairs to the ‘morgue’” (where clippings were kept).

It wasn’t long before she realized she wanted to write, and her editor began giving her opportunities to do so — though she stresses it was “always as a guest reporter” and the assignments involved matters of such non-pressing local interest as recent goings-on at the Great Dane Rescue Society. Her first professional byline was covering a Kenny G concert, because, as she says, “no writers on staff wanted to do it.” She wanted to write more, but they wouldn’t hire her in that capacity without a degree.

With fresh motivation, Megan signed up for evening classes with a plan to complete her bachelor’s in English at the University of Cincinnati. By day she worked full-time at The Cincinnati Post, still mainly as a clerk but with the occasional chance to write. She graduated in 1996.

“I immediately realized I liked school again, so I applied to graduate programs for a master’s in English,” she says. She earned a scholarship from The Scripps Howard Foundation for newspaper employees that paid for her tuition and living expenses, and allowed her to complete her master’s in English in two years.

Megan was smitten early on by the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. When she was 11 or 12 (she can’t remember exactly) her family traveled to Greece after visiting an aunt and uncle stationed in Germany by the Air Force. As her parents drove their rental car through Greece’s ancient architectural wonders, Megan sat in the back seat with her brother, scarcely looking out the window, so focused was she on memorizing Mark Antony’s oration at Caesar’s funeral.

“Shakespeare’s language was lovely, as were the universal truths revealed in his plays,” says Megan on why she enjoyed Shakespeare then and still does, today. “Anything you want to read about, you can pretty much read about it in Shakespeare’s plays.”

Her favorite play, however, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” is not by the illustrious bard. Rather it’s written by Francis Beaumont. “It’s a joke about syphilis,” she says. “But few people know Francis Beaumont, so I say I studied Shakespeare.”

In 1998, when she was 30, Megan was hired by F+W Media, a few months after completing her M.A.

“I was a low-level copy writer, hired to write promotional material,” she says. “I dressed up for work every day — skirts and high heels. My immediate supervisor left and I was hired for her position — promotions manager. It would have been 2000 or 2001, so I was actually in charge of some titles and did all the marketing for them. One of those titles was Popular Woodworking. I would stomp down to the offices of Popular Woodworking in my high heels and short  skirt and give the editor and publisher, Steve Shanesy, a piece of my mind, because he was always late returning materials.”

She made an impression. (Christopher Schwarz was promoted to editor just as Megan joined the staff; Steve stayed on as publisher.)

“When Kara [Uhl] was leaving Pop Wood to join the Writer’s Digest team, I had turned in my resignation at F+W to go back to school and get my Ph.D.,” Megan says. “It would have been August 2005. And both Chris and Steve said, ‘Hey, do you want the managing editor job at Pop Wood?'”

The job, she explains, was to be the traffic cop — “making sure people got their stuff in on time, copy editing, making sure people got paid. Basically it was back to my clerking job, but with a better title. But this time I was also working with the words. And there was nothing wrong with being a clerk! It was more intellectually rewarding than making coffee for people.”

At first Megan told Chris and Steve no. Undeterred, they offered her the opportunity to do the job while taking classes. So she changed her mind and stayed. And even though she still planned to leave the magazine eventually in exchange for college-level teaching, she took the opportunity to gain some serious woodworking skills with Chris’s encouragement and the use of the Pop Wood shop (and, she notes, “using Chris’s tools, which he kindly loaned me”). She had always made things, such as a simple bookcase in lumberyard pine held together with angle brackets. But now she was able to use high-quality tools in a well-equipped shop, with expert guidance just a request away. She took to furniture making like a duck to water and built pieces for project articles in the magazine, such as a wall cabinet, a plate rack and a workbench with an LVL top.

Megan tackled her doctoral coursework from 2005 to 2008, toggling back and forth between the University of Cincinnati campus and the offices at Pop Wood every day. She would leave work, take classes, then come back to the office to make sure everything was done as it should be. “They didn’t mind, as long as the work got done,” she says.

Meanwhile, instead of taking vacations out of town, or even the occasional week off, she was strategically banking paid leave. When it was time to take her comprehensive exams, Steve and Chris let her take off six consecutive weeks to study. To call her days focused would be an understatement. “I sat on the couch, had a cat on my lap, read my books,” she says. “It was really kind of them, and I don’t know if I thanked them enough.”

Megan took her exams in February 2009, and began working on her dissertation. Then, in 2011, she was promoted to executive editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine. A mere nine months later she was promoted again, this time to content director (editor of the magazine, also with oversight of her publisher’s entire woodworking community).

At this point, she says, “I had to choose. I had no time left to work on my dissertation. ‘Am I going to stay with woodworking or finish my Ph.D. and go teach full time?’”

She considered switching to a creative dissertation, which was an option at the University of Cincinnati. “You would do a short critical paper and produce a creative work — a novel, a play — and that would be your dissertation,” she says. She envisioned a critical paper about the use of furniture in plays by Shakespeare and others, then building 10 or so of the pieces mentioned therein. But her dissertation directors weren’t keen on the idea. “It was too far outside the accepted paradigm,” she says. “I don’t think they knew how to evaluate such an approach.” She lost the drive to finish the dissertation, and even though she loves teaching, she says, “I chose woodworking.”

“As a woman editor of a woodworking magazine, I faced some sexual harassment,” Megan says. “I was often in situations where I was one of few women at a tool show, industry event or what have you, and it led to some uncomfortable situations. I thought that if we could see a broader swath of representation in the magazines and at events, that might help to address an imbalance — and cut down on that sort of crap. The people from whom we ran articles were (and still are) great woodworkers … but I knew there was room to expand into a more representative view of the world at large. There are more people than white men building wonderful things, many of whom have things to teach us. I did my best to level that field a little bit. There are black woodworkers, there are Hispanic woodworkers … there are women of all races who are woodworkers. Why shouldn’t they have a space, too?”

She made a point of inviting woodworkers from diverse demographic groups to speak and present workshops at Popular Woodworking’s biennial national event, Woodworking in America. She followed up with members of under-represented groups who’d submitted article proposals in years past. (That was how my first article for Popular Woodworking came to be published.) Then, in March 2017, she published her editor’s note for the magazine’s May-June issue online.

“Welcome, Gentles All” (a riff on a line from Shakespeare’s “Henry V”), invited “any excellent woodworker — women and men (cisgender, transgender, gay, straight, bi-sexual, asexual) of all ages, races, nationalities, religions and political persuasions” to pitch an idea for an article. While she received many emails of support after that editorial ran, Megan says she also received more negative responses than for anything she’s ever written — not that she let them bother her.

In short, Megan has made it her business to broaden the range of images that come to mind in response to the question, “What does a woodworker look like?”

“But after I threw down that gauntlet I was sort of shuffled off the stage,” she says. She’d spent nearly 20 years working for F+W when she was unceremoniously let go in early December 2017. “I would have liked to have more time to have done more, but if I did give a larger platform to people of non-binary sexuality, to women, to people of color, great. I’m glad to have had that platform to do whatever I could for however long I could do it.”

She notes that in hindsight, with F+W filing for bankruptcy about 14 months later, she was actually thankful she left when she did, but at the time, she was utterly shocked. She’d thought it was a fairly safe job. As one of those who got to know her during her last couple of years there, I can attest to her proficiency, professionalism and the unstinting dedication she gave to the operation, as well as to contributors and colleagues. She worked as many hours as it took, seven days a week. She put visiting speakers and authors up in her home when they couldn’t find a place to stay. She never missed a deadline. And through it all, she somehow managed to maintain her graciousness and composure.

“Most people love Megan for her cheerful and genuinely helpful nature,” Chris Schwarz says. “I became bonded to her because she can make grown men cry.”

“We were both hired at F+W in the late 1990s,” Chris continues. “She was in the promotions department (marketing, basically). I was in editorial. We crossed paths occasionally when she asked my fellow editors for help writing junk mail for our magazine. When they put her off or dismissed her, there was a specific hell to pay. She was always professional, but she did not suffer fools.

“When my managing editor left, I wanted to hire her. Megan was spending her free time in our workshop, building stuff and asking woodworking questions, plus she was supremely qualified in the language department. I, however, was afraid to recommend her as a candidate to my boss because she had ripped him in two on many occasions.

“The following is a credit to Megan: It was my boss’s idea to interview her for the job.

“She took the job under difficult conditions. She was taking courses to complete her doctorate. Her boss in the marketing department didn’t want to let her go and asked her to continue writing promotional material. And I was training her as managing editor (the most unforgiving job at a magazine).

“On her first day at the magazine, a technology guy came down to set up her computer station. It wasn’t simple. She needed a PC to do her marketing work and a Mac to do the magazine work — plus logins across the company’s many networks.

“The tech guy they sent generally required everyone to kiss his butt if you wanted the job done. I know this is true because I had chapped lips for about a decade because of him.

“At some point during the day, I heard the tech guy say there was a problem. He was going to leave and come back and finish the job some other day. (This would delay both her work for her old boss and her training at the magazine.)

“Then Megan spoke. It wasn’t loud or angry. I don’t know what she said. But when I walked past him a few minutes later the guy was at her keyboard, working and crying.

“By the end of the day her computers were (mostly) working.

“And the following is a credit to Megan: She and the crying tech guy got along just fine for years after that.

“She’s the best co-worker and employee I’ve ever had. Works like the devil. Holds herself to the highest standards possible. And she will not take shit from anyone.”

Back to Megan: “Of course it hurts,” she says. “It feels like you’re being let go because you weren’t doing a good job. In the last few years I was working 80 hours a week and giving everything to make the magazine and related publications as good as I could with the resources I was given, which were few.” She had given up her goal of teaching literature, a career plan in which she’d invested years of work and money, for the job.

“What the hell do I do now?” she wondered. “I was terrified. I thought that everything I had accomplished was gone.” She texted Chris immediately: “-30-” which, she explains, is “what you used to put at the bottom of the raw copy of a newspaper article to signify the end.”

Straightaway, he met her downtown — at a pub, where, she says, “I had a drink. And I went home and had many more. That was Dec. 5, 2017. On Dec. 6 I had the worst hangover I’ve had since I was an undergrad in college. I don’t recommend [getting drunk] as a coping mechanism.”

She and Chris had been talking for some time about what she might do if and when she left Popular Woodworking — maybe work on a book with him, do some more editing. She had copy edited almost every book Lost Art Press published, working on the fringes of her already-demanding job. After being laid off she didn’t spend any money for about six months. She was terrified. “How am I going to pay my bills?” she wondered.

And that’s how Lost Art Press’s “The Woodworking School That’s Not a School” got its start. Chris offered her the use of his storefront shop to teach classes. She taught her first class in February, just weeks after being let go. It filled up quickly, and she says that’s when she realized, “I think it’s going to be alright.” Chris encouraged her to teach more classes. (By now she has taught so many classes on the Anarchist’s Tool Chest and the Dutch Tool Chest that she could probably teach both in a blindfold.)

Here Megan pauses. “There have been two men in my life who helped to shape it more than any other,” she says. “Jonathan Kamholtz and Chris. Dr. Kamholtz encouraged me to go to grad school when I thought I wouldn’t amount to anything. I don’t think I would have gone without him. Hell — I’m not sure I would have finished my undergraduate work without his encouragement.” As for Chris, she says, “he has always made me think I could do something with woodworking, and helped me to do it. And he’s one of my best friends.”

Megan began doing more copy editing for Lost Art Press, more work with InDesign, more writing for the blog. Chris urged her to contact other schools about freelance teaching, and encouraged her to form her own publishing business, Rude Mechanicals Press. (She named the business after “rude mechanicals” (skilled laborers) in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Her Instagram handle, @1snugthejoiner, comes from the name of “rude mechanic” Snug the Joiner.) Chris also helped her publish a new edition of Peter Nicholson’s Mechanic’s Companion, sharing his advice and allowing her full access to the scanner in his home while he and his family were on vacation so she could scan the pages of an original copy.

“Chris and his business partner, John Hoffman, gave me all the resources to make my transition into small publishing easier so I didn’t have to spend much money doing it,” she says.

In addition to writing, editing, publishing and teaching, she copy edits Mortise & Tenon Magazine and is editor of The Chronicle, the journal of the Early American Industries Association. She’s also working on that book about furniture in the plays of Shakespeare and others that she had wanted to do for her dissertation, as well as a book on Shaker furniture.

Not long after Megan started working at Popular Woodworking, she built a small dovetailed box in a class with Kelly Mehler. She showed it to her grandfather, who said women don’t belong in the shop. “Oh, those are terrible dovetails,” she recalls him saying. “They shouldn’t have let you use good wood for a beginner project.”

I’ll show you, she thought. As hurt as she was by his remarks, she thinks he’d be proud of her now. “The way to get me to do something is to say ‘you can’t do that.’ I’m not going to let it beat me. I’m going to figure it out.”

That same resilience supports her now. As a freelancer, Megan feels fortunate in this time of enforced isolation to be able to so much of her work from home. Like most of those who teach woodworking, she has lost some income due to the coronavirus pandemic, but she’s upbeat in her outlook.

“I love teaching,” she says. “I went to school to teach. I absolutely miss teaching people; that’s been the worst thing for me. And I know I’ll be teaching people [again]. You can learn from books and magazines, but having someone there to help you and show you, there’s nothing like that. And there is little as satisfying as helping people get better at something they love to do.”

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work“