Noted woodworker, teacher and author Robert Wearing (1921-2020) died peacefully on April 27 at age 99, according to his son, Dave Wearing.
Wearing was “interested in wood to the end,” Dave wrote in an email.
Wearing was the author of many important books on woodworking, including “The Resourceful Woodworker,” “Making Woodwork Aids & Devices” and “Hand Tools for Woodworkers.” Lost Art Press had the privilege of republishing Wearing’s “The Essential Woodworker” in 2010 and compiling a collection of his best hand-tool appliances for “The Solution at Hand” (2019).
Wearing’s career as a craftsman began after his service during World War II. He was formally trained at Loughborough College (now University) in Leicestershire, England. After graduating, he went on to teach for 50 more years and write countless articles on woodwork and several well-received books.
During our relationship with the Wearing family, we have published two short biographies you might like to read. One, from 2011, was written by Wearing. The other, from 2017, was written by Kara Gebhart Uhl.
“The Essential Woodworker,” originally released in 1988, was the third book Lost Art Press published. It was also our introduction to the rough-and-tumble world of book publishing. After Wearing readily agreed to have us republish the book, it was up to us to get the original materials back from a former publisher.
They were uncooperative, despite the fact that they didn’t own the rights. After a scuffle, they admitted they had lost all the original materials, including the drawings and photos. (This, we have found, is a common problem – or perhaps a tactic – employed by corporate publishers.)
So we recreated the book from scratch with the guidance and support of Wearing and his son David. We reset all the text and restaged all the photos to produce our edition.
“The Essential Woodworker” has always been a strong seller. As I write this, its seventh press run is at our Michigan plant. The only book that has sold better for us is “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
John and I owe a huge debt to Wearing and his son Dave. They supported and encouraged us at every turn. They took a leap of faith in 2010 when they signed on with a tiny publisher that no one had heard of. Without a doubt, we owe a lot of our early success to “The Essential Woodworker,” which is still a strong seller – a testament to its excellence as a clear and concise path to enter handwork.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We hope to continue our relationship with the Wearing estate for as long as it is willing for us to remain the publisher. It is entirely too soon for us to enter into negotiations, but we don’t expect to run out of stock on any of his titles in the near future.
“Chromosomes have nothing to do with your abilities or potential in a woodshop.” — Barbie, of Barbie Woodshop
Megan’s step-back cupboard in cherry
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, TheNews 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 TheCincinnati 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.”
Megan’s yearbook picture, junior year of high school
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 WoodworkingMagazine. 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.”
Megan in the summer of 2017, setting up for a photo shoot of the Veritas combination plane at Popular Woodworking Magazine.
“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?”
The illustration to Megan’s hot potato editorial
“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.”
At the end of a long evening celebrating a recently published book
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.”
Editor’s note: I was recently intrigued to discover the Instagram feed of a young woman who is blazing an inspiring trail for others. Barbie, of Barbie Woodshop, is fearless in the face of new joinery challenges; while always ready to acknowledge the difficulty of new things, she jumps right in, understanding that the most important key to mastery is practice. She is strategic about collecting high-quality hand tools and other equipment, has a supportive partner and manages to combine genuine niceness with razor-sharp wit. I recently requested permission to publish a Q&A interview for the blog, confident that readers would be delighted and enlightened by Barbie’s thoughts on woodworking and other topics.
NH: Barbie, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Let me start by asking what got you into woodworking. How old were you? What kind of shop space did you start with? (I ask because my first shop set-up was in what should have been the dining room of the house I was renting.)
BW: Thank you for having me.
I’ve been crafting my whole life. All things you do with your hands support other types of hand working. I have small hands so I guess they excel in detailed working.
I started woodworking before I went to school. I spent my summers in my family’s summer house. I was always outdoors whittling and tinkering. I especially liked working with pine bark because it was soft and easy to work with, and I didn’t know how to sharpen my tools. Later I discovered power tools. At some point I thought a power router and a pocket screw jig were the most fantastic tools ever.
Before I moved in with Ken, I was first living with two of my friends in a shared flat. We had a shared kitchen and bathroom and we had our own small bedrooms. My room was always filled with tools and dust. I made all kinds of things using all kinds of materials – wood, MDF, aluminum, plaster, you name it. I worked on the floor because I didn’t have any kind of workbench or even a little table space. Luckily my friends were really easy-going. Sometimes in the morning they asked something like, were you sawing something at 2 am. And I was like, no… I was filing. I can’t stop when I get in the zone. I love how the momentum grabs you and doesn’t let go.
NH: How do you feel about being a role model for other girls and women?
BW: I don’t know about being a role model. I’d like for people to see me as a person woodworking, instead of a woman woodworking. Chromosomes have nothing to do with your abilities or potential in a woodshop. I believe many of my IG followers are kids or parents who show their kids what I’ve been working on. I hope to see more kids, both boys and girls, get into woodworking instead of only gaming and consuming social media. When you get into making things, you won’t ever feel bored in life.
At first I cleaned the shop before taking pictures but changed that pretty quickly as I felt it was the wrong approach. It’s the easy way out, to make things look a bit better than they actually are, on social media. A real role model wouldn’t do that. So, I stopped cleaning. It’s like an American ninja warrior track in there but with sharp objects.
NH: In one of your posts, Ken was delivering dinner to you in your workshop (or perhaps it was lunch?). You said it was because he knew better than to disturb you when you were working. He seems extraordinarily supportive! Can you tell us a bit more about how he encourages your work?
BW: It’s not like I eat all my meals in the woodshop, but from time to time Ken brings me lunch or dinner or a cup of coffee when I’m on a roll. I fed him once like a baby when he was working on his car and he was all covered in grease and filth.
What would you have thought if it was Ken who was working in the woodshop and I brought him dinner? Life should be a balance of give and take, wouldn’t you agree?
NH: How did you and Ken meet each other?
BW: Local hardware store, aisle 12, miscellaneous screws and fasteners section. We both reached for the last threaded insert. Our hands touched…
NH: Is woodworking your hobby or your profession?
BW: It’s a hobby. I wouldn’t want to do this for living. I’d starve.
I admire the makers who can support themselves woodworking, but I’m afraid only a handful of people can make a living out of handmade furniture and objects. The rest of us can enjoy it as a hobby. I’m not going to sell any of my creations, but I enjoy making gifts for friends and family. Money changing hands only creates stress.
Barbie with a few of her favorite tools and test joints
NH: You have some really nice tools, as well as a great workbench. Those things don’t come cheap. How do you prioritize spending?
BW: She who dies with the most tools wins! I love tools. The shinier the better. I’d rather spend my money on tools than traveling.
There’s no such thing as too many tools. If you feel like you need a bigger tool cabinet or a second tool chest, get one. I’ve read you don’t need all the tools in the world, but you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
My dad always says it’s better to buy one good tool instead of a thousand bad ones. It’s true, but sometimes it hurts too much to pay the price. But then it hurts every time you use a bad tool. Everybody knows that, but sometimes we forget. The first plane I bought was a new Stanley SB-4. Later on, I sold it to someone. Does that make me a bad person? The thought still haunts me at nights.
Experienced woodworkers say that you first need to learn how to sharpen your tools and the next thing you need is a good workbench. When you buy or make a good workbench it will last the rest of your life. I love my workbench. I haven’t regretted going “all in” on that purchase.
Ken criticizes me for buying new tools, but I keep telling him it’s the tool fairy that keeps bringing me new toys. He’s not buying it.
“I love tools,” Barbie says. “The shinier the better.”
NH: Fifty years ago, your forebears thought it was of the utmost importance to amass a vast wardrobe of stylish outfits – they had a special outfit for every occasion, whether playing tennis, horseback riding or going to the office. You seem to wear regular clothes in the workshop; I believe I even recall you working in a kilt one day. I think readers would find it interesting to hear your thoughts on this.
BW: It’s not like I choose to wear the clothes that I wear in the workshop. It just happens. A few weeks ago, we were having a night out and I thought I would just pop into the workshop for a quick visit before going to bed. I ended up applying some wood stain while wearing an evening dress. I don’t think I have any clothes that don’t have a little glue or paint here and there. My friends say it’s my trademark. I know I should wear an apron before I make a mess but I forget sometimes.
One of Barbie’s recent obsessions has been kumiko.
NH: Do you have a favorite style of furniture?
BW: I like anything I can make. Last year I stacked a few pallets together and called it a sofa. I was so proud of myself. I guess I’ve moved on from that now. Now I’m making my first kumiko. Maybe next year I’ll be making Louis XIV style furniture (not likely). I’m probably going to try my new dovetailing skills with a Dutch tool chest build. A greenwood chair is also high on my to-do list. What I don’t like is the look of mass-produced “perfect” furniture. That stuff lacks soul and character. And I can’t see myself ever making an epoxy river table.
Barbie swears by a sharp marking knife and blue tape.
NH: Do you find that men are intimidated by your woodworking skills?
BW: I hope not. The thing is that many people are scared of trying new things because of fear of failure. I boldly go where I have never gone before. I try to take my time with the first try. I’m using sharp, good-quality tools, and I’m being careful and patient. And I don’t use a pencil to mark critical cuts. A marking knife and the blue masking tape trick are the keys to my early success. If you approach the scribe lines patiently and don’t pass them, what can go wrong?
I always thought dovetails were impossible to make and only mythical creatures could make them. After watching a few YouTube videos, they didn’t seem so intimidating anymore. I must admit that before making the first attempt at dovetails I thought I needed to buy some sort of jig or sawing guide. Luckily my woodworking friend talked me out of that silly belief. I feel using a sawing guide is cheating on myself, but hey, that’s just me!
Barbie and her business sign, which is based on her logo
NH: On your logo, you describe the quality of your work as “mediocre,” but the joinery you show on your feed is exemplary. Do you plan to modify your logo soon, in light of your ever-increasing proficiency? It’s not that one needs to boast, but exaggerated modesty is arguably one of those traditionally feminine traits that are less than helpful to girls today.
BW: When I started to build up my woodshop, one of the first things I knew I had to make was a logo. I’ve been admiring maker logos on social media and I couldn’t resist designing a logo for my woodshop. Designing the logo was easy. I just downloaded an app and made it.
I designed the sign before I knew if I could make anything. I am happy about how my practice projects have turned out and the quality of the results have been delightful for me, too.
We can all benefit from a little humility and having a sense of humor about ourselves and the world can go a long way. I think the logo is funny and it draws attention. Just like it should.
Proper stance and not a hair out of place
NH: How has Instagram shaped your experience as a woodworker?
BW: I really like social media, but I’m not interested in seeing celebrity selfies or people showing off their imaginary wealth. I’m looking for inspiration and new skills. I’ve learned so much watching YouTube and Instagram content. If it wasn’t for the makers who share their knowledge or skills, I would never have found the joy of hand tool woodworking and I wouldn’t have any idea how to use them. I just want to chip in and share my story and show people that you can learn new skills if you just try. Doing beats mere intention, always.
I had no intention of posting anything to Instagram. My friends twisted my arm and so, I ended up setting up an Instagram account. I’m glad I started this. It has been a lot of fun. People are supportive, give me good advice and suggestions, which I’m more than happy to receive. Many people have offered to send me materials from their own stash. That’s really overwhelming. I really appreciate the positive vibe in the woodworking community. When I make something, I get a feeling of fulfillment when I behold the accomplishment. It’s even better when you can share the moment with the woodworking community.
Barbie’s homage to Megan Fitzpatrick’s sweater-girl-style cover for Popular Woodworking
Comfort, v. 1. To strengthen; to encourage; to support; to invigorate.
— The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles
Had it not been for COVID-19, many of us would have been in southwestern Massachusetts this weekend for Fine Woodworking Live. Even as a hard-core loner I had a blast there last year, and while the news that this year’s event had been cancelled did not surprise me, I’m really missing the opportunity to reconnect with some people I met there. Among them is furniture maker Aspen Golann, whom I profile here as part of my “Comforting Soups” series* of interviews with woodworkers I find inspiring, especially in this current moment.
Aspen at North Bennet Street School
On April 6th Aspen Golann published a video on Instagram titled “One way to make a brush.” Knowing Aspen as I do (which is to say, not well — we’ve met just twice, but every contact I have with her is a riotous explosion of ideas and laughter and empathy), I anticipated a piece of work that would be thoughtful, as well as beautifully put together. But it was so much more: a detailed instructional video that takes viewers through every step of the process, from design to finishing, with hand-lettered instructions written in real time – and humor! – all sent out to the universe at no charge. Even better, Aspen includes instructions for improvising with tools and materials that most of us are likely to have on hand, knowing that we’re staying home in response to the current pandemic (and many folks have seen their income reduced, if not slashed to nothing). Even though I’m probably not going to make a brush, I’ve watched the video multiple times for fun, because (let’s be honest) even the loners among us are feeling isolated and could do with a bit of cheer.
Drafting brushes with integral erasers
Aspen, 33, is the Wood Studio Coordinator at Penland School of Craft near Asheville, North Carolina, where she has worked since May 2019. As with other schools and colleges across the country, the campus is currently shut down. So Aspen made the video in her garage, using an old desk reinforced with 2x4s, to which she bolted a vise.
“Hangon a sec,” I hear you thinking. “Collaborated with Peter Galbert?How did she make that happen?”
They met when she was a student in the two-year furniture program at North Bennet Street School in Boston, where Peter is a guest lecturer and instructor. “Pete’s an artsy nerd, and I think he saw some of that in me,” Aspen says with characteristic modesty. “He’s always excited to meet maker-weirdos even if they’re students – and I was so jazzed to connect with someone excited about styles outside of iconic period furniture. Pretty soon we were just regular friends.”
At Peter Galbert’s shop
After graduating from NBSS she received a commission she considered out of her league: to make a Windsor settee. Not just any Windsor settee, this one “needed to perfectly kiss the wall of the clients’ spiral staircase.” The designer Beata Heuman chose her to build it because she had made a table for her the year before. She pitched the collaboration to Peter: “We split the dough and make the chair.” He agreed. “In some ways, making that chair felt like a master class,” she says. “I got to ask every question and see him work through every problem and work through them with him and alone. It was really cool.”
For a creative fix while she was a student in the program at North Bennet Street, which is renowned for its focus on high traditional East Coast furniture techniques and forms, Aspen took classes in glass enameling and lost wax casting at Penland. She also co-taught a sculptural spoon carving class with Julian Watts during a residency at Anderson Ranch. “We were scheduled to teach an experimental carving course with him at Penland this summer,” she says, disappointed.
A few of Aspen’s spoons
Having seen a number of Aspen’s spoons online, I’ve been struck by their fine lines, so different from those of greenwood spoons. I wondered whether she makes them from kiln-dried wood. Yes, she answers, adding that some of the bowls are so thin “you can read the newspaper through them. The handles are three pieces of veneer thick; because they’re sandwiching a piece of shop-sawn ebonized maple veneer, they’re super strong.” To glue the material together she uses Titebond III.
Before her studies at North Bennet Street, Aspen spent six years teaching art and Russian literature at a couple of private high schools, The Cate School in Santa Barbara (“It wasn’t a great fit for me culturally – no jeans, no first names, water polo – but I loved my students; I still text with them”) and The Putney School in Vermont, which was more progressive; it had a full farm and strong focus on art and student independence. But this is Aspen Golann we’re talking about, so you won’t be surprised to hear there was more – in this case, a class called “From Sheep to Shawl,” in which students learned to shear a sheep, spin the wool and weave it into a shawl. And because color is important, there was also a dye garden, where they grew plants such as marigold and indigo to color the wool.
Aspen with her sheep
“I loved teaching,” Aspen says. “It wasn’t a ‘safety plan’; it was my whole plan, a big-kid job. I did it long enough that I could do it, leave it, go back to it. But [at 28 I realized] there was [still] time to do something really dumb” – here she’s indulging in her trademark self-deprecation – “and that was going to furniture school.”
“School is a place where people don’t mind if you’re terrible at things.” She had taken an ‘art with a function’ class as a student at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. “I had always loved art, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as it needed to be for me to pursue it as a full-time job. Somehow, when you add functionality, it was like this now matters. It’s a sculpture you can read by. It’s a sculpture you can sit on, and even better, it’s comfortable.”
First chair
Now, at 28, she wanted to explore furniture. “I’ve taught myself to do a lot of things, but furniture…I couldn’t even imagine how I’d approach it. Furniture felt like the most inaccessible art form, both culturally and technically, for a young woman interested in art. I felt I had to go to school for those things. I knew that my gender meant that if I was going to make it, I needed the pedigree.”
While visiting her parents in Boston in 2016 she visited North Bennet Street School, and “it was like, everything they were teaching seemed completely and impossibly out of my league. This is what I should spend money on: the thing that I can’t teach myself. I consistently invest in things that play to my weaknesses. I like doing things that are too hard for me.”
As a student at NBSS Aspen adapted historic forms to a feminist perspective. As she puts it, “I was one of the only women in a shop with male furniture makers, learning from other male furniture makers. When I feel isolated, I look for ways to express myself. At NBSS I was surrounded by masters of period furniture forms, so I committed to learning as much as I could from them – while simultaneously looking for ways to incorporate my artistic background and to talk about my experience as a woman.” In Aspen’s rendering, an Eli Terry shelf clock that would historically have had a farm scene reverse-painted on the glass panel now had the lower half of a woman’s body. “I like to blur the line between furniture and figure sculpture. I literally inserted myself in my pieces.
“I really worked with my instructors,” she emphasizes, as someone who in no way takes the work of dedicated teachers for granted. “I respected them and committed myself 100 percent to their expertise and put my own interests on the back burner. Being creative with the furniture allowed me to strike a balance – between traditional and contemporary styles, and between the roles of student and designer.”
She follows this earnest testimonial with a flourish of self-deprecation. “I had prior training in fine art, and at that point I just wanted an old master to criticize my dovetails for two years – I definitely got that, and a lot more.”
“Window seat” (2017)
But before that…
Between college and teaching Aspen worked as a pig, turkey and apple farmer at a farm outside Austin, Texas. The property was run by a couple who needed help because the husband, a deep-water pipe layer, was gone for six weeks at a time. “And when he comes home, he’s a cross-dresser named Viviana La Tarte!” she exclaims. “The first time I saw him working, he had this really long red hair and looked about 6-1/2’ tall, with his hair blowing in the wind, and he was wearing a little secretarial outfit with a pencil skirt while chain-sawing posts for a pig fence to the same height. I woke up and came out of my cabin and thought ‘What is that beautiful being on the horizon in that beautiful outfit with that hair?’”
Not that her first sight of Viviana was any more unusual than her initial encounter upon arriving at the farm. She pulled up just as Viviana’s partner was attending to a pig in labor. Part of the pig’s uterus was stuck, and no sooner had Aspen emerged from her car than the partner shouted, “GO GET ME THE LUBE!”
“Where is it?” asked Aspen, a complete stranger to the place.
“IN THE BEDROOM, BY THE BED!”
“I ran into the house and retrieved an enormous pump bottle of personal lubricant. After I coated her entire arm in KY Jelly, she was able to get all of the piglets out safely.”
While living in the Austin area, Aspen also worked for the Haas Brothers. “They weren’t as well-known at that point,” she notes. “Their dad was looking for someone to work on a mosaic in glass, for minimum wage, for a client of his.” She worked on the project and they became friends, she and “this incredibly pleasant Austrian man who seems to appreciate my skills, affect and oddity.” He ended up commissioning her to make a painting for Leonardo DiCaprio, a friend of the Haas family.
Farm near Austin
Exploring yet another layer of Aspen’s history, we find her living on a sailboat in the Caribbean during a gap year between high school and college, where she earned her professional coastal navigation and sailing licenses through the American Sailing Association. “I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As long as I have food and meaningful work to do, I can pursue whatever other opportunities I want.
“I was the only crew member small enough to be lowered into the bilge for cleaning, so I think it’s fair to say I earned my keep. I worked so I got fed and did correspondence classes in coastal navigation and marine biology, out of pure curiosity. Meanwhile, we sailed from tiny island to tiny island…delivering half-food and medical supplies, and half b.s. t-shirts and [other] American stuff.”
Family background
What accounts for Aspen’s relentless drive to challenge herself, to subject what is so often the self-indulgence of art to the discipline of function, to cement her ceaseless learning with so many types of accreditation? “On one level,” she answers, “I come from a long line of inventors. Things should work. On another level, some people’s creativity is sparked by having complete freedom, but most people’s is sparked by being asked to play within boundaries. When my sculptures became usable, I finally cared and saw a place for myself in the creative field.
“I’ve been trying to figure out where my set of interests came from. I don’t know anything about the women [in my family’s history], because that’s the way it goes. My mom’s parents were dairy farmers.” But her favorite possessions growing up were the small-scale pieces of furniture that her mother’s father, whom she regrets she never got to meet, had carved out of firewood. “If you’re a person who carves 15-drawer chests out of firewood, you’re a tender person, at least.
“I remember growing up in my paternal grandfather, Herbert Goldberg’s, shop. He was an inventor in a time before it was easy to commission custom hardware, plastic and glass so he knew how to make everything himself. I remember my grandmother got really mad because my brother and he snuck into the house to slump glass in the oven.” Herbert invented the refractometer and updated the pacemaker to make it more functional. Making functional things runs in the family, so Aspen says “credit where credit is due.”
Credit is also due to her paternal great-grandfather, Emanual Goldberg (1881-1970), whose inventions include microfilm and the first video camera. The first Jew to be kidnapped by the Nazi Party, he was held hostage until he handed over the rights to his inventions. He escaped to Israel; later her grandfather Herbert changed the family name to Golann, after the Golan Heights.
At her maternal grandparents’ dairy farm. Left to right: One very patient cow, Charles Hopkins, Jr. (Aspen’s maternal grandfather), Helaine S. Golann (Aspen’s mother), Charles “Butch” Hopkins (maternal uncle) and neighbor (name unknown).Emanuel Goldberg, Aspen’s paternal great-grandfather
Her father, Dwight Golann, spent his career in law. After practicing as a litigator for many years he turned to mediation, which he taught at Harvard. Her mother, Helaine, is a retired psychologist and currently teaches yoga; she has worked with people living with post-traumatic stress and Parkinson’s disease. Her older brother, David, designs and teaches maker-space classes for a STEAM program in New York City that offers art classes to schools that wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer art at all.
Aspen with her brother and parents, 1990
Back to today
The Penland campus is shut down through the summer of 2020. Although Aspen can’t get into her shop, she’s making pieces at home, some of which she sells through the Penland Gallery’s online store. She’s also doing some things she previously considered out of her league, such as electrical work and repairing small motors. In the past year she learned how to tune up all the machines in the shop. YouTube is invaluable, she says. “I’ve been watching kids’ videos about how small motors work and how electricity works, then working my way up.” I also highly recommend the book The Way Things Work!”
Addressing the strangeness of the current moment, she says: “It’s a good time to be patient with yourself, because you have time. The last time I remember having this kind of free time is when I was a kid on summer break. For the first time in my adult life, I have more time than anything else. I tell myself, ‘You have different resources, so you’ve got to do different things. The reason you’re feeling lost in all the time is…because normally time is our most limited resource. And now things are flipped. You don’t have money, but you do have time. So that’s why I made that video. Because I know people need support and distraction, and all it cost me was time.
Working in her studio at Penland (Photo: Chad Weeden)
“I’m making peace with what I have at hand. This hearkens back – some people are inspired by limitations and boundaries. What can I do when I only have these things? I’m using it as an opportunity to apply the skills I have to a completely different kind of work. If you’re a furniture maker you’re already excited by rules and boundaries. This is just an opportunity to dig deeper into that perspective on making.”
The book Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine (2006; Libraries Unlimited) tells the story of Aspen’s paternal great-grandfather.
*This series is my version of all those recipes for comforting soups that have proliferated across the web in response to enforced isolation and anxiety.
Nancy’s story begins in 1960s suburban Florida, a life that was soon challenged and broadened by homesteading hippies. There was divorce, a move to a tiny flat in London at the age of 12, boarding school in the English countryside, a strict grammar school, work, rain, boyfriends, work, cold, miles spent commuting on her bicycle, a City & Guilds certificate in furniture making, work she loved, more cold she hated, a move back to the States, a marriage, a divorce, work for others, work for herself, love again and grief; but through it all, passion.
This, from Nancy’s July 20, 2019, “Making Things Work” blog post titled “The Problem with passion.”
The problem is, the popular understanding of passion is seriously flawed. The word passion comes from a Latin verb that means to suffer, undergo, experience, endure. While love is central to passion, passion is no easy kind of love. When we’re passionate about something, we’re driven. We serve our passion by dealing with the trying circumstances and sometimes-maddening fallout that come in its train, every bit as much as by enjoying the satisfactions generated by our pursuit.
From Florida to London
Nancy (right) with her sister, Magda, wearing dresses made by their mother.
“The salient thing is that my mother was always very handy when we were little,” Nancy says when talking about her childhood in Florida. “She was always doing things around the house, like home-improvement projects such as changing the hinges on the kitchen cabinets and changing the faucet on the sink. She built us a playhouse in the backyard. One of my favorite things was that she tore down the wall between our two bedrooms [Nancy has one younger sister, Magda] and so we had a good example of a woman who wasn’t afraid of using tools.”
“Listening to music with my sister in the living room furnished with stuff our mother put together –– an old couch she reupholstered in mod fabric, coffee table made from a salvaged base topped with a found piece of marble, artwork by friends, and a stack of upholstery materials waiting to be put to use,” Nancy says.
Nancy’s father was brought up to be a white-collar professional. He went to law school and then into public relations after time in the Coast Guard.
Nancy grew up in what had been the gatehouse of a once-large estate, later chopped up into subdivisions. It had a Spanish-Colonial-Revival vibe and the outside walls were made of coral. Located on a half-acre plot, it had been landscaped decades earlier by a well-known botanist who brought plants from all over the world back to the estate.
“The scale of our half-acre must have been tiny, but to a little kid it was just this huge world of diverse landscape,” Nancy says. “There was a little bamboo forest with gravel paths and there were all kinds of exotic tropical fruit trees, like carambola, kumquats, loquats and all kinds of oranges and mangoes and avocados.”
Growing up middle class in 1960s America, Nancy says her family’s little patch of land was a revelation. While everything else around her was pre-packaged and filled with preservatives, she witnessed fruit growing on trees first-hand. There was a Norfolk Island Pine tree she loved and a little coral stone cottage in the backyard. For a child, it was near magical.
Nancy grew up playing with Tonka toys, Flintstone building blocks, Mattel’s Thingmaker, Play-Doh and LEGO. At the beach she would build sandcastles, bridges and little channels for water to flow.
“One thing I remember vividly is that I loved rearranging the furniture in the living room and in my bedroom as a little kid,” Nancy says. “So I was always interested in how the inside of the house looked and felt.”
Nancy has always been deeply interested in people and their stories. She didn’t love school, but she remembers enjoying learning about Eli Whitney and his invention of the cotton gin. In second grade she went through a stage in which she signed all her schoolwork with different names –– Amelia Earhart, Calamity Jane –– she’s grateful for the teacher who quietly allowed it.
When Nancy was in fourth or fifth grade, on a cold (for Florida) winter night, her parents brought home some young people who had been sleeping in the local park.
“My parents, Mary Lee and Herb, around 2001 with two of their (now-late) dogs, Lottie and Jeffrey.”
“My parents, to their credit, have always been pretty open-minded,” Nancy says. Her parents were impressed with how these young people, from all over the country, were living free-spirited lives, eschewing conventional ways of earning a living and instead building what they needed, growing their own food, and selling natural foods in a society that seemingly loved the opposite. So intrigued, Nancy’s parents ended up inviting some of the young people to stay with them. And that’s when everything changed.
“There were all these different micro-areas within this half-acre lot and so a couple of the hippies lived in this little stone cottage in the backyard and a couple more built a little wooden house and a couple others built an A-frame,” Nancy says.
The experience was undoubtedly formative. “Whenever that kind of thing happens it certainly makes you realize that the way you’ve been brought up to see the world is not the only way,” Nancy says. “So it was opening up a perspective that I think, in principle, is a good thing.”
Then Nancy’s dad told her she didn’t have to go to school anymore on the grounds that she was being homeschooled. But there was no structure. Nancy filled her time with reading the World Book Encyclopedia and spent countless hours watching and learning from the people living in her backyard.
“It was a revelation to see these guys with a saw and sawhorses building a house,” Nancy says. “It was just so direct. It was amazing to see that you could take tools and simple materials and build a dwelling in which you could live, however crude. That was wonderful for me to see.”
Nancy’s grandparents became concerned. Her sister had already gone to live with them. In 1971, Nancy’s parents separated, and Nancy, along with her mother and sister, moved to a tiny flat in London. Nancy’s grandparents had good friends who lived in London and helped them settle. They then sent Nancy and her sister to a boarding school in Sussex.
Her last year in Florida, with its total lack of structure and discipline, did prove valuable. “After that, I craved structure and discipline,” she says. “I was 12, going back to school and I actually wanted to be there. Had we not had this series of events I might have gone through the rest of my educational years totally unmotivated.”
The boarding school was a Rudolf Steiner school, which meant all the boys and girls had to take sewing classes and woodworking. “It was great because it involved a real contact with material,” Nancy says. She carved a serving platter out of Applewood, which she gave to her parents, and a mechanical toy.
“The mechanical toy I made in shop class at school when I was 12, an alligator (in theory) whose tail and jaw move when you swing the weight on the string back and forth,” Nancy says.
“There were so many things I loved about that school because the boarding hostel was in this fantastic old building and to get to the school you had to walk through part of the Ashdown Forest and just all the smells and the seasons — it was a real sensory awakening for me,” Nancy says. “But I just really missed my mother who was in London. So she finally let me move back.”
“Drawing in felt-tip marker of a view through my bedroom window in 1973.”
“Drawing in felt-tip marker of the roofscape in the mews behind our flat in London when I was 14.”
Nancy then attended a grammar school operated by “an extremely strict, no-nonsense woman and that was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” she says. She started learning Latin “which it turned out I had a great affinity for,” she says. “It’s very obvious to me now, because it’s architectural. It’s all about building blocks and how they go together. But it was very good for me psychologically because it was like, ‘Here, take this thing, show me you can do it and I will give you praise.’ It was one of the first times in my life someone said, ‘Oh, you’re good at this. You can do this.’ It gave me a feeling of achievement that was new to me. And that’s important for everyone to have.”
Learning the Trade
“A self portrait made from the reflection in the window over my bedroom desk at night when I was 14,” Nancy says.
Nancy doesn’t talk about lifelong dreams. Instead she has always led her life with an air of practicality. As a young adult, she didn’t have a strong sense of direction. “I knew what I was good at and I knew I had to work,” she says.
Throughout high school Nancy worked in bakeries and cleaned apartments and worked at a local sandwich shop with a woman named Hilda.
“Sure it was minimum wage but it was a job and it was money and it was experience and I never thought I was too good for any of it,” Nancy says. “I was always grateful to have someone pay me to work.”
“With my sister in a park during a visit with our father in the mid-’70s.”
Nancy was accepted into the University of Cambridge but took a gap year and worked as a clerk at the Automobile Association in London. Several years earlier, her mother had gone back to school to study art, met a fellow student and married. Together they had started a remodeling business. Nancy’s father was freelancing as a travel writer, and she and her sister would see him once or twice a year. Nancy lived with her boyfriend in an old building in Islington, east London, that had been condemned but through a community housing association they were allowed to rent an apartment.
At Cambridge, Nancy loved the studying but couldn’t imagine staying there without knowing how a degree in Hebrew and Aramaic would be relevant to a career. She didn’t want to be a teacher and didn’t know what else one could do with such a degree.
“It just seemed, honestly, so self-indulgent,” she says. “I wouldn’t say that now but that’s how it felt to me.” Nancy was there on a government grant, surrounded by people who believed a Cambridge degree and the right contacts were all they needed to succeed. “There was this overwhelming sense of privilege. I loved my tiny, tiny world of study, but other than that, I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ So I left,” she says.
She went back to the Automobile Association and then, after moving out to the country with her boyfriend, close to where her mother and stepfather then lived, found work in a factory. Having no furniture, she began building some in her spare time. Her stepfather was intensely critical of her work; his harsh and hurtful words prompted her to sign up for a City & Guilds course in furniture making, and she was intent on proving him wrong.
The course was taught in a local community college and she commuted 3-1/2 miles each way by bike daily. Because she had already done her A-levels she was (a) the oldest in the class and (b) exempt from doing course’s required desk work in the afternoons. So she spent her mornings in City & Guild shop classes and her afternoons earning money.
“I set up a ridiculously crude, in retrospect, shop in our dining room and just started making stuff,” Nancy says. She built furniture for her family and neighbors using pine from the local lumberyard. “It was pretty miserable,” Nancy says. “Mainly because it was always freezing and my stepfather was just not a kind person.”
After earning her City & Guilds certificate, Nancy put an ad in the local newspaper, looking for a workshop with a place to live. A man named Roy Griffiths, a Slade School of Fine Art-trained designer, answered. He owned a kitchen company called Crosskeys Joinery that built mostly pine kitchens.
“He drove out to where I lived and I showed him pictures of what I had done,” Nancy says. “I went and visited his workshop. He had bought a Georgian brick house, which sounds fancy but it was just what all the houses were along the river in this little town of Wisbech.”
Roy’s house had come with brick horse stables, which is where he had set up his woodworking shop. There was no insulation, all the windows were single pane and the only heat source was a wood stove.
“It was freezing cold but you know, I had never seen anything like it,” Nancy says. “It was really cool. And he had all this old machinery he had fixed up.”
At first Roy wanted Nancy to build a set of upper kitchen cabinets (what he called a dresser top) as a trial, for pay. But then he simply offered her a job. Nancy left her boyfriend, accepted the job and moved into a room in Roy’s house. But a week later, near frozen, she moved out, choosing instead to move back in with her boyfriend and commute to work by bicycle each day.
“To get to his place was four miles each way, which was not a lot at all and it was all flat but it was always windy and this was through all weather, so it was really, really cold and miserable and always damp, throughout the year,” Nancy says. “But in retrospect I’m so glad I did it because I know I did it and no one can take that away from me.”
Roy served as Nancy’s mentor, not so much in the way of craft but in the way of business.
“I learned from him the importance of being efficient, working efficiently, and designing things for efficient production as well as beauty,” she says. “I mean he certainly impressed on me the importance of good materials and proportions. He was trained as a fine artist, a painter –– he had been to art school, like many of the big names in English furniture making who came from architecture and the world of fine arts. It was before the renaissance in craft training.”
“The upper sections of this kitchen dresser were the first job I did for my first woodworking employer, Roy Griffiths,” Nancy says. “The image is from an article in the English House & Garden Magazine circa 1981. Although the stained pine and low-res picture suggest the piece was rustic, it was meticulously made. The drawers were dovetailed and inset in the dadoed solid structure; the doors were all solid, with mortise-and-tenon frames, inset in their openings and hung on traditional butt hinges; I made the mouldings for the doors and crown, as well as the beaded back boards, in the shop and cut the friezes individually with great care.”
Nancy learned a number of techniques using old, restored, English machinery that are less common in America, such as a tenoner and a sliding table saw. She worked for Roy for about two years. By then, she had decided she no longer wanted to be a woodworker.
“That was my only experience in professional woodworking, and I found it depressingly monotonous,” she says.
Nancy acknowledges that Roy had given her a plum job, building the upper kitchen cabinets that were decorated with custom-made mouldings, and little doors and cubbies. But still, she spent much of her time cutting hundreds of tenons and mortises, and while it was not factory work, it began to feel like factory work.
“I was just doing the same basic processes every day and going out of my mind with boredom,” she says. “Plus, I was freezing all the time. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining. That was just the reality. It was depressing. And I was in my early 20s and I had not yet developed the capacity for that kind of routine work I now possess. That is a real learning experience, learning how to just keep doing it. It’s part of growing up in any line of work.” Nancy was desperate to use her brain.
So she and her boyfriend moved, and Nancy got an office job with a travel agency at the University of Reading in Berkshire, England.
“That was a great experience because it was run by this fabulous woman, Bobbie Gass, with whom I’m still friends,” Nancy says. It was an office of women and they became so close that they still stay in touch and even got together for a reunion several years ago.
But eventually Nancy felt an urge to return to woodworking and she found employment at Millside Cabinetmakers, a rural shop located in a converted chicken shed where craftspeople built custom furniture and kitchens. Nancy was the only woman, and there wasn’t even a bathroom when she first worked there. So Nancy used her lunch break to ride her bicycle into town to use a public restroom. “They were nice to me, or they tried to be,” she says.
Back to America
Nancy worked at Millside for about a year and then, for a number of personal reasons, began thinking about moving back to the United States. By this time she had gone through a divorce, and both her mother and sister had already moved back to the States.
“I just wanted to be closer to my family,” she says.
While preparing to move Nancy got a temporary job in the carpentry shop of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford Airbase. There she worked on displays, cabinets and platforms with older, unabashedly sexist male woodworkers who, she says, she got along with splendidly.
Nancy wanted to move to New England, specifically western Massachusetts. But she couldn’t find work there. So she ended up taking a job at WallGoldfinger in Northfield, Vermont, a woodworking company that made architect-designed furniture mostly for financial-market offices on Wall Street and in Boston.
The work, made with architectural-veneered panels, edge banding and highly rubbed-out lacquer finishes, was completely different to what she had been doing in England. “Superficially, the work was absolutely gorgeous, and I learned a lot there about using sheet materials and European hardware.”
While at WallGoldfinger, Nancy fell in love with fellow craftsperson Kent Perelman. They soon decided to leave Vermont together, seeking work in Montana. It was 1988. Nancy was 28. But within the year, they married and moved to Brown County, Indiana, close to where Kent’s parents and sister lived. They opened their own furniture and cabinetmaking business, Credence Custom Furniture. They worked together in their home shop and, after a while, Nancy decided she wanted to go back to university. So she began taking one class a semester while also working in the business. Soon she decided to attend school full time. She won a scholarship, which paid for her tuition. She continued working at Credence, doing design, bookkeeping, client visits and helping with installations and deliveries. The combination of school and work, she says, was good.
Kent and Nancy divorced in 1993. (Kent, who Nancy says was an outstanding craftsman, moved back to Montana, where he remarried, had a family and continued woodworking until he died in 2016 from cancer at the too-young age of 53.) Nancy went on to graduate school with the intent of getting her doctorate and teaching. “But in my first two years of graduate school I realized that an academic life was less likely to be about teaching and much more likely to be about research and bureaucracy,” she says. So after completing her master’s degree, she stopped.
“The one thing I knew is that I did not want to build furniture and cabinets anymore” she says. “I wanted to get an office job.” No longer weighed down by the lack of a degree, Nancy applied with optimism. But it was one rejection after another. “You’re over-qualified.” Or, “You ran your own business, you won’t want to work for someone else.” She became exasperated and, frankly, needed to make money.
She called up a man whose house she had rented with another grad student her first year of graduate school. She remembered his bathroom being almost totally decrepit. She asked him to hire her to remodel it at a reduced rate, because she would be learning as she worked. “I’m not sure whether it was a good thing he said yes but he did,” Nancy says, laughing. “And that was how I got back into the trades.”
Initially Nancy focused on remodeling old houses. She wanted varied work, outside of a solo workshop, allowing contact with fellow human beings. She needed more than working with mute material. But over the years she simply found herself doing more of the woodworking parts of the jobs and less of the remodeling. There was no grand vision. There was no dream. Rather, life happened. Practicality reigned.
“If you said to me, ‘What has driven you?’ I would say it’s really been the need to make a living,” Nancy says. “But also, the desire to be happy and for me, part of being happy is doing what I have to do. So it’s not like a person who feels she knows she has a burning desire to do something in particular. I’ve always been happily motivated by necessity. And when I say happily, it’s a happiness that isn’t always recognizable by everyone as happiness but there is a peace in accepting what is necessary. I know this is not a fashionable way to think in America. But I find it key to happiness. Doing what you have to do and finding happiness in that, finding the bright spots or something that gives you the feeling of comfort or hope or joy or — look at that joint, that joint fits well —I’m happy about that. And I build it up out of little, little things.”
Nancy started her own business, NR Hiller Design, in 1995. She incorporated a few years later at the advice of her accountant.
“I didn’t want to be self-employed,” she says. “It just seems so scary to me.” But she leans on Mark Longacre, her partner, who also is self-employed (Mark Longacre Construction Inc.) and has been for most of his adult life. “It helps to have somebody with whom you can discuss the problems and challenges,” she says.
“My husband, Mark, with our (now-late) dog Henny around 2011.”
Also helpful is that Nancy and Mark have built and become part of a network, made up of customers who have become friends; employees (Mark has three and Nancy says they’re as close as brothers); colleagues; acquaintances met through research and at talks; readers; editors; students and more. This larger community of like-minded individuals, this connectedness, has helped ease the anxiety that inevitably comes with self-employment.
Nancy knew of Mark the same way you’re aware of other people in your larger field who also live in your town, she says. They first ran into each other at an appliance store where they had both gone independently to look at appliances for their respective clients. “It was shortly after my first article in Fine Woodworking had been published and the local paper had written a story with a picture of me. He said, ‘You’re Nancy Hiller, aren’t you? I recognize you from your Fine Woodworking articles.’ And I said, ‘Well, there aren’t articles, plural, there’s only been one.’” She then asked, “You’re Mark Longacre, aren’t you? I recognize you from the article the paper did about you.”
At the time they were both involved with other people. For a few years they would run into each other every so often. “I always thought he just seemed like a nice, capable, kind, down-to-earth person,” Nancy says. Nancy and Mark both split up with their respective partners and on the night before Mark’s 50th birthday, Mark called Nancy and invited her to dinner. That was their first date, in 2006. They’ve been together ever since.
Although Nancy never wanted to be a mother, she says she was given the extreme privilege of becoming a stepmother to Mark’s brilliant son, Jonas. “I was lucky,” she says. “I was just so lucky to walk into a relationship in which there was this beautiful, intelligent, self-motivated learner who was just endlessly curious.”
That curiosity is, unfortunately, what ended Jonas’s life on Jan. 2, 2014, at only 15 years old. Described by many as an old soul and deeply curious about the word around him, Jonas was interested in everything, from robotics, advanced calculus and writing software to Latin, constructing languages and reading (at the time of his death he was reading Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden”). He adored spending summers at Camp Palawopec and was keen on learning primitive survival skills. He was considering a career in computational linguistics.
Nancy was the one who discovered Jonas on the night he died. Out of simple curiosity, a desire to better understand how the human body works, Jonas had experimented with what’s commonly called the “choking game.” It involves self-strangulation as an experiment, to feel what it’s like to have oxygen rush back to your brain after it’s been cut off. Only Jonas died before he could un-strangle himself.
Nancy says she believes in the importance of telling this part of her life story for no other reason than to share the light of Jonas with others and to raise awareness about the game. “I was very lucky to get to know him and be a part of his life.”
Finding the Bright Spots
Left: An armoire inspired by a turn-of-the-century Scandinavian design, featuring retractable doors with decorative strap hinge hardware salvaged from an old barn in Ohio. Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography and Design. Middle: Mohawk sideboard commissioned to double as a room divider made entirely of solid walnut and curly ambrosia maple with hand-cut joinery. Right: A measured reproduction of a 1903 English Arts & Crafts sideboard by the Harris Lebus company of London. Nancy made this piece for her book on English Arts & Crafts furniture, and it was also the cover feature of Popular Woodworking Magazine (November 2017). Photo by Al Parrish.
These days Nancy works on her own, although she has had employees in the past (see her post “Daniel O’Grady is in the house” here). Her work is now so varied, employing someone would be difficult. In addition to shop time Nancy’s writing, designing and meeting with clients. Flexibility is important and, Nancy notes, it’s often nice to not carry the heavy weight of responsibility that comes with being in charge of someone else’s livelihood.
At the end of last year Nancy spent three months building and installing a couple of kitchens. The installation process in particular is intense, physical work, manhandling cabinets made out of 3/4″-thick veneer-core plywood with solid face frames while scribing them to fit walls and floors. There is travel time between the client’s houses and Nancy’s shop, along with ongoing business-related work: preparing quotes for customers, design work, drawing and more. For book projects, Nancy might block out three weeks at a time to focus on writing, attending to small parts of the business in the evenings or on weekends. And then, it might all reverse. She’ll spend her days in the shop, using her nights and weekends to write her next blog post for Fine Woodworking.
“I find the more variety I have the more hours I can work because changing is refreshing,” she says.
It is here, though, that Nancy’s lifelong work ethic deserves praise. I ask her about it. “I just have this deep-seated admiration for people who work hard,” she says.
Nancy isn’t sure where this came from. Perhaps England. Perhaps hidden in the prayers she had to recite at school. Perhaps, paradoxically, she says, from the hippies. “Even though people think of hippies as layabouts, what I saw was a lot of work being done.”
Nancy in her shop, May 2018.
Growing up in the 1960s, Nancy says as a child, she associated working hard with being a man. “I didn’t aspire to be a man,” she says. “I just thought, well, those are the people who have respect in our culture. They were the people who were recognized in public life and they were the people who did important things with a capital I. It’s hilariously ironic because look at women’s work! It’s just that women’s work hasn’t always been appreciated (and is still vastly underappreciated) in American culture.”
And it’s not that Nancy loves working for its own sake. “It’s that I’m building toward something,” she says. “There’s a tangible result, a satisfaction, and I feel connected to the world, and I feel like I have a purpose. All of those are important motivators for me.”
This, of course, all ties back into Nancy’s definition of passion: While love is central to passion, passion is no easy kind of love.
Nancy finds herself thinking a lot about the tiny bright spots in her life. It’s easy to feel depressed right now, she says, by politics, ecological realities, the pandemic. “So much of it is just psychological,” she says. “It’s like playing on the monkey bars, going from one rung to the next. You just keep going. And it’s weird because I know that I’m depressed a lot of the time lately. I recognize that clearly but there’s also kind of an underlying happiness at the same time and it comes partly from acceptance and partly from finding joy in tiny things and not needing everything to be perfect. I think there’s happiness to be found in kind of letting go of trying to control your fate at every level of your life because you can’t. Or, at least, I can’t, and I don’t know anyone who can.”
When we’re passionate about something, we’re driven. We serve our passion by dealing with the trying circumstances and sometimes-maddening fallout that come in its train, every bit as much as by enjoying the satisfactions generated by our pursuit.
“Our dog, Joey, with the shop cat, Tony,” Nancy says.
And so Nancy spends time at home, with Mark, and in her shop with her shop cat, her dog, Joey, often by her side. She reads. At the time of our interview she was reading a biography of Thoreau. She finds reading about the obstacles humans overcome both helpful and fascinating. She likes gardening (but despises the chiggers). She likes the changing of the seasons, the way the soil, plants, animals and trees change with them. She loves to laugh. Nancy Hiller has thebest laugh.
Not too long ago Elizabeth Knapp, managing editor at Fine Woodworking, read Nancy’s “The problem with passion” blog post. Liz asked Nancy if they could publish it in the magazine (Nancy said yes). It’s easy to see why. It sums up Nancy’s life so beautifully but with that air of Nancy practicality.
Doing what you love for a living demands that you cultivate a larger understanding of loving what you do, she writes. And that is why, because of everything, despite everything, Nancy can say, she’s happy.
