I’m looking forward to the upcoming open house at Lost Art Press on August 7th. It’s a chance to share a project Jim Tolpin and I have been working on. Yes, we are at it again – exploring the world of design and artisan geometry. This latest adventure began after looking at a number of historic tool chests and tools used by pre-industrial woodworkers. Most of the tools like hand planes, saws and chisels were typically acquired from specialty toolmakers. Yet there was a group of tools that were often user made, including straight edges, try squares and miter squares. This grouping of tools had a few things in common. Generally, they are used for design and layout and they all embody the geometry that lies beneath everything. They provide that physical link between our designer’s eye and the work at hand.
After Jim and I made some of these tools and began using them, we both came to realize there is something deeper going on. Yes they are highly functional and a pleasure to use. More than that, these tools are teachers. Turns out that building a set of traditional layout tools is a class in advanced hand-tool techniques as well as a master class in artisan geometry. All these tool builds use geometry to generate the tool, but also utilize geometry to dial in each tool to a high level of perfection.
A simple tool exploration on our part blossomed as we looked at historic examples and built one tool after another. To our delight we learned that each build and each tool contains insights that deepens the connection between hand and eye. Jim won’t be able to attend the open house, but I’ll be there with a pile of these “Tools of By Hand & Eye” for you to handle and see for yourself. I look forward to hearing from you and perhaps gaining insights from your questions and perspective. These tools have a way of sparking the imagination.
P.S. I also will be bringing along a special surprise for anyone interested in the nautical history of the Ohio River Valley.
Today I reviewed a big batch of Crucible dividers for quality control problems and sent them on to our warehouse in Indiana. Barring some delivery stupidity (it happens), they should go on sale on Saturday.
These dividers are the most complex tool we make and are difficult to manufacture, especially considering the $110 price tag. If they were $300, we could lavish a couple hours of polishing and tuning on each tool and still come out in the black. But that’s not what we’re about.
Instead, these tools are manufactured – like our books. Yes, there is a lot of handwork, hand-assembly and tuning involved in these tools. But a lot of the skill to make them is in programming the robots and ensuring the processes are foolproof so that even I can assemble them – even though I’m not a skilled machinist. And so far, I’ve assembled quite a few of them.
Because I’m not a fan of hype, I’ve tried to downplay these dividers quite a bit (maybe too much). They aren’t like an infill plane or a blacksmith-made fretsaw. But when I pick up our dividers and use them – as I have every day for the last six months – I am tickled by their presence. Despite the fact that my personal dividers aren’t cosmetically perfect, I carry them around all day like a nice pen. I hold them when I’m thinking or on the stupid phone.
I open them and shut them over and over, and think about the mechanism inside. It looks so simple, but the angles and tolerances have almost broken my head a few times. But still they make me think. And now that we have the mechanism (almost) perfected, we’ve been designing other tools that use it.
(EDIT: When I say “almost” perfect, I mean that we are improving the hinge to make the assembly process easier. Right now we have to do a couple extra steps to get the hinge working perfectly. Nothing leaves our hands that isn’t 100 percent functional and meets our standards for fit and finish.)
Books have authors, but there is always a team of people behind them that makes the thing look good and read well. Tools are the same way. And so I will continue to call out the people who have made this tool really work: Craig Jackson at Machine Time and Josh Cook, a mechanical designer. Thanks guys.
So look for the dividers on Saturday. And if we sell out, know that we now are making hundreds more. Our goal is that everyone who wants one can get one.
Jennie Alexander was born John Alexander on Dec. 8, 1930. She has lived in row houses her entire life, and their vernacular architecture defines, in part, not only the city she has always called home, but also a more intimate part of herself.
A lifelong Baltimorean, Jennie was educated in the Baltimore school systems, which were quite good, she says. “I was a lonely child. I had a very, very busy father and my mother was rather reserved — a good mother, but rather reserved. After 32 years of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) I have come to recognize that they did the best they could. And I’m starting to recognize that I’m doing the best I can, rather than reaching further, further, further.”
Those who know Jennie consider her a pioneer, instrumental in designing the now-iconic two-slat post-and-rung shaved chair, and responsible for the revolution of “greenwoodworking” (a word she coined, and spelled as one word, she insists, because “it sings.”). Her complex, twisty past in many ways resembles the sinuous shavings that once hooked over her right ear (one of her favorite stories, more on that later), and is essential to understanding how a jazz musician turned divorce lawyer became one of the most beloved chairmakers of our time.
And at 86 years old, Jennie wants to share her story – all of it.
“I had a sister, but we weren’t close,” Jennie says, delving into her childhood while drinking a hot cup of Throat Coat tea. “I was intelligent. I was anxious. I was inquiring. I read out the local library. I was a child of the alleys. There was a park also fairly close by where I could romp. I was a great walker.”
The Alexanders’ maid, Maggie, was Jennie’s “most interesting influence,” and it was Maggie who Jennie was around most as a child. “She knew children and we got along very well,” Jennie says. “I can remember her sitting me on the window sill of the second floor and holding me firmly, singing to me to teach me to climb without fear, to teach me tone. Songs were powerful spirits.”
Jennie’s father, a well-known lawyer, was an anxious man, she says. “My father and I never got along. He knew that when I was a child I wasn’t going to be manly, because I was little. And he sent me to the greatest doctors at Johns Hopkins. As a result, they hung a swing set in the passageway between the kitchen and dining room, and I was supposed to swing on it and stretch.”
This, Jennie says, led to lifelong anxiety and feelings of isolation.
“My mother wasn’t exactly touchy-feely. She was a good mother, and by the way, they both did the best they could, 100 percent. But that led to a lot of these incidents that got me to where I went.”
The incidents Jennie is referring to come later in her story – mostly key people in her life that prompted transformation, including a psychologist, Charles Hummel and Peter Follansbee.
Kindnesses and Recognizing ‘the Flash’
Jennie spent her childhood pounding away at the piano and later became a self-taught jazz musician who played professionally. “I enjoyed that very much, and I met some wonderful people,” she says. “I grew up in the time when New Orleans jazz was being revived and at the same time be-bop was being created. And it was very interesting that the two groups coincided. In other words, they knew each other. They hung out together. We got together and had a good time.”
The Baltimore Jazz Trio, 2002
One of the more well-known jazz musicians at the time was a man named Benny, who Jennie said was very active on the be-bop side, when not in jail. The two never met until many years later, when Jennie was transitioning from male to female. It was 2007. The last job Jennie ever played as a male was with Benny on drums. The two were part of a trio playing at one of Jennie’s alma maters, St. John’s College.
“It was a wonderful job,” Jennie says. “I had driven Benny down from Baltimore and we drove back and I said, ‘Benny, would you like dinner?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ And so I went upstairs, came back as a female and we went to dinner. We had a very pleasant dinner. He is just a nice, gentle person with a wonderful beat, by the way. And two-thirds of the way into dinner Benny looked and me and said, ‘John! You’ve really changed!’ And that was the nicest, from-the-heart little thing.”
Nothing more was said, and the two finished dinner. “It speaks to jazz, friendship and kindness,” Jennie says. “And those are such wonderful, wonderful aspects of life that I enjoy and, of course, friendship and kindness have much to do with woodworking, too.”
These days Jennie loves when a stranger calls, writes or visits, and she can tell that they’ve shaved wood and they know what that experience is like. “You can see it in their eyes,” she says, describing it as a flash. “It’s incredible. The beauty of that for me is this was given to me, greenwoodworking. And therefore my calling is to give it back. So if they call, I listen. I answer. I think. I’m willing to be called again. There is a spirit of shaving wood that fills a place in me that otherwise is not filled as a person, as a thinker, as a human being. It was given to me, so I give it back.”
Jennie has kept regular files of folks who have contacted her and responses, and every year a few stand out. “They become correspondents, students, critics, adventurers, and it’s such a blessing that that and music has sustained me,” she says.
Woodworking, never mind greenwoodworking, did not define Jennie until later in life. But the seed was always there.
From Student to Jazz Musician to Divorce Lawyer
As a teenager Jennie spent a lot of time taking down dead locust trees on her father’s country property. To do so, she would scrape out some dirt around the trees’ shallow roots and then simply push the trees down. “The problem,” she says, laughing, “you’ve got dead locust limbs up there. And we kids, we didn’t even have helmets on. Absolutely nuts. When we’d hear a crack, we’d run. And so we got the trees down, and I had a little experience with them.”
With both parents working, Jennie’s mother often left Jennie a to-do list, with the freedom to pick up any needed tools from Boulevard Hardware. Jennie says her mother told the owner, “If Johnny comes in and wants anything, you provide him with the best.” What Jennie’s mother didn’t say was that, as a child in Quincy, Mass., she was a student of the Educational Sloyd System, which provided training in the use of tools and materials, and, Jennie says, focused on proportion work.
“So Mother knew a little about wood and grain and so on, and she also had a post-and-rung rocking chair,” Jennie says. “But she never told me when I was growing up or when I was woodworking that I was doing it wrong or anything. Except that she told the hardware man to furnish me with any tool I needed.”
Jennie attended high school at Baltimore City Polytechnic Institute, which specialized in engineering. After graduating she enrolled at Johns Hopkins University as a sophomore to study engineering and was immediately bored. She says the only difference between college and high school at that point was they were teaching to four decimal points rather than two, so she had to get a better slide rule.
Jennie began singing and playing the piano in bars at night, and eventually dropped out of Johns Hopkins and worked for a while. She then attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, a participant in its “100 Great Books” program.
“I learned a lot, but not as much as I should have because in those four years, three of them were consumed with my relationship with Harlan James,” Jennie says. “He was a much better musician than I, but we were both students of traditional jazz, and we played duets for three years. He’s still in his 80s playing professionally in New York.”
The Baltimore Jazz Trio, 1952
After St. John’s Jennie began playing jazz professionally, up to five days a week, making a living. “But one morning I wake up and I have this hideous problem,” she says. “I’m not happy because I know that I’m a self-taught musician. And though I have worked things out – now I can play rather well, and in the style of traditional New Orleans music or blues – I know I’m never going to be a great musician.”
This, she says, was because she didn’t have the real fluidity of playing tone – improvisation. “I can do it, but I’m not free of it because I don’t have that much command, you see, of the keys and of the chords. And that’s very typical of self-taught musicians. Some of them go on to train themselves but that’s not going to happen with me, I know that. So I would love to be a musician but I want to be a very good musician and I’m close, but I won’t make it unless I study, and study isn’t in me for some reason.”
And then, while lying in bed another morning, Jennie hears a voice.
“Go to law school,” the voice said. “And I knew exactly who that voice was. The voice as the voice of Snowball, the imaginary voice of a banjo player who had played on local AM radio in Baltimore when I was 8, 10 years old – ‘Uncle Bill and Snowball.’ Snowball has come back, buried in me. So what do I do? I get up, eat breakfast, put on my best suit and walk to the law school. The University of Maryland is within walking distance.”
Jennie simply walked inside and asked, “May I see the dean?” The receptionist said yes.
“And the dean is an old gentleman, wearing the old library coat sometimes professors wore to keep their suits from getting dusty from books,” she says. “And he’s a Southern gentleman. And he says, ‘From what you tell me you graduated from Polytechnic Institute and from what you tell me you graduated from the Annapolis liberal arts schools, St. John’s. Those are excellent places to learn. You’re admitted.’ No background. No records. Nothing from other schools. And so on that day, probably the 12th of August, just before law school was starting, that’s what happened. Snowball and the dean sent me to law school.”
Jennie took night classes so she wouldn’t be tempted to play music. For each hour of class, she studied an hour, and at the end, came in first in the Maryland bar exam. “But that was also because of the approach I took,” she said.
Years before Jennie had spent a year working in her father’s law office. As a result, she answered her exam questions as if she was working back in that law office – if she didn’t know the answer, she said she didn’t know. “And the law examiner, he probably gave me an 8 or a 9 out of 10. He said, ‘You know, I like this kid because he doesn’t bullshit me. He doesn’t guess. Because when he’s going to work for me and gives me a guess, I’m dead.’ And I had figured that out working in my father’s office for a year. And that’s why I came in first.” That honesty extended into Jennie’s law career, and served her well.
To imagine Jennie as a lawyer, imagine her as she appeared in a magazine article that featured Maryland’s five best divorce lawyers: a 5’3” male wearing a three-piece suit with a vest, what she calls “Methodist minister’s shoes,” with little dots around them, and a red, white-dotted bowtie.
While being interviewed for that article, by the way, Jennie refused to share details about some of her more interesting cases. The journalist persisted but Jennie stood her ground, so as not to out and shame her clients. The journalist left and Jennie assumed she would be featured poorly. But she wasn’t. Twenty-five years later Jennie says she reread the article and realized love in a place she hadn’t seen it before. “I realized love appears in many, many, many places,” she says. “And it appears for me, also, when I’m shaving green wood. And in a piece of greenwoodworking.”
Like the sinuous fibers in a thin shaving, Jennie has come to realize that all of her experiences relate tenuously yet meaningfully, in a way that’s difficult to see until you reach the age of 86.
Her Moment
It was while lawyering that Jennie became interested in woodworking. By then Jennie, then John, was married to Joyce. “Joyce,” Jennie says, “my wife of years and years and years, who is now deceased, and a total sweet, blessed antidote to this very fast, very nervous, very jazzy, very anxious person.”
Jennie was reading books on woodworking and chairmaking, and had collected some tools. Her neighbor, Jack Goembel, let her use his shop. Later another woodworking friend, when he decided to stop woodworking to become a mail carrier, sold her his lathe, band saw and drill press. It was the first loan Jennie and Joyce ever took out and it was with Joyce’s insistence. “It was just so beautiful,” Jennie says.
Jennie and Joyce made several trips to Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, where they met Sister Mildred. The first visit was to see the chairs. Sister Mildred said, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” They visited a couple more times (to see the chairs, yes, but to also learn about the Shakers). Soon, Jennie decided that she wanted to build a Shaker one-slat dining chair.
Once home Jennie called a firewood man she found in the phone book and asked if he could deliver some 6’ hickory logs. He could, and did, and when he dropped them on the pavement out back, the whole house trembled.
Without a froe Jennie says she whacked them up into a somewhat cylindrical shape and put them on the lathe.
“Now the lathe had a 2-horsepower motor and the sticks were, let’s say, 4” in diameter and all bumpy and irregular,” she says. “The lathe danced across the cellar floor because of the lack of symmetry. So I danced along with them. And then, finally, I got down to the sapwood – and by the way, the wood is soaking wet, which is the other requirement I needed – and the sinuous shavings keep flying through the air and hooking on my right ear. They come off the gouge, hit my right ear and they’re soaking wet. I tell myself I will never go back to the lumberyard. That was my moment.”
And with that, Jennie made her first, rather clunky, she says, one-slat Shaker dining chair.
“I’m John, practicing lawyer, busier than the dickens, full of himself, and by the way I was a divorce trial lawyer, not just a settler,” she says, “which is about the worst profession for a human being that can be.” John spent a lot of his time listening to clients in crisis. Though successful, lawyering never had the flash that woodworking did.
It was around this time that Jennie became a member of the Early American Industries Association (EAIA). At an early meeting she met Charles Hummel, a curator at Winterthur. Charles was Jennie’s introduction to the academic side of woodworking.
Remember when Jennie was talking about that flash? Charles, she says, saw that flash in Jennie. “And his response was to show me, but never explain it,” she says.
Charles was often invited to museums a day before EAIA meetings to discuss complicated issues with staff regarding furniture and tools.
“Charles would often say, ‘John, would you like to go with me?’ And off we would go,” Jennie says. “So I would get exposed to the museum people, their problems, and the professional students. And I would get to listen. And some of these conversations took place down in what they call the Study Collection. Oh my goodness gracious. Here I am with my eyes popping, listening with one ear while looking at everything around me. And, of course, the beauty of what I’m looking at down there is it’s often broken up. And I’m a fiend for traditional joinery. And they were very generous, instructed me, gave me slides and all the information I needed.”
Charles knew what Jennie wanted to see and often, while walking around with a docent, Charles would purposefully lead the docent away, from, for example, a chair that interested Jennie. And while they’d be engaged in conversation, Jennie would be under the chair to get a better look.
“It was incredible,” she says. “We laughed together and we were very personable and I’m still dear friends with he and his wife and oodles of people because they, how should I put it? They loved me before I loved myself. And they treasured me. They sensed this little flame, you see, because they had this little flame. And sometimes, it was very interesting, it turned out I learned a little more about these things than they did. Particularly the construction.”
Jennie became an expert and her study of antique furniture grew into hours spent experimenting with theories on joinery. She decided to write a book (which later would be published as the revolutionary “Make a Chair from a Tree,” in 1978 by Taunton Press, and then later in 1999 in DVD form, directed by Anatol Polillo, a professional videographer and a former student).
However, just as the book was almost complete, yet another twist.
Inspiring a Movement
Jennie was slated to demonstrate at an EAIA event. A week before the event she got a call. “Oh, Mr. Alexander,” the caller said. “We’re terribly sorry but you can’t demonstrate.”
“Why is that?” Jennie asked.
“It’s because you’re using a lathe in front of an audience and we were told by the insurance people that if the spindle flies out into the audience and perhaps injures someone …”
Jennie was devastated.
“I’m down in the basement kicking and cussing and Joyce is upstairs,” Jennie says.
“John?” Joyce says. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yuh.”
Jennie says she went upstairs, the perfect picture of despair. After Jennie sips some tea Joyce says, “Look. You cut down a tree.Then you take your wedges and your mallet and you split it up. And then you split it into smaller pieces. And then you drawknife and you make a rather good cylindrical piece of wood because now you know how to do all that, not like before. So why don’t you just keep going and shave the entire chair?”
And Jennie did.
And when she returned from the EAIA meeting, she brought with her the shaved chair parts, and made her first entirely shaved two-slat post-and-rung chair.
Once finished, the publication of “Make a Chair from a Tree” was one-and-a-half months away. John Kelsey, then the editor of Fine Woodworking, at Jennie’s request, removed all references to the lathe and the reader was presented with a book about a shaved two-slat post-and-rung chair.
A side hatchet, which Jennie made from a standard double-bevel hatchet.
“Give them a mallet, give them a wedge, pay them a lot of attention, give them a froe, fine split it, give them a drawknife, give them a spokeshave, and they’ve got a chair,” she says.
By now it was 1978. “And I keep teaching and teaching and teaching and traveling there and traveling elsewhere,” she says. “So the shaving, really, made the existence of the post-and-rung chair a reality in this country.” People from all over the country were becoming more interested in hand tools, traditional woodworking, greenwoodworking and chairmaking. Jennie’s classes at Country Workshops in North Carolina were filled with experts in the field of traditional furniture, folks like Robert Trent.
And Jennie says, over and over, that it was thanks to Joyce, and a cup of tea.
In addition to the traveling, teaching, demonstrating and chairmaking, Jennie was still visiting her beloved museums. And eventually, she was given permission to carefully disassemble the door of an unusual wall cabinet, which was located in Winterthur’s Study Collection. So she popped out the pins of the drawbored mortise-and-tenon joint and, “It was fascinating,” she says. “Totally fascinating and a large tribute to an incredible piece of joinery. Here I am, this divorce lawyer (and I think I might have been diddling with gin still then, which led to a 32-year career with AA, which has been a wonderful journey) and I take this thing apart and it’s unbelievable. There is no literature on this. There is no written thing to my knowledge of anybody describing the joint.”
Why?
“The museum people are fascinated by 17th-century woodworking so much that they want to distribute it and show it to the world,” Jennie says. “And so what they do is they glue it together. It’s creaky, it’s bumpy, so it’s bye-bye joint.” Most academics were more interested in who made the furniture and where it was from versus how it was constructed, Jennie says. “And then they met this untutored person, who now they’re quite familiar with, and they let me go down there and take the sucker apart.”
Another story: One day Charles took Jennie up to a little room filled with 17th century items upstairs at Winterthur. They come upon a chest covered with a rug. And on top of the rug, about $25,000 worth of trinkets — a small cup, a little brass spoon, etc.
“And Charles – I’ll never forget this scene – takes his necktie, droops it over each little item, holds it to the necktie and carries it to the top of the next chest so he can open this one,” Jennie says. “Not saying a word! And so I figured if Charles is not saying a word, I’ll shut up, which is rare for me.”
After all the trinkets were carefully removed, Charles threw open the chest.
“He doesn’t say a damn word,” Jennie says. “And this chest has two back posts, which are both terrible looking. They have knots. They have hatchet slashes. So there I am staring at these two back posts and all of a sudden it strikes me that these two posts are the faded, scratched mirror image of each other. That is if one has a bump, the other has a crevice. In other words, these two posts were rived. They were split.”
At this point Jennie was teaching at Drew Langsner’s Country Workshops. Drew and his wife, Louise, were instrumental in Jennie’s evolution as a chairmaker, particularly in the support they offered by providing a place for Jennie to teach, and bringing in students from all over the world which still, to this day, amazes Jennie.
Peter Follansbee and Jennie at Country Workshops.
While Jennie was teaching at Country Workshops, Peter was taking classes.
And the two, as Jennie says, “just hit it off.” They would often talk about joinery, these majestic chests made out of rived wood and the disassembled drawbored mortise-and-tenon joint Jennie discovered at Winterthur. And, as this was before computers, they would look at slides.
While Peter says he saw the slides of the disassembled cupboard door at Country Workshops, Jennie insists it was at her house, in Baltimore. But the where doesn’t matter. What matters is the resulting six books of correspondence sitting in three-ring binders upstairs in Jennie’s row house – page after page of ideas, arguments, drawings and questions between Peter and Jennie, which ultimately resulted in an article on the construction of 17th-century mortise-and-tenon joinery and “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” (Lost Art Press).
Jennie describes it as a “wonderful explosion” and says Peter simply rocketed off. “It was just incredible to watch,” she says. And while Peter “zoomed off into space,” Jennie says, she, “somehow for some reason or another, said, it’s time to go back to making two-slat post-and-rung chairs. And that’s what I’ve done since.”
And she’s done so, “realizing with gratitude the kindnesses to a very precocious, young, unstudied man, from the academics and also from the really accomplished joiners in North Carolina and New England, Maine and Delaware. And it has been a tremendous blessing. A tremendous blessing.”
And Jennie’s comfortable with having stuck to two-slat post-and-rung chairs. (Her health is such that she no longer builds them today.) Many consider her design, which is not from an artist’s or designer’s perspective, she says, but rather a nod to the lumbar spine, the body, perfection.
Despite being responsible for revolutionizing the world of chairmaking, Jennie says “the wonderful thing about this is it has so little to do with me. It’s almost as I’ve been led step by step by step. It was like someone was pulling me by my nose – here we go, you little funny man with the hat.”
Mentorship and Happy Incidents
So who is Jennie today?
“First of all, I’m much, much better,” she says. “At 77 years of age it was suggested that I transgendered by my wonderful therapist who I see every fall when I get depressed.” In the fall of 2007 Jennie visited her therapist, as she does every year, and Jennie shared her “old sad stories with no new data.” The therapist listened, looked at her and simply said, “Are you ready to be a woman?”
“Now, obviously, I had a lot of indications along the way that I wasn’t exactly the full, red-blooded male, but I had never really considered it,” Jennie says. “My wife had died, god bless her, in ’96, my children (Jennie has three daughters) were up in age. I had never even thought about it. And she says, ‘Are you ready to be a woman?’ Seven words. I said, ‘Certainly!’ So we laid out a little course.”
And while transgendering helped Jennie, woodworking, she says, has always been the ultimate cure to years of anxiety and feelings of isolation. “That’s the place where I can be myself,” she says. “That was where I could express my creativity.”
Woodworking, and also playing music. If Jennie could be summed up in two words, it would be “greenwoodworker” and “musician.”
And, I would add, mentor.
Jennie talks a lot about the kindnesses that she has been given, the happy accidents and run-ins and introductions that have led to new discoveries, opportunities and lifelong friends. But in addition to the many students she has taught and corresponded with over the years, several stick out, including Evangelos Courpas, Nathaniel Krause and, of course, Peter.
Jennie taught Peter greendwoodworking, chairmaking, and introduced him to 17th century joinery. “He and I were co-apprentices, whatever that would be, for quite a while, all the way through the stool book,” Jennie says. “And we wrote back and forth and it was a most exciting time. And then he was just rocketing off in space and he is No. 1. He is a better carver. He is a better craftsman. There is no question about that. So I went back to making two-slat post-and-rung chairs, which is really where I belonged for a lot of reasons.”
Evangelos Courpas (left) had a five-year informal apprenticeship with Jennie.
Evangelos, who Jennie calls Geli, was born in Baltimore in 1960. He was 13 years old when he began a five-year informal apprenticeship in greenwoodworking with Jennie, which took place during the period Jennie was writing “Make a Chair from a Tree.”
Geli lived a few doors down the street from Jennie, and simply began hanging around Jennie’s shop. Eventually Jennie gave him a key. “The interesting thing was, and I don’t know why this ever happened, but I never told him anything,” Jennie says. “I never used words. He watched, you know I might go a little slower on something I was doing, and he watched and he watched and he watched. And after a long time I went to the basement one more morning and there was Geli, putting his chair together. He must have been doing this in the early mornings because I had never seen him making one. At this point, he was shaving rungs for me, or so I thought. And here was a darn, daggone chair. And I’ll never forget the shy, little smile on his face. He was making his first chair.”
But what Jennie found most interesting about Geli’s chair was that it wasn’t a copy. Geli’s back post-and-rung slats, which Jennie says are the most dramatic thing about her chairs, had been shaved just a little bit differently. “He had come up with a feeling for the back posts, which was his,” she says. “You could tell a Geli chair.”
After graduating with a studio art degree from Oberlin College in 1984, Geli began making art and furniture. He spent years building and creating, while also earning more degrees in things like ceramics and electronic integrated arts. In 2013, Jennie gifted Geli tools and a workbench, and since then Geli has gone back to his roots, opening up a woodworking studio in Liberty, S.C.
And then there’s Nathaniel Krause. When Nathaniel was a young teenager, Jennie received a phone call from a school in West Virginia where she was slated to teach a chairmaking class. “Mr. Alexander?” the caller said. “We have a young man here would like to take your chairmaking class and he’s a very nice young man.” He was a young teenager. Jennie said, “Certainly.”
It was clear from the start that Nathaniel was a good student. At one point, when the students were up to their hips in shavings, Nathaniel, who had finished all his parts, simply picked up a broom and started sweeping – something Jennie still remembers to this day.
When Nathaniel’s parents came to pick him up from that class, Jennie shaved and put on a clean shirt. She explained to his parents the importance of the youth in America being involved in traditional woodworking. “They seemed impressed,” Jennie says.
“And so Nathaniel expressed an interest to come to Baltimore in the summer and would you believe his parents drove him from West Virginia and he stayed six weeks, maybe eight weeks,” Jennie says. “And then he started to learn all kinds of things because I was playing with joint stools then, and joinery and chairmaking. And we just had a whale of a time. He is an excellent craftsman.”
The next summer, Nathaniel took the train to Baltimore and again, spent six weeks with Jennie. The summer after that, Nathaniel had his driver’s license and drove to Baltimore for another six weeks.
Nathaniel earned a civil engineering degree from West Virginia University and a masters in civil engineering from Virginia Tech. These days he’s an engineer in Baltimore City Department of Public Works’ Office of Compliance and Laboratories (and was recently named the 2017 Young Engineer of the Year by the Engineering Society of Baltimore).
Once Nathaniel stopped spending his summers with Jennie, for the next 10 years Jennie would still call him, asking him where a tool was – and Nathaniel would tell her. They still have dinner together most Thursday nights.
Jennie’s love of greenwoodworking is infectious. Another example: Jennie still lives at home, alone, and it was suggested that someone visit her five days a week to check on her and provide assistance when needed. Enter Jennie Boyd. In addition to helping Jennie Alexander with daily tasks, Jennie Alexander has been teaching Jennie Boyd greenwoodworking, which Jennie Boyd has fallen in love with – specifically spoon carving. Without much effort, Jennie Alexander has sparked the flash in yet someone else.
In many ways, Jennie attributes her success to others, and “happy incidents.” But the story of her life clearly paints a different picture. It’s the story of an intelligent, anxiety-ridden child who fell in love with music, put herself through law school, immersed herself into the world of traditional woodworking, revitalized shaved chairmaking, coined “greenwoodworking” and “two-slat shaved post-and-rung chair,” mentored many, and rediscovered herself at 77.
“I couldn’t be more fortunate,” she says. “I’m going to die happy, not unfulfilled.”
To end, “You Are My Sunshine,” sung and played on the piano by Jennie, as part of the Baltimore Jazz Trio. You may listen to it here.
Whenever I write, whether it’s a blog post, article, book or simple email to a friend, I’m thinking about what readers may make of my words – not only my words in a literal sense (especially when I use a term of art, a foreign name or a four-letter expression that starts with the letter F), but the points I aim to convey. As someone who was fortunate to have teachers who were strict about standards and liberal with criticism, I internalized the most challenging critiques that came my way, a practice that has served me well. Over the years I’ve augmented those critiques with thought-provoking comments from others, among them the kind of uncharitable characters who read everything with an arched brow and think they know the author’s mind better than she knows herself. (Really…just spare me.)
As the publication of “Shop Tails” nears,* I thought it would be helpful to answer a few questions from my inner dragonAva Hunting-Badcocke as a heads-up to those who may be interested in buying the book.
Dido, a kitten I adopted from a salvage yard.
I just saw that you identified your medical diagnosis as “adenoma of the pancreas” in one of your early chapters. Don’t you even know that the name of your disease is adenocarcinoma, not to be confused with the rarer form of pancreatic cancer, the neuroendocrine variety that killed Steve Jobs? How can you expect anyone to grant you a shred of credibility after reading that appalling mistake?
I make my share of mistakes. I cannot tell you how many times I read the manuscript, not to mention how many articles in medical journals I have read about pancreatic adenocarcinoma. And still I missed this poop pile while cleaning the yard. So now I’m covered in it. We will forewarn readers with a note on the ordering page.
Joey and Tony in the early daysof Tony’s regime.
Most publishers look for consistency in a manuscript – consistency in voice and chapter length, as well as spelling and punctuation. Your manuscript reads more like a lorry packed with the assorted contents of a shuttered Oxfam shop that’s spilt its load all across the motorway, leaving a trail of tacky Beatles portraits on velour, melamine ashtrays with burnt spots, hand-knitted Shetland jumpers, crotchless knickers and worn plimsolls with missing laces. The first few animal stories read as though they were written by a child. The rest are what we expect from you. Some of the chapters are 30 pages long, while others are only four – or in one case, two! What is that, even? How can a chapter be two pages long? I can’t believe that your publisher agreed to invest in this farce. — Miss Ava Hunting-Badcocke, 1973
Consistency may be overrated. I wrote the first few chapters from the perspective I recall as a child, when I lived with the animals in question: Sidney and Phoebe (both dogs), Binky (a mouse), then David (a guinea pig). One pre-publication reader described these chapters as “sweet.” The sweetness vanishes with “Oscar”; he was my first dog as an adult, so the narrative voice reverts to that of the adult who wrote the first two introductory chapters.
My goal is to convey important information and entertaining stories, and sometimes introduce a reader to new perspectives on familiar subjects. I’m writing about real life, and at least in my experience, real life is more like the contents of that overturned lorry than the polished near-perfection of your sitting room-turned-security–checkpoint-homework-checking station, with your line of girls and Gaston, your farting pug.**
My husband, Mark, with Henny.
I thought this was a book about animals and woodworking, but the first two chapters read like someone’s private cancer journal.
By the time Lost Art Press sent me a contract to publish this book, I’d been writing the stories about individual animals for about 15 years. My relationships with non-human animals have brought me comfort and joy (and the occasional heartbreak). They have also taught me important lessons about life and my relationships with my fellow human animals. What precipitated the contract was my diagnosis in November 2020, so as I began to work on the book as a project for publication, my mind went naturally to the circumstances that had prompted the opportunity.
When Christopher Schwarz was designing the book, I told him it would be fine with me if he wanted to excise the first two chapters, or parts thereof. I worried that there might be too much introspection and blow-by-blow accounting of what was going on in my head. He replied that he wanted to leave them in because they show how my mind works and add richness to the stories that follow. You can just skip those chapters and go straight to the animal tales if you’re so inclined. There will not be a test.
Edie’s puppy Poika looking like a sheared lamb.
I see you’re trying to con us into believing that blurb from “Edith Sarra of Harvard and Indiana University” is legit. We know the two of you are friends, and we’re here to out you.
No one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Edie is one of my dearest friends. We met in 2006, by which time I’d been hearing for years from my friend Ben Sturbaum that I just had to meet this woman who lives in his favorite house in the world because we would love each other. And love her I do. However, I didn’t ask her for what publishers call a “comment”; that blurb is an excerpt from a personal note she sent to me after she had read the manuscript of “Shop Tails” a few times. She’d been interested in the project for as long as she had known of it, because she, too, is a serious lover of animals (especially dogs, but don’t tell anyone). My friend Edie has delivered some world-class withering comments, sometimes by saying nothing, so I trust her not to be giving me an easier time than she would give most other people. She implicitly affirmed this by granting us permission to quote her remarks as a blurb for the book.
William reading the comics.
So, Lost Art Press gave you a contract because you had cancer?
Pardon me while I wipe the tears of laughter out of my eyes. I know… I’m not supposed to be laughing, right? Because I have an incurable life-threatening illness. But why go on living at all if I can’t keep laughing?
Seriously, though, I get your point. When I sent my pitch to Chris and told him that writing this book could provide the motivation I needed in order to face chemotherapy, I added that I was simply stating the truth, not inviting a pity party or being emotionally manipulative. Or something like that. I trusted that he would get where I was coming from, because he is a straight shooter. I was relieved that his response included something along the lines of Lost Art Press does not engage in pity publishing. So, yeah, no.
During the last four years, I’ve lost four members of my immediate family (mom, dad, stepfather, sister), most of them suddenly and unexpectedly. And if I’ve learned one thing from the experience, it’s this: Tell people who are important to you how you feel about them. Today. Don’t wait for a nice evening on the back porch.
As many of you know, Nancy Hiller is battling pancreatic cancer. Her treatment has its ups and (deep) downs. And while I am counting on her to be one of the long-term survivors of this horrible disease, I also didn’t want her to ever leave this earth without know how important she has been to me as a person, woodworker, writer and supremely ethical being.
I’m not alone. Kara Gebhart Uhl spent the last couple weeks talking to some of the people in and out of Nancy’s orbit. And below is what they had to say.
If you’ve read her books, been a student in one of her classes or been a customer of hers, you know that this only scratches the surface of a most impressive and lovely person.
C.H. Becksvoort, furniture maker, designer, author, contributing editor to Fine Woodworking magazine
I first heard of Nancy back in 2004 or 2005. I think it was a kitchen cabinet design article in Fine Woodworking magazine. She stayed on my radar for several more years and wrote a few more articles, as well as a series of pieces for Pro’s Corner. In 2017, her book “Making Things Work”really caught my attention. Here was a kindred spirit who made her living from woodworking, without a rich partner or a trust fund. And she did it in a male-dominated field. The book was amazing, in that she debunked the common woodworking images of curly shavings, satisfying smells and days of crafting hand-cut dovetails. Instead, she revealed what it was really like to run a day-to-day business: difficult customers, insurance payments, bookkeeping and tax hassles, and time management. She’s paid her dues.
Not only that, but Nancy is a wonderful, gifted and generous human being. And a good friend.
***
Laura Mays, woodworker, designer, educator, director of The Krenov School
When I first came across nrhillerdesign.com a handful of years ago, I was genuinely confused; was this a group of people? A workshop or a company? Were they designers or historians or cabinetmakers? It never occurred to me that I was seeing the prodigious output of just one person, and I navigated away, bemused.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I read “Making Things Work” [some of which takes place in England], and I started to understand the fullness, the depth and breadth of Nancy. But before understanding came a lot of laughing, deep out-loud belly laughs, that are rare for me in adulthood. It was the descriptions of the miserable weather/plumbing/dampness/general decrepitude seen through the eyes of an affectionate outsider that really got me. I had grown up at a similar time on the adjacent island of Ireland, where similar conditions prevailed, and I had gone through a somewhat parallel trajectory of abandoning academia and a professional career for woodworking. I resonated.
So when Deirdre Visser, Phoebe Kuo and I embarked on interviewing women woodworkers for a project, called at that time “Making a Seat at the Table,” I knew this would be a tremendous opportunity to meet Nancy in person. This long-limbed woman with a huge laugh welcomed us into her house in Bloomington, rearranging her pets, making us comfortable, with a constant stream of talk that moved quickly, seamlessly, between the profane, the intellectual, the moral, the practical. It involved swear words and Latin quotes; it revealed someone who reflected on her life while also enthusiastically pouring herself into it.
This, I think, is one of Nancy’s greatest gifts to woodworking and the world: to bring together morality and material, to examine what it is to do good work, in both an ethical and craft sense. This of course is the primary idea at the core of the Arts & Crafts movement, and it is no surprise that she has studied and written about that period extensively. There is a direct line of thought between them and her, between their concerns of labor and value and honesty and meaning, and hers. But where they, at least in my rather flippant understanding, appear to be a bunch of middle-class men who dropped out of London society and moved to the Cotswolds, she is the 21st-century self-employed woman version, working out how to make a living from her work in the context of Ikea and supply chains and gig work, and all the other pressures and intricacies of late capitalism “Me Too” globalization.
Nancy’s book about English Arts & Crafts furniture is an exemplar of how she brings together the material and the mundane: not only is a beautifully written study of the ethics at the core of the movement and short biographies of some of the key thinkers, it is equally a how-to, or a how-done, on the actual making of several pieces of furniture. While this combination might, I suppose, reduce the book’s academic gravitas on the one hand, and on the other, be off-putting to someone who just wants the woodworking content, for me, it is exactly this juxtaposition that makes Nancy important. “No ideas but in things,” and vice versa.
In article after article in Fine Woodworking magazine and elsewhere, Nancy pores over how to make a living, make a life, making things. She parses, for example, the relative merits, ethical and otherwise, of different pricing structures with an honesty and a depth of detail that is refreshing, like having a window thrown open on what can be murky and hidden. She doesn’t shy away from the annoyingness, the hard work, the nitty-gritty, but she always brings it back to what it means to live a good life, to be fair and just to oneself and to others. There is no one whose moral compass I trust better than Nancy Hiller’s.
***
Nancy with her dog William.
Charles Bickford, carpenter, writer, photographer and former senior editor of Fine Homebuilding magazine
It’s hard enough for anyone, at any time, to run a one-person cabinetshop. It’s a whole hat rack full of jobs rolled into one – getting clients, keeping clients, managing clients, design, building, finishing, maintaining the shop, keeping track of expenses – that usually doesn’t leave much time in the day for anything else. Somehow, Nancy Hiller has managed to run a successful shop by herself for the last 30 years or so (a feat worth celebrating in itself), while at the same time, she has written five books, countless magazine articles and blog posts, in addition to leading the occasional furniture class.
And while other craftspeople might consider writing just another means to marketing their goods, it seems like Nancy has spent as much time writing as she has building. (I suspect she’s fast on the keyboard, but that’s just a guess.) As she has pointed out, she’s not writing for the money, of which there is precious little anyway in the writing game. That’s a shame in itself, because she’s as good a writer as she is a furniture builder, and by now should be wealthy as Croesus.
She writes to inspire and advise the community of shop rats, both the professionals and the part-timers, that are her audience. Where else would they go for advice on the potential pitfalls and obstacles of running your own shop? How to stay creative, or how to deal with customers? Or info on the proportions of a sideboard, Johnny Grey, Arts & Crafts design or (who knew?) Hoosier cabinets. Or how to train and keep a hop-a-long canine shop foreman named Joey? Who else does this? Through her hard work and by example, she raises the bar for everyone else, and continues to weave the strands that make the woodworking community stronger, more aware, more connected and more informed.
She still makes great furniture, too. And don’t you forget it.
Being in our 60s, Nancy and I have been involved in the woodworking world for about the same amount of time. But it wasn’t until four years ago that my friend and colleague, Chris Becksvoort, started to mention her. He suggested that I get to know her. He felt it would be beneficial for me to hear her stories. He would always say “she has really been in the trenches.” One might question why I did not know of Nancy since she had been published for a while. Well, the answer is after going through a challenging professional experience in 1994 that lasted a decade, my self-confidence was so shaken that I chose to go underground, making my woodworking world small and self-contained.
Fast forward to 2018 when I ordered Nancy’s book “Making Things Work.” I was so taken by her writing style, her wonderful sense of humor, and her honesty. I devoured the book and then read it again. I share so many of her experiences, especially being a woman in a non-traditional field trying to make woodworking my career. Nancy’s down-to-earth approach put us all in a level playing field – no more hierarchical attitudes that I had grown accustomed to. Quality work is quality work no matter how one chooses to express that.
I have read so much of Nancy’s work since my initial introduction to her. Her example evokes confidence in others, promotes support rather than judgement, encourages us to share successes as well as hardships and to remain vulnerable to the whole journey. Whether we make historic pieces, carve beautiful wooden critters, make contemporary furniture, create beautiful kitchens, conserve other’s work or make wooden barrels, we are the lucky ones who have found common ground through her. I will be forever be grateful to have found Nancy. Her bright light helped guide me back to myself and the places I have honored before.
***
Nancy and her great smile.Nancy teaching at a cabinetmaking class at the former Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking, 2008.
What a lucky day it was when I first saw some of Nancy Hiller’s beautiful cabinetry in the pages of the Sept/Oct 2005 edition of Fine Woodworking magazine! Little did I know that reading that article and subsequently contacting Nancy would result in a long-time professional association and a warm friendship that hasn’t diminished over time and distance. I invited Nancy to teach a cabinet-building class at my former* school, her first such experience, and I was pleased that she accepted the offer. After seeing her in action, I invited Nancy back many times, and she developed a following with many students who continued to sign up for classes she taught.
It was clear from the first class day that Nancy had not only the technical skills necessary to teach, but more importantly she had the people skills that made the students feel comfortable with taking on new information and new skills. Nancy has a great smile and a frequent laugh. Her affirming ways with class participants inspired confidence and motivation even when technical problems arose. I specifically remember Nancy splayed out on the floor helping a student to problem solve a difficulty with hanging the door of a cabinet. The tone of the interaction went from frustration to laughter right away.
I have so enjoyed seeing Nancy’s prodigious skills gain recognition and accolades over the years. Yeah Nancy! Since our first encounter in 2005, Nancy continues to shine brightly through her writing (books, blogs and periodicals), her teaching and her design talents. She has an uncanny nose for sniffing out talent and originality in the work and stories of others. Her articles and interviews are fun to read as she describes the makers and their settings and work.
Nancy’s own work blends the integrity of good design with the joy of creating cabinetry and furniture that reflect the unique settings in which those pieces are placed, and the practical ways that the pieces are to be used. I learned those things from Nancy first-hand as she helped us design a completely new kitchen in our former residence, a 100-year-old log home. The outcome of that effort is a comfortable, functional and aesthetically pleasing kitchen where friends and family gathered. What a gift!
Nancy is a people-connector for certain. Above and beyond woodworking, that is her gift. I’m so glad that our paths have crossed and zigzagged in so many interesting ways.
*The former Kelly Mehler of Woodworking is now owned by Berea College and operates as The Woodworking School at Pine Croft.
***
Nancy and her great laugh.Nancy and Johnny Grey, 2019.
Johnny Grey, kitchen designer, author, educator, founder of Johnny Grey Studios
I have a soft spot for workers of wood. Nancy is in that mould but unusual in straddling the practical life of a carpenter with great skill in writing both academic and lifestyle books. Though in correspondence with her for many years, I only met her when she and her husband, Mark, came to stay with us in England not long before lockdown. Our family took warmly to them – a mutual love of dogs and the gift of a fine bottle of bourbon playing a role – and the visit was over all too quickly.
Nancy’s journey starts, I think, with her mother’s can-do attitude, a way of life of making things that she luckily passed on to her daughter. It happens that I share some early experiences with Nancy. Like me (and many of us), she took pleasure as a child in rearranging the furniture in her living room and bedroom. We both also started out on our careers, coincidentally, by restoring an 18th-century pine dresser, a halfway house to making something new. A similar dresser is pictured in Kara Uhl’s charmingly interesting blog profile of Nancy.
I first came across Nancy when she was writing “The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History” (2009, note to publisher: please reprint). This was the book I was looking for without realising. It serves as a justification for an ambitious and slightly crazy idea of mine: making kitchens with real furniture along with coining the phrase ‘the Unfitted Kitchen’. In Nancy’s vision, kitchen furniture was both an organising principle and a space for creativity, fun and efficiency. Hoosier, a company from Indiana, built functional cabinetry for cooking and storage but also developed their own quirky and witty marketing. They used catchphrases and slogans such as, ‘A kitchen without a cabinet is like a farm without a plow’ and ‘Saving work is saving youthfulness.’ These were fun, modern responses to domestic workloads, and by 1920 the Hoosier Manufacturing Company had sold 2,000,000 cabinets.
Nancy’s analysis in the book relates the wit and energy from this period of kitchen history to fresh thinking in our time. She explores current kitchen culture, including gender roles, and questions the nature of a ‘residential’ kitchen. One answer to that comes from our recent response to lockdown, as we now regularly acknowledge the kitchen as a hybrid space that all the family occupies and use as an office, homework zone and place to play. Nancy generously includes some of my ideas on this sort of thing in her chapter on the Hoosier legacy. She includes quotes from Christopher Alexander in “A Pattern Language” on the ‘self-selecting features’ of a friendly home, and celebrates the concept of the kitchen as a living room that has, ideally, evolved well beyond the cramped little workplace for hard-pressed women that it admittedly still is in many cultures.
Nancy breaks through glass ceilings without making a fuss. I find it extraordinary that there are not more female cabinetmakers in the U.S. (it’s 7.5 percent, according to Zippia), although she tells me that there has been a growth in women working in the U.S. construction sector. In the U.K. it’s a worse story. Statistics are hard to come by. The number of craft courses at the tertiary education level has dropped by 46 percent due to the government’s education reforms.
I see Nancy as a designer-maker ambassador, a timeless figure who embodies the craftsmanship and the emotional and ecological benefits of the handmade. We need more voices like hers in the world of construction, design and the kitchen industry, but don’t hold your breath.
I noticed Nancy’s work before I noticed her. She had a piece in Fine Woodworking magazine when I was at Popular Woodworking magazine, and I remember thinking that it was a fine example of Art & Crafts work… and we were always looking for good Arts & Crafts (and Shaker) for Popular Woodworking. Then I noticed it was by a woman. I think it’s fair to say I started stalking Nancy. I read everything of hers I could get my hands on (she’d written a couple of books at that point, and articles for Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding and Old House Journal). There just weren’t that many other woodworkers who were women, doing the kind of work I liked, who were featured in major magazines. I didn’t know her, but I loved her from afar for showing me what was possible (and because she’s a darn fine writer).
Nancy is an excellent person to emulate in work and in life. She is obviously a talented furniture maker and designer – but she is also hilarious, incredibly generous on every front, and kind to pesky editors and small animals. I am honored to now call her my friend, and to love her from close up.
***
Nancy during a photoshoot in 2017. (She’s just pretending to be mad.)
In 1988 my career took an interesting turn when I was offered the opportunity to switch from running restaurants, hotels and country clubs on the west coast to selling hardwood lumber on behalf of Paxton Lumber in Cincinnati. That is a story, but this story is about Nancy Hiller. Knowing absolutely nothing about hardwood lumber, I was assigned to a sales territory that included all southern Ohio, southern Indiana and Kentucky. I would introduce myself to my inherited and prospective customers as a service-oriented salesman with no experience in hardwood who needed their help in understanding the processes of cabinetmaking, flooring, furniture manufacturing and custom millwork. In return for teaching me about their craft, I would be sure that they received the quality lumber they needed, when they needed it. My customers were happy to show me their craft and I made sure that I delivered on my promises. My territory grew quickly. Bloomington, Ind., was in my territory and there were quite a few small woodworking companies of all sorts there, so I spent a good deal of time there building relationships.
In my work there I came across a small high-end cabinetmaking shop in Nashville, Ind., run by Nancy Hiller, the only female cabinetmaker I had yet encountered. The shop was small, only Nancy and her husband. I made sure to visit them when I was in the area and was awed by Nancy’s spectacular work. She said that she learned cabinetmaking in England, which I found to be extremely interesting. She stood out to me instantly as being at the top of her field, overshadowing the work of every other cabinetmaker in my vast territory.
I enjoyed our visits and I made sure that my service and the quality of the lumber I shipped to the shop matched the respect I had for her as a person and as a fine woodworker. Our visits were always enjoyable, and I learned about how a fine craftsperson worked. I was her salesman for about six or seven years, then I wound up working with another company and we regrettably lost touch. In 1996, I started to work with the Frank Miller Lumber Co., in Indiana, covering the U.S. west and all of Canada. I found out after a few years there that Nancy bought some quartersawn white oak from their outlet store. Since my territory was nowhere near Bloomington, Ind., I passed my greetings to her through her salesman.
Around 2010, I started traveling the country lecturing on the quarter-sawing process, the core business of Frank Miller Lumber. I found myself as speaker at a traditional building conference in Baltimore. I went to the room where the speakers were to drop their materials and when I turned around, I saw Nancy. It had been almost 20 years since I last saw her, and she immediately recognized me and gave me a hug. It was a brief but happy reunion and when I told her that I was working with Frank Miller Lumber, she said that they were favorite lumber supplier. She was very pleased that I worked for them. I said I was giving a talk the next morning and she was crestfallen that she would miss my talk, since she had to leave that night after her talk. Shortly after our chance meeting she gave a great talk about the evolution of the American kitchen. As she opened her remarks, she told her audience that her “favorite lumber salesman from her favorite lumber supplier” was in the audience. She gave them my name and told them to all come to my talk the next morning. It was very kind of her since my talk was scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on Saturday and I had low expectations for attendance. I was pleasantly surprised to see many members of her audience in my audience the next morning. That was a great kindness that I will never forget.
Several years later I took a film crew with me to Bloomington to interview Nancy and document her building a Voysey chair with Frank Miller’s quartersawn white oak. She was an inspirational subject and a generous host to me and the crew, even providing us lunch.
I have read all her books and have learned much from them, but by far my favorite is “Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life,” which chronicles her amazing professional journey starting in England, where she dropped out of Cambridge and set herself on the harrowing journey to become the fine wood craftsperson she is today. It is an inspiring story of tenacity, strength and perseverance – the qualities she is teaching us as today as she faces her current health challenges. Nancy brings beauty to the world through her art and is a stellar human. The world is a better place because she is in it.
I would not be making a living as a cabinetmaker today if it were not for Nancy Hiller. Nancy took me on as her assistant in 2004. At the time, her shop was newly built and somewhat unfinished. It was home to two insane dogs, Wilhelm von Wundt and Winnie, who became my workday companions, and a cat or two depending on the year. Nancy’s shop was a relatively small workspace for two people, so when there wasn’t an interesting NPR story on WFIU or a machine blasting, we would regale each other with absurd stories and silly jokes. I’ve always been able to make Nancy laugh hard – in her signature hyena way – and take great pleasure in seeing her keel over from one of my inappropriate jokes.
When I was offered the job as her assistant, I was thrilled to be working alongside a craftsperson who was trained in England and had an impressive portfolio of work. I knew it was a great opportunity to hone my craft alongside such a skilled practitioner. But I didn’t know all the other things that I would learn along the way.
Working with Nancy provided me with invaluable lessons in historic preservation, the history of furniture design, building relationships with homes as if they were people, etymology, grammar and, of course, myriad woodworking techniques. She also modeled how to run a woodworking business with integrity.
It became clear to me early on that Nancy has a deep ethical core. While she can wax eloquent on the philosophy of ethics, she lives out her principles daily. I witnessed Nancy’s integrity in her treating clients with fairness and respect, building things the right way (even when it was less profitable), and always having her employee’s back – when the work ran dry, when clients behaved badly and when dark clouds rolled in.
It has been an honor to have had the opportunity to work alongside Nancy and be able to call her my mentor. It has been even better to maintain a relationship with her and call her my friend.
***
Anissa Kapsales and Nancy.
Anissa Kapsales, furniture maker and editor at Fine Woodworking.
If you know anything about Nancy Hiller you know that her contributions, her commitment and her place in the woodworking community are legendary. For decades she has plugged away in a calling where it is difficult to succeed professionally. She has written countless articles showing how to make gorgeous pieces of furniture. She has written books about designing and woodworking and life. She’s a woodworking social media icon. She has taught and lectured around the country. She has blogged about the realities, joys, trials and every other aspect of the woodworking life you can imagine. Through her LAP blog “Little Acorns: Profiles by Nancy Hiller,”Nancy has introduced us to each other. She has a remarkable knack for seeking out the fascinating aspects of people’s lives and writing eloquently about them. This I attribute to the person Nancy is. She doesn’t simply interview her subjects with a series of questions, rather she just talks with them. She enjoys the conversation and gets to know them. She listens. She’s naturally curious, interested and sincere.
Nancy has paved the way for aspiring woodworkers, authors, women in woodworking and designers. And now she is illuminating a dark path for anybody who struggles, so … all of us. In the same strong, determined and steady way that she moved through her career, Nancy is confronting her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, thinking creatively, managing one obstacle at a time, learning, teaching, advocating. I am in awe.
All that said, I must tell you that I was intimidated by Nancy when I started out as an editor. At least I was, for a blip, way back in 2006. Fresh out of the nurturing cocoon that is the Krenov School, I had just started at Fine Woodworking magazine and was assigned to work on an article with Nancy. “Arts & Crafts Wall Shelf” would be my first (mostly) solo assignment, and I would be traveling to Nancy’s shop, with Mike Pekovich shadowing me to make sure I didn’t completely screw it up.
Prior to the shoot, Nancy and I had worked together on the months-long process via phone calls and emails getting her manuscript turned into a shot list. I had called to introduce myself, tell her the proposal was accepted and get things rolling. The instant we got on the phone for the first time it was clear I was out of my intellectual league and every other league I cared about. She was talented, educated, articulate and could woodwork circles around most pros. She could write quite well, had ridiculous design skills and was clearly going to be on top of her deadlines. And I was a nervous newbie editor/photographer. Every speck of intimidation was coming from within me, and had nothing to do with what Nancy was putting out. But intimidated I was, nonetheless.
When I arrived for the shoot, Nancy was all those amazing things. Even more, she was kind, thoughtful, very well prepared, humble, professional, accommodating, funny and had an ease about her that started things off on the right foot. We made our way through that shoot and article and today, more than 15 years later, we’ve done so many more together. I think we’re a pretty darn good team! I often wonder if I had been paired with a different author on that first shoot if I would have made it past the first year in a job with a steep learning curve.
What began with me feeling intimidated has transformed into something great. I admire Nancy for her life and woodworking wisdom, her sense of humor, her empathy, her sage advice, the breadth of knowledge she has on so many topics, her incredible talent as a designer and maker, her fortitude in the face of all things.
Nancy, I am far better because I know you. You have what is probably the best freaking laugh and smile on the planet. It is my pleasure to capture it every time we shoot together! With all my love, I am proud to call you my friend.