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Meet the Author: David Finck (Part 1)

Posted on December 7, 2020March 20, 2024 by Kara Uhl

It’s mid-July and David Finck has just finished reading his maternal grandmother’s memoir. The youngest of 13 children, she grew up in Czarist Russia and was a pianist and top student at St. Petersburg State Conservatory. She gave recitals to Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, hung out in the Winter Palace, met Rasputin and walked hand-in-hand with Grand Duchess Anastasia.

“It’s stunning,” he says.

David’s aunt, a gerontologist, helped write the first-person memoir. It reads like historical fiction, David says. Which is interesting, because after spending a couple hours talking with David, and seeing the circles and ties to generations past, present and future, one could almost say the same about his life, too.

Many know David as author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” a classic in woodworking circles first published by Sterling and now sold under the Lost Art Press imprint. But since David first wrote that book he finds himself in a different place entirely, making violins and violas beloved by musicians. He talks a lot about luck but between his words is a lot of time, talent and skill. It’s a story that begins with his grandparents and now rests with his daughters. It’s about paths chosen and paths neglected, finishing what was left behind and following passions, all interconnecting to form a beautiful tale.

A Childhood Filled with Art & Music

David’s paternal grandfather, a paint chemist by trade, was a hobbyist woodworker. His grandfather also wrote, acted and directed Yiddish theater, and was founder of the Vagabond Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, the nation’s oldest continuously running community theater. His paternal grandmother was a trained sculptor. David has a couple little dovetailed boxes his grandfather made, with chip carving on them by his grandmother. David’s maternal grandfather, a doctor, was trained in St. Petersburg and cared for immigrant families in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood.

David Finck and his father, Henry Finck, on a hike about 50 years ago.

David grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Henry Finck, had a small woodshop in their basement and his mother, Paula, had an art studio in their home. David’s dad, academically gifted, was a professor of anatomy at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, although academia didn’t suit him.

As a child David recognized his parents were unique. His mother, a substitute art teacher, always had projects for him and his two older sisters. He laughs, remembering how they used to melt packing peanuts with candles, creating all sorts of things with long strings of burnt plastic in the basement of their old house, a dungeon-like space with low ceilings and thick cut-stone walls. They would play with clay and origami. With a friend, David would use cardstock from old computer programs to create taped-and-glued-together cars for play.

“I was into making stuff as a kid but it was just a part of life, something you didn’t even really think about,” he says.

In high school, he took a woodshop class taught by “a very nice man who didn’t know a lot about woodworking.” While his teacher spent much of the class dealing with discipline issues, David managed to build a few projects.

“They were laughably bad, really bad,” he says. “No portent of the future came out of that shop class.”

David’s first foray into music was the recorder. At the time, his parents were secular Jews. While his mom was still interested in some of the Jewish traditions, his family didn’t belong to a temple. When David’s friends began attending Hebrew School, his mom gave him a choice: He could go to Hebrew school or learn to play an instrument. Hebrew School was a three-day-a-week proposition, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., following full days of school.

“Guess which one I did?” he says, laughing.

He took recorder lessons for about a year – then something introduced him to the world of string instruments, which would become a significant part of his life ever after. That something? The movie “Deliverance.”

“I don’t know why my folks let me see it but I had watched ‘Deliverance’ with my dad when I was about 11, which is pretty intense, but you know the scene in the beginning where the Appalachian kid is sitting on the porch playing banjo and one of the characters starts backing him up on the guitar? Well, I just thought that was the most incredible thing I had ever heard.”

Later, David learned there were issues with that scene: While the music you hear is Scruggs-style three-finger bluegrass picking, the kid on the porch is playing a totally different style. What David did know at the time was that he wanted to play that tune. “It totally inspired me,” he says.

So his folks bought him an inexpensive plastic banjo that sounded, actually, pretty good, he says. It was the early 1970s and Pittsburgh was experiencing a folk revival – in fact, his sister, Tina, was playing guitar, mandolin and accordion in one of the city’s first old-time string bands. David began taking banjo lessons at a local music shop. Six months into them he realized there were different styles of banjo playing, and that he was never going to learn dueling banjos from his teacher, from whom he’d been learning a style called frailing (also called clawhammer). David was disappointed. And he probably would have found a new teacher and kept up with banjo had his dad not taken a sabbatical that resulted in his entire family moving – to New Zealand.

Dunedin’s Star Basketball Player (For a Short While)

Watergate and the Vietnam War filled the news. David’s parents, who were pretty liberal, wanted to leave the U.S. His father found a part-time job at a university on the South Island of New Zealand, in a town called Dunedin. New Zealand, David thought, offered a kind of paradise. This feeling was dashed a bit when the family arrived only to be greeted by a rare traffic jam caused by, of all things, the opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. His parents, believing they had left U.S. culture behind, were chagrined. They also were unsure about New Zealand’s political future.

Years later, David came across a passage in one of his father’s many notebooks about their time in New Zealand. His dad was a prodigious collector of clippings, pasting hundreds of them into dozens and dozens of composition notebooks, along with his own comments.

“There were a series of newspaper clippings related to Watergate that he had clipped out of the New Zealand newspaper,” David says. “And he was teaching anatomy at this university and he’s writing, ‘I can’t wait to be done with this. I want to do things with my hands. I want to make things that are tangible.’” (Eventually, he would.)

Grades were organized differently in New Zealand, by forms. The form David was initially placed in proved to be a little too easy; they moved him to the high school, which proved to be a little too hard. But there was a bright spot: For a short time, David was Dunedin’s star high school basketball player.

“I think basketball had been introduced in New Zealand three or four years earlier and I was one of the few people in the nation, it seemed, that knew how to dribble,” he says. “They put me on the varsity basketball team. I was like 100 pounds, 5’2”, 11 years old or something. But I could dribble circles around all these people. No one else really had any kind of dribbling skills at that point, but I quickly got beat up pretty bad by these much older kids and they put me in JV. But for a little while there, I was reveling in my athletic prowess. It was pretty thrilling.”

David’s true athletic passion had always been baseball. It was the early 1970s, the heyday for Pittsburgh teams. And in Pittsburgh, David lived two miles from the old Forbes Field. Like most 11-year-olds he wanted to be a major league baseball player – woodworking wasn’t even a thought. “The only trouble was I wasn’t very good and didn’t know it,” he says.

After a year in New Zealand David’s dad realized his part-time position wasn’t going to become full time anytime soon. So the family moved back to Pittsburgh, where David finished high school.

A Crooked Course Through College

“I hated high school,” David says. “But coming from an intellectual, academic-minded family, I was totally geared to go to college because I didn’t have anything better to do. And I sure wish that was not the case. I wish I had figured something else out.”

At the time Pittsburgh had a scholars program, which essentially meant starting high school in eighth grade if you maintained a B average – and David was a straight B student. He completed his high school courses by 11^th grade and, not wanting to spend a year in high school taking AP courses, he graduated. Without a real plan he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh.

“My parents were really laissez-faire when it came to guidance,” he says. “Either that or I didn’t seek them out and they didn’t impose their will on me. I don’t remember having heart-to-heart talks about this sort of thing at all. I just sort of plotted my own course in a really poor way.”

David, 17, was miserable in his big introductory college classes. But then he met Tom, a guy in his late 20s who had just earned his undergraduate degree in marine biology in Santa Barbara, California. David already had a vague interest in marine biology. Jacques Cousteau was big at the time. And David had spent several summers in Cape Cod, mucking around in estuaries and mud flats, and snorkeling while his dad worked in a lab at the Oceanic Institute. Tom told David he should go to UC Santa Barbara and study marine biology. And so, David did.

He ended up in a house with friends of Tom’s, all in their late 20s. A quarter-mile from campus, the house was two blocks from the beach and half the guys were surfers. It was paradise, David says, really beautiful. But yet again he found himself in huge general science classes. The beach was distracting and he worried he wouldn’t be successful in the environment.

He got in touch with a cousin who lived in Big Pine Key, Florida, about 20 miles from Key West. David’s cousin was taking marine technology classes at a small community college. Instead of sitting in auditorium-style classrooms, students at this college were out on boats doing sampling.

“Man, that sounded like a great idea to me,” David says. “So I took a leave, got myself all the way down to Big Pine Key, Florida, in time for the winter semester.” The problem? He hadn’t read the course catalog – no one was out on boats doing sampling in the winter. Despite this disappointment David continued his studies and spent a nice six months with his aunt, uncle and cousins in Florida.

Still unsure about his path in life, he decided to pursue a liberal arts education, and he transferred to UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, his guidance counselor told him a liberal arts degree didn’t exist. Together they came up with environmental science, and despite all the jogging around, David graduated with an environmental science degree four years after starting college.

David’s First Guitar

Before David and his family moved to New Zealand, his father had started – and stopped – building a classical guitar. The guitar was intended to be a stepping stone. After completing it his father wanted to build a viola da gamba. And if he accomplished that, he’d build his dream project: a violin. The move to New Zealand had interrupted the next step in the guitar, cutting a channel in the edges for inlaying the binding. After returning to Pittsburgh, David’s father, a cautious man with myriad things on his plate, found ways to put that step off for close to 20 years.

“It was during high school when I really started bugging him to finish that guitar because I thought it was good,” David says. “He was very meticulous.”

At the time David was a fan of James Taylor and Cat Stevens. He began playing pop folk on guitar, eventually moving to classical guitar and taking lessons. Another reason David wanted his dad to finish the guitar? He wanted it.

“It would have been way better than the hand-me-down guitar I was playing,” he says.

With a dream to join the back-to-land movement, David’s dad hunted for years for a farm. The family finally found a place in West Virginia, about 110 miles south of Pittsburgh. The plan was to spend six or seven years fixing it up, then move there once David’s dad retired. But a year later, his father had had enough of academia. He quit his job and David’s parents began a new life in West Virginia.

Throughout college David and his sisters would visit and help out on the farm. David and his dad turned one of the outbuildings into a shop and in it sat the unfinished guitar, along with all the forms that had been used to build it, a how-to book and extra wood. Having grown tired of trying to convince his dad – who had plenty of other work to do on the farm –to finish it, David decided to build his own.

“It was nothing I was passionate about,” he says. “Just when we had a little bit of down time it was something to do. But I really think at the heart of it I was still trying to manipulate him to finish his own instrument. I had a lot of confidence that it would be a nice, playable instrument and I thought this might inspire him to get started.”

David says his dad was a good craftsman – the kind who could take construction lumber and build a really nice trestle table with well-fitted joinery. He built a floor loom once, with six harnesses, because one of his interests was weaving. Without a background in fine woodworking, his dad simply figured out how to do stuff, building all sorts of things including small kit sailboats in the family living room. He also suffered from a bad back and spent a lot of time on his back reading – he was incredibly well-read. And busy. David mostly built the guitar on his own.

Turns out, he loved it.

“It was just inspiring for me,” David says. “Really, it was the first time I found something I was as passionate about as baseball. It just really felt like a real love, not just like, ‘Oh, this is kind of interesting.’ It was something like a bonfire, pushing me ahead.”

Comparatively, environmental science offered him little to no passion. He remembers a “horrible” work-study job at UC Berkeley, working with a young hotshot professor.

“He had a gazillion little surf creatures preserved in formaldehyde and I had to peer between the legs of each little one of them and tell him if it was a male or female and I would do that for 10 hours a week and it drove me nuts.”

Fortunately, while at UC Berkeley, a fortuitous meeting with a young woman changed the course of his life.

In Meet the Author: David Finck (Part 2) (coming December 9) you’ll learn about David’s switch from environmental science to woodworking, the birth of ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ (while caring for two young children), his family band and pivot into violin making.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Meet the Author: Nancy Hiller

Posted on April 16, 2020March 20, 2024 by Kara Uhl

Professional cabinetmaker and author Nancy Hiller’s story is filled with all the places and characters and plots that make up the best biographies (which happens to be Nancy’s genre of choice). The author of five books, including “English Arts & Crafts Furniture” (Popular Woodworking Books), “Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life” (Lost Art Press) and an upcoming book about kitchens (also Lost Art Press), Hiller also writes regularly for Fine Woodworking and her blog, “Making Things Work.” She has taught cabinetmaking, furniture and finishing courses, and she’s a member of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers and a Companion of Ruskin’s Guild of St George.

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 Wall G oldfinger 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 50^th 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.

Left: a mid-century modern kitchen. *Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography and Design*. Middle: a Voysey-inspired kitchen. *Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography and Design*. Right: a 1930s Colonial Revival kitchen.

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.”

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 the best 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.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Meet the Author (and Illustrator): Maurice Pommier

Posted on October 18, 2019March 20, 2024 by Kara Uhl

Maurice Pommier, in his workshop. *Photo by Brian Anderson.*

[Editor’s note: We recently reached out for an interview with Maurice Pommier, author and illustrator of “Grandpa’s Workshop” (translated by Brian Anderson – you can read about Brian’s visit to see Maurice and his workshop in 2012 here). Maurice lives in Évreux, France, and speaks little English. But he responded, in the most generous way – an illustrated letter. Here are his words, as he wrote them without edits from us, along with a handful of illustrations, sketches and pictures to help paint a small picture of who Maurice is and some of the brilliant work he has done.]

I am not very able to speak of me. I am born in 1946.

My mother was dressmaker. She worked hard, early morning and late evening.

My father, alive but broken by the nazis.

We lived in a little village, Peyrat de Bellac. I go to school and after I was boarder at collège in the nearby town.

I thank life for having put in my company a lot of great people – I can not name them all. I choose three, the others do not be dissatisﬁed.

Tonton Dédé, the best, with working with tools and with his hands.

Pépé Léonard, the best storyteller. When he stop speaking, he was whistling.

Mémé Anna.

I think I’ve been drawing since I know how is made a pencil.

In 1968, I married Francine, she supports me since that date. We live in Évreux. We had three children and now four grandchildren; I worked at the Post Office for a long time. But I did not stop drawing.

My friend Xavier Josset has been presenting my ﬁrst book to a publisher, me, I would have never been there.

After things changed, I left the Post Office, but I continued to draw and scribble. And write stories. In the following pages I enclose a small catalog of my bad habits.
J’espère ne pas être ennuyeux.

Drawings & Colors

Some pictures made when I work in the team of Guides Gallimard.

“Moulin Richard de Bas, Ambert,” the oldest paper mill in France (watercolor)

“Rosace, tracé régulateur,” Cathédrale St Guy, Prague

François Calame, creator of Carpenters Without Borders, is a friend. I had the chance to make shavings and sawdust in his company.

The Tithe Barn of Daubeuf-la-Campagne (*La grange aux dîmes de Daubeuf la Campagne*)

Originally the barn was built with five bays. It was later extended to the south with five further bays. The barn is oriented north to south in its length. The drawing here shows the older part of the barn. The cross-frames, the main purlins and the bracing are shown, but for clarity, the rafters and the intermediate purlins are omitted. The doors, which have undergone several alterations over the course of the barnʼs history, have also been omitted.

La grange était constituée à son origine par 5 travées. Par la suite elle fut agrandie vers le sud, par 5 travées nouvelles. La construction est orientée nord/sud. Voici un petit schéma décrivant la charpente la plus ancienne. Il montre les travées, les fermes et le contreventement, pour plus de clarté, les chevrons n’ont pas été dessinés, ainsi qu’une partie des pannes. Les portes, modiﬁées ou crées au cours de son histoire, ne sont pas représentées non plus.

— “Daubeuf Workshop Diary,” p. 11, Carpenters Without Borders, (ink + sweat …)

illustration from “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, illustrated by Maurice Pommier, Ch. 41, (Hachette-Jeunesse, Paris, 2001) (watercolor + pen + ink)

illustration from “Le Sac Du Mousse” by Maurice Pommier, (La Martinière Groupe, Paris, 2004) (watercolor + pen + ink)

Papercuts

“The Book of Tobit,” papercut (paper + X-Acto knife – “impossible to erase, no repentance …”

“St. Nicolas & Pierre le Noir,” papercut (paper + X-Acto knife)

“St. Nicolas & Pierre le Noir,” papercut (paper + X-Acto knife)
“The genies of the fields and woods that accompanied St. Nicolas; as they were a source of disorder, the religious authorities forbade them.”

Tools & Wood

Simon (6 years old), my last grandson, says: “Pépé make me a crossbow!”

“My woodwork shop, it’s a mess! I know, it’s the same thing in my drawing workshop. But I love old tools. My friend Loïc says: ‘Maurice, to find room, you’ll have to push the walls!'”

My toolbox, less beautiful than Christopher’s.

Small model of a trestle born of my passion for roofing geometry – en français, “l’art du Trait.” One of the essential skills of the French carpenters.

My current job, under Patrick’s direction. I met Patrick Macaire a few years
ago and since, in my drawing workshop, there is a struggle for space between little pieces of wood and drawings.

P. 93

Gros plan sur le tracé de la saillie de l’arêtier en plan.

Gros plan sur le tracé de la queue de vache sur l’élévation de l’arêtier.

Tracés théoriques qui ne seront pas repris intégralement à l’épure (Theoretical plots that will not be fully included in the sketch)

P. 99

Jambe de force
La jambe de force peut s’établir en prolongeant sa face inférieure jusqu’au lattis et en reportant son niveau sur la ferme de croupe et de l’arêtier; puis, en plan, en générant une sablière d’emprunt (au niveau de la ligne de trave) et en la faisant tourner à l’axe. Vériﬁcation en générant un faîtage d’emprunt au niveau de la dalle et en faisant tourner: les trois points doivent s’aligner.

We are finishing the Deuxième carnet – it’s been 7 years since we are working on these two notebooks.

For carpenters, the rabbit is the apprentice – he has big legs to run fast and big ears to hear everything.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Meet the Author: Joshua A. Klein

Posted on September 26, 2019March 20, 2024 by Kara Uhl

Joshua Klein was born in Appleton, Wisconsin.

“I was always the art kid,” he says.

He wasn’t much into sports and instead spent his spare time painting, drawing and playing music. He was content with Bs, spending less time on achieving perfect test scores and more time on creating things of beauty. In high school he attended a charter school with a focus on art. Half of his day was spent taking art classes along with dance, music and theater.

“That really was pretty formative for me,” he says. “It legitimized my interests.”

Although his parents were supportive, Joshua said many of his peers were more interested in sports – that is, until he was surrounded by likeminded peers at the charter school. That experience set up his life trajectory in a way, which has been, essentially, exploring different forms of art.

Joshua grew up in a typical Midwestern suburb and had a conventional upbringing.

“I don’t say that disparagingly,” he says. “It was a blessing to us.”

Joshua’s father worked for Pierce Manufacturing, building fire trucks. He started out in the engineering department and later moved to sales. His mother stayed home to care for Joshua and his two younger brothers. She did some babysitting as well.

Joshua’s father was skilled at drawing, handy around the house and built the family some furniture in his basement shop, but has never considered himself a furnituremaker. Joshua remembers his father drawing for his engineering job in the early years, and says that influenced his own interest in visual arts.

But kids are kids, and following footsteps or building skills for work as an adult seems unnecessary when adulthood feels like a lifetime away. “I was basically just a snot-nosed kid who didn’t really have any interest in what my dad was building in the basement,” Joshua says.

Throughout high school Joshua played guitar in several bands.

“We were terrible, of course, but that was pretty fun,” Joshua says. “I was pretty faithful to that. We had multiple practices a week and we’d play shows and we had merchandise and we’d do recordings, all that stuff. That was pretty fun to do. I was pretty dedicated to the electric guitar all throughout high school.”

The genre? “We actually played really loud, distorted, hardcore screaming music. So lots of very aggressive-sounding music – there was thrashing – it was pretty wild, pretty loud stuff.”

At 17, still in high school, Joshua did a 180. “Basically I was very, very hardened and very bitter toward Christianity,” he says. “It just seemed like a bunch of hypocrisy to me, and I didn’t have any time for it. I was actually quite vocal and aggressive in high school toward Christians.”

But Joshua had a few Christian friends and he realized they didn’t fit the mold of who he thought Christians were. In fact, he was impressed by them. And through conversations with them, talking about the relevance of the Bible in this century, he reconsidered.

“It pretty dramatically changed my life,” he says. He stepped away from his “dark, dark, dark music stuff,” he says. “It basically reoriented my whole framework of life.”

So much so that after high school, Joshua attended Calvary Chapel Bible College.

“I wanted to have a firm spiritual foundation for my decision making, and if I got married someday I wanted to have that firm foundation,” he says. “So I felt like that was the first thing I needed to do, get established spiritually, and then pursue career things.”

The best way Joshua can describe Calvary Chapel Bible College is as a Christian ashram. “It wasn’t a seminary, per se – I wasn’t getting rigorous academic theology study although there was definitely a lot of study of the Bible but it was sort of a personal growth kind of time.”

Joshua studied there for a year. It was a two-year program, and he was taking it (and paying for it) one semester at a time. There, he also met his wife. They fell madly in love, he says, and made plans. But after two semesters of college, Joshua was out of money.

“I needed to make money to go forward with anything in my life,” he says. So he worked for a year in the metal fabrication department of Pierce Manufacturing, where his dad worked, to save up. Then, he and Julia got married.

“During that year I was pursuing a lot of different options,” he says. “I wanted to work with my hands and at the time I really loved music, and was very dedicated to it. So, I thought, you know what would be really cool is if I could learn how to make guitars or repair guitars. That would be the coolest job ever.”

On their honeymoon Joshua and Julia went from Maine, where they got married, and drove up through Canada to Minnesota. They found a place to live and Joshua enrolled in a guitar program at a technical institute in Red Wing, Minnesota, where he learned how to make and repair guitars.

“I basically think of that as my introduction to woodworking,” he says. “I learned how to do woodworking building guitars, highly precise, highly micro-scale kind of woodworking. And which is probably a good thing, because I was focused on a thousandth of an inch of adjustment. So that was good, but it didn’t quite suit me, it wasn’t quite the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

While at the tech school Joshua took a tour of the National Institute of Wood Finishing, located on the campus of Dakota County Technical College in Rosemont, Minnesota. Much of the focus was on furniture restoration and, as someone who thought something from the 1950s was ancient, the work this school was doing on antiques – on pieces built before the advent of power tools – blew Joshua’s mind. He was hooked.

So after one year in the guitar program, Joshua switched and studied furniture restoration for a year at the National Institute of Wood Finishing.

Choosing Maine

By this time Joshua and Julia had decided that they wanted to settle in Maine, which is where Julia grew up. While dating, Joshua had met Julia’s family in Maine, who lived on the Blue Hill peninsula, right below Bar Harbor on the coast.

“It’s vacation land,” Joshua says. “Totally gorgeous. … This place has such an art culture. It’s very rural and tucked away but so many really interesting people either summer out here or they retire out here.”

The area is also considered a hot spot for the back-to-the-land movement.

“Scott and Helen Nearing, and Eliot Coleman and a lot of other people, real foundational people, this is their neighborhood,” Joshua says.

This community’s strong local farming and homesteading culture appealed to Joshua. There are also a lot of antiques in Maine, and so Joshua’s change in study made a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, he says. He had a viable career option in sight.

But before moving to Maine, Joshua landed what he thought might be his dream job in Nashville, Tennessee – he was hired in the finishing department of a small custom guitar shop. It was a short stint.

“Basically, we tried it,” he says. “It wasn’t a great fit. It was interesting, but it wasn’t for me.”

By this time Julia was pregnant with their first son. “Let’s just go home,” Joshua says. So in 2009 Joshua secured a job in a cabinetmaking shop and three days prior to their move, as he was loaded up their U-Haul, he got a call. The shop had a huge job that fell through and they lost six months of work. They couldn’t hire him.

Upon their arrival in Maine, Joshua was hired by his father-in-law, a carpenter, just so he could pay some bills. Although stressful at times, the experience of trying to put pieces together and simply figure it out ended up being great, he says.

“When you’re self-employed you have freedom,” he says.

So in addition to working alongside his father-in-law, Joshua says he also was able to start building some furniture and restoring antiques. And then, after working for his father-in-law for a year and a half, Joshua hung out his shingle and opened up his own shop.

“Instantly I was booked up,” he says.

He told his father-in-law he was going to take some time off, just to further establish his own business and work through his initial job orders. “But I never worked for him again,” Joshua says.

The ease of getting customers surprised Joshua. “It caught me off guard,” he says. “Basically, I showed up at the right time that there was a gap. There was no one around that was doing this type of work for at least a decade. So, there was this backlog of work that needed to be done.”

Also, because the Blue Hill peninsula was an established vacation destination at the time, many of the summer homes which were being bought up were filled with antiques that needed work. Word of mouth spread quickly in the small, rural area. Still, Joshua placed a small black-and-white ad in the local newspaper, just to feel legitimate, he says. And it did make him feel more legitimate, even when clients were approaching him on referral.

Laying Down Roots

Joshua and Julia were renting a small house when Joshua, with a stack of woodworking books and a desire to be part of the back-to-land movement, built his first piece of furniture. His workshop was a tiny garden shed out back, which also held things like their lawnmower. He made a small, painted, two-board top pine table with tapered legs.

At the guitar-making school, Joshua had been taught how to do highly precise and mechanized work. He had learned how to sharpen hand tools for very precise tasks. Because the entire school’s curriculum centered on guitars, the process of how to get boards out of rough stock and turn them into a finished piece of furniture had not been discussed. Rather the school’s teachers focused on complex router jigs and technical mechanical operations.

“It didn’t really fulfill me, for what I was after,” Joshua says.

Joshua loved seeing tool marks on furniture and every time he did, it reiterated his desire for a different type of work.

Once he began taking his own clients in Maine, most of whom contacted him for restoration work, Joshua filled his free time with learning how to build furniture and tools using pre-industrial methods. He owned a few power tools – a table saw, drill press, router and band saw. He knew how to sharpen hand tools, and the basics of using them. But what he really wanted to do was work with a rough board all the way through a completed project using hand tools only.

Eventually he rented a shop from Julia’s grandmother, a small carriage shed, 14’ x 17’, located next to a stream. In it he kept a workbench, a tool chest and the object he was working on. There was a large picture window with old wavy glass with a view of a massive multi-family garden. “It was quite an inspiring setting,” Joshua says.

Joshua and Julia bought the property they live on today, 11 acres on a dead-end road, seven years ago. They bought the house and land from old friends who were doing homesteading and had been working on the house for 10 years. “Basically, we bought into their progress,” Joshua says. “We jumped in where they left off.”

But Joshua and Julia’s vision when buying the land was to eventually build their own house. “We wanted a handmade house,” Joshua says. “We ultimately decided, because of our love for history, that we wanted to restore an old house.”

So about three years ago they bought an 1810 Cape Cod a half hour away. The house had fallen into disrepair and was going to be bulldozed. “It had a gorgeous mantel, all the original moulding, there was no plumbing in the house, very minimal electricity – it was basically untouched,” Joshua says. “It was such a beautiful thing it would be a tragedy to see it go. So it was perfect for us.”

They spent an entire summer documenting and dismantling and labeling every board, every joint, everything. They took the entire house apart and put it in storage, and are now making plans to perform a massive restoration on it, on their current property, in the next few years.

The land Joshua lives on has a small pond with a stream at the back of the property, and it’s mostly wooded with a few small fields – basically, it has a little bit of everything.

“The major selling point for us was that the way the property is situated there is a perfect area for a workshop right at the road that is separate from the house,” Joshua says.

This allows Joshua to work from home, while still keeping home and work separate. Because Joshua and Julia are active in homeschool and homesteading, Joshua says their yard and driveway are filled with kids (they have three sons) and chickens, and is simply not suitable for customer traffic. But with this separation he can still hear his son practice his trumpet and yet, when customers visit his shop, Joshua and Julia’s house is out of view.

Joshua’s shop is an old 24’ x 26’ 1-1/2 story house frame that was built around 1790 in Vermont. He found a company that dismantled old homes and restored them – they had done that to this one and, after seeing it on their website, Joshua thought it would be perfect for his shop. So he bought it and the company brought it to his property, where there was a raising that lasted an entire week. The company put the boards on the rafters, shook hands and then left. Joshua and Mike Updegraff – Joshua’s co-worker an editorial assistant at Mortise & Tenon magazine have been working on it ever since.

The Birth of Mortise & Tenon Magazine

Joshua founded Mortise & Tenon magazine in 2015. The inspiration came from spending every day in his conservation studio taking apart antiques to repair them and putting them back together again. Joshua found himself filing all this information he learned about the process away, simply because it differed so drastically from his work at the guitar-making school.

“It broke all of the conventional dogma that ‘good work looks like this’ or ‘don’t ever do that’ – all those rules that existed for the last 200 years,” he says. “And so I got really interested.”

At the same time Joshua was learning how to use hand tools.

“And I heard a lot of people telling me that hand tools are slow, and that it’s a romantic way to do it but it’s really not practical,” he says. “But then when I looked at the furniture it actually looked like it was done very fast. The tool marks were actually quite interesting looking.”

In addition, Joshua was reading journals of journeymen who detailed what they charged for the time they spent working and the time they took on various tasks was so fast. Something didn’t add up. Modern woodworkers were insisting hand tools were slow, but records from the past proved otherwise. Why?

M&T grew out of an old blog that Joshua was writing exploring this question. “It was a personal blog, about my life and gardening, but it also had a lot of shop stuff,” he says.

But Joshua was growing tired of his blog. He wanted something that would be around for a while, something crisp. He considered making a print version of his blog but then he wanted contributors to share what they were learning. What would that be? he thought. He realized, laughing, that what he was dreaming up already existed – it’s a magazine.

So then he shared his idea with a bunch of people. “They all said I was insane,” Joshua says, “and that I shouldn’t do it because ‘print is dead’ and ‘there is no market for that kind of thing.’”

Chris Schwarz was one of the people Joshua consulted with “and he probably wouldn’t say he told me I shouldn’t do it but he did warn me,” Joshua says. “And so everybody else is saying, ‘Yeah – that would be cool if it would work but I don’t think the market is going to support that.’”

Joshua took all this information and advice and ignored it. He got printing quotes for 100 copies. “I wanted to figure out the smallest print run I could possible do, and how much it would cost,” he says.

Why move forward despite the well-intentioned advice not to? “I just really believed in it,” he says. But he wasn’t willing to take a financial risk for his family. He has no trust fund, no investors. “I was just this dumb poor kid that wanted to start this thing,” he says. “So how was I going to do that? How was I going to make this thing sustainable right out of the gate?”

Print proved impossibly expensive but then Joshua realized that if he is going to sell a magazine dedicated to hand tools, he was probably going to have to connect with people outside of Blue Hill.

“So I got one of those newfangled smart phone things and did some social media stuff, trying to connect with people,” he says. “I remember getting on the Internet and searching, ‘How to use Instagram.’”

He learned and through Instagram and Facebook he really began connecting with people. Eventually he shared his vision for the magazine and took pre-orders six months in advance for Issue No. 1. This direct sales to customers helped him gauge the print run. “That’s how I felt confident that it wouldn’t sink my family and I thought, ‘Well, I got to try it.’”

Joshua describes it as the magazine he’s always wanted to read. There’s no advertising in it. It reads like a journal. It’s hefty. There’s beautiful photography and solid research – both in and out of the shop.

The first print run, gauged on the initial pre-orders, was 5,000. Joshua assumed this would give him enough copies to also sell back issues over the next few years. And while the size of the print run compared to pre-orders didn’t provide him a massive profit, it did allow him to pay the bill.

But there were no back issues to sell. To fulfill the orders Joshua and friends wrapped each issue, along with a wood shaving, in brown paper sealed with wax. As they fulfilled orders, images of the magazine began appearing on Instagram. Interest grew quickly and he sold out before they finished shipping.

Today Joshua’s print runs are 10,000 and the magazine is published two times a year. Fulfillment still works the same way (brown paper, wax etc.). To get it done Joshua throws a big party for about 30 friends and family. Over a Friday and Saturday they help him with fulfillment, and he and Julia feeds them. On Monday morning Joshua fills a U-Haul with all the magazines and drives them to his local post office.

“The heart of it for us is, and so much of the goal of Mortise & Tenon is celebrating the joy in manual labor,” Joshua says. “So for us, this is just like that. We’re all standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder, wrapping magazines. It’s relatively mindless work so we’re just talking, having amazing conversations for two days straight and gorging ourselves on great food and we’re just having such a blast.”

Inevitably, fulfillment will someday have to change. Joshua says he knows that and already there are ways he could it do it more easily and more cheaply, but right now, he says, it’s just too fun.

Hands Employed Aright

Joshua spent five years working on “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).”

“I was not trained as a historian,” he says. “I went to a trade school. It was very hard for me, very hard to do this kind of work. Because every single sentence in that book could be wrong. I think it’s a lot easier in books that say, ‘This is how I do it in my shop,’ because I’m right. But with that book every sentence could be wrong or not have the right nuance to be accurate. So it was really honestly grueling, it was really hard work, but I was obsessed for five years. My wife is so pleased this book is done because I was just immersed in it.”

Joshua was so focused on the book that by the time it published, he needed time away from it. So he poured himself into M&T. Only now is he willing to look at his book again, an act he finds interesting as he now has a different perspective on it.

“I don’t have regrets with the book at all,” he says. He’s also beginning to realize how deeply his research for this book shaped his thinking about woodworking. “It completely transformed my whole thought process, the questions I’m asking about historic work, my aspirations with what I want to do with woodworking in my life, and it totally changed my trajectory, forever I think.”

As a merger of historic research and hands-on woodwork, M&T has been the perfect outlet for him to explore this new way of working. Joshua and Mike now spend about half their time in the shop and the other half writing and editing articles, and doing graphic design work. The two met in a homeschool co-op. Mike had been woodworking for 10 years and was looking for a change. At that time Issue No. 1 of M&T had taken off, and was completely consuming Joshua’s life. He was working 90 hours a week on M&T but also had a backlog of furniture projects he needed to finish. So Joshua asked Mike for help in the shop, repairing furniture. Mike started part-time, pretty quickly moving to full-time. And pretty soon after that, Joshua said he needed help on the magazine full-time.

“He’s super skilled, super talented and so basically he was able to jump right into Mortise & Tenon,” Joshua says. Now the workload is split 50-50 between the two of them – they do everything together.

The two also have additional freelance help, including Jim McConnell (content editor), Megan Fitzpatrick (content and copy editor) and Grace Cox (customer service, shipping and administration).

These days Joshua is also dabbling in instructional videos and some other book ideas, but M&T is his primary, long-term project. He no longer does furniture conservation – the last project he worked on was more than two years ago. “Not because I dislike it,” Joshua says. “I love it. There are just so many hours in a day, in a week, and I want to be available to my family some. So I cut it off.”

Building is still deeply important to Joshua. He’s structured his business so that half of his year is spent building things. Of course, the last two years have been spent building the shop itself – doing trim, window glazing etc. Joshua calculates they have about six more months of work on the shop, and then he’ll have more time to explore, research and build.

“Furniture projects primarily for me are the exploration of the process, not about getting more furniture,” he says. “I have a bunch of antiques and I have a bunch of stuff I made and I don’t have room for any more furniture.”

These days he makes furniture and simply passes it off to other people. He’ll occasionally take commissions but usually only exact replicas so that he can also take the time to research it, learn about it and report on it. “My primary goal is research,” he says. “I love learning about things and then teaching about it.”

Cultivating Reverence

Joshua describes himself as a very independent person. “I’m homeschool, homestead, home business,” he says. “I guess I’m just wired that way.”

At school, he struggled with assignments not chosen by him that had to be done a certain way and had to be turned in at a certain time. But if it’s a project of his choosing he pursues it passionately, becoming obsessed (his word) and unable to stop researching it.

It’s similar to the relationship he’s had with theology. For many years, after school, he got very deep into theological research (particularly in the Reformed tradition) and, to some degree, he still is, he says. But that same deep research now also applies to woodworking.

“I like researching and asking questions and discovering,” he says. “I think doing woodworking research at the bench is, frankly, the better way to do it.”

The years Joshua has spent researching both theology and woodworking intersect on the subject of work – its value and what the Bible says about it – and he has spent a year and a half focused on that.

Joshua’s spiritual life and interests, and professional life and interests, are all connected right now.

“Working with your hands and how that relates to the head, heart and hand thing – it’s all intertwined,” he says. “And that’s what I learned from Fisher, you can’t really compartmentalize it. That’s part of what I learned from Fisher is to try and say so-and-so was just a woodworker or to try to define their identity in just one aspect just oversimplifies it.”

Joshua gets up at 5 a.m. and does an hour to an hour-and-a-half of research, reading and studying. He then spends the first two hours of his day doing farm work. He and Julia have goats that they milk, chickens that they raise for meat and for laying eggs, and they’re expanding their vegetable garden. He arrives at his shop at 9 a.m., joining Mike who is typically already there. Then it simply depends on what’s needed to be done. Maybe it’s editing manuscripts or shooting the next cover for the magazine or building something.

Mike (left) and Joshua weaving cattail seats

“I think it would be fair to describe the work as always different,” he says. “Mike and I work as a team with whatever is going on so there might be a situation where we’re working in the shop and we hear my son’s trumpet through the woods and then all of a sudden the goats start screaming through the woods and one of them jumps the fence and gets electrified and they all run down into the woods and you have to go catch them and bring them back in. It’s honestly like a circus around here. A typical work day has nothing typical.”

Mike heads home around 4 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Joshua typically works through email and begins thinking about the next day’s tasks. He leaves the shop around 5:30 p.m. and is then home with the kids. He doesn’t work on Saturdays and Sundays.

Evenings are family centered. Joshua hangs out with the boys while Julia makes dinner, and because his children are young, he often fixes something in the house that had been broken during the day. He reads before bed.

The youngest of Joshua’s three sons is 2 but still, the boys have a workbench in the house, with rasps, spokeshaves and handplanes. Joshua says he regularly finds little piles of shavings around the bench.

“I moved out to rural Maine because I wanted to be with my family,” Joshua says. “We started the whole thing by asking ourselves, What kind of life do we want to have? What do we want to do day in and day out? How do we want to raise our kids? What will life be like when the kids move out? And this is the kind of life we want – connected to nature, connected to farming, connected to handwork. And so we have the business stuff, Julia has her piano stuff [she teaches], I have Mortise & Tenon, so there’s a lot going on. But we always come back to: What kind of life do you want to live? Do we always want to be out in life chasing things? Do we want to push M&T and try to get it to grow, grow, grow? But it’s about satisfaction and family and raising our kids.”

And in 10 years?

“I just want to milk my goats,” he says.

Joshua and Mike have been asking some hard questions lately. Mortise & Tenon is going all the time. Take the packing parties, for example. With growth, they simply aren’t sustainable. And Joshua finds that distressing.

“I don’t have visions of conquering the woodworking world,” he says. “I just want to make my own magazine and have my garden. I’m not resisting success but I don’t do any advertising, I’m not a salesman, I don’t try to push it. It’s just the natural growth of it. I just want a quiet life in rural Maine. That’s my goal.”

Joshua talks about Patagonia, and how they only grow 1 percent a year. He talks about strong growth rather than fast growth and how he wants M&T to still be around in 75 years.

“It really changes the way you think about your work,” he says.

At the time of our interview Joshua was re-reading “A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity” by William Coperthwaite as part of his more-recent deep immersion into the intersection of modern technology and society. In the book Coperthwaite doesn’t preach anti-technology but rather focuses on humane technology, technology that’s good for us.

And that’s what Joshua has been diving into – the relationship of working with one’s hands, modernization, machines and smart phones. While he says he’s been sharing some of that in his publishing, he sees this as becoming a strong message or theme in M&T.

Joshua, though, is human. Self-sufficiency is a myth, he says. With farming, they do it because they love it and they simply grow enough to keep them happy. With three young children, teaching them to be helpful on the land takes time and, honestly, distracts from productivity. So Joshua isn’t uptight or rigorous about living off the land. Rather, the family simply does what it can, focusing on what brings them joy. They hope to take their hobby and let it grow, knowing that they’ll have more help from their children in the future.

In the meantime, Joshua and Mike continue to work on Mortise & Tenon magazine being mindful of their purpose statement, which speaks not only to the publication, but both their lives: Mortise & Tenon exists to cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft. You can read a detailed blog post about this here.

After talking about beauty for a bit, Joshua talks about Proverbs 27, which Fisher mentioned a lot in his journals: “You do not know what a day will bring.” In addition to this bit of inspiration, Joshua lives by his purpose statement, trying each day to “cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world” through handcraft, his farm, the soil, being at home with his family, loving his kids, attending church, worshiping, singing and reading the Bible. … I’m just on a journey, trying to keep my head on straight, doing what I love and trying to make sense of it along the way.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Meet the Author: C. H. Becksvoort

Posted on August 31, 2019March 20, 2024 by Kara Uhl

Christian Becksvoort was born in Wolfsburg, Germany. His father, who had spent seven years as a German apprentice, worked as a cabinetmaker. When Chris was 6, his parents decided to move to Toronto. But shortly before relocating to Canada, the Toronto church sponsorship fell through and Washington, D.C. became a last-minute alternative. In time, the family settled in Wheaton, Maryland – better school, better neighborhood.

As a child, Chris remembers building small wooden boats, model ships and historic schooners – “little things like that,” he says. “I always enjoyed making things and being outdoors.”

Chris’s high school had a nice shop, and he took four years of shop class. There he learned how to use power tools, tool safety, joinery methods and finishing techniques. Wood technology, however, was glossed over. He built a mahogany plant table “that was put together pretty well,” he says, but it cracked. When he asked his shop teacher why, his teacher simply said, “You didn’t let the wood move.”

Chris says at the time, he didn’t have the faintest idea of how wood movement worked or how to allow for it. (He later took one semester of wood technology in college.) His furniture now sells to clients all over the country, in many different climates.

“Sending it back to me is not an option,” he says, citing, in particular, substantial delivery costs. “Once I get paid I never see it again.”

And that’s how he likes it – his furniture is built to last generations, and this lesson he learned in high school has influenced the design of every piece he has made since. On his website, under “The Becksvoort Difference,” he writes, “I take wood movement seriously, over-building and compensating to ensure that your investment lasts.” He includes two examples: dovetailing all his mouldings and constructing telescoping web frames between his drawers.

Chris’s dad continued working as a cabinetmaker in the states, building furniture and doing architectural work, built-ins and kitchens. When Chris, who was still learning, turned 12, his dad, a perfectionist, hired him.

“Things didn’t go as well as they should have,” Chris says, counting the number of times he was fired and re-hired in one summer. “He was not the easiest guy to work for. So the last thing I wanted to do was be a woodworker for a living.”

Chris Becksvoort in 1972, when he met his now-wife, Peggy, in a photography class.

Chris ended up at the University of Maine – far enough away that he couldn’t go home for a weekend but close enough that he could go home for a week’s vacation, he says. Plus, he enjoyed cold weather. He played intramural hockey (and, later in life, did speed skating for several years). He started out studying forestry, but switched to wildlife. The switch in majors required some summer coursework to catch up on credits. While taking a photography course he met a woman who would soon become his wife, Peggy.

Peggy and Chris Becksvoort, shortly after their marriage.

After graduating in 1972, Chris got a government job at a wildlife research center in Maryland. Part of his job was feeding 600 Japanese quail. While he enjoyed the fact that everyone knocked off early on Fridays to go out for a beer, the work wasn’t what he expected, and wasn’t much fun (let’s just say another employee’s misplaced decimal point once meant the untimely demise of hundreds of birds). Woodworking, he said, was beginning to look not too bad after all.

So Chris returned to Maine and worked for a furniture manufacturer for nine years. He learned a lot, both about woodworking and running a business. Next was a gig with a large architectural millwork shop in downtown Portland. There he helped restore Victorian homes by working on stairways, windows and doors, and reproducing historic mouldings. “It was a real learning experience,” he says, as he describes using routers and shapers in heart-stopping ways.

Chris Becksvoort at one of his first teaching gigs in 1979.

In 1986, he opened his own shop. “I’ve been at it ever since, and it’s been a real challenging ride, to say the least,” he says.

‘That Shaker Guy’

“Mary mother of God. That’s Christian Becksvoort! He’s the modern master of Shaker style. I never dreamed that I would see him in the flesh.” — Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman, NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” season 5, episode 9.

Before Chris’s name became synonymous with Shaker furniture, he first became smitten with the form after seeing pieces in a 1974 exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick gallery. “I went back to visit it five, six, seven times,” he says. Little did he know that someday he would have the chance to reproduce two of the gallery’s pieces in his own shop.

Chris says his father built a lot of Danish-style, mid-century modern furniture. So Chris grew up admiring clean surfaces and with an understanding that less is often more. “I don’t want to interrupt a surface with fancy mouldings,” he says. He doesn’t like design that exists without a utilitarian purpose (ahem, gingerbread), anything that screams “hey, look what I can do” or anything that makes dusting difficult. “There’s no dirt in heaven,” he quips.

Chris’s signature piece, a cherry 15-drawer chest. *Photo by Dennis Griggs Photo*.

In his 1998 book “The Shaker Legacy: Perspectives on an Enduring Furniture Style,” (The Taunton Press) Chris writes, “As a furniture maker, I not only value the Shakers’ considerable craftsmanship but also respect their insistence upon utility as the first tenet of good design. With the Shakers, there is no ego involved, no conscious effort to produce works of art. Austere utility is beautiful in and of itself, and often works of art are inadvertently produced.”

With full-width panels, Chris says web frames must be allowed to telescope to account for side-to-side wood movement, as shown here.

He not only appreciates the simplicity of Shaker furniture, but the construction methods used as well. “It’s clean,” he says. “But some of the construction is fairly complex. It’s well-designed.”

Chris says his biggest entry into Shaker furniture was being allowed to do maintenance and restoration work for Sabbathday Lake, the last remaining active Shaker community, in New Gloucester, Maine.

“If you want any repair work done I’ll do it for the cost of materials,” he said. They agreed, and it’s work he’s still doing today.

One of Chris’s cherry four-drawer chests, photographed in the hallway of the Girl’s Shop at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community. *Photo by Dennis Griggs Photo*.

“From making display cases to replacing chair parts, restoring a sewing desk, replacing moulding, or assembling an entire built-in, my work with the Shakers has been rewarding, educational and, hopefully, mutually beneficial,” Chris wrote in “Shaker Inspiration,” his latest book from Lost Art Press. “Seeing the size, angle and spacing of dovetails cut 200 years ago, or taking apart a mortise-and-tenon joint and discovering that the edges were carefully chamfered, was a learning experience unlike any taught in school.”

Chris also rose in name recognition through his work with Fine Woodworking. Chris had heard about a guy who had a cool portable band saw so he drove to him, interviewed him and took pictures. He sent it all to Fine Woodworking and not only did they buy the article, but soon after they offered him a job. Not wanting to move to Connecticut, Chris agreed to a contributing editor position, which he has held since 1989. (You can read much of his magazine work here.)

He has written several books, including “The Shaker Legacy” (Taunton Press, 1998); “With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood” (Lost Art Press, 2013), which was originally published as “In Harmony With Wood” (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983) and “Shaker Inspiration” (Lost Art Press, 2018).

And for years he ran workshops and conducted lectures around the country.

What Chris Becksvoort calls “brainstorm designing” of a music stand.

As such, Chris says he’s been dubbed “that Shaker guy.” I ask if this has ever made him feel pigeonholed. Sometimes, he admits. But he’s also taken some creative liberties with design. For example, a traditional Shaker music stand is fairly straight forward and stiff – his are more fluid, “Shaker-inspired.”

“There are plusses and minuses,” he says. “But mostly it’s a good label.”

Chris Becksvoort, Nick Offerman and Thomas Lie-Nielsen

His work has resulted in a bit of fame. Fans regularly take the time to find and visit his showroom and shop, tucked away on a dirt road in the backwoods of Maine. Most visitors are kind and considerate, he says. He’s been featured on Martha Stewart’s show (you can watch the 2001 clip here). And actor, woodworker and writer Nick Offerman considers him a personal hero (Chris is featured in Nick’s book “Good Clean Fun” (Dutton, 2016) and Chris appeared in an episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which Nick plays character Ron Swanson).

“A major treat, and a great honor, was to be featured in Nick Offerman’s new book, ‘Good Clean Fun,’” Chris wrote on his blog in October 2016. “A whole chapter, no less!”

Crafting a Business

In “Shaker Inspiration,” Chris spends a lot of ink on the business of woodworking. He begins with the necessity of preparation and a solid business plan that includes a summary, organization, description, product line, market analysis and funding. He then dives into the importance of quality photos, advertising, catalogs, customer lists, customer records and time cards.

Pre-website days Chris could buy a 1”, black-and-white ad in The New Yorker for $800. Search the October 19, 1992, issue online and you’ll see one, on page 106, situated aside a review of Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Reservoir Dogs”:

Why invest in furniture from a
one-man shop on a dirt road in
New Gloucester, Maine?
CATALOG $5.00
C. H. BECKSVOORT
FURNITUREMAKER
Box 12, New Gloucester
Maine 04260. (207) 926-4608

These ads often led to a couple sales.

Additional business matters he addresses in his book include mailing lists, public relations, craft shows, galleries, selling direct, customer care and giving back.

“There were a lot of dead ends,” he says, when talking about the business side of things. He started collecting catalogs from other woodworkers, not to copy them but to be different. He learned that placing his work in galleries cut too much into his profits and unless a show was indoors and juried, he skipped them.

“After more than five decades, I can do the woodworking almost in the dark,” he writes in “Shaker Inspiration.” “It’s the business end that’s a constant challenge, and it keeps me on my toes.”

Chris eventually built a 14 x 20 showroom on his property. “It takes effort to find me,” he says. But a customer/fan who is willing to find him is one often willing to purchase a piece. And having a designated space where customers can see much of his work in person, touch surfaces, pull out drawers and run their fingertips over carvings has been a great benefit, he says.

He works alone and builds 20 to 30 custom pieces each year. They are all signed and dated, and each piece has an embedded silver dollar in it, secreted away to the delight of many customers. He estimates he’s built more than 850 pieces.

“I keep trying to retire but it’s not happening yet,” he says. “I keep saying to myself, ‘Where were these people 25 years ago?’” Right now he’s booked almost to Christmas. There are five to six pieces he would like to design and build for himself, “but the bills have to be paid first,” he says. Finding time for personal prototypes is difficult.

The Gift of Simplicity

Chris and Peggy have two children, a son and daughter, both now grown but within easy driving distance. They also have one grandson who likes to push his bulldozer through little piles of sawdust in Chris’s shop.

Chris and Peggy’s $20,000 house (plus 25 acres) in 1977.

Still not a fan of hot weather, Chris says he enjoys Maine and the changing of the seasons, although he hates shoveling in the winter and isn’t a big fan of mowing in the summer. When they first moved to New Gloucester, they rented while looking for a house to buy. Eventually, in 1977, they saw an ad in the paper – a fully furnished house for sale on 25 acres for $20,000. In reality, there were only a couple pieces of furniture and the house required a significant amount of work. Chris and Peggy spent a year working on it, tearing out, redoing plumbing and wiring, adding insulation, sheet rocking and painting. They moved in in 1978.

The house last winter, with an added showroom, shop and two outbuildings.

With time Chris added a shop (Fine Woodworking featured it in their Tools & Shops 2019 Issue – you can take a tour of it here), garden shed and showroom. In the main house, there are built-ins in every room. They did a significant amount of landscaping, including planting hundreds of daffodils. They rebuilt stone walls and created trails through the woods. The land allows for gardening and Chris’s first love, forestry.

When studying forestry all those years ago Chris remembers being handed a sheet of paper with spaces numbered 1 through 100. Outside the university’s lab were trees labeled with numbers – students had to identify them all. He did well, and to this day he can identify most any tree in any season.

Climate change has changed Maine’s winters, he says. The first winter he and Peggy moved into the house the only heat source they had was a wood stove and the temperature dropped to 44 below zero. The water in the washing machine froze. “We haven’t seen temps like that in the past 30 to 40 years,” he says. They also now have ticks and opossums and cardinals.

Every year he buys a little calendar that he uses to track the daily temperature, first frosts, the birth of a child, the addition of a dog (he’s had three huskies over the years). “It’s not really a diary,” he says, “but every day I write two or three lines of what happened, what we did.”

The house and land, he says, is getting a little more difficult to maintain. With thoughts of retirement on the horizon Chris and Peggy are considering moving to something smaller.

These days Chris sometimes slows down on Friday afternoons, as he and his colleagues did at his first job at the wildlife research center. He still works Monday through Friday, and he’ll occasionally finish up some work on a Saturday, after supper. But he no longer puts in what used to be a solid 60 hours a week. He splits his time between working in the shop and the business side of things – sending out proposals, tracking down hardware, bookkeeping, taxes etc.

Chris enjoys working in the garden, walking, going out to eat with friends, drinking Scotch and listening to music. He has a Bose player in his shop and 4,000 songs on his iPhone. His taste in music is varied – ’60s and ’70s rock, folk music, jazz, classical, dulcimer music (but no opera or hip hop). Peggy is a librarian and they both enjoy reading.

“Bookshelves are all over the house – we have way too many books,” he says. They’re filled with books about woodworking, Shakers and forestry. He typically doesn’t indulge in buying novels – those he gets from the library. He uses his books for research and owns almost every book on Shakers that has ever come out.

Some folks may be surprised to learn that Chris has nine tattoos (you can see a few of them here). They include a butterfly joint, a maple leaf (because he likes working with maple and almost became a Canadian, he says), a white pine silhouette, a dovetail saw, a cross section of black walnut, a No. 5 plane, a black cherry tree, a chisel and, his newest, a Shaker peg (“a wink at my wife,” he says). “That’s it for now, unless the spirit moves me.”

The Herbie Project

In the June 20, 2010, issue of Portland Press Herald,” Bob Keyes wrote an article titled “Herbie’s come down, sadly. Happily, there’s a big upside.” Herbie was considered the biggest American elm in New England, and started growing in Yarmouth in 1793.

“In 2010, the tree was beyond saving, and had to be cut down,” Chris wrote in a September 2016 blog post. “Some of the branches were over 4’ thick, and the trunk was over 10’ long and roughly 7’ at the butt end. I joined the Herbie committee and suggested that we distribute the wood to craftspeople throughout Maine. During the next nine months the branches were cut up, and the trunk was sawn and the boards were kiln dried, and the wood was distributed to woodworkers throughout the state. They made chairs, benches, birds, baseball bats, cabinets, desks, tables, music stands, hundreds of bowls, pens, a coffin, sculptures, cutting boards, and even an electric guitar.”

In November 2010, the items were auctioned off and the Yarmouth Tree Trust netted about $40,000.

According to the Portland Press Herald article, Chris made a music stand, which was debuted at the Maine Festival of American Music: Its Roots and Traditions at the Shaker Meeting House in New Gloucester, hosted by the Portland String Quartet. The article also noted that the tree’s birth year, 1793, coincided with the establishment of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community and its plans for the building of the 1794 Meeting House – which was where the festival’s concert took place.

Tailor counter. *Photo by Dennis Griggs Photo*.

Looking at Chris’s life as a whole, circles like this become apparent. His love of forestry and trees and woodworking connect in a simple and satisfying way as in the story about Herbie. His love of reading and learning have translated in dozens of articles, books and workshops. He has followed his father’s legacy, but on his own terms. And his philosophy on life, rules, if you will, for good living, are seemingly so simple on the outside, but require a sometimes surprising bit of complexity on the inside (much like Shaker furniture):

“Only let positive people influence you. Try to stick to your values. Leave a little footprint. Be as creative as possible. Honesty and kindness go a long way.”

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