I am pleased to announce that we have hired Megan Fitzpatrick as the editor at Lost Art Press. She is our company’s first employee, and I cannot think of anyone I’d rather have in that position.
I am not going anywhere. I will be the publisher. That means I’ll be deciding what titles we’ll print, what tools we will make and – most important to me – I’ll be writing many more books for Lost Art Press (my real love).
Why are we doing this? During the last few years our company has grown to the point where it cannot function with only me, John and a few part-time contractors. We now ship more than 60,000 books a year. And we make tools and apparel, too. We have dozens of supply chains and more than 50 books that have to be managed – plus another four or five new titles every year.
I have resisted hiring employees because I don’t want to manage people. And I don’t want to control anyone’s livelihood. Luckily, Megan does not have to be managed.
Megan and I have worked together for about 20 years now. I first met her when she was on the marketing team at F&W Media about 1998, and she had no problem bossing around my boss when he was late. I immediately liked her. I later hired her as my managing editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine, and she made quite an impression on her first day. When the IT guy (a former Marine) repeatedly failed to do his job, she quietly but fiercely (and correctly) explained his shortcomings to him and reduced him to tears.
Megan was a beginning woodworker when I hired her, and she quickly latched onto anyone on the magazine’s staff who would teach her things. Her skills advanced quickly. After I left the magazine in 2011, there was some shuffling about on the staff and she ended up as editor. And I was one of her freelance authors.
After so many years of working together in different roles, Megan and I can (mostly) read each other’s minds. We (mostly) don’t annoy one another. And we both agree 100 percent on how to make good woodworking books and how to treat our authors.
So not much will change here, except for the fact that I’ll have more time to write books and blog entries. And Megan will be in charge. She’ll continue to teach woodworking classes here and elsewhere. And I hope she will continue to write for Fine Woodworking as well.
Please congratulate Megan on her new job. And I hope we get to work together for another 20 years (and that she never has to make me cry).
— Christopher Schwarz
(Ed. note: I will never try to make authors, customers or Chris cry. The guy he’s talking about, though, absolutely deserved it.)
Tell someone you’re working on a children’s book, and you can anticipate a few common responses – expressions of delight, followed by a short list of favorite titles and hope-filled questions such as “Will there be pictures?” People generally assume that books intended for children will be simple affairs, often with some type of moral instruction on the importance of kindness, taking responsibility when things go wrong, or learning about such hard-to-face topics as pimples and poop. Odds are, you won’t get a lot of questions about research.
But when author and editor Kara Gebhart Uhl sent me a PDF of her forthcoming book as a personal preview, the most compelling questions I wanted to ask concerned the research that underlay the work. How had she come up with the topic, a tale centered around an ancient tree in Wales, a place that Kara herself has not (yet) even visited? How had she found an illustrator whose work may well make this book a contender for a Caldecott Medal? And is it OK to have scary stuff in a book meant for kids?
Perfect for this spooky time of year
Let’s start with the last question, which struck me as I was reading the part of the book about witch trials that took place beneath the tree:
“Witch hunters strapped suspected witches to an oak armchair and dunked it into the water,” reads the story a few pages in. “If the woman survived, she was deemed a witch and executed.”
“And if she was innocent?” asks Cadi, the story’s young protagonist.
“She drowned.”
It’s one thing to terrorize kids with images of cackling, bony-fingered witches in pointy hats (even though most of us beyond the age of, say, 5, recognize those depictions as cartoon stereotypes). Far more disturbing is the historical reality of witch trials, in which women suspected of practicing sorcery were “tried” by what we today would call torture. If they were innocent, they died, thereby proving that they lacked a witch’s superpowers; if guilty, they lived, only to be put to death. I can think of few things more disturbing than the absolute injustice of being damned whether you’re innocent or guilty. And at 62, I’m far from a child.
Knowing Kara as I do, I felt confident that she’d done the necessary research.
“As I think back to the stories I connected to as a child, there was some deepness to them,” she began in response. “I think of ‘Charlotte’s Web.’ I remember when Sophie [Kara’s 13-year-old daughter] was reading it…she was getting to the end and she started crying. And yet she loved the book, and I loved the book. But it is sad. But also not, in many ways!” Sounds like life to me – endlessly faceted, with meanings that shift according to your perspective. How is this not a valuable lesson for children?
It’s also helpful to note that Kara plans to pitch this book to “older children” – say, age 8 and above, though Kara hesitates even to state an age range, aware that the tolerance for sad or scary content varies from one child to another. She sent a list of articles and essays she’d consulted on the advisability of telling kids sad and scary stories:
She’d done the research. As Cadi’s grandmother says, echoing one of DiCamillo’s points, “There will always be sad stories. Scary stories. Heavy stories you wish had never happened. Sometimes the only way to lighten the load is to share them.”
Kara also sent more than a page of information about other aspects of the book, with illustrative references. Some of this material makes for an intriguing read in its own right. Take this excerpt, for example, which is full of references to idiosyncratic features of Welsh culture:
“Detailed images and descriptions of the plasterwork scene(and the restaurant) can be found in this Standing Building Report commissioned by the Snowdonia National Park Authority here and also in an article here. Legend states that frieze depicts the Nannau oak and even features actual branches, but this is almost certainly not true. It is likely the armorial was constructed as late as the 19th century, perhaps when it was used by the Dolgellau Cricket and Reading Club, and the tree was constructed as part of the 1758 restoration of the hall, as the subject’s clothing matches that time period. Y Sospan is still an operating restaurant located in Dolgellau – pictures can be found on their Facebook page here. Breaded chicken goujons [are] on the children’s menu.
“A gaol is a jail. According to the Standing Building Report this building was first built in 1606 as Shire Hall with House of Corrections (gaol) below. Images of a ducking (sometimes called cucking) stool.”
Why the Nannau Oak?
Kara was thrilled to find a copy of this original magazine from 1832.
For years, Kara had wanted to write a children’s book. Like many of us, she started writing long before she got a contract, coming up with ideas, and then developing them as she could make time around the edges of her regular work. Most readers will know her as a managing editor at Lost Art Press, but she freelance writes and edits for other clients, including magazines, universities, ad agencies and companies. A wife and mother of three kids – her twin sons, Owen and James, are 11 – she shares the diverse demands of family with her husband, Andy, and has little time for personal creative endeavors. As she points out, “It’s hard to find the time for something you’re not getting paid for unless it ends up happening.” You have to go out on a limb, balancing your passion and determination to see a project through against the energy required to honor the responsibilities and opportunities of everyday life. Even with a contract, there’s no guarantee that your project will become anything more than a bunch of words in an electronic file, perhaps to be printed out and read to your own family someday. (In fact, many – perhaps most – publishing contracts state that the contract does not guarantee the piece of writing will be published, though most of the time that is what happens.)
But Kara kept writing. At one point she had a literary agent. These days you pretty much have to have an agent to break into the world of big-time publishing, and just finding an experienced agent willing to represent you can be its own challenge. Kara’s agent got the manuscript for one of her books all the way to the acquisitions department with HarperCollins, but the finance department said no.
“You get rejections,” she acknowledges. And how. “Agents and others are so overworked. Rejections come at all times.” She recalls one particular occasion, when Sophie was having a piano lesson. In came the email. Kara ran to the bathroom, where she stuck her face in a towel and cried. Then she went downstairs and “carried on mothering.”
Kara’s parents gave her this linocut print by Nicola Barsaleau after her rejection by HarperCollins.It reads “She loved books, yet she knew the search for the right book at the right time was a sacred affair.”
The idea for “The Curse of the Nannau Oak” grew out of Kara’s work on “Honest Labour,” a collection of essays by Charles Hayward published in TheWoodworker magazine, which Hayward edited from 1936 to 1966. She looked through every page of every issue, collecting the “enticing tidbits” that Hayward scattered around the pages – fun information related to woodworking, such as “The Diary” that took her into deep, fanciful rabbit holes. “In one of them he talked about the Nannau Oak, the story of it being haunted,” she said. “I immediately thought, that could make a really cool children’s book.” She made a note and started doing research whenever she could make the time. After six months she mustered the nerve to pitch the idea to Christopher Schwarz by email. She was relieved when he responded, “Hell yes this is cool.”
They set up a meeting, several weeks later. By the end of the discussion they agreed that the germ of the tale would require elaboration. She dug back in with research and writing for another five months.
Once she had a rough draft, she got a contract.
She says she “broke about every single rule” when it comes to writing a picture book for children. As the former managing editor for Writer’s Digest magazine (and currently a contributing editor), she’s familiar with publishers’ expectations. The book publishing industry generally prefers picture books for children to be no longer than 1,000 words, with around 500 words being preferred, which translates roughly to one full page of single-spaced text on a standard sheet of 8-1/2” x 11” paper. (By comparison, a manuscript for a nonfiction work aimed at adults is typically a minimum of 60,000 words.) At the end of her rough draft, she was at 2,000 words. Another publisher would likely have turned it down, or told her to take a buzz saw to it. Not Chris Schwarz. Instead, he told her, “Don’t be afraid to flesh this out,” based on readers’ responses to “Grandpa’s Workshop.” “He doesn’t care what the traditional publishing world thinks,” Kara says. Instead, he told her, “We should make this what it needs to be.” By the time Kara’s manuscript was finished, it came in at around 4,000 words.
The unusual subject brought with it other challenges. Children’s books are usually written to be read aloud, typically by a parent to a child. But so many of the words in “The Curse of the Nannau Oak” are Welsh, which Kara doesn’t speak. There would have to be a glossary. (Those working on the book are hoping to add a guide to pronunciation.)
As she got deeper into the writing and received feedback from others – she specifically cites the value of constructive criticism from researcher Suzanne Ellison – the story became more complex and layered. Storytelling itself, which is integral to Welsh culture, became part of the story. Her original draft hadn’t even mentioned “The Mabinogion,” a classic of Welsh literature that popularized mythical tales such as those about King Arthur and Merlin. “I think it was while in the process of fleshing the story out, I decided to dive deeper into one of the central themes of the book which is the concept of ‘story,’ given that storytelling is so important to Welsh culture. And over and again I kept going back to ‘The Mabinogion’ in my research, or it would pop up on its own. While complex in nature, I felt like it was an important piece to include.”
The illustrations
It’s common knowledge that children’s books are among the most gorgeously illustrated literary genres, and this book is no exception. The illustrations by Elin Manon Cooper are fluid and lush, with layered detail. Nothing here is dumbed down for kids. Rather, the illustrations pull you in, inviting you to explore. Not only is this dimension of the book appropriate for adult readers whose children are long gone from home (or who never had them in the first place); it also expresses a respect for children’s potential to sense vastly more complexity and nuance than adults sometimes give them credit for, in addition to elevating the standard of what we think of as “child-appropriate artwork.”
Finding an illustrator proved more difficult than Kara anticipated. “It was important to me that my partner in this be Welsh,” she says. Even though Wales is a small country, she spent a lot of time searching online for an artist who would be a good fit. Instagram proved helpful; she searched hashtags such as #welshart, #welshillustrator and #welshfolkart. Adding to the challenge, she found that hashtag searches in Welsh turned up many more hits, so she tried a few of those as well. She contacted a few artists, among them Elin Manon Cooper. “Elin seemed so perfect for the book, with her fondness for trees and folktales,” Kara explains. “She even worked at St Fagans,” Wales’s National Museum of History. And she speaks Welsh. Things looked promising until Google published Elin’s Google Doodle commemorating St. David’s Day on March 1, 2021, prompting Kara to worry that Elin would be beyond the reach of a publisher such as Lost Art Press. Google Doodles don’t just happen; the internet search engine giant commissions them well in advance, and they’re seen by millions across the globe who use Google to search for anything on a given day, from paper clips to insulin syringes, translation tools from English to Latvian or what to do if you find a deer in your car. (For real.) “Oh my goodness, she’s going to be too popular!” Kara thought. “She’ll never say yes!” They talked about schedules, which initially posed a challenge. So Kara was extra-thrilled when Elin signed a contract in May to illustrate the book. “She’s worked so quickly,” Kara adds. “She thought she could finish the illustrations by the end of October and she’s well on her way.”
In the meantime, Elin has sent her illustrations-in-progress to Chris, who is designing the book. He takes each set and flows the text onto the pages, hugging the illustrations’ contours, then sends Elin and Kara an updated PDF.
The sophistication of Elin’s work is all the more striking considering that she’s just 23. (Then again, she is Welsh, and the Welsh are known to have special powers.)
Although this is Kara’s first book, it’s worth mentioning that “A Lesson I Hold Dear,” “This I Believe,” was published in the book by the same name. Kara graduated with a B.S. in magazine journalism from the Ohio University. After starting out in environmental pre-law and taking a variety of courses, she found she loved to write. She eventually switched majors to magazine journalism. She wrote a personal essay column for the college paper and has been writing ever since.
Kara’s dining room table, January 16 2021. Research materials for “The Curse of the Nannau Oak.”(By the way, nice figure!)
The shelves in Kara’s home office hold lots of illustrated books, along with books published by Lost Art Press. To this day, she says, she’ll come into the room after being away for a while “and there will be picture books scattered around. I don’t yell at [the kids] for not putting them away, because I’m intrigued by the ones they chose. It gives me insight into what’s going on in their world.”
A place to get lost for days. When Kara says she has a lot of illustrated books for children, she means it.
It’s easy to imagine young readers returning time and again to “The Curse of the Nannau Oak” for reassurance that trees, which provide us and our fellow creatures with so much – from oxygen and shade to edible nuts and fruits, not to mention the primary material for woodworking – can live a very long time. During its long life, a tree may witness tragic events and terrible acts; sometimes the tree itself may even be used in those acts’ commission. But the same world that visits pain and injustice on so many holds hope for something kinder, better and more lovely, a truth that young Cadi shares through her own story, which forms the book’s conclusion.
Comfort, v. 1. To strengthen; to encourage; to support; to invigorate.
— The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles
Had it not been for COVID-19, many of us would have been in southwestern Massachusetts this weekend for Fine Woodworking Live. Even as a hard-core loner I had a blast there last year, and while the news that this year’s event had been cancelled did not surprise me, I’m really missing the opportunity to reconnect with some people I met there. Among them is furniture maker Aspen Golann, whom I profile here as part of my “Comforting Soups” series* of interviews with woodworkers I find inspiring, especially in this current moment.
Aspen at North Bennet Street School
On April 6th Aspen Golann published a video on Instagram titled “One way to make a brush.” Knowing Aspen as I do (which is to say, not well — we’ve met just twice, but every contact I have with her is a riotous explosion of ideas and laughter and empathy), I anticipated a piece of work that would be thoughtful, as well as beautifully put together. But it was so much more: a detailed instructional video that takes viewers through every step of the process, from design to finishing, with hand-lettered instructions written in real time – and humor! – all sent out to the universe at no charge. Even better, Aspen includes instructions for improvising with tools and materials that most of us are likely to have on hand, knowing that we’re staying home in response to the current pandemic (and many folks have seen their income reduced, if not slashed to nothing). Even though I’m probably not going to make a brush, I’ve watched the video multiple times for fun, because (let’s be honest) even the loners among us are feeling isolated and could do with a bit of cheer.
Drafting brushes with integral erasers
Aspen, 33, is the Wood Studio Coordinator at Penland School of Craft near Asheville, North Carolina, where she has worked since May 2019. As with other schools and colleges across the country, the campus is currently shut down. So Aspen made the video in her garage, using an old desk reinforced with 2x4s, to which she bolted a vise.
“Hangon a sec,” I hear you thinking. “Collaborated with Peter Galbert?How did she make that happen?”
They met when she was a student in the two-year furniture program at North Bennet Street School in Boston, where Peter is a guest lecturer and instructor. “Pete’s an artsy nerd, and I think he saw some of that in me,” Aspen says with characteristic modesty. “He’s always excited to meet maker-weirdos even if they’re students – and I was so jazzed to connect with someone excited about styles outside of iconic period furniture. Pretty soon we were just regular friends.”
At Peter Galbert’s shop
After graduating from NBSS she received a commission she considered out of her league: to make a Windsor settee. Not just any Windsor settee, this one “needed to perfectly kiss the wall of the clients’ spiral staircase.” The designer Beata Heuman chose her to build it because she had made a table for her the year before. She pitched the collaboration to Peter: “We split the dough and make the chair.” He agreed. “In some ways, making that chair felt like a master class,” she says. “I got to ask every question and see him work through every problem and work through them with him and alone. It was really cool.”
For a creative fix while she was a student in the program at North Bennet Street, which is renowned for its focus on high traditional East Coast furniture techniques and forms, Aspen took classes in glass enameling and lost wax casting at Penland. She also co-taught a sculptural spoon carving class with Julian Watts during a residency at Anderson Ranch. “We were scheduled to teach an experimental carving course with him at Penland this summer,” she says, disappointed.
A few of Aspen’s spoons
Having seen a number of Aspen’s spoons online, I’ve been struck by their fine lines, so different from those of greenwood spoons. I wondered whether she makes them from kiln-dried wood. Yes, she answers, adding that some of the bowls are so thin “you can read the newspaper through them. The handles are three pieces of veneer thick; because they’re sandwiching a piece of shop-sawn ebonized maple veneer, they’re super strong.” To glue the material together she uses Titebond III.
Before her studies at North Bennet Street, Aspen spent six years teaching art and Russian literature at a couple of private high schools, The Cate School in Santa Barbara (“It wasn’t a great fit for me culturally – no jeans, no first names, water polo – but I loved my students; I still text with them”) and The Putney School in Vermont, which was more progressive; it had a full farm and strong focus on art and student independence. But this is Aspen Golann we’re talking about, so you won’t be surprised to hear there was more – in this case, a class called “From Sheep to Shawl,” in which students learned to shear a sheep, spin the wool and weave it into a shawl. And because color is important, there was also a dye garden, where they grew plants such as marigold and indigo to color the wool.
Aspen with her sheep
“I loved teaching,” Aspen says. “It wasn’t a ‘safety plan’; it was my whole plan, a big-kid job. I did it long enough that I could do it, leave it, go back to it. But [at 28 I realized] there was [still] time to do something really dumb” – here she’s indulging in her trademark self-deprecation – “and that was going to furniture school.”
“School is a place where people don’t mind if you’re terrible at things.” She had taken an ‘art with a function’ class as a student at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. “I had always loved art, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as it needed to be for me to pursue it as a full-time job. Somehow, when you add functionality, it was like this now matters. It’s a sculpture you can read by. It’s a sculpture you can sit on, and even better, it’s comfortable.”
First chair
Now, at 28, she wanted to explore furniture. “I’ve taught myself to do a lot of things, but furniture…I couldn’t even imagine how I’d approach it. Furniture felt like the most inaccessible art form, both culturally and technically, for a young woman interested in art. I felt I had to go to school for those things. I knew that my gender meant that if I was going to make it, I needed the pedigree.”
While visiting her parents in Boston in 2016 she visited North Bennet Street School, and “it was like, everything they were teaching seemed completely and impossibly out of my league. This is what I should spend money on: the thing that I can’t teach myself. I consistently invest in things that play to my weaknesses. I like doing things that are too hard for me.”
As a student at NBSS Aspen adapted historic forms to a feminist perspective. As she puts it, “I was one of the only women in a shop with male furniture makers, learning from other male furniture makers. When I feel isolated, I look for ways to express myself. At NBSS I was surrounded by masters of period furniture forms, so I committed to learning as much as I could from them – while simultaneously looking for ways to incorporate my artistic background and to talk about my experience as a woman.” In Aspen’s rendering, an Eli Terry shelf clock that would historically have had a farm scene reverse-painted on the glass panel now had the lower half of a woman’s body. “I like to blur the line between furniture and figure sculpture. I literally inserted myself in my pieces.
“I really worked with my instructors,” she emphasizes, as someone who in no way takes the work of dedicated teachers for granted. “I respected them and committed myself 100 percent to their expertise and put my own interests on the back burner. Being creative with the furniture allowed me to strike a balance – between traditional and contemporary styles, and between the roles of student and designer.”
She follows this earnest testimonial with a flourish of self-deprecation. “I had prior training in fine art, and at that point I just wanted an old master to criticize my dovetails for two years – I definitely got that, and a lot more.”
“Window seat” (2017)
But before that…
Between college and teaching Aspen worked as a pig, turkey and apple farmer at a farm outside Austin, Texas. The property was run by a couple who needed help because the husband, a deep-water pipe layer, was gone for six weeks at a time. “And when he comes home, he’s a cross-dresser named Viviana La Tarte!” she exclaims. “The first time I saw him working, he had this really long red hair and looked about 6-1/2’ tall, with his hair blowing in the wind, and he was wearing a little secretarial outfit with a pencil skirt while chain-sawing posts for a pig fence to the same height. I woke up and came out of my cabin and thought ‘What is that beautiful being on the horizon in that beautiful outfit with that hair?’”
Not that her first sight of Viviana was any more unusual than her initial encounter upon arriving at the farm. She pulled up just as Viviana’s partner was attending to a pig in labor. Part of the pig’s uterus was stuck, and no sooner had Aspen emerged from her car than the partner shouted, “GO GET ME THE LUBE!”
“Where is it?” asked Aspen, a complete stranger to the place.
“IN THE BEDROOM, BY THE BED!”
“I ran into the house and retrieved an enormous pump bottle of personal lubricant. After I coated her entire arm in KY Jelly, she was able to get all of the piglets out safely.”
While living in the Austin area, Aspen also worked for the Haas Brothers. “They weren’t as well-known at that point,” she notes. “Their dad was looking for someone to work on a mosaic in glass, for minimum wage, for a client of his.” She worked on the project and they became friends, she and “this incredibly pleasant Austrian man who seems to appreciate my skills, affect and oddity.” He ended up commissioning her to make a painting for Leonardo DiCaprio, a friend of the Haas family.
Farm near Austin
Exploring yet another layer of Aspen’s history, we find her living on a sailboat in the Caribbean during a gap year between high school and college, where she earned her professional coastal navigation and sailing licenses through the American Sailing Association. “I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As long as I have food and meaningful work to do, I can pursue whatever other opportunities I want.
“I was the only crew member small enough to be lowered into the bilge for cleaning, so I think it’s fair to say I earned my keep. I worked so I got fed and did correspondence classes in coastal navigation and marine biology, out of pure curiosity. Meanwhile, we sailed from tiny island to tiny island…delivering half-food and medical supplies, and half b.s. t-shirts and [other] American stuff.”
Family background
What accounts for Aspen’s relentless drive to challenge herself, to subject what is so often the self-indulgence of art to the discipline of function, to cement her ceaseless learning with so many types of accreditation? “On one level,” she answers, “I come from a long line of inventors. Things should work. On another level, some people’s creativity is sparked by having complete freedom, but most people’s is sparked by being asked to play within boundaries. When my sculptures became usable, I finally cared and saw a place for myself in the creative field.
“I’ve been trying to figure out where my set of interests came from. I don’t know anything about the women [in my family’s history], because that’s the way it goes. My mom’s parents were dairy farmers.” But her favorite possessions growing up were the small-scale pieces of furniture that her mother’s father, whom she regrets she never got to meet, had carved out of firewood. “If you’re a person who carves 15-drawer chests out of firewood, you’re a tender person, at least.
“I remember growing up in my paternal grandfather, Herbert Goldberg’s, shop. He was an inventor in a time before it was easy to commission custom hardware, plastic and glass so he knew how to make everything himself. I remember my grandmother got really mad because my brother and he snuck into the house to slump glass in the oven.” Herbert invented the refractometer and updated the pacemaker to make it more functional. Making functional things runs in the family, so Aspen says “credit where credit is due.”
Credit is also due to her paternal great-grandfather, Emanual Goldberg (1881-1970), whose inventions include microfilm and the first video camera. The first Jew to be kidnapped by the Nazi Party, he was held hostage until he handed over the rights to his inventions. He escaped to Israel; later her grandfather Herbert changed the family name to Golann, after the Golan Heights.
At her maternal grandparents’ dairy farm. Left to right: One very patient cow, Charles Hopkins, Jr. (Aspen’s maternal grandfather), Helaine S. Golann (Aspen’s mother), Charles “Butch” Hopkins (maternal uncle) and neighbor (name unknown).Emanuel Goldberg, Aspen’s paternal great-grandfather
Her father, Dwight Golann, spent his career in law. After practicing as a litigator for many years he turned to mediation, which he taught at Harvard. Her mother, Helaine, is a retired psychologist and currently teaches yoga; she has worked with people living with post-traumatic stress and Parkinson’s disease. Her older brother, David, designs and teaches maker-space classes for a STEAM program in New York City that offers art classes to schools that wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer art at all.
Aspen with her brother and parents, 1990
Back to today
The Penland campus is shut down through the summer of 2020. Although Aspen can’t get into her shop, she’s making pieces at home, some of which she sells through the Penland Gallery’s online store. She’s also doing some things she previously considered out of her league, such as electrical work and repairing small motors. In the past year she learned how to tune up all the machines in the shop. YouTube is invaluable, she says. “I’ve been watching kids’ videos about how small motors work and how electricity works, then working my way up.” I also highly recommend the book The Way Things Work!”
Addressing the strangeness of the current moment, she says: “It’s a good time to be patient with yourself, because you have time. The last time I remember having this kind of free time is when I was a kid on summer break. For the first time in my adult life, I have more time than anything else. I tell myself, ‘You have different resources, so you’ve got to do different things. The reason you’re feeling lost in all the time is…because normally time is our most limited resource. And now things are flipped. You don’t have money, but you do have time. So that’s why I made that video. Because I know people need support and distraction, and all it cost me was time.
Working in her studio at Penland (Photo: Chad Weeden)
“I’m making peace with what I have at hand. This hearkens back – some people are inspired by limitations and boundaries. What can I do when I only have these things? I’m using it as an opportunity to apply the skills I have to a completely different kind of work. If you’re a furniture maker you’re already excited by rules and boundaries. This is just an opportunity to dig deeper into that perspective on making.”
The book Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine (2006; Libraries Unlimited) tells the story of Aspen’s paternal great-grandfather.
*This series is my version of all those recipes for comforting soups that have proliferated across the web in response to enforced isolation and anxiety.
Philippe Lafargue died at his home from an undiagnosed glioblastoma on June 22. Philippe has been instrumental in the Roubo project, helping with translations for “Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” and “With All Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture.”
“When we first met more than 35 years ago, I recognized immediately the talents Philippe possessed, talents that often surpassed his ability to communicate them,” says Don Williams, who co-authored the Roubo books along with Michele Pietryka-Pagán. “Over the years, thanks to the foundation of the multi-year curriculum of École Boulle and the career choices he made later on, combined with the thoughtful encouragement of his former wife, Maria, and the family life with his children, he became what Tom Wolfe would call ‘A man in full.’ In the end, his contribution of good-humored friendship and technical, historical and verbal expertise was integral to Team Roubo functioning smoothly for creating the volumes. We will proceed without him, although to be truthful, I cannot fully envision that right now.”
On learning of his death, Michelewrote, “I never actually met Philippe, but I could tell from one phone call that I was communicating with a true professional – not only a true master at what he did, but also a superb human being. We are all worse off with this loss of Philippe. May he rest in peace.”
We recently featured Philippe in a Meet the Author profile. It ended with this quote from Philippe:
“You can fight all the time but life is going to take you where it’s going to take you. It’s up for you to go for it, to be quick to accept and change. And you are always part of it. That’s the beauty of it. No matter what happened, you are part of it – 50 percent is your choice. The rest is to accept that you have decided to do this or not. That’s the difficult part. But life is short. Life is to be lived. Life is to discover yourself.”
I was chatting with Kara Gebhart Uhl about some new “Meet the Author” profiles, and realized that while we have a blog category for Nancy Hiller’s “Little Acorns,” we don’t have an easy way to find the profiles Kara and others have written. So, I’ve added a new category to our drop-down menu: Profiles. There, you’ll find 75 good reads about woodworkers (and that number will no doubt grow as I find ones I’ve missed).
