a lingering question

In the late autumn of 1993, my Father took me on a series of college visits. We leapt from one small New England town to another in his wisp of a plane. The trip was scheduled not long after he had learned to fly, but enough time had passed for him to terrify several other family members with forgotten reserve gas tanks and reversed readings of apparently critical gauges and monitors. I approached with the trip with equal measures grave trepidation and pragmatic determination. I needed to get to these interviews and this was my ride.

It was the interviews, though, that I was thinking about last night, not the ride. Actually, it was just one interview that I’ve never forgotten. All the rest, at leafy colleges with big endowments, bad football teams, and scores of a cappella groups were the same. What did I hope to study? What had been my greatest challenge? How might my life look in ten years? They were big, lofty, silly questions. But one was different. It was at a place I never matriculated, but in some sense, it planted something that’s endured just as long as my “real” education at Middlebury.

Amidst all those other benign questions, this one interviewer—having picked up on something I can’t now recall but something I must have said—stopped and got this half-excited, half-confused look on his face (it’s a face I’ve been trying to do for more than a decade in the classroom). He blurted out, “Well then, what is the different between art and craft?”

I was quick with my tongue at 17. I made a habit of speaking first and thinking later, which got me in loads of trouble but also seemed to be quite a lot of fun for everyone else. So without really thinking, I gave an answer that today—17 years later—still kicks around in my head:

“Craft is about turning precise corners on a tea cozy and choosing suitably neutral colors for a needled-pointed seat cushion. It’s not about expression or idea.”

I still get a bit sour in stomach thinking about how obnoxious this response was, how quick I was to judge, how dismissive I was the entire history of craft. All I could think about were 1980s church bazaars with their cross-stitched slogans like “Home is where the Heart is” inside neatly tatted hearts.

But it’s not my obnoxious answer alone that keeps this memory so vivid. Instead, it has something to do my deception in that moment. Even as I curtly dismissed tea cozies in public, I knit hats for my ski team in my high school dorm room and I sewed patternless skirts during vacations in Michigan. I was simultaneously repulsed by the idea of craft—and what at 17 I thought it stood for—and totally engaged in it. In my turned-about world, I thought about the things I did with my hands as private, as almost shameful, as certainly not serious.

Even at Middlebury, I took studio art classes and studied line and perspective. I was a lousy drawer and could never really "commit to the line." But even as my daylight hours were spent in the respectable fine arts studio, I walked down the steep hill each wednesday night to take pottery classes at Frog Hollow, a meeting ground for local craftsmen and women. I was infinitely more happy there.

The rehabilitation, or rather the reappearance through the Internet, of really, rather exceptionally beautiful crafts in a moment of “new domesticity,” has been like a smart rejoinder to my earlier naïveté. And yet, I’m still thinking about that question. I still make excuses for the things I turn with my hands. Even as I admire them, I still dismiss them as silly or fussy. I do it less now, but I still search for ways to reconcile the work I do with my head with the work I do with my hands.

It’s job season now and I know that I’m thinking about these questions because the fractured, anxious prose of my job letter and dissertation description tell only part of the story of me and the rest of the story, the one about thinking about, looking at, making, and finishing things will remain hidden from view.