My interest in history predated my interest in wood, but it was when the two came together
by accident, really, that I realized, wow, I'm onto something, because I love history,
I love telling stories, and I love making things with my hands.
Why not try a unique way of telling or retelling history?
And it's not just history writ large, it's also personal stories.
I mean, that's really what started it was families approaching me and saying, we lost
this tree, and we love this tree, could you make something for me out of it?
The preparation, though, to do a piece really starts with the chainsaw out in the wooded
area of the fields.
Of course, all wood needs to be dried, so really the first phase is rough turning it,
and then coming back to it later.
So in that sense, it takes months, but the actual turning of a finished piece, it's not
a long process, and things happen pretty fast.
It's important to me to see past flaws or what other people might consider to be deficiency
somehow, and in fact, sometimes I like to highlight those things.
Flaws, I think, often contribute to the beauty and complexity of both a person and a tree,
a piece of wood.
I use only local hardwoods that I harvested myself.
With all these trees around us, and all this downed wood and available wood, there must
be beauty here that we're just not seeing.
And I love finding a tree that people don't often associate with beautiful turnings, hack
berry, linden, beautiful trees, but the wood isn't necessarily considered gorgeous.
I like to find that one crotch piece or that odd piece and try to get something out of that.
And frankly, sometimes there's a piece of wood that just isn't that character laden,
but it's provenance makes it interesting.
So I have a piece from, say, Mount Vernon, a pecan was taken down in Mount Vernon.
The one piece I did, it was all sap wood, so it's not this beautiful colored wood, so
I made a more interesting shape out of it.
So I let the wood do the talking, but sometimes I have to make it a little more interesting.
I think that I've always known that I had to be involved in something creative, but
I really stumbled on the wood thing by accident.
I was making maple syrup at the time, local maple syrup, and branches kept falling from
the maple trees.
I was so intrigued by the wood, I started to carve on it, whittle on it, and made walking
sticks, things like that.
And then one day out of the blue, I don't know why, but I bought a lathe through the
mail, and I turned it on, started making mistakes, and I was hooked.
I call it the sickness.
I had the sickness, and that was about eight years ago, and there's been no looking back
ever since.
When I think about the future, when I think about where this might be going, I realize
I found my home.
I found what I believed I was meant to be.
Very optimistic about the future, because I think I found a kind of unique way of expressing
or telling that history.
And where does that end?
I mean, it's just next connection, next connection, and I don't know where I'll be in ten years,
but I'm pretty certain I'll be turning wood from some interesting place and trying to
tell the story about it.
