Friday, November 18, 2016

Real dark days

 Bob's paper studio outdoors
 Bob's paper
St. Lawrence University paper studio hello

I'm still not really functioning well. The grieving was very intense and immediate during a 9-hour drive to Western Massachusetts, though I was fortunate to be traveling to visit an area full of people feeling the same despair and sadness. Jackie and Steve were superb hosts. I visited Smith and talked to Rie's paper class at Mt. Holyoke. I finally got to meet Carol and Liz and saw some handmade paper in a show at Historic Northampton before I met Eva, who showed me her studio full of beautiful work and also her entire studio building before treating me to a delicious dinner. My last day I went to Snow Farm (twice! The food is so good), drove around Holyoke and met Vitek, and then did a little too much meandering driving before I met Rebecca and Wesley (we overlapped at Oberlin but weren't in the same circles).

This was all to see if I'd like to move to this part of the country. I left on Sunday and took a brief detour to visit Bob and his beautiful home/studio before heading to Velma's. Therese arrived the next evening. What was supposed to be an amazingly productive hanji residency has been something else entirely—current events that have made me unable to work and think, a terrible cough that has made sleep impossible, and now a car that needs a new alternator. My friends have been amazingly kind as I hack through the night and trudge around in a stupor, and I've learned and re-learned a lot. The hanji vat went up and down in record time and I got through a kilo of Korean dak, lovely fiber. More on that later.

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