Printing in Tacoma at Springtide Press

For the first time, I focused my work trip to the Pacific NW to do only 1. what I had to do (certain things attached to my museum exhibit) and 2. what I wanted to do. Most of it was work, but it was work I chose. The key was letting go of the feeling that I "should" teach. I blocked myself from sabotaging my trip by asking Jessica right away if I could do a mini residency at Springtide Press.

Jessica Spring is the proprietor of Springtide Press and as another friend said, "Jessica is Queen. Full stop." She and I are not fans of the word "master" (I don't want to call her a "master printer" even though that is the easiest shorthand) but she has been steeped in letterpress printing for decades, from the midwest to the west and way beyond. She has a deep well of experience that people coming up now would never be able to get, because of how tech has transformed media. She has seen huge changes in the landscape of her field, while being in its vanguard. Years ago, she coined Daredevil Typesetting and created furniture that makes it possible to set and lock up type on curves and diagonals.

Jessica also had a long-standing collaboration with the late, great, Chandler O'Leary called Dead Feminists. It was a series of broadsides about feminists throughout history (even if they didn't call themselves that). A related project was a beautiful trade book about the project that is a fantastic teaching tool. I hadn't been able to sit down with Jessica since Chandler's death to process it, so this visit was valuable for that alone.

Jessica also makes artists' books that fully involve her impressive printing skills and collection of type and ornament. I am shocked by how affordable they are given the level of craft, which extends to her studio, her home, everything she touches.

It has been almost 10 years since my last visit to Jessica's shop, and my first time meeting Chase. She and I just missed each other in Chicago because she finished grad school at the same program I started a few months later. But we have friends in common and it was affirming to share stories and lament the loss of our program, because a big point of grad school is access to a network, and structure within an institution. We've made the best of it without that, but were reminded why it would have been easier with it intact.

Thanks to Shereen, her 36" standing kutrimmer, I could trim all of the hanji that I brought, with ease and speed. I am excited about what I get to do with these offcuts, which is the legacy of hanji: all the things Koreans figured out to do with scraps! Jessica is the best collaborator you could dream up. Extremely skilled and talented, super smart and hilarious, a whiz with type and language, with an effervescent grasp of design, color, all of it. She's one of a kind, and has committed to community building and activism through print and impeccable craft. She is a remarkable teacher and gave Pacific Lutheran College 16 years of teaching, and continues to teach in other capacities. I was in such good hands.

Here I am pretending that I locked up properly. Jessica said things to me that reminded me exactly of what I say to my students. In my head, I'm thinking, "You forgot?? How many times do I have to remind you??" and then realized that her approach makes you not feel like a total dumdum for forgetting. Because....why would someone who doesn't do this all the time or hasn't done it for years remember every last detail? Maybe if I wasn't chatting so much while printing I would have remembered (again, something else I see my students do, and now I get it).

Here is Jessica locking up properly. Everything I did privately in a letterpress shop, I could not hide from her (like not measuring anything and instead walking back and forth from the press to the furniture, guessing what I needed instead of measuring, doing the math, and taking ONE walk. It's not that I wasn't taught how, I was stubbornly making my life harder because I don't like measuring and doing arithmetic in my head. And then pretended it was about getting exercise).

She had rollers on the press that have a worm gear that enables tight bands of color in a rainbow roll that will never blend out like regular rollers eventually would. I had given her a game plan before I arrived, ditched the idea while packing the night before my flight, and didn't tell her until I got to the shop. A pro can roll with all of that. We spent the first afternoon/evening talking over ideas, deciding what to use (in this case, wood type, rule, and ornament), and setting everything up in the bed of the press.

We printed the next two days. When I arrived Sunday morning, I watched her in the middle of printing a collaborative suite: use scrubs in a bucket! They looked like a magic secret and now I know.

I decided to mostly cut my hanji in half lengthwise (a few are cut the other way), so I needed help at the press to get it off the drum because it's longer than the circumference. We figured it out eventually and insisted that her husband Tim document it. Here we are laughing because I said we had to get a shot of both of our hands on the paper at once, which happens only for a second.

After one run, we'd turn the sheets around and print the other side. I'm so glad she was there to figure out all of the math. It looks very simple but it's not to my brain, which is why this kind of work is not my main jam.

Day two of printing, we switched up ink colors and she insisted on documenting my pants with the new color combo, which was her brainchild.

The resulting prints will eventually turn into new dresses for my next solo museum show that opens this August. This was the main reason that I could not make other visits or book teaching gigs: no time! I was so impressed by what we were able to get done in such a short amount of time given how zonked I was, without a clear directive besides, Let's print onto hanji and later I'll cut it up to sew back together.

Tim kept us fed throughout, and this was one of our lunches. Gabby also visited our first full printing day, which was great fun. Congrats to her for a big recent grant!

Again, like my BIMA visit, there was so much more but it's still processing. It's a gift to get to spend meaningful time working and playing with kin. To the very end, Tim was there to transport all of my heavy stuff (getting my suitcase upstairs upon arrival, and then down the stairs and then more stairs to the car that would whisk me to the airport). Since my return, I've been in that liminal post-travel space where everything is up in the air, but it's settling down as the reality of home, car, and body repairs remind me of everything I left behind. But the photos remain!

March visit to Bainbridge Island

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art has been on my radar for years and this month I was fortunate enough to finally visit, to put finishing touches on my first solo museum exhibit, and give an artist talk to an attentive, curious, full-capacity audience. The first (and I think only) Korean astronaut was in attendance, and later I had an upbeat talk about my work with the former governor of Washington.

I was up at 4am to get ready for a morning flight, managed longer than usual TSA precheck lines, and the car got me to the ferry in time to catch it if I knew how to actually get to the boarding area. But I didn't, but it wasn't an onerous wait for the next one. The curator, Erin, picked me up after I got off the ferry and after dumping my things at the airbnb, I asked for lunch right away. After that, we went to the museum and I got to see the show for the first time as a few other folks. Erin did a fabulous job installing and there wasn't much to update but I was glad I had a few days to fiddle with it.

Concurrently was a wonderful exhibit of the large-scale concrete art of sculptor / gardener / artist duo George and David Lewis, longtime and beloved residents of the island. A lot of pieces were on loan from various collections and had to be dislodged from gardens to install in the gallery, including fountains! It's a stunning show and I was happy to meet George and David my first evening in town. On my last full day before my talk, I took a walk in the morning and on the way back, passed the museum while they were in the gallery to take care of their beautiful pomegranate and tetrapanax sculptures.

It's a wealthy island but also progressive, so I saw a lot of signs like this in the neighborhood where I stayed.

I wasn't able to interact with the owner of my airbnb because of her cold, but I know she is very involved in the arts community and of course the whole house is beautiful and full of thoughtful touches, like the green driveway. I was so comfortable in the peaceful downstairs apartment.

It wasn't since my visit to Tasmania years ago that I had been greeted with such a beautiful welcome spread, which came in handy my second night when I was too jet lagged to go out and was content to have snacks as a meal.

It was gratifying to see my books highlighted at the museum shop, and the newest addition at top is the gorgeous catalog that Laura Zander designed with so much skill and care. Special thanks to Erin for the into, Vicky Stewart for the essay, and Mina Takahashi for the interview, and to all the generous people who provided testimonials that are sprinkled throughout. Everyone who was on this project worked really hard on it, including my photographer of 20+ years, Stefan.

That's just a few gallery shots and I was likely too discombobulated to do very good ones, which is why it's good that the museum has people for that! But you can see more, including a video walkthrough, here.

This is from a walk I took the morning of my artist talk, when things were mostly done and I could breathe a bit, heading to the post office to mail catalogs, happy to feel like I could walk after my steroid injection a week or so prior. I was amazed by how little pain I felt on this entire trip, but it's because I was treated so well, reunited with dear friends, and relieved that something I had worked on for years had come to fruition in an ideal way. There is so much I could share but it's all still processing, so all I can say is that this trip filled and overflowed my heart. Thanks to BIMA, Cynthia Sears, Erin Zona, Catherine Alice Michaelis, and the many more people who make all of this, and more, possible.

I wish it was as easy as tearing and reconstituting paper

 

Before

 

After 

Two years ago, I learned that when I was born, no one noticed my hip dysplasia. When I was 17, I got a bad ankle sprain going up concrete stairs to a violin lesson but my teacher made me stand the entire hour (she was a young woman so maybe she had no physical ailments); that foot is still stiff and creaky. I've never been athletic but threw my body around in college modern dance classes, circus and trapeze ones in my early 20s, and yoga and breakdancing in grad school. My entire life, I was rewarded for being "flexible" but it was not until 11 years ago that I learned that my tissues are very lax, after a car crash where all the impact went up my braking leg that was trying hard to keep me from getting t-boned. That crash likely tore my hip labrum. Years later, after many rounds of PT and other types of care, osteoarthritis began.

I've been conservative with cortisone shots and NSAIDS, and have tried many other things, almost all not covered by insurance. I swim regularly. I have been in escalating pain for years that causes a limp. Everything hurts: sitting, standing, driving, doing dishes, making art, laying down, walking, sleeping or trying to. I try to mask the pain by staying seated during meals with friends when I want to run away screaming. I stay on my feet when my students rush to sit down. I have been unwilling to admit real disability even though my activity, work, and quality of life have been significantly curtailed. I've had physical therapy folks tell me that I can never do yoga again (which doesn't make me that sad; many yoga teachers have fallen into the trap of admiring my "flexibility" and further injured me by pushing my body into extreme poses with their own hands), or that walking is highly dangerous because my pelvis is so unstable (this devastated me; one time walking through the new LaGuardia airport, I worried I would have to ask for a wheelchair because the gates are now so far from the exits). A surgeon told me I had to stop lifting heavy things. Subsequent PTs and doctors have disagreed, saying it's better to exercise because the pain isn't going anywhere, so why not be more fit since it will hurt either way.

Recently I went to a new sports medicine doctor hoping for another shot, and instead he told me the x-rays look terrible and that it's time for surgery. I panicked and scheduled five surgical consults, since my case is not a slam dunk the way many total hip replacements can be. The dysplasia and laxity increase risk of dislocation, and I'm young enough to outlive implants. The first two surgeons said the case is not as urgent as the first doctor made it seem, and that continued injections are fine, even if they destroy my tissue. As the dysplasia specialist said, "Your tissues are already destroyed!" He also said, "Arthritis never killed anyone." A friend reminded me that arthritis causes enough pain that maybe you'd rather die.

The other big piece of the puzzle (aside from aging) is that my work, whether in the studio or the classroom or on the road, is very demanding. I've worked for years to make changes but it's hard not to feel discouraged by invitations I have to decline and travel I have to avoid, the hours doing the most boring exercises every day, the impossibility of converting my sedan bucket seat into a reasonable driving position, how hard it is to live in a multi-story house, and the feeling that it's easier to avoid tedious explanations by staying seated instead of standing up to stretch or pretend to go to the restroom, or by ditching people who won't accept that I cannot walk far or fast anymore. 

Surgery is on the horizon though if I am lucky I will have time to plan it. I am already tremendously lucky because I have so many wonderful friends who are willing to support me through the process. I've heard countless times that this is "easy" surgery, "easy" recovery, that I will wonder why I didn't do it sooner. In the last few years I had to be a caregiver for someone who had joint surgery twice and was frustrated by his recalcitrance, but now I feel some of it. I saw how much work it takes to prepare, recover, and how drastically your life changes, even if only temporarily. I also love my soft and flawed and deformed and decaying body and hate the idea of having to take saws, hammers, drills, reamers, scalpels, and god knows what else to it. Is this how trees feel? Or all the paper that I rip up before I piece it together again?

Uncensored: January in Oberlin

Right before this post, I wrote a milquetoast version of what January 2026 entailed. Remember also what was going down in the sordid history of this country, which I could barely process. This is going to be the "explicit" version of my Jan, a relentless start to the year.

Let's begin with a giant blessing/disruption: the walls. Last summer, I suggested that we mount laminate panels onto the unfinished drywall directly outside of the studio. This project got lost in the shuffle and by the time I tried to revive it, we were too close to end of year, though my library colleagues tried valiantly to get this done before class began. Due to red tape, guess what I saw on the first day of class, a Monday? A contractor mudding the wall. He said the laminate would be up by Wed. Perfect timing!

How silly of me to believe a project like this would proceed speedily. Turns out the walls had to be finished completely before any laminate could go up. That involved sanding, priming, and painting two coats of the walls from floor to ceiling, which meant noise and enormous amounts of dust directly outside the studio. I had to keep our doors closed, and our tiny space turned into a steam room.

The contractors were courteous and friendly, but because of confusion around getting the right laminate, everything was delayed by a week. By the time the walls were done, students no longer needed them.

The upside: it's perfect, looks great, and this is before the baseboard went in. It will make subsequent classes easier, and I chose a height to hang that will provide something for everyone, from tall to short. By the end of the last week of class, the drybox mount popped off again, so I called Bill for a repair, which fell early on the following Monday...when my car started to malfunction. This sent me into PTSD mode from last year, when my car failed in a much bigger way on the last day of class, forced an extra stay, delayed a residency, and cancelled a trip. I booked a date with the local mechanic, but it weirdly started to resolve after a week so I kept my car because it became too cold and snowy to be carless.

The weather became a very powerful character this month. We had two snow days, though my students valiantly worked the entirety of the first one. I stay in a house on the edge of campus for the month, as I would never commute this time of year. However, it became apparent after a couple of weeks of heavy space heater reliance that something was wrong with the furnace. The thermostat in my space was 57 degrees F and wouldn't get past 59 on its own. When the emergency furnace guy said that the house needed a new one, I had to find a new place to stay for nearly the last week (I also had to change rooms in the middle of my stay to accommodate scholars arriving from overseas). I turned to my most stalwart colleague and generous friend: Ed, the special collections librarian who spearheaded the studio space and class over a decade ago. Here he is shoveling.

Ed and his wife Kim took me in without hesitation and kept me warm and safe while they did all of the heavy work. They are Canadian and remarkably fit, so the task of shoveling, which seems completely body breaking to me, is like taking a short walk to them. While they were outside doing this, I was laying in bed trying to recover from many sleepless nights (a mix of trying to warm up under 6 layers of blankets, perimenopause, overstimulation from teaching, accepting visits to class, and going out almost every night because I revert to some kind of weird college kid schedule when I'm living on campus and have a lot of friends in town). 

The pall of death came over the month quickly. These are Mattias' book samples that he made from the handmade papers by the late Stephen DeSantis, which his sister donated to Oberlin. Stephen and I overlapped at grad school in Chicago for a year, and while he was older than many of us, his death felt very untimely last year. In the first week of class, a childhood friend's mother suffered a massive stroke. I wanted immediately to call a different childhood friend, though I couldn't because cancer killed her over 20 years ago. The second week of class, my friend's mom died. Last year, four friends lost their fathers. But this is the first big parental loss of friends I grew up with, people that I knew and loved since I was a kid, spurring lots of conversations with my own mom. Near the end of the month, major diagnoses in my family started to emerge.

This toolmaking was the best solution to a panic moment I had when unpacking screens and realizing I had not made them yet, something I assumed I'd get done during summer. Fortunately, I trusted my students to do the work instead, providing valuable experience that no prior students have gotten (and no future students will, until the tools wear out). For video and magazine features, on top of class visits by researching students and the curious, I also had a photo shoot, two video shoots, and a long interview. The first week of class I was also editing my museum catalog on deadline.

Every year, I'm dumbfounded by how young bodies are changing. This class was the most, hurry and find a chair as soon as Aimee starts talking for more than two sentences during studio time!! It used to be one or two students here and there that required regular sitting, and I often try to hide chairs, or only leave folding chairs in the space that are not that comfortable. They knew exactly where those chairs were and snapped them open any chance they got. I faced another first this year: students wearing gloves while pulling sheets. One did it the entire time, another for a cut, and another for a bandage. While my fingers were cut and splitting because Oberlin water is HARD, I swim every other day, and I am aging, I have never in my papermaking life been able to wear gloves even when I wanted to because I lose too much tactile sense. My guess is that younger people have so much less tactile experience that they don't miss what I miss when my hands are covered. This behavior also reminded me of how infectious certain practices are. The positive spin on this image is that the milkweed coma paper was very beautiful and though the beating was incomplete because we did not have enough fiber to get a proper beat, everyone who helped did a great job.

This was an extra batch of corn husks that my father dutifully saves and dries during the summer season to use as napkins and scrubbies. I found them in December and asked if I could takek them to make paper. I only had half a pound but went to the paper studio after class during bookbinding to cut, soak, cook, and rinse before the temperatures really plummeted. Thanks to Abby for donating an induction burner to the studio! Makes cooking so much easier and faster.

For this batch, I needed help. Amelia, one of my best students from last year, gave me a 7.5-hour day on Saturday. She was there even longer than me, because she arrived before I did for both the morning session and after lunch. She greased the beater, fixed the fan (she is a mechanical whiz) that I had put together in the wrong sequence years ago, helped run the beater for two loads and cleaned it at the end, hand beat a batch of milkweed bast that I had stripped in Michigan and brought expressly to test the new walls that went up too late to test in class, and pulled 1.5 lbs of abaca mixed with corn husk (why did I add too much abaca?! I was so distracted by more students in the room and overestimated what would be appropriate for a day of work). We had a student visit for part of her museum project, and Eliza from this year's class also came to help for a bit before she went back to practicing viola. I brought years of hanji scraps to recycle, but that and the milkweed batch were still less than Amelia's load. Plus, I had her use the heavier brass mould! I tested the school's sugeta for larger sheets as well.

Amelia and I started to really wear out as the afternoon wore on and we were losing sunlight, so I urged Oliver (another top student from last year) to come by after his sports practice. He came in time to do a couple of hours and it was such a relief to get some help. I had them use the new deckle boxes I made this summer to empty the dregs of the vats.

They loaded the drybox while I boarded the other sheets. I didn't want to overwhelm them with two press loads, which would have been the better call (hard press for drybox, less so for walls), so I knew I had to come back the next day after Ed and Kim shoveled the first pass of a full-day snow to check on any paper that fell off the walls.

The walls worked great! Aside from the weird drafts and hot spots I felt that haven't been an issue in the past, likely from the extreme weather that was rolling in. We were working against the clock to finish before the snow arrived. While most of my snow stress at Oberlin was about getting it off my car, I also had to coordinate snow removal back home so that I could get back into my driveway at home. The first time I was able to get a plow guy to push, but the second time his truck was broken. Fortunately my angel teenage neighbor offered to shovel because she said I wouldn't be able to get in otherwise, and then after she cleared the apron (which looks like a mountain of snow), another neighbor angel used her blower to clear the whole rest of my driveway. You know what book I thought about most of this month? Foreman, by Herb Childress.

That is my growing stash of book samples, which I give away to all of my students in a lottery on the last day of class. I always buy a month of a local gym membership so I can swim in a warm pool, and lost my entry card within days of activating it. The front desk person took pity on me and my peri brain, waiving the charge for a new one. I also had a personal training session to begin weight training in earnest, even though it is partly contraindicated for my disabling conditions. I've been in the worst pain of my life because I haven't found a new doctor for injections, and need more physical therapy, but couldn't do it while teaching. Instead of staying home for the big snow day, I went back to campus to check on paper and meet with a student preparing a presentation about my art. Thank goodness for my snow tires because the lots were not plowed.

Right before the storm, my period arrived 2.5 weeks after the last one. I was completely unprepared and stores were closed due to snow. Thankfully, Kim raised daughters, so she found stashes to save me. She and others noted this likely happened from the stress of being so cold at home and needing to move last minute. I also fell one day short of hormones, which I timed for my "day off." When school was cancelled on the final Monday, I treated myself to a soak in their hot tub after my workout, and didn't realize until I got out that my hair had frozen. On the very last day of class, as students were helping me load my car with supplies, my car started to freak out the way it did in the first week. Just in time! It made concerning sounds on the drive home but I got back in one piece, pulled into a newly blown driveway, and unloaded. I called the mechanic the next day and he'll tell me the damage next week—the joys of having a 20-yo vehicle.

I know all of this is nothing in the face of those losing their lives and rights, but from all I've heard, this has been a doozy of a month for everyone. Above: buckets to catch leaks at the library, inevitable for skylights and buildings with flat roofs! My big takeaway: actively recruit an assistant for next year, and plan to do even less.

Another January in Oberlin: Paper, books, snow

Since 2014, I've been teaching this class for Oberlin College's Winter Term. Each Jan, students devote themselves to one project for the entire month, which falls between fall and spring semesters. Three full credits of Winter Term are required to graduate. It means that commencement falls late in May, but I think WT is a rare and perfect time to focus on one thing, and if on campus, experience a quiet and chill environment that is much more subdued than the rest of the school year. Unless you are in my class, which requires industriousness all day every day. Day one: scrape outer layers away from paper mulberry bark.

In the afternoon, fiber processing is more difficult and provides a much smaller yield, but uses native and abundant plants: separating bast fiber from milkweed inner cores. These are dry stems I harvested in Michigan the previous fall.

We had a new project this year, a great way to keep more students occupied because the concurrent task of rinsing cooked fiber cannot really accomodate all eight students in the shower space. We sewed new screens for our modified tools for Asian-style papermaking. This went much faster than me making them myself over the summer.

After rinsing the cooked fiber, students had to clean both the paper mulberry fiber they scraped (from Florida, courtesy of Amy), and the fiber from Thailand.

Then, usually everyone's not favorite step: beating fiber to a pulp. I was surprised with how together this group wanted to be. I've never before seen six students fit onto these tables (usually it's half the amount). I bet the others would have squeezed in if they could have.

Asian-style sheet formation. I had them make more plain sheets this year to get good practice, but may change this next year.

The new hydraulic jack last year shifted around too much in the press, so I took a leaky glove and cut off the fingers to place under the jack to keep it in place.

My dream was for a new laminate wall to be installed in time for boarding, but timing was off by a week. It's okay! The marble shower walls work great for this process. I wish I had monitored students more closely on this step because they had the most wrinkled sheets I've seen; it's so hard to impart the importance of how precise every single step must be.

I didn't give as much time for embedding this year, which I will also change for next year, reverting to pacing from past years for the Asian section.

When we moved into European-style papermaking, I included milkweed coma processing (from pods I harvested in the fall and froze). I had closed and exploded pods, expecting them to get through them all but they refused to touch the open pods and took a long time with the fairly modest number of closed pods. Working pace is different for every group!

They also prepared rags before we loaded the beater.

Early loads included printmaking paper scraps, lots provided by Justin (R) left from his printmaking class and a few more from Mattias (L), who said that the print professor always encourages students to save scraps in case they take papermaking. Wise, given the high-quality cotton content of decent printmaking paper.

This was the first year I had students work solely with cotton (half stuff and rag) to pull with moulds and deckles, deleting abaca because I didn't want to overwhelm them with long beating times since we don't have a dedicated sound-proofed space for the beater. The milkweed coma was finished pretty quickly and made gorgeous sheets as always.

Even with occasional student absences, the drybox filled easily each day. Almost everyone arrived to work all day on our snow day, which was optional.

It's always hard to pull students away from the studio, but in the first week I took them to the museum to see the paper show that I'm in, and in the second week they viewed artists' books in the art library, which also is running a show of my books. This one is always a fave, by Julie Chen.

We always end our wet studio time with paper decoration. Here: suminagashi.

Ed is always extremely generous with prepping and teaching the marbling section, which makes my life so much easier since we have three concurrent techniques going on at once.

Paste papers

We carry everything over from the paper studio that we'll need in the main library special collections classroom, various tools and all of the paper they've made, so that they can make books! I don't know why it took me this long to consider this, but I finally asked if we could move the tables to keep everyone closer to me. Otherwise, those at the end of the tables are too far away to see what I'm doing, even given the document camera. I only wish I figured this out sooner.

The workstation of a chemistry major at the end of the day, impeccable. Makes my heart sing!

Justin, that chem major, was also the first student ever in the history of this class to voluntarily rise his station. I've suggested this, as there is a hand crank for the tables, but no one has taken me up on it, likely because humans are so sedentary now. Lab work doesn't allow for sitting so he is conditioned to a different way of working. To be fair, some students have to share stations, so it's hard to raise the table if you have someone of a different height/seating preference next to you. I'm grateful to my students who shared space without complaint and with a lot of grace.

A second snow day derailed our schedule so we had to move to a different floor to do our regular viewing of books in special collections, but were still able to get a peek before getting back to bookbinding.

On the way back upstairs, we stopped at the letterpress studio so that Ed could give us a tour/history, and see examples of what past classes have printed. Our classes run concurrently and both fulfill the practicum requirement for a Book Studies minor. We definitely have students who do both, which complement each other well.

These are Eliza's books and paper, only a slice of what she produced over the month. She's only the second Conservatory student I've had, and I was worried that she would not be able to do everything she needs as a viola student while in my class. Instead, she impressed me by being fully present daily, practicing after our 6-hour days ended. As one of my history professor colleagues said, she loves Conservatory students because of their intense discipline. I have seven more batches of images of as many pieces from each student! We used to exhibit everything at the end but that stopped a few years back, not by choice. I may push to revive this tradition.

The last task I assign is to make, write, and sign thank you notes to everyone who make this class possible as it's truly a village every year. It's an important good practice, and at least two who received them responded right away, saying, "This made my day!" I was happy to have another wonderful group of students, and to shepherd them through an enormous amount of material during one of our most challenging winters. More images here! Also, Loie, my only senior but the most enthusiastic of the bunch, was kind enough to do a video interview; enjoy her reel here.