The Independent Stitch

Alaska: Sitka Symposium 2007

There've been no interim reports during my time in Sitka, Alaska. I kept having to decide whether to (1) take a quiet walk in Totem Park or by one of the harbors or (2) attempt to get a useful level of wireless signal. Guess which won, even though—or perhaps because—the weather was cool and often drizzly?

The Sitka Symposium is wonderful. I hadn't attended in five years. It's billed as "the best conversation you'll have," and that's true. There's a central topic and a small group of resource people, plus a not-too-big gathering of participants.

This year's topic was "On the Edge: The Necessity of Beauty." The resource folks were potter/weaver/writer/architect Rina Swentzell, writer/teacher Scott Russell Sanders, poet Barbara Ras, and sculptor/writer Tom Jay. The total group consists of between forty and sixty people, varied and fascinating. The participants read, talk, and think for a few days, as a whole group, in small groups, and as individuals. As usual, the subject wasn't one we could talk through to completion, but we covered a lot of interesting territory as we explored it.

You don't need an invitation to attend. You just need to be able to figure out how to register and get to Sitka and find housing there. This is all possible, as I've proven by doing it against all logic on several occasions.

The photo below, which I took when I was leaving, shows what Sitka looks like from the air. It's on Baranof Island, which is in turn largely composed of parts of the Tongass National Forest (see the July 2007 issue of National Geographic). It's rich in cultural as well as natural history, with Tlingit-, Russian-, Finnish-, and English-speaking background (and more). You can get there by water or air. That long, straight strip is the Sitka Airport runway. Yes, it's surrounded by water. Ferry also works, if you have the time to travel that way (it's on my wish list).  In past years, some participants have arrived by kayak. I think at least one sailed in this year.

What I read during the week was Scott Russell Sanders' A Private History of Awe, which I recommend highly. Sometimes I've found that I like a writer in person better than his/her books, or vice versa. In Scott Sanders, the two match perfectly in integrity, intelligence, and humanity.

On the plane(s) home I read Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades. Thanks to SueEllen Campbell for the loaner book. Mystery writers end up on a publication treadmill that often crushes the life out of their works; I frequently discover a writer I admire and then quit reading later works when the market-driven release schedule force the follow-up stories into flatness. Martha Grimes has been able to simultaneously produce new works and freshen the form. She does that in The Old Wine Shades, breaking the mold as she moves forward.

And here's what I accomplished during the past week on my socks from ColorJoy! Lynn H's lovely yarn. I keep trying to take a photo that does the colors justice. This one is closer, but still misses the richness.

The variegated (predominantly purple) socks I finished just before I left were perfect for the cool, damp Sitka weather this past week. Wool socks and Teva sandals: the ideal footgear for Southeast Alaska in June.

Except for the times when you need rubber boots. The pre-trip wrapping of my old boots in black duct-tape worked. They didn't leak when I mucked about in the intertidal zone. I learned a lot about the land and water and people of Sitka this time and on previous trips from Vivian Mork, Carolyn Servid, Greg Streveler and Kathleen Dean Moore.

This is about to turn into a list of wonderful folks (everyone at the symposium) and of their writings, which could get overwhelming, so I'll stop. Links from the Island Institute pages will lead to more treasures for those who are interested. I've participated in 2000 ("Matters of Faith, Matters of Fact"), 2001 ("Gifts of Grace: Reconciliation, Restoration, and Forgiveness"), 2002 ("Creating a Geography of Hope"), and 2007 ("On the Edge: The Necessity of Beauty").

Five airports in four states in less than 20 hours (I think)

When I wrote this post, the network connection wouldn't let me upload it to the blog. It will appear when it appears. Imagine it's dated Wednesday, 6/20.

Yesterday =

Leave home 8 a.m. MDT.
    DEN (Colorado) = Denver International Airport
    PDX (Oregon) = Portland International Airport
    SEA (Washington) = SeaTac (Seattle-Tacoma) International Airport
    JNU (Alaska) = Juneau International Airport
    SIT (Alaska) = Sitka Rocky Gutierrez Airport

Arrive at destination 1 a.m. MDT, 6/20 (11 p.m. Alaska time, still 6/19 here).

What I read and knitted en route:

Connotations: A literary magazine published by the Island Institute in Sitka that contains essays and poetry related to the symposium I will be attending.

Shambhala Sun: Interesting articles, especially the interview with Alice Walker.

Cast On, Bet's Off, by Jack Olesker: The author was selling the book himself at the Estes Park Wool Market. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee makes a cameo appearance. So do a few other knitters (and many specific yarns) but Stephanie's is the most significant.

The Power of Limits, by Gyorgi Doczi: On patterns in many naturally occurring and human-devised phenomena.

Toe-up socks (Simple Socks) from Colorjoy! Lynn H's hand-dyed yarn on 2mm (size 0) circulars (easier to manage on airplanes than double-points).

The hotel is supposed to have wireless available in all rooms . . . but mine is not included in "all" (even though it is physically in the hotel . . . I'm not sleeping on a roof or anything), so I've found a spot at the top of the stairs (elevator's not working, either) with a power outlet and signal. This is good. My new temporary office is even nicely carpeted. However, the hotel will remain nameless and unlinked because it is currently underperforming.

No links today because the pages are loading too slowly to retrieve them. If you happen to see links in this post, something miraculous occurred.

Tonight I saw: sea lions, seals, sea otters with pups, pelagic cormorants, common murres, tufted puffins, a peregrine falcon, gray whales, and more. This was not planned. Quite a day. Tomorrow the symposium starts. I think I've succeeded in shifting time zones.

However, the network is refusing now to upload or retrieve anything.

Ending with the thought of an unexpected evening cruise with the Sitka Conservation Society (check out the SCS-featuring article, which I haven't seen yet, in the brand-new National Geographic) that included Saint Lazaria Island, which I feel blessed to have now circumnavigated in the company of people who could tell me something of what I was in the presence of, and sea lions and otters and puffins and gray whales.

. . . and another hotel guest just completely out of the blue brought me a cup of coffee here on my landing. . . . 

Socks finished, socks started

I've been concentrating hard on doing work that I got behind on this spring, but I also finished a pair of socks. Socks are my knitting for when I just need to knit. I almost always have a pair of socks going. My socks have Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Simple Socks short-row heels and toes. I like the fit and I don't want to have to think about how to make the heel or toe. I can do these without paying much attention and they work well.

So here's the new pair, in front of the Louis Gimard rose, a variety that's been around since 1877. They took a long time to knit because I've knitted many other things since I started them—including the Norsk Strikkedesign sweater.

Those are my worn-out jeans, and I seem to have been pulling weeds or hauling around cartons of books (or both) just before I took the photo, so they're dusty, too. I don't know what the variegated yarn is; I bought a couple of balls at a local needlework shop that closed a number of years ago. It's the same weight as Brown Sheep's Wildfoote, which is what the purple is. (No, the socks don't match exactly. I make them myself, so they don't have to match exactly like machine-made socks do.) Worked on 1.5 mm needles (000), the gauge is about 10 stitches/inch. The fabric's nice and firm and should wear well.

Because I knit loosely, I ordinarily go down two needle sizes from what's suggested on a yarn's ball band for my first swatch. Wildfoote's suggested needle size is US 1 (which translates to either 2.25 or 2.5 mm) and the suggested gauge is 8 stitches/inch. For sock durability, I follow Priscilla's guidance and tighten the gauge as well—which means even smaller needles.

However, I've cast on to swatch for my next pair of socks using 2 mm (size 0). You can see the starting rows of the swatch below. The yarn is some of Colorjoy! Lynn's hand-dyed flammegarn, which I'll be trying to take a close-up of before long to see if I can catch the delightful but subtle tonalities.

Lynn's yarn is pretty close to Wildfoote. Both are wool/nylon blends. Hers is 80% wool and Wildfoote is 75%. Hers is 440 yards/100 grams and Wildfoote is 430. I could have just used the same needles and stitch count as for the previous socks. But I want to work with different needles for a change, and the 1.5 mm needles are the 1.5 mm needles. No variety. Well, I have the steel double-points and the circular Addis; there are still some discontinued Inox 1.5s around, although I either don't have any yet or they're in a canvas bag with one or another of the works-in-progress.

In 2 mm, I have a broad selection of materials, lengths, and configurations: bamboo, wood, steel, plastic, aluminum; double-points, single-points, and circulars, all in various lengths. I often wish the abundance of choices extended down to 1.75 and 1.5 mm.

But it doesn't. Even in the new Addi lace needles.

The next pair of socks will be at 8.25 stitches/inch.

*

In addition to filing the annual reports with the secretary of state for the business and taking the huge step of beginning to work with someone who will help me with both bookkeeping and accounting (WHEW), I'm making progress on the last few drawings that I'm able to do for the fall title, Ethnic Knitting Discovery. We need five more drawings that I'll need to talk with the second illustrator about in July. The work on this book has been interrupted so often . . . and it's taking not one or two but three illustrators to get all the images done right . . . but it will get finished.

*

Today I learned that Colin Fletcher, the author of two of my all-time favorite books (The Man Who Walked Through Time, which I liked better than his later River although some other folks reverse those preferences, and The Complete Walker) died on Tuesday at the age of 85. He filled his life well.

And now I go back to working on filling mine, one pair of socks at a time.

*

Tomorrow is the Estes Park Wool Market. Yep, I'm going. And looking forward to seeing a number of folks.

Traces of a friend’s life in everyday activities

While responding to an e-mail from someone I'd hoped to see at BookExpo America last week but didn't connect with, I went to the bookshelf to take a quick look at Shirley ("Shirl the Purl") Scott's Canada Knits: Craft and Comfort in a Northern Land.

Nearby on the shelf, face up, was another small book with what I realized with a pang was Deborah Pulliam's handwriting on a yellow sticky note. About four years ago, I'd mentioned to Deb that I was having trouble finding a book I'd heard of—perhaps because it had been published in Australia and was not yet readily available in North America—and she had sent me a copy. So here's It's My Party and I'll Knit if I Want To! by Sharon Aris, with Deb's comment: "It's a good read overall—enjoy!"

Reminders of Deb P keep popping up in my life like single fibers, apparently insignificant on their own but cumulatively powerful.

For example, every day when my daughter and I walk the dogs we use the leashes Deb made from nautical rope and brass fittings and sent to us after she visited, many years ago. Having experienced our walking conditions firsthand, she made the blue leash longer than the red one. It was custom-sized for Heather, our well-behaved Australian shepherd. The shorter leash was red (for "not so calm"), intended for Ariel Miranda, our then-young Border collie cross. Because of their personalized leashes, Ariel had to stay closer to us and Heather could evade puppyish antics.

Now Ariel, age 12 1/2, uses the blue leash and we clip the red one to Tussah's collar. The knots Deb tied have held firm under all conditions. She was right: there's no better leash to be had. Last night, my daughter said, "I don't know what we'll do if they ever wear out."

On Thursday while the memorial service was taking place in Castine, Maine, I thought of Deb as I was in New York at a wonderful all-day gathering of independent publishers. I wish Nomad Press was going to be able to publish the book she had in progress.

I thought of Deb even more frequently than usual on Saturday, which would have been her fifty-fifth birthday. On that day, another friend and I attended a performance of a new Broadway musical called The Pirate Queen.

The musical is loosely based on a novel called Grania: She King of the Irish Seas, by Morgan Llewellyn, which is in turn loosely based on the life of Grace O'Malley (also called Granuaile and Grania, among other names), who was an Irish contemporary of England's Queen Elizabeth I, who was then expending a lot of effort to include Ireland in her realm.

The creators of the musical adjusted the particulars of what is known about Grace O'Malley's life (by adjusted I mean "simplified radically" and "altered in many important ways") to produce an entertaining theatrical production that becomes an artistic statement on its own terms. It especially examines some ideas about strong women in cultures that have specific role expectations that some individual women refuse to accept as boundaries. It's fiction that uses history as a launching point for its own purposes.

I have a particular interest in historiography (which I take to mean the idea that what happened in the past is always perceived through a lens, and the study of various lenses is part of the study of history) and in the integrity of artistic vision. That sentence can lead down rabbit holes into a vast wonderland of inquiry. This was one of the subsurface threads in a lot of the conversations Deb P and I engaged in. There's no end to it. We had come nowhere near completing any of our discussions.

I also have a more focused interest in the history and story associated with the life of Grace O'Malley, sparked by an astounding play called A Most Notorious Woman, written and acted by Molly Lyons.

My close friends know that I don't ordinarily like to repeat experiences. I do re-read books, but not often. I'll see a movie a second time . . . if I can bring my knitting.

Over a couple of years, I saw A Most Notorious Woman several times, all at Bas Bleu Theatre. I saw it twice during the sold-out world premiere in 2000 and once (or was it twice again?) in 2001 when the play returned to that theater for another sold-out series of performances. This is not at all normal for me. The play kept drawing me back.

Molly based her play on Granuaile: Ireland's Pirate Queen, 1530-1603, by Anne Chambers, which is not a novel. I know a lot about O'Malley's life from Molly's play that may have given me a deeper appreciation—both historical and artistic—for the large-scale musical. Molly herself is both an incredible actor who portrays Grace O'Malley from girlhood to crone and a gifted playwright who can weave what is known about O'Malley's life into an effective drama without simplifying the content. Her play is one of the finest artistic creations I have ever experienced.

After I saw A Most Notorious Woman a couple of times, I special-ordered a copy of Chambers' book from a specialist in Irish publications (the work is more readily available now). It's not a fast read, but gave me a good overview of what is and isn't known about O'Malley's life and the context within which she lived, so I could become acquainted with the soil from which Molly Lyons grew her play.

I haven't had additional time to really learn more about Grace O'Malley. But related topics have, obviously, intrigued me for a number of years. For example, when I couldn't locate my copy of Chambers for the photo I just grabbed another book that happened to be handy: The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, by Barbara Sjoholm.

As I work on bringing books to the world as an independent micro-publisher in a world of mega-publishers, these stories from the past help me keep my focus and courage up. What I'm doing is relatively easy, by comparison!

This discussion connects more than casually to Deborah Pulliam's and my conversations over the years, because about this time in many previous springs she would have been preparing for a trip to the United Kingdom to look at knitting in museums and to visit the northern islands where there are sheep and wool and wonderful knitting traditions—and where the stories of some especially headstrong and capable women like Grace O'Malley originated. I've never been to these places. Each year, I looked forward to having Deb tell me about what she'd found.

A pair of gloves handknitted from North Ronaldsay wool hangs from the peg rack in my living room. Deb brought them to me from the Orkneys. Not only are they made from wool grown by a rare breed of sheep (one perfectly acclimated to living in the tidal area of an island), they have been worked in an unusual manner, with seed-stitch background and a two-color Celtic knot on the back of each hand.

One of these days I will stumble across a note from Deb—probably on a postcard—with the name of the maker, which I can almost but not quite recall. Jane . . . ?

I am not going around looking for these Deborah Pulliam-contributed fibers in the strand that is my life. The bits are just here, reminders of years during which our paths ran parallel in ways that allowed us to hash out ideas or add new perspective or egg each other on with projects or questions.

To the many people who have been sending me notes about their own connections with Deb P, those who knew her in person and those who knew her through her publications: Thank you.

While these notes highlight the loss and bring tears to my eyes, that's a good thing because I'm having trouble mourning because I don't want to believe Deb and I are not going to have another Saturday-evening phone chat either this week or next. Your notes also offer me hope and new connections that honor the memory of the friend we share who is still, and always will be, an active and inseparable part of our lives.

Advance reading copy: Crazy Aunt Purl's book

One of the major activities at BookExpo America is publishers' distribution of advance reading copies (ARCs), also known as galleys or bound galleys, to attendees, who are booksellers, librarians, and others (I'm "other").

ARCs aren't finished books.

For example, on Saturday I picked up a copy of Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split, by Laurie Perry, who blogs as Crazy Aunt Purl.

Here's what the ARC of her book looks like, back home at my favorite coffeehouse.

Note that across the top is a band that says "UNCORRECTED READERS COPY - NOT FOR SALE." In this case, there are a few typos (not proofread yet) and the knitting patterns at the back of the book are incomplete and/or not tech-edited yet—or there's just a title at the top of the pattern page. Here, in fact, is a picture of one of the disadvantages of an ARC:

The idea of ARCs is to get some folks reading and talking about the book early, deciding whether to stock it in their bookstores or buy it for their libraries. They aren't complete. They aren't perfect.

The production staff at the publishing house is scrambling to finish its jobs so the book can go to press on time. Those pages will not be blank by the time the "real people" get their finished copies. Nonetheless, there's got to be enough copy in the ARC that the "advance readers" won't say, "This is a blank book so I haven't a clue what I think about it." ARCs give a good preview.

Anyway, I had meetings all day Friday so I didn't get to walk the show floor until Saturday. As I cruised past the author-signing tables (which have long, rope-channeled lines leading up to them), I noticed that it was just then Laurie's half-hour at table 22 and the line wasn't too long, so I might be able to jump into it without a ticket (tickets are given out each morning before the expo opens). At the start of the line, you throw a contribution into a collection box in exchange for the ARC. The money goes to non-profit literacy-promotion programs. So I folded a bill, dropped it into the slot, and joined the queue, which was less-than-interminable only because it was not Laurie's only signing at the event. Her publisher tends to schedule both booth and table signings.

Laurie's table was directly adjacent to the Chicken Soup folks (same publisher), so one of her signing buddies was Jack Canfield. It's that kind of event.

And it was true: luck was on my side. I got a galley. Laurie looked like most authors do in that situation: happy and dazed. It's a big deal to be at BookExpo, and a bigger deal to be at one of the table signings; your eyes glaze over, though, because it's such a weird environment.

I started reading the book between events later that day. By page 5 I was laughing out loud. I finished the ARC on the flight home last night.

Laurie manages to talk about challenging life transitions with honesty, perception, and humor. If you're familiar with her blog, you'll recognize the style, although this is a book, not a blog, and has a narrative arc.

Although there's enough of a knitting component for yarn aficionados, neither that nor the cats is the biggest part of the text (yet, in terms of patterns: I can't say much about them except they have great titles).

What it's about is a shift from expectations to reality when life throws you an unexpected upset that throws your core identity into question.

Here's a quick quote from early in the book, pre-knitting but after Laurie's friend Shannon has suggested she needs a hobby . . . like knitting: "I looked around at my house. Just a pile of stuff, half in and half out of boxes. . . . I was a thirty-something woman living alone with four cats. . . . I was on the short bus to crazy. I pictured my grandmother making hoopskirted yarn cozies for the toilet paper. I pictured myself making doilies for furniture that I did not own. I saw my cats wearing knitted hats with lace appliques. From my vantage point, knitting seemed like 100 percent of some road I did not want to walk down."

There's another spot toward the end where she incorporates a lovely riff on the benefits of commuting by bus: it makes me wish I didn't work one staircase away from where I live.

And many good and insightful, sometimes very amusing, moments in between.

I don't pick up many ARCs at BookExpo. I've learned that publishers at BookExpo push more interesting-sounding books than I have time to read and I've become extremely selective in what I consider carrying home. Books are heavy. I feel guilty if I don't read the galleys I pick up. I have galleys from four years ago that are still on my "read it some day" piles.

Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair turned out to have been a fine choice for my limited collection this year, even though I do hope I'm well past too much experience with divorce. It's a good read even without the patterns—a book to look forward to when it's released in October 2007.

Congratulations to Laurie, and heads-up to readers. If the ARC is good, the real book will be even better.

NYC: Awards and a nightclub scene

This will be quick. The days at BookExpo America are crammed start to finish. This is how the day ended:

But before that, the ForeWord Book of the Year winners were announced. In the Crafts category, I had submitted two books that Nomad Press had published: Spinning in the Old Way (released in May 2006) and Arctic Lace (released in October 2006). Wonder of wonders, they both won top awards! Spinning in the Old Way received the bronze award and Arctic Lace won the silver.

Later in the evening, I went to the party for the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs), which were announced earlier, and picked up the bronze medal Arctic Lace had earned in that competition.

Simply producing good books full of solid information is really enough. However, it's also nice to have the work acknowledged within the general world of books . . . and winning awards for knitting and spinning books, especially about traditional and ethnic techniques, may help the subjects be taken more seriously in the wider world (see Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's writing and presentations and blog for the importance and challenge of this). There were nearly 1,400 entries in the ForeWord competition and 2,690 in the IPPYs. The photo shows me (somewhat overloaded with people and noise) with Jim Barnes, Independent Publisher editor and coordinator of the IPPY awards.

After the IPPY festivities, it was time for a cab across town to Webster Hall for a concert by the Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of well-known authors who resurrect their garage-band personas to raise money for good causes. The location was less concert hall than mob scene; after more than an hour in line outside (not very well organized) and forty-five minutes in the standing-room-everywhere crowd inside (Roger McGuinn helping out on lead guitar and Lesley Gore showing up just for fun) turned out to be what my energy and feet could handle, so I figured I'd done my bit for partying and the support of literacy and cabbed back to the hotel to recoup my energy for today. (The photo at the top of this post shows Lesley Gore singing "It's My Party," which Amy Tan had just sung, too.)

And now I need to sort my notes and lists of booths so I can figure out what I'm going to do my best to learn today at BookExpo America. Because yesterday was filled front-to-back with appointments, I haven't really seen the show floor at all. It's impossible to see it all, so I'll need a plan. One thing I learned by reading yesterday's show daily (a slick, 68-page, large-format on-the-spot magazine produced by Publishers Weekly) is that not only does Crazy Aunt Purl have a book coming out from HCI in October, her publisher is giving the book enough push that she's at BookExpo doing signings. This is good.

Now I need breakfast and a plan (and a fresh pair of feet for today's walking-and-standing, although that won't happen).

One of my scribbled notes from a two-person meeting yesterday: "Would it be easier just to write an encyclopedia?" And that's the sort of day it was.