River Journeys Podcast

1971 arrived. I was an expectant mother in a small second-floor apartment behind a gas station in Eugene, Oregon. Our first purchase was a huge desk with a laminated wood top and chrome legs. In front of it, we squeezed a secondhand blond crib, adorned with the teeth marks of its four previous occupants. We figured we didn’t need much else. After all, I first slept in a dresser drawer, so this was an upgrade. On July 20, 1971, I wrote in my journal:

Summer is upon us… interminable. The world reflects my own restlessness — what will become of me now that I have set aside one career, well defined, for another, not defined at all? Am I strong enough to be curious, eager for each day — without a pre-designated series of challenges? I dream of writing, but wonder how much I have to say. I dream of art projects — warm, friendly things, and wonder if my imagination can take me there. The change from daughter to mother — what a giant step! Is my stride long enough?

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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Unpacking, I discovered my old stamp-filled shoebox. Sifting through the tiny reminders of time gone by, an idea dawned on me. I might be lost, but the mail would find me. I began to collect postage stamps in earnest. They are beautiful. They tell stories. Former Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield said of them, “The postage stamps of a nation are a picture gallery of its glories. They depict in miniature its famous men and women, the great events of its history, its organizations, its industries, its natural wonders.” I joined the Postal Commemorative Society, which delivered first-day-issue stamps from their point of origin to me for 25 years. No matter where we lived, they found their way… home.

Something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it. What could it be? 

Most of my graduate students were Generation Ys (aka Millennials)… born after 1982, raised in a digital world. Slogging through various credentials and degree programs at the end of their long workdays made it difficult for them to focus. The cares and worries of their days came with them every week. Their commutes, their own course preparations and classroom management challenges, and their responsibilities at home hung around them like Marley’s chains in Dickens’ Christmas Carol. For any teacher, it’s a problem. All students are difficult to focus, no matter what their age. I had decades of experience, but it wasn’t helping. Things weren’t going well.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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To counter the distracted hum and glazed looks, I filled a large easel at the front of the room with “presenting questions” to jumpstart the evening. Written in careful cursive, I reasoned the sheets would become part of the class record and help them remember what we were doing. As weeks passed, the room walls filled with topics from earlier sessions. It was like living inside a house with walls of grace, looping Palmer writing. It seemed like a good idea—sort of like “dinner special” easels in restaurant waiting areas. It wasn’t working. Students rummaged in their backpacks, pulled out papers, laptops, books, talked to each other, or gazed at the clock, willing it to advance. The same few people opened every discussion. 

Midway through the term, a 30-something middle school history teacher approached me as I was putting the finishing touches on my easel questions. Twisting his hands, he lowered his eyes. Gesturing at the sheet behind me, I beamed, “Hi Mark. Would you like to add something?”

Shoulders hunched, he sighed. “Some of us can’t read your handwriting.” He rushed on, “We only print or keyboard. We didn’t learn cursive.” 

I’m not sure which of us was more embarrassed.

One Christmas, Jim brought home a set of calligraphy pens, the least wanted item in his office holiday party swap gift exchange. A beheaded fountain pen and collection of odd-looking nibs, they were left behind by the disappointed recipient. I was delighted.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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I practiced in the pre-dawn morning hours before the children were awake. It became a time of focus and meditation as I twisted the broad-edged square-cut pen to decorate note cards with sayings I found or had written. In the quiet at dawn, I was not just lettering, but talking to myself. I sent collections on colored linen paper to my parents and in-laws. Most were questions. Among them:

“What if the rain never stopped? The earth would turn into one big sponge for wiping the universe clean.”

“Who are teachers? The world is full of teachers, each of us for others and ourselves.”

“What is soul? Perhaps it is a longing for an Infinite that is elusive in a finite world.”

The careful writing helped me think. My answers might be different now but the process still works.

In the 20th century, handwriting was another place where perfection seemed important, in part because people thought one’s character could be improved by working on one’s handwriting. Alfred Binet, who came up with the Stanford-Binet IQ test, believed there was a “science of graphology” that revealed a person’s character in their handwriting. It is an idea still popular in Europe.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Taltavall, was a devotee. She took our penmanship lessons as seriously as she did every other content area. A large, florid woman, she stood in front of the class at the appointed time every day, like a dance master before a ballet lesson. She would sway back and forth, arms shooting up or dropping down like an airport ground-crew worker guiding a plane to its gate, as we followed her body language with our pencils. I liked the symmetry and challenge of getting the shapes “just right”… though “just right” never happened.

A prose poem:

The smooth, suave agent repeatedwhat he had been saying all week.“California prices are difficult.”

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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Sixty houses later, shirt wrinkled,tie loose, glossy flyers fillinghis luxury car, through clenched teeth, he snapped,“This is the last one in your range.”

It was no surprise I paid no attention to running a household or creating a home. In the subtle ways past generations shape future ones, Mother survived a childhood of drudgery compounded by poverty and parents with grade school educations. She wanted neither for her children. She ran the house. I studied. My much younger sister played. When faced with a home of my own, the shock was electric. I had no idea what to do.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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The children grew. I returned to what society called “work”; that is, work outside the household. It is a peculiar distinction, suggesting life at home isn’t work. In both places activities are sometimes creative, often mundane. Both have their share of boredom and stress. But only one has a salary. For many years I apologized for the time I spent at home. I no longer do. It’s the old Gatsby spin: the light through the windows is always more enchanting when viewed from the street outside.

Being able to look back is important, but not enough. Old art, whether magnificent or mundane, is always the raw material of new art. The artist’s job is to build on it or transform it, not offer up comforting familiarity as a talisman against the void. That was the problem with my glass project. It was a bridge backward. Much later, painting became a path forward.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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One January years later, I scanned my new spring term last period class list, fearing the rumor I heard in the faculty room was true. It was. One of the most disruptive high school seniors was in my elective, “The Short Story.” He made his first appearance by swinging into the room off the doorjamb like Tarzan dropping from a tree. Six feet four inches of uncontrolled energy, he electrified the all-boy class with his defiance, his arrogance, his slick BMW in the student parking lot and his athletic scholarship to the University of San Diego if he passed every class the last term. The first week was a nightmare.

Could I be more than a caregiver, housekeeper, cook, gardener — important jobs, functional jobs, exhausting in their relentlessness? Jackson Pollock characterized art as an act of “self-discovery,” positioning the experience of the individual, not the work, at the center of the endeavor. I didn’t need to be the center of anything. I needed something else. Tole painting became that something.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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Ten years later, Oregon became part of our past. I kept a dozen or so wooden tole projects. Beyond the designs — cherries, gooseberries, pears, grapes, ornate Scandinavian florals — was a less obvious lesson I learned from preparing the wood. The more time I spent on the unglamorous, dirty work — stripping, sanding, staining, sealing — the better the finished piece. Shortcuts never worked. The paint flaked, the wood grain interfered, the brushes lost their shape whenever I rushed. Today, a lifetime later, when the speed and demands of contemporary living make it easier, faster and cheaper to buy things rather than make them I often wonder: What are the hidden costs of our shortcuts?

On bookbinding, questioning Plato and poiesis.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

EXCERPT

But measuring and sewing the bindings of my simple books, I knew I was both working and thinking. Buried in the Greek language is a word, “poiesis.” It is the same word used to describe the work of both mechanic and poet. In modern times, we are accustomed to thinking of the inspired artist and the disciplined worker as opposite human types who have nothing in common. But they are more alike than different. Despite what Greeks thought, their language didn’t make any distinction between the work of artists or builders, architects or philosophers. A single word described their otherwise disconnected efforts. Different manifestations. One spirit. Poiesis became a cornerstone of my philosophy for teaching and for life—think and do. Either alone is insufficient.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces | Between stars—on stars where no human race is. | I have it in me so much nearer home | To scare myself with my own desert places. —Robert Frost

Now what? First house. First job. The house was in an almost new tract miles from charming homes we couldn’t afford around the university. The job matched Jim’s research interests in business and labor relations. He had his hands full at work unraveling the byzantine mysteries of academic communities. At home, I faced my own mysteries. Far from the crowded Los Angeles landscape we left, the house was a one-story, three-bedroom rectangle with a triangular roof pitch jutting over the front door, interrupting the flat elevation like a droopy umbrella. The house had been painted in just two colors. The exterior was pale beige; the interior a collection of Navajo white walls, white metal closet doors, white window frames. Inside reminded me of a person trying hard not to be noticed in a crowd; the outside, of KOA campground tent signs jutting above highway billboard advertisements. Tucked in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, it sat midway on a street where every third house looked like ours. The interstate winding through the northwest was lined with towering Douglas firs. The unfortunate, sparse neighborhood saplings were anemic cousins. Standing in the vacant rooms, I thought of Willa Cather’s pioneer stories of life on the Nebraska plains. In a wild leap, I imagined myself on an empty road like the one in the Jules Breton painting “Song of the Lark” Cather used as the title of her 1915 story of a woman seeking a more artistic life. My quest wasn’t so grand but the road was unfamiliar. Where should I begin? Looking for a way to soften the white box in which we found ourselves. Looking for a meaningful life outside the formal workplace I had left. Looking for ways to soothe the fatigue and insecurity of new parenthood. It wasn’t a question of being busy. That’s easy. Yet activity, no matter how layered and intense, doesn’t guarantee keeping emptiness at bay. Sometimes just the opposite.

I found an answer in a Eugene library display for a brand new publication, Early American Life. A cross between an academic journal and magazine, it announced its intention to devote itself to stories featuring architecture, decorative arts, period style, and social history from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Every issue featured homes, antiques, histories of crafts, biographies of forgotten Americans, heritage plants and all things devoted to a “traditional, comfortable, warm sense” of America. Traditional. Comfortable. Warm. It was a start. I subscribed and devoured every issue. Formatted in tiny print in two narrow columns, I poured through not just stories of how our ancestors had gone about creating homes and communities, but instructions for projects they undertook. Early American Life was the unlikely catalyst I needed to begin making sense of a new life chapter. Thoreau was right when he said, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?” Many topics I dismissed — blacksmithing, using lye for soap-making, woodcarving, plant propagation and recreating Martha Washington’s Christmas dinner. Others looked intriguing — pinecone wreaths, cornhusk ornaments, rag dolls, cranberry garlands. I tried them all. Bookbinding was first. Our blue-collar neighbors and the young academics we socialized with thought such pursuits were unnecessary, even frivolous. Who cared about old-time-consuming arts when modern life made buying everything, including books, as easy as shopping? I cared, more than I thought I would at the start. And besides, look what shopping has done to us.

I remembered a phrase my high school French teacher used when we complained about his tedious assignments. Squaring his shoulders, he would quote dramatically from Voltaire’s 1736 poem “Le Mondain” — “Le superflu, chose tres necessaire.” The superfluous is very necessary. The trick is figuring out what is superfluous. None of us imagined paper books would become needless for many people before the next century was a decade old. Today, we are awash in e-readers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads and of course, phones. At the same time, scientists tell us the sun has entered a cycle of powerful flares and eruptions. They are catapulting to earth high-energy particles capable of wreaking havoc on electronic and communication systems that support our high-tech civilization. The result may be damaged transformers, orbiting satellites and global positioning systems.

While not catastrophic, temporary computer glitches are commonplace. We have all been inconvenienced in banks, medical offices and stores when clerks mournfully stare at blank screens and then at us, mumbling, “The network is down.” Temporary outages are one thing, satellite crashes another. The tangible may not be as relevant as the cloud, but as necessary. Over time, I grew more comfortable with roads I wouldn’t have chosen earlier in life. Change is inevitable. I began to see my goal of “traditional, warm, comfortable” in a new light. White wasn’t always cold. Traditional is not always desirable. Comfortable might be stagnation. Arts and crafts I undertook at the outset helped me navigate a tangible road. Willa Cather’s heroine started down a well-worn path. At the curve in the road, she saw her life in new ways. Turns out I was more like the girl in the Jules Breton painting she wrote about than I imagined. What is extraneous and what is essential changes depending on what kind of box we are in. Voltaire knew that. Now I know too.

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