A Remembrance

On Saturday, April 18, I’ll once again be part of the fabulous Conversations & Connections conference, hosted by Barrelhouse! If you’re in the mid-Atlantic, make the trip for a warm, energetic whirl of writerly goodness! I’ll be offering a session on how to write and pitch book reviews, which hones our writerly and readerly skills and also gives the gift of attention to someone else’s work. See you there?

A Remembrance

This past week, I made violet syrup again. Violets are one of my favorite spring flowers. They’re humble, low to the ground, brief. A posy of them in a vase barely lasts a day, while the rose from my grandmother’s funeral two weeks ago is still round and pink, though only in the center.

My grandmother Thelma—Nana—is really the person to whom this newsletter owes its greatest debt. She was the craftiest person in my young life, and though we never actually spoke about it, she modeled to me that it was entirely possible to learn to do creative things. So many times, when faced with the skill of someone else’s hands, people will say I could never do that and then they don’t. Nana, who lived her whole life without the internet, without formal education past high school, who worked in a poultry processing plant and a sewing factory while also raising a large family, and without workshops or folk schools or artists’ residencies or such, found ways. In the basement of her house—situated in a Pennsylvania hollow that still, in 2026, is unreachable by cellular service—she watched Bob Ross paint on PBS and painted along with him, in acrylics. She ordered other painting technique courses on VHS, and used those skills to render landscapes on sawblades and pieces of slate, to make flowers and sprays of winter greenery on the wooden rocking horses my grandfather assembled in his woodshop. These she sold at local craft fairs and to people who worked with her two daughters. She knitted some—enough to make six-year-old me a mint-green sweater with an intarsia Snoopy on the back of it—but crocheted much, much more: doilies, decorations, doll clothes, Christmas stockings, snowflakes, table runners, and toilet paper roll covers. She quilted, stitching outlines painstakingly by hand, on the quilt frame on her enclosed porch. There wasn’t room for it in her craft room. There was no room for anything in her craft room. The hall closet bulged with yarn, mostly Red Heart and crochet cotton. The card table downstairs was covered in small, plastic bottles of paint, palettes made from the lids of margarine and Cool Whip containers resting in a stack.

While she crocheted elaborate works of lace, I learned how to chain stitch and then make little medallions along the chain, using a ball of red/green/white variegated yarn with a single strand of gold foil running through it. At the end, I’d made a garland, asymmetrical and too short, but one that found its way onto the Christmas tree often enough. It’s likely still in a box somewhere in my parents’ attic.

I grew up surrounded by people who know how to do things, and if you hung around them long enough, you’d likely learn how to do some of those things, too, because you’d get roped into helping with one thing or another. This is how I learned to spackle, to tape the joins in drywall, and things like that. But Nana was the first one I remember who set out to learn how to do things, who didn’t wait to just fall into the knowledge by chance or have to do it at work or get it from someone she knew directly. Like I said, we never talked about it—the defining feature of my Pennsylvania upbringing—but it has clearly had a profound effect on my own life. Learning how to do new things is, I think, the greatest joy in the world, and I am wholly and entirely indebted to her example. That I love to learn new things to do with yarn and thread is absolutely Nana’s legacy, and I am grateful to carry that forward, even without her now.

Making, Doing, & Making Do: Just April Things

The semester ends in three-ish weeks, give or take a grading fugue state and study abroad packing, and so I’ve done the most reasonable thing I can think of: throw myself face-first into bobbin lace.

One great boon of being an academic and a library-loving creature is having access to the WorldCat database, which can point me to 19th century books on bobbin lace and the like, which I can then obtain from the Hathitrust archive. I can borrow new, glossy-imaged, step-by-step beginners’ guides from interlibrary loan. (Use your library resources, friends! What we don’t use, we lose!) So while I’m on my way to my study abroad destination, I plan to putter my way through ebooks about Brussels lace and Honiton and Idrija and all the things I absolutely know nothing about just yet. If you have any bobbin lace advice, I would love to hear it!

(I won’t be taking the bobbin lace accoutrements abroad because there’s a lot of moving parts, but I did also get a tatting shuttle and a travel-sized watercolor kit. I’ve never regretted a crafty purchase and I am not going to start now.)

I also frogged seven months of process on my knitted cape and started over because it was clear I’d screwed up my counts somewhere. The last thing I wanted to do was finish it and then never wear it because it was wonky.

I am reworking the ending of my novel because it felt like the cape. I had to rip it back and rewrite. It’s a better fit now, and the final words are in sight.

I can’t decide if knitting taught me to be all right with “undoing” a novel draft or if writing taught me to accept converting actual square feet of knitted fabric back to balls of yarn, but I am glad I’ve learned that skill. I think this, again, is a credit to Nana.