Loomings Returns: Weaving and Getting Into It

Hello after an impromptu summer break here at Loomings headquarters! Later this fall, you can find me offering my interactive workshop, Containing Multitudes: Working with Large Casts of Characters, at the Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival (October 17-19). I’ll also be giving a talk at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, PA, on October 1 as part of their NCC Featured Author program—join us for “The Writer’s Compass” at 11 a.m. on-site! If you’d like me to run a workshop or give a talk for your organization or visit with your book club, reach out!

Recent Loomings

At the end of the teaching day, I unlock my car and slide into the driver’s seat, hands curled around the steering wheel, windows still rolled up. The all-day sun, trapped between windshield and brake pedal, stored in all this plastic and metal, leeches into me, and my whole body sighs and relents. My shoulders slowly lower; the middle joints of my fingers loosen. I sit like this for a few minutes, and even after I turn the key and begin my drive home, I keep the windows rolled up until I’m halfway through town. Sometimes longer. This is the place and time where I try (and often fail) to separate the parts of my day, an opportunist’s sauna, a stolen quiet. There’s something important and solid about the heat and the way it surrounds, the physical force of it, and it’s all the more important to me as I know the days for this feeling are dwindling. Soon enough, the sun will hang low, or not show at all, and there will be a day in November when it’s somehow colder inside the closed up car than outside. I try not to think about that part too much, try not to borrow trouble on the incoming seasonal affective disorder. I try (and sometimes succeed) in simply enjoying the blissful warmth here and now, the way the building’s climate control finally leaves my body.

In August, I sat inside a loom nearly as big as my car—wider, for certain—and felt similarly held, separated from everything else in a way that was delightful and real, rather than a few stolen minutes, during the week-long Foundations workshop at the Marshfield School of Weaving. For all of my love of making, I’d never actually taken a proper class in anything, and so to devote an entire week to a single endeavor worked magic on me. For five days, from roughly 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., the hours fell only to planning, winding, warping, weaving, and finishing. In the evenings, I ate ravenously and fell asleep early. But by the end of it, I’d woven a wool blanket of a size to cover a twin bed, complete with hand-twisted fringe. As someone whose weaving timeline generally runs on a scale of months, that fact alone—from start to finish on something in a single week, let alone a functionally sized throw—felt like a miracle. But it wasn’t a miracle; it was simply single-minded purpose and excellent instruction combining to achieve what becomes eminently possible under those conditions.

Having paid for the course, having driven to Vermont for the sole purpose of learning in this place, before the fall semester started, surely helped with that atmosphere of focus, but it was the whole-body engagement of the process that really did it. Seated at a loom like these—two and three hundred years old, their beams and bodies hewn from whole trees of a size that exist now only in certain preserves or by sheer, rarefied luck—was not at all like being seated at my loom at home. There’s even the matter of the preposition: at my loom at home, I sit at it, on a bench, like the loom is a piano, and my hands and feet enter the loom’s space, throwing the shuttle, pressing the treadles. When I thread my heddles and sley the reed, I’m a little closer, leaning in, but I’m also bound by the fact that my loom was made to fit in a 20th century home, a modest one, and so it has features to minimize the space it takes up. The room I have my loom in was not made to hold a loom and everything else in it, so I must sidle to my bench. When I want to put on a new warp, I have to move my desk, a cupboard, and a chair.

At Marshfield, the weaver sits in the loom, and each loom has enough space around it to access any part of it from any angle. For some parts of the weaving process, such as threading the heddles, the sitting in is quite literal and quite sensible. Why lean and hunch when the size of the space between the beams means the weaver can bring a small chair into the space? Even when sitting on the bench, ready to weave, the loom surrounds the weaver with a wooden frame; the bench is fully part of the structure; the uprights at each corner and the beams above and below are nearly as big as the beams holding up the roof of the barn in which we work.

(The joinery of these looms is not unlike the joinery used to build barns that stand up to these hundreds of years, too, and the size of the looms, coupled with a decline in the regular use of them, has led some folks to call looms like these “barn looms,” but there’s nothing crude or primitive about them, as the moniker may suggest. While I was weaving plied wool yarn, two other students wove singles linen, thin and fine and shining.)

The weight and solidity of everything—from the gravity of the batten sley to the sheer weight of the shuttles we used—are also immersive, especially for someone coming to this kind of loom for the first time. With every pass of the shuttle, the weaver is holding the batten sley back with one hand (to make room for the shuttle to pass between the threads of the warp), pressing down the treadles with two feet (and with a lot more gusto than my loom at home requires), throwing the shuttle with the other hand, and making a quick change of hands: the holding hand must then catch the shuttle before it falls to the floor, and the throwing hand grasps the batten sley to beat the weft in and then hold the heavy wooden bar and its metal reed back for the next pass of the shuttle. For the project I did—a blanket almost as wide as my wingspan—that also meant keeping my arms spread wide to throw and catch the shuttle at the edges of the warp. By the end of each weaving day, I was tired, a little sore in the muscles my loom doesn’t require me to use and a little bruised from dropping the metal-tipped shuttle on my bare feet and smacking my head on various beams, but bone-deep happy.

It was, in essence, a pretty textbook week of embodying what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as flow, working through the stages of ease, frustration, and finally the rewarding challenge. The way the clock leapt and bounded through the day was testament to it.

At writing residencies, I’ve had those brilliant immersive days, but those days when I’m writing essentially means my body disappeared with the hours. Everything of me disappeared in lieu of the world of the book (and that is magnificent, but also different). On the bike, sometimes, in the middle third of a long ride, my brain disappears, and I’m just a machine that also notices trees: no thoughts, only muscles and bones and an appreciation for birches. At Marshfield, everything had to work together. I haven’t woven so much that the motions ever became automatic in my body or my brain. Certainly not on that loom, with its unfamiliar dimensions and weights. And despite my wonderment at having woven a whole blanket in one week, the actual weaving took less than half of the working time. Every day brought a new challenge, an old task completed in a new way, and so there was much to keep track of. All of my thoughts gathered together in one place, all of my sense of purpose, for this one aim, and there was no to-do list waiting.

God, but it was freeing.

Immense gratitude to Justin Squizzero, director of Marshfield School of Weaving, who captained our ship with such skill and patience and good humor—no crying, except tears of joy—and Marshfield board member Jesse Klein Seret, who gave generously from her own time to help guide eight weavers of varying experience through eight simultaneous projects, and the wonderful fellow weavers in whose company I was blessed to be for the week. If ever you find yourself yearning loomward, I hope you’ll seek out this marvelous place, now in its new home in Newbury, MA.

Reading:

Shenandoah has a new blog feature, Small Town Dispatches, created by Special Fiction Editor Nadeen Karputly, that features interviews with Shenandoah contributors who live in smaller places. As you can imagine, I adore this project. Presently, there are three interviews you can enjoy: one with Melissa Helton, one with Shamala Gallagher, and one with Laura Villareal.

A new magazine love: Faire features in-depth interviews with and profiles of makers of many kinds, and each feature is supported by completely lush and thoughtful photography. I discovered it because Atelier Guiditta Brozzetti, a historical weaving workshop and museum in Perugia, was featured in the most recent issue. Mostly, the pages of Faire represent all the different lives I fantasize about running away and living.

Renée K. Nicholson’s recently released poetry collection Post Scripts is both a jewel and the reliquary it enriches. The poems here memorialize places passed through and people passed on and bring them into the reader’s eye, treasured. My favorite stanza from “For M, Pirouette”:

Renée also has a beautiful free newsletter that I highly recommend.

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates is just as smart and compelling as everyone in the book business says it is. It contains the most effective, moving presentation of photography on the page I’ve ever read.

Mesmerizing:

Former World Tour cycling pro and now pro in doing massively difficult, always interesting things on a bike Lachlan Morton is attempting the Fastest Known Time for cycling around Australia. The 14,200-kilometer (8823 mile) route took the previous record-holder 37 days and change. Lachy is presently smashing that pace, often riding at night to get a little respite from the staggering sun, passing kangaroos and avoiding crocodiles and keeping a weather eye on swooping magpies and brush fires. His efforts are fundraising to provide books and learning materials for indigenous children living in remote areas in Australia. What I love about this—beyond the good cause and mad delight and audacity of it (to just break the record, he’s got to go at a clip of 250 miles per day for more than a month, and he’s been routinely putting in 300-mile days)—is also the fact that the project introduced me to windy.com, which shows real-time wind currents and speeds around the globe.

Sorry I wasn’t paying attention in that meeting. I was looking at whatever the wind was doing around Iceland. (Tip: the wind is often doing something interesting around Iceland.)

It’s closer to October than otherwise, and the month after October is November, and thus Heading North is closing in on its first birthday! If you’re interested in a signed copy of Heading North for yourself or a “happy impending hockey season!” gift for someone you know, you can order one directly from me. [Send me an e-mail!] Or snag a print copy from Braddock Avenue Books! Or get the e-book and read during the intermissions. That’s what all the cool kids do.

If you’ve read and enjoyed Heading North, please consider reviewing it on Amazon or goodreads.