THE FRONT
DOUG STOWE BELIEVES OUR BRAINS ARE IN OUR HANDS
Q&A
NEW BOOK BLENDS PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICAL INSIGHT. Perhaps Arkansas’s most decorated woodworker, Doug Stowe of Eureka Springs is also one of our most erudite thinkers about the meaning of craft and its importance in community and education. The founder of the Eureka Springs Guild of Artists and Craftspeople and a co-founder of the Eureka Springs School of the Arts, Stowe is a past Arkansas Living Treasure and the author of more than a dozen books, most recently “The Wisdom of Our Hands” (Linden Publishing, $16.95), a passionate, thoughtful and highly approachable treatise on the importance of making things with our hands.
Eureka Springs School of the Arts. What differences and similarities have you observed among them? My adult students have all signed up and usually paid something to be there and made a commitment to a certain number of days and they are extremely attentive to my teaching. The kids don’t always know “what’s in it for me.” They come to woodshop because it’s expected of them. I have to prove to them that it’s of interest. Or they have to prove to themselves that it’s of interest to them. Adults are less forgiving of their own mistakes. For kids, they’re so proud of their work. I could look at it and say, “They could’ve done that better.” But they have what some of my adult students need, and that’s the willingness to forgive themselves for not measuring up to the standard. The hand slips or the mind slips or the wood doesn’t perform, one or another. So many times I’ve looked at the grain on a piece of wood, and I think, “Because the grain goes this way, I have to approach it from a certain direction,” but then I find that it’s tearing out. And it’s just some little misunderstanding we’ve had. Perfection is elusive and maybe there’s no such thing.
There’s a fair amount of pedagogical theory in this book. When did you get interested in education and make the connection between craft and better methods of teaching? My mother was a kindergarten teacher, so I was watching her go off each day and I was listening to the stories she told when she came home. I had a natural interest in teaching and a fear of it because AGE: 73 I saw what my mother put into it each day. It really became of interest because I had FROM: Eureka Springs a daughter and when the school she was attending, Clear Spring, decided to be a A RECENT CREATION HE’S PROUD OF: “A box high school, I asked, “Are you gonna have called ‘A Reliquary of Wood.’ It’s designed to look like a woodshop?” They said, “We don’t have You’ve been a woodworker for 46 years, a little chapel, so it’s got doors that open to reveal funding, but if you can find funding, we’d a published author on woodworking what would be the choir loft of the chapel and has certainly start one.” So I happened to find topics for nearly 30 and a teacher for little doors that pull out. Inside I’ve got 25 Arkansas funding, so we were able to get started. more than 20. How have each of the hardwoods to celebrate the diversity of our forests. I [Studying woodworking education took three pursuits informed the others? I did another version that I call ‘The Choiring of Trees,’ Stowe to conferences all over the world, think of myself as a woodworker. I teach named after Don Harrington’s book.” where he learned about the Swedish eduwoodworking and I write about it and I do cational sloyd system of handicraft-based it. That’s who I am. I don’t think there’s education and the theories of play through geometric building blocks anything I would do differently about that. But we’re multifunctional. of Friedrich Frobel, the German educator who created the concept of We’re like Swiss Army knives in a way, with screwdriver blades and all kindergarten. Stowe wrote a how-to book called “Making Classic Toys that stuff. That Teach” and explores the teaching theories in “The Wisdom of Our Hands.”] You seem spry at 73, but do you envision a world where you pull back If you visit the Clear Spring campus, you find the giant kindergarten on any of your work? I’m already pulling back. I’m going to retire from blocks. The kids use them to make forts and objects of beauty. One Clear Spring School at the end of this semester. I’ll still be available as day they turned them into a giant sofa that they can all sit on. For me, a resource and volunteer. With this book, I don’t know if I have another woodworking isn’t just about picking up a piece of wood, it’s also about one in me or not. I still have articles I’m working on. I’ll still be teaching doing things that reshape our relationships to each other. Woodworking adults. Maybe not at the same pace. All of us get to a point where we is a way we build community and we serve within that community. It’s a slow down. I think we have a tendency to get a little smarter about way of connecting more deeply with the natural environment. Developthings. When you do something a lot, you start to realize that some of ing yourself as a craftsman is not just getting your dovetail joints more the steps you thought were essential are not. Some of the things start closely to the line; it’s about bringing yourself more closely to the line, falling to the wayside and you simplify, and I think that enables you to to your own sense of what is ideal. do what you do and maybe with a little less stress and in a little less time. Slowing down is not necessarily a bad thing. You teach children at Clear Spring School and mostly adults at the — Lindsey Millar ARKANSASTIMES.COM
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