MISTAKEN IDENTITY: The River It has occurred to me that I am not what I used to be. This is too obvious. In recent years, my knees have become as fragile as egg shells. I can hurt myself rolling over in bed. Inside I still feel like the bumbling reliable fool that I’ve always been. Yet indictment or statement of fact, the truth is that change has been my only steady companion through the years. I am now a different me. The question is am I the same me? I do think that I am better read, of firmer opinion and with a logic based on my years of experience. Some might call my opinions and logic just a more firmly ingrained bias. Perhaps. Others would remember this bit of wisdom: ‘My good judgement is based on my experience. My experience is the result of my bad judgement.’ I have a

BUILD ALONG SESSION: BOXWORKS   Boxworks is a series of classes on designing and making wooden boxes. Starting Saturday Oct. 10, 2026 10am – 12pm Pacific Time, we will run class on six consecutive Saturdays to build three different box designs. Each box will have different joinery, details, shapes, or carvings. Each Build Along Session is taught online and requires a Zoom account. It may seem contrary to the spirit of hands on woodworking but in this time, education has changed. It now can allow folks access to information in ways no one dreamed possible. There will be a free class preview Sept. 26 at 12am, PT. Contact the Studio for one of the 100 Zoom spots available. studio@Northwestwoodworking.com. Tuition for the full 12 hours of class and 3 sets of box plans is $395. The Setting Up Shop lecture series will run again this Winter. Stay tuned for more

Inspiration is a shy Muse. You reach out to see if you two can meet but wait for a call that never comes. Inspiration can remain hidden from you behind a tree, asleep, inattentive, aloof. She can disappear for weeks without a word. Many of us lament our sorry self then. ‘Poor me, no inspiration today, or tomorrow, or any days as I simply have no ideas. I never have new ideas. I am empty. My mind is a waste land.’ Then you go about your work at the bench and become deeply engrossed in a project. Perhaps it involves four table legs to be shaped and sanded and readied for gluing. This is repetitive work. Once your movements are in place you go about them with some measure of skill and then of speed. Your mind is untethered and wanders off on its own to search out things while

An online student of mine told me once that he got his woodworking information from the internet. This internet had informed him that woodworking was supposed to be easy. Everyone on-line said so. I felt bad for him. He had seen techniques on camera and most every time they were made with no mistakes and sometimes they even sped it up so the idea was that it was not only easy but quick to do. Or so this internet implied. He had to disagree with both ideas. Woodworking for him was hard and slow. Welcome to woodworking. It is slow work. It does require patience. But with the right approach, it can be a source of great reward. Adjusting one’s sights at the outset helps. Getting quality information also matters. The purpose of the Internet is to convince you, first and foremost, to come back to the Internet. It is

The Studio first saw light in 1997 when I wanted to try a new approach to craft education. It seemed that only folks with an MFA behind their name had value to schools or galleries or museums. Initials were deemed more important than skills or experience. So I planned my own school in a way that was different. I imagined a place of good design, a school of thought, and a refuge for learning traditional craft work. I spent one month in an empty studio at an artist’s retreat in Vermont planning. I had all the space I needed to draw which I did slowly and poorly, or paint which I did not do at all. But along with my drawing, I dreamed. I dreamed of what I thought a school of woodworking should be. I had studied the traditional MFA programs and considered joining one once. One sculpture professor

I remember when I first started woodworking how ignorant I felt. There was so much to learn about tools and machinery and wood. I mean there was all that but then there was finishing to learn and also design, hardware and dovetails. Goodness. There was so much. It was just after college for me and my head was filled with poetry and debate and just a bit too much weed so my woodworking skills were not, shall we say, fully honed yet. As luck would have it though, after graduation I found work with a guy named Harvey Ronne. We poured sidewalks and driveways. Harvey thought of himself as a Renaissance man as any concrete worker might. The Romans had built their domed Pantheon with concrete after all. Harvey also made furniture for himself in his garage shop. The coffee table he showed me came from a design right out

I am going to confess something to you. This thought had never come to me until this dark January morning. I wondered what would have happened if I had just realized that the Studio was done? That when Covid hit us, and I shut the doors and started classes online, that these were last gasps. The world had changed. We were all just so close to things that we couldn’t see what had occurred. The world would never look like it once had so I should have embraced that change. Dark morning thoughts. Listen to Beethoven. His world changed when he went deaf. He was a composer! How do you do your life’s work when you can’t even hear it except in your head? He pressed forward. I’m sure he felt sorry for himself some days, raged against misfortune, cursed his luck. Then he pressed forward. This is what I

Greetings. It’s that time of year again when everyone says ‘It’s that time of year again when . . . ’ Well it is just that so hang onto this season and to 2025 as tightly as you can. Both will be gone in a few days. I just saw a nice quote by the poet Robert Bly: ‘Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying the time in bags.’ I myself have forgiven Time for tricking me over and again into believing that it is always the same, a slow steady metronome of tock and tick with no variation. In my school years, Time inched forward with a glacial pace at almost a dead snail speed. I know because I would check the clock every ten seconds to see if it had died.

Like many craftspeople, I made a fortune early on and didn’t know what to do with my time and all that money. Nah, I’m kidding. The economy makes puppets of us all. I had to work hard to stay solvent enough to lose only a little money each month. I sold cutting boards, plant stands, and hand mirrors at craft fairs making these quick little items that brought in a small bit of cash. After some years, I thought that teaching might help my income stream. The very first woodworking class I taught was held at the Multnomah Arts Center in SW Portland. Their woodshop and the dust-making sat down three flights of stairs in the basement of an old house on the main drag there. Smart folks at the MAC. Douglas Janacek was one of three students enrolled in that class. I don’t remember the other two. Why do I

Laminated Curved Tool Rack Project Setting Up Shop Series Try and build something simple in your shop. Build a birdhouse or a trivet and see how the work goes. Will it flow easily through to completion? Will it be a weekend project that actually takes a weekend? Or will you find, like I did for a time, that your new shop is not set up for working yet. Yours may actually be a storage facility, a retreat center, or a private bar, but it is most certainly not a working shop. A few years back I found that my new little shop was so cluttered I couldn’t find my tools or the clamps were under another pile of stuff or I had to move something off my bench to do the next simple job. The only sense of Flow I got was by opening my roll up door every few

Screws hold our stuff together. Nuts & Bolts & Screws I’ve been struggling with a couple of ideas to discuss with you and none of them has gained any traction. That says to me that they’re not ready yet for daylight. Therefore since this is a newsletter for woodworkers, let’s get down to some nuts and bolts, and screws. The first lecture I ever gave was in 6th grade shop class. Not because I was noted then as a great and riveting speaker. No. We all had to do a presentation in class on some subject be it woodworking, metals, or melting plastics into bowl shapes in the oven. My own talk was on the mighty wood screw. The screw as we all remember is one of the six classic Basic Machines. This list starts with the mighty wedge, which is a part of every tool in the shop except

Gary pondering the world and all its charms these days. I Get It I am in a curious spot these days. We all are. This time is, our times are, so uncharted. No one knows which way is up. Are we on the verge of a revolution or will we calm down as a people and start acting ‘normal’ again? And were we normal before Covid? The Covid effect makes us feel even more strange. Is the internet surge in all of our lives something we can recover from, manage, or do we just go numb under its constant effects? You know what I’m talking about: our phones, personal computers, digital toasters and ‘smart’ washing machines. What happened to technologies that we could put in neat little boxes? Here’s the phone technology and the computer technology and here’s the durable goods technology. Why ever should they all meet? Cui bono?