THEGARDAN 02
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“In the space between chaos and shape there is another chance.” — Jeanette Winterson
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THE
CRAIGARDAN JOURNAL
WE PAUSE Dear Reader, We pause to listen. To learn. To honor. To reset, and recommit. We pause to ensure that we: Strengthen the social justice work that we do through our programs and our founding commitment to serve and support the exploration of creativity in all forms. Support the voices and the work of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Disabled, LGBTQIA+, and Women artists and thinkers so that they are seen, read, and heard. Reflect on and challenge the assumptions and material realities that shape our mission. Create networks of collaboration and creativity based on respect, equity, and safety.
Craigardan remains committed to fostering a sense of place and welcome, beginning with the pages of this publication. As we continue to reflect and learn as individuals and as an organization, we hope the journal will become a creative space made of your work, your voices, your stories. This issue is a CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS, and dedicated only to that purpose. Please consider this a template, an invitation, to converse and collaborate in The Gardan. — All of Us at Craigardan July 2020
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MISSION
THE GARDAN
Craigardan is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a mission to encourage the human imagination to interpret the world with philosophical, ecological, and artistic perspective.
The Gardan, a project of Craigardan, is an offering to our community in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, with the intention to carry us forward and onward long after. Together we will be stronger and more imaginative than ever before.
To fulfill our mission, Craigardan supports artists, chefs, craftspeople, farmers, scholars, and writers through residencies, social justice initiatives, and other community programs. PROGRAMS AND PLACE Located in the heart of the Adirondacks, Craigardan’s artistin-residence program strives to cultivate a rich and collaborative place-based experience for all people working in all disciplines. Our interdisciplinary foundation encourages creative thinking and collective problem solving by welcoming diversity in all of its forms.
The Gardan is intended to foster conversations about creativity and its processes among and a c r o s s a l l d i s c i p l i n e s . We welcome contributions from artists and thinkers, activists and farmers, and environmentalists and chefs at any and all stages of creative development. Each issue is inspired by and draws from the weekly happenings during a residency session, delivering a small piece of our program — along with inspiration and ongoing support — to encourage you to self residency wherever you are. We hope that The Gardan will unite you with your extended
family of creative thinkers and bring a breath of Adirondack air to your inbox. Each issue can be found online at www.craigardan.org/gardan CONTENT SUBMISSION We invite your contributions of words, images, video, field notes, sound, and any other way you wish to connect to us, and to each other. Issues are curated by our editors. Complete guidelines for content submission can be found online at www.craigardan.org/ journalsubmission The Gardan is guided by our staff and fully supported by Craigardan’s funding and the efforts of our board and volunteers. We are actively pursuing grants and donations that would enable us to offer compensation for contributors. A l l c o n t r i b u t o r s re c e i v e a complimentary print copy of The Gardan by mail.
BOARD AND STAFF Lanse Stover, President
Mary Barringer
Andrea Volpe
David Speert, Vice-President
Allison Eddy
Frances Westley
Lorene Garrett, Treasurer
Kate Moses
Michele Drozd
Catherine Haskins, Secretary
Brooks Thomas Townsend
Janelle A. Schwartz
CONTACT
EDITORS
CRAIGARDAN www.craigardan.org info@craigardan.org 518.242.6535 9216 NYS Route 9N, Elizabethtown, NY 12932
With special thanks to editors Mary Barringer and Kate Moses.
All artwork is used with permission of the artist, who retains copyright of their work
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By sharing your work in The Gardan, you will reach an international audience of creative individuals and supportive institutions.
CONTRIBUTORS
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
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YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
YOU Your Town @yourvoice
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IN RESIDENCE MONDAYNIGHTDINNER
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TUESDAYCLASS
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WEDNESDAYCRIT
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THURSDAYCHECKIN
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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES
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SATURDAYFARMSHARE
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SUNDAYPOSTCARDPROJECT
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conversations with artists around the table: interviews, panels, memoirs, and other formats
we learn by teaching. skills, theory, pie-making…whatever
a low-pressure sharing of artwork in all media, at any stage of completion
words to support the creative individual at our core
artist talks, performances, slide shows, lectures — in all media
notes from the land, ours or yours
audio and video messages
Send us your words, sounds, images, and videos and we’ll plug them into one of these open, flexible categories, or create a new one.
WORDS + IMAGES JEANETTE WINTERSON AND JEFF MERTZ
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COVER BLACK LIVES MATTER
This cover is in honor of the fight to end systemic racism. Our commitment to equity and justice does not end with this cover. This cover represents a future of equality and inclusion for all people.
BACK COVER
Artwork by You
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MONDAYNIGHTDINNER
CONVERSATIONS AROUND THE TABLE Kate Moses and Someone Else in conversation with artist/writer/ potter/farmer/chef/scholar, Your Name
Title of artwork by artist
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What are you making right now? What are the material conditions that shape what and how you create? What are you explicitly not making?
Throughout this template issue, you’ll find colorful prompts in the place of artwork to inspire your impulse to share, perhaps to create anew.
Caption for artwork above by Your Name
Here’s an example of a MONDAYNIGHTDINNER article from the first issue, an interview with writer Fenton Johnson.
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MONDAYNIGHTDINNER
A CONVERSATION AT THE CENTER Kate Moses interviews writer Fenton Johnson on solitude, artistry, and his new book 8
You have to feel badly for any writer whose book was published in the midst of the coronavirus lockdowns. Except for Kentucky-born novelist and memoir writer Fenton Johnson: his fourth work of nonfiction couldn’t be more timely. At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life hit bookstores just as the global COVID-19 pandemic began to infect the lives of Americans, ushering in an unprecedented lexicon: social distancing and flattening the curve and the difference between the CDC and the WHO, between quarantine and isolation, between alone and lonely. With the lyrical precision, seamless grounding in research, and elegant narrative logic that make his novels and memoirs a literary joy to sink into, Fenton identifies the state of solitude as part of the essential discipline of creators, as necessary as language to writers or clay to ceramicists. “. . . It is the struggle with and in solitude that defines the artist,” he writes early in the book, going on to illuminate the lives of elevenplus “solitaries” as he calls them, iconic figures across the disciplines of painting, philosophy, music, poetry, fi c t i o n w r i t i n g , a n d photography.
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the women artists who achieved fame on the level of their male counterparts were married or mothers. “After a moment Miss Welty responded,” Fenton tells us, “simply and powerfully, ‘I have known love. I have been lucky, in love.’” To be solitary, in Fenton’s view, is not to be without love, to be less than, but to preserve the psychological and practical autonomy that gives us an opportunity for a richer inner life.
FJ: No, I’m not! And another coincidence – I have an abiding interest in the Adirondacks. I’ve thought about leaving Tucson, where I live now, as much as I love Tu c s o n , a n d I ’ m considering a move to the Hudson Valley, which I know well and like a lot. But the Adirondacks – those winters are long. I’ve driven down from Montreal through the Lake Champlain Valley, down to Lake George. It’s certainly very beautiful, beautiful country.
appropriate agreement that you do not talk until late in the afternoon. And around two o’clock in the afternoon, it gets really dull. I used to fight that. I mean, I still do. But what I’ve discovered over and over again is that usually without my being aware of it at the time, a month later or a year later or six years later, I’ll go back and look at the work I did and I’ll say to myself, I was not smart enough to write that sentence. I was not wise enough. I was writing that sentence and TGJ: The Hudson Valley is something took charge similar . . . But there are that was smarter and certain things about the wiser than I am. It’s about weather in the making a space where Adirondacks that you just that deeply buried voice can’t replicate. After my has enough room to first long muggy and emerge. We don’t realize buggy summer here, that even if we have an when Autumn arrived I open, flexible schedule cried the first time I saw like I have here in Tucson, the leaves turn color. The where I spend virtually all second week of October day alone and I’m pretty or so, it’s jaw-dropping. disciplined, there’s still I’d never imagined it like the opportunity for that – the colors just killed distraction. It’s always at The jacket art for At the Center of All Beauty is one of me. It was probably that hand. And the great thing Paul Cezanne’s series of paintings of Mont Saintemuch better because about an arts colony Victoire in the Provencal region of France; from his summer is kind of experience is that it pretty studio in Aix-en-Provence Cezanne painted the miserable for a westm u c h removes the mountain over and over again for years. coaster and it seems as obstacles, particularly if long as winter. Almost. you go there without a car. You’re really thrown onto your own resources. I FJ: This reminds me of the process of staying at arts think it’s important when you are talking to people who colonies. The first time I went to MacDowell I was there are new to it, not to romanticize the experience, for six weeks. That was a week too long. The second because it’s hard. But I found it in every case to be time I’d learned and I went for five weeks, which meant really productive. I did four weeks of really, really, really intense work. But first comes what I call the transcendent boredom, TGJ: You’re right, there’s something that will take over which I think of as a state that is necessary. You need it if you allow it. And that transcendent boredom -- that’s to achieve what you’re at the arts colony to do. The first such a great phrase. I’ve been thinking about that so few days you walk all the trails, you see the pretty sites, much these last two months, about how people are you say hello to the people but you get the very freaking out about having to be at home. And granted,
Adding to the cross section of lives of solitary artists captured in these pages are Fenton’s own and those of his parents: while raising nine children (Fenton the youngest), his mother retreated daily to a greenhouse where she grew orchids, all the more exotic for their location in the rural Kentucky hills; his father was a sculptor who built his own “HERMITage” deep in the w o o d s o u t o f m at e r i a l s s a l v a g e d f ro m t h e modernization of the bourbon distillery where he worked. Growing up, Fenton was influenced not only by his parents and their big Catholic family but by their neighbors and close friends, t h e Tr a p p i s t m o n k s o f Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani (who, with all the Johnson kids, helped on Fenton’s father’s building projects, their walls whiskeyscented from reused cypress).
“Being a writer or an artist demands that we develop a relationship with our solitude.”
“We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, a sentiment many now sheltering at home might find to be untrue -- unless they’re homeschooling for the first time, in which case they would likely agree that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Fenton tells us that Thoreau spent four times as long writing his transcendental opus as he spent living on the pond – “eight drafts in ten years” – and that the book was out of print at the philosopher’s death. We learn that Fenton was present, as a Stanford undergrad, when another student asked Eudora Welty – who had been recently called “America’s greatest living writer,” recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom – “Miss Welty, how is it that you, who have never been married, can write so eloquently of love?” The entire room held its collective breath; awkward as the question was, it wasn’t unreasonable. Until the second half of the twentieth century few of
Photograph byJeff Mertz Sicilian picnic during La Via Di Gangivecchio, Fall 2019
“Being a writer or an artist demands that we develop a relationship with our solitude,” writes Fenton, although he ultimately sees the “challenge and solace of solitude” as far more widely applicable, however essential it may be to artists in particular. “If the journey through our interior landscape is so critical to our characters, let us become more informed and responsible travelers. Let us start by turning off our phones and spending more time alone.” Kate Moses of The Gardan had a chance to catch up with Fenton Johnson via Zoom – what else? – learning that he was awaiting the arrival of a new laptop, which had been shipped from . . . Wuhan, China. TGJ: Oh my god, you’re kidding.
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In times of crisis or change, how do you respond as a creative person? Does conflict or injustice bring you inward, or outward? What does this look like?
TUESDAYCLASS
A RECIPE OR SKILL SHARE By Your Name
Photograph by Your Name
Sharing a favorite recipe is a simple way to offer up a piece of yourself, your culture, or background to those around you. Check out this example by Luke Ayres from the first issue.
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TUESDAYCLASS
TASTING SPRING By Luke Ayres
I was once trying to make a subtle pea-flavored ice cream to accompany a carrot cake dessert for a spring menu. I was unsuccessful using fresh peas; they were doing something weird to the texture, making it chalky and not very delicious.
Sweet Pea ice cream goes great with carrot cake but it could also pair well with some lemon sorbet or with shortbread. This is a fun recipe to use up some of those abundant pea shoots found at most farm markets in early spring.
It finally dawned on me to use pea tendrils and treat them the same way as I would to make basil ice cream. It worked perfectly and the result looked and tasted like spring.
As it gets later in the season, switch the herb to basil and pair with some macerated local strawberries for summer in a bowl.
Sweet Pea Ice Cream 1 cup pea shoots, packed A scant 3/4 cup of sugar 2 cups cream 1 cup milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 6 egg yolks
Strain the pea shoots out of the milk and pour the milk into a clean saucepan to warm over medium heat. Once hot, pour a fine stream of the milk mixture into the eggs, very slowly - a little at a time - whisking constantly. (A hand towel folded under the bowl will hold it in place if you only have two arms.) Gradually pour the rest of the milk mixture into the eggs and whisk until combined.
Combine pea shoots and sugar in a food processor and blend until well chopped and mixed. Scrape contents into a saucepan with the cream and milk. Heat until steaming and just starting to bubble around the sides. Remove from heat and set aside to steep for 30 minutes to an hour. When ready to continue, quickly whisk the egg yolks together in a mixing bowl and set aside.
Pour egg and milk mixture back into the saucepan and heat on medium heat until a thermometer reads 170 degrees. Stir occasionally, as the bottom can scorch if left unattended. When 170 is reached, remove from heat and pass through a fine strainer and into a clean bowl. Place in the fridge to chill. Once cold, churn in your ice cream machine following manufacturer’s specifications.
Photograph of this year’s lambs by Michele Drozd: executive director, ceramic artist, and current farmer
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What does a safe space mean to you? How would you talk about your work in a space without judgment, without pressure, without fear? How would you talk about your work without using words?
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WEDNESDAYCRIT
SHOWING ARTWORK Artists Your Name and Another Artist
ABOVE Title of Film Film by Your Name Click the image above to view www.yourwebsite.com
OPPOSITE PAGE Title of Artwork
Name of Artist 2020 painting or collage or pottery or photography Statement about the work by the artist… www.yourwebsite.com
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All video/audio submissions can be viewed with a click on the digital version of the publication, or found on our website using the URL provided on print copies.
What does anti-racism, inclusion, and accessibility look like in your community?
We’re here to help. Email info@craigardan.org or call 518.242.6535 with any questions or for technical assistance. Once you are ready to send us your submission, small files can be emailed and large files shared via Google Drive or Dropbox to craigardan@gmail.com
Title of artwork by artist
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THURSDAYCHECKIN
SUPPORTING CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS By Your Name Submission Guidelines for All Sections
Submit a small file via email or send a link to an external host.
We invite original submissions on topics that stem from, relate or respond to, and challenge assumptions about creativity in all its forms. Issues are designed, curated, and edited by our team. We respect the artistic integrity of all submissions.
Video - send us links to externally hosted video pieces. Recipes - send us your favorite, seasonal recipes! The more, the merrier. We especially love creative uses of local, seasonal produce and products. Shine a light on your home region and give us some background information on why you shared this particular recipe.
By submitting to The Gardan, you agree that all work submitted is used by permission of the artist, who retains copyright to their work. Submit all images and other large files through Dropbox or Google Drive and all writing via Word or Pages document only. Include your name, photograph, home city and state, and social media handle.
Skill Share - send us a lesson plan or article, up to 1000-words, about a skill or technique you would like to share or teach. This can relate to — but is not limited to — the crafts of writing, cooking, pottery, woodworking, farming, weaving, composing, drawing, or photography.
FridayLectureSeries - we are interested in articles that share knowledge on a diverse array of topics. This section showcases artist talks, research lectures, short stories, and more.
SundayPostcardProject - send us the Vimeo or YouTube link to your video, or the embed code. Smartphone videos should be shared via Dropbox. Please limit your piece to 45 seconds or less in length. One postcard per month will be selected for The Gardan print publication, additional curated submissions will be shared and archived online.
Writing - we invite excerpts of fiction and nonfiction, poetry, short stories, and interviews of varying lengths. Artwork - we invite submissions in all media. Please include a description of the work including materials used, title, year produced, and some context around the work, its inspiration, intention, location of exhibition, etc. Sound - we invite submissions of sound art, or the sounds of what surrounds you. All clips must be less than one minute in length, in .mp3 format only.
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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES
YOUR SHOW, RESEARCH, ARTIST TALK, SHORT STORY By Your Name
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How does your work represent risk? How does your work represent comfort? How do you share your lived human experience?
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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES
ARRIVAL ON HURRICANE MOUNTAIN A Tale in Two Parts By Michele Drozd and TaraMarie Perri The peak of Hurricane Mountain at daybreak by Michele Drozd
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Photograph of an artist-inresidence throwing off the hump by Ben Stechschulte
Performance: Thomas Graves and Jennifer Kidwell
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When young potters learn the science of clay and glazes, they learn chemistry, geology, and the history of earth itself. It is powerful stuff.
Clay is a material that talks back. Its birthplace, geologic lineage, handling, grit, and the mood of its handler all influence the conversation. The artist may coerce, nudge, beg, bargain, or sweet-talk clay into doing what they want - but clay often has its own agenda, hidden deep in its history, which will contribute to the message regardless of the handler’s best intentions. We must simply embrace the moment that emerges.
Craigardan was founded by potters on the western flank of Hurricane Mountain. As with most good tales, Craigardan has multiple points of origin. One dreamer laid an architectural foundation, one dreamer believed that art and food and farming are inseparable, one dreamer saw life in community-building. And so it goes.
Clay is a global material. It can be found under the fingernails of every culture from the earliest beginnings of humankind to the most modern of modern makers. It is humble and luxurious. Malleable, yet defiant. It teaches as it learns. It is functional and sculptural and everything in between. It is love and hate, the best days and the worst. It is addiction and necessity.
In its first few years, Craigardan grew on the energy of the people it served. As is the case with most epic adventures, the young organization met conflict, had to leave its birth place, and thus set out into the world to find its true place. Hurricane Mountain is a sentinel in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. It stands at the nexus of wilderness and environmental conservation; historic and current preservation efforts; mountain living and the resurgence of farming; and the survival of rural economies and small towns.
Clay can be collaborative and inclusive, requiring large families or small towns to pitch in on its gathering and firing. Clay can be isolating, solitary, and meditative — offering process as art and art as life in the most monastic way.
Just as we left the mountain, it drew us back home.
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Here’s an example of a FRIDAYLECTURESERIES article and artwork submission from the first issue, an origin story about Craigardan in two parts.
“Your brilliant, enlightening, joyful, thoughtful, fearful, questioning, angry, impassioned, expansive, relatable, or uncomfortable quote or poem here.” — Your Name
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What represents nature around you? Does that nature inspire you? Your work? If the built environment is your nature, how do you respond?
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SATURDAYFARMSHARE
OUR FARM OR YOURS By Your Name
"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our databanks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.�
THEGARDAN
— Arundhati Roy
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Tell us about your farm or food adventures; real or aspiring, urban or rural, large or small. Send photos, sound, notes, lessons learned, or inspiration for others to connect with food and the environment around them. 1
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Who are you as a person? Who are you as an artist? What do you see, hear, taste, touch, smell in the world around you right now?
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SUNDAYPOSTCARDPROJECT
SEND US A MESSAGE
This video postcard comes from Your Name in Your Town, State.
Your video or audio submission will be accessed with a click on the digital version of the publication, and found on our website with URL for print copies.
ABOVE: Title
Click the audio/video links above, or listen to Your Name's postcards online at: www.craigardan.org/sundaypostcardproject
The Sunday Postcard Project is a way to say hello, send out a virtual message in a bottle, and know that your message will be heard and appreciated. In 45 seconds or less, tell us how you’re doing - show us what you’re working on, what you see, hear, smell, taste. Describe what you’re listening to or reading. Show us what you’ve made. Describe the place you’re in — or share whatever you’re moved to share. Find submission guidelines online at www.craigardan.org/journalsubmission. One submission will be selected for each publication of The Gardan. All postcards will be shared and archived on our website.
Photograph courtesy of Your Name
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Musician Taylor Haskins
THIS SPACE IS OPEN FOR YOU Come Be You.
Come be the best you for a better world.
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