Integrity, Simplicity, and Grace

Our class spent the first two days of the program learning to bevel our chisels to the proper angle and then sharpen them. The back of the chisel must be perfectly flat, and the front must be angled at twenty-five to thirty degrees, the edge even and razor sharp. Our leaders—Peter (here demonstrating how to grind a uniform hollow bevel), Bobby Sukrachand, and Eddie Orellana—are infinitely patient but show no forgiveness if a step is incorrectly executed. They know that what Peter says is true— “You can’t bullshit a chisel.” If it’s not beveled and sharpened properly, we will never make effective joinery.

On top of a small bookcase in Peter Korn’s office at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine, is a sign that reads You Can’t Bullshit a Chisel. It was made for Peter by a fan who attended a lecture he gave as part of a tour for his 2013 book, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. I’m in Peter’s office, interviewing him after spending two weeks in his Basic Woodworking course at the school—of which he is the founder and director. The course was a unique challenge for me, as I had never before done even the smallest woodworking task beyond sanding some boards and, with the help of a friend, sawing them. Yet in just the first few days in Rockport, I was tasked with milling a piece of poplar four-square (meaning to the point where the faces and edges are straight, square, and parallel to one another) and hand-cutting both a dovetail and a mortise and tenon, the most essential forms of joinery for fine furniture making, with chisels I sharpened myself.

Peter coined the phrase on the sign, a sage shorthand, while traveling to promote his book. When I ask him to elaborate, he does so thoughtfully, relying on the same methodical logic and underlying philosophical nuance with which he writes and with which he instructed me and my eleven classmates throughout our workshop. “In some areas of life, mistakes or skipped steps are acceptable as long as the final result looks good. But in woodworking, the quality of the result depends entirely on the excellence with which you accomplish every little step along the way. You can’t leapfrog; you can’t pretend. Woodworking repays close intention. It repays integrity.”

Using a back-and-forth rocking motion on a sharpening stone, without applying pressure, I hone the blade on my chisel to create the sharpest edge possible. Without a sharp edge, I will not be able to cut and fit my joinery with the required precision.

“There is a certain type of emotional or spiritual hunger we have that isn’t answered by anything but making physical objects.”

For Peter, integrity is key in every aspect of his life, a priority he traces back to his secondary education at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, where he also developed an unequivocal commitment to community. Although he went on to the University of Pennsylvania and studied history (as a precursor, perhaps, to becoming a lawyer like his father), he segued into woodworking and found his way in life first as a carpenter in the early 1970s, then as a full-time fine furniture designer and maker, and, ultimately, as the teacher, administrator, and author (as well as sailor and sourdough bread maker) he is today.

Peter founded the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in 1993, following a six-year stint as program director at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in the Colorado Rockies. Although the school has grown and developed significantly since then (from two rooms in a converted barn that could accommodate only six students at a time to a vibrant nonprofit with three large workshops, a gallery, an endowment, a scholarship fund, and a visiting artists program), its mission, according to Peter, has been constant: “To teach woodworking from the point of view that designing and creating beautiful, useful things is just as much an exploration of what is important in life—what it is to be a human being, and how we should live—as any other art form, including the fine arts.” In fact, that mission parallels Peter’s lived experience, the benefits of which he shares with the approximately four hundred students and fellows who make use of the school’s facilities each year.

During the summer and fall seasons, CFC runs a full curriculum of thirty different one- and two-week courses for beginning and experienced woodworkers, most of whom are hobbyists ranging from about seventeen to eighty-something years old. Throughout the year, the school offers longer-term and more intensive eight-week, twelve-week, and nine-month courses, plus fellowships, generally undertaken by younger students who seek to develop their skills for professional purposes.

As I practice grinding a uniform hollow bevel, I am developing trust in my own hands, eyes, and instincts.

My class consists of nine men and three women, hailing from all over the country. Rex is an economist with the World Bank who has been trying to teach himself woodworking by watching YouTube videos. William, an internist from Mississippi whose wife and baby have come to Maine with him, wants to make furniture for their home, starting with a kitchen table. Ian is a Massachusetts-based quality engineer for the aerospace and semiconductor industries who also studied theology and ethics at Harvard Divinity School and is residing in a tent in the woods on the school’s grounds for the length of the course (the rest of us have secured more conventional housing nearby). As a child, he dreamed of pursuing a career in the arts, an aspiration his father didn’t support.

One day, as we eat lunch at the picnic tables outside our studio, Ian says something that catches my attention: “I wonder how different my life would have been if I had worked with my hands. Most of what I have done has been intellectual stuff, and I don’t have much to show for it.” Instructor Eddie Orellana, who completed the CFC’s twelve-week Furniture Intensive a few months ago and is an assistant for our class, is acting upon a similar curiosity and a hunch that he is meant for something different—he worked in the tech industry in Texas, but, as of recently, he is seeking a career in woodworking because he wants to “make something where you can see the result.”

These stories are familiar to Peter, who hears similar ones every session. “There is a certain type of emotional or spiritual hunger we have that isn’t answered by anything but making physical objects,” he explains. “There is something that most people don’t get nearly enough of—and get even less of now than they have historically—because more and more of our lives are at keyboards and computer screens and more and more fabrication is done by pushing buttons and watching output than by taking a tool in our hands and understanding how to use it.”

Each task in hand joinery requires a razor-sharp chisel in a particular size.

While our group spends one week practicing the basics of hand joinery and one week designing and building a bench with those newly acquired skills, in the bench room next to ours, more-experienced woodworkers are taking classes in precision with hand tools and veneering. Across the yard, around which all the red clapboard buildings sit, are two additional workshops where students in the twelve-week Furniture Intensive and fellows are intently focused on their individual projects.

Jesslyn Stanley and I share our brown-bag lunches on the steps outside her studio at the beginning of my second week. She traveled here from Georgia for a twelve-week course—following an apprenticeship with a woodworker back in Atlanta—and would like to grow her business, Lluu Evelyn Furniture (named in memory of her grandmothers), when she returns home. “A lot of my motivation comes from the influence of people in my family who gave me their care and unconditional love. I can put that back into furniture I make and give it to someone else,” she tells me. “Woodworking is connected to my well-being, to how I want to be seen in the world, and to the mark I leave.”

Once our chisels are properly prepared, we will begin to learn how to execute a mortise and tenon (center right)and then a dovetail (bottom right), the most essential forms of joinery for fine furniture making. Before nails and screws became commonplace, these types of joints were standard. When clean and tight, they remain sturdy for centuries.

The next day, Yuri Kobayashi and I eat our lunch in the library, which is adjacent to the school’s gallery. Yuri trained as an architect then as a woodworker in Japan; she came to the United States on an exchange program and decided to stay in part because she feels she is able to express her creativity more freely here. She teaches every other semester at the Rhode Island School of Design and spends much of the rest of the year at CFC as a senior fellow. Her focus is sculpture, with which, she explains, she is able to transcend language barriers and express her identity, experiences, and thoughts. At CFC, she says, she has found a second family, a home.

Although no one actually lives on campus (unless, like Ian, they decide to pitch a tent for a while), there is a sense of camaraderie, especially among those who study here long term or come back to teach regularly. “The school is a node where people, many of whom work in isolation, build peer relationships all over the world. It has enriched so many people’s professional and personal lives,” Peter explains.

During the summer season, the community gathers on Monday nights for a slide show led by an instructor or fellow, and on Thursday nights, everyone on campus (plus friends of the school who are visiting or live nearby) partakes in a lobster boil/potluck dinner followed by a croquet match. The game is a fun tradition that Peter started back in the early days of the school, when a friend sent him a croquet set as a gift. “It brings people together in way that doesn’t happen in the workshop. It is one of the tools for making the school run well,” he says. It’s true. There’s lots of laughter and friendly banter during the game, and when we reconvene the next morning, we all seem to feel a bit closer, more at ease moving from bench to bench to look at one another’s progress, ask for advice, and, inevitably, share stories about our quest for perfect joints and the challenges we are facing along the way.

Bobby kindly explains why my chisel needs further refinement to be work ready. Bobby is based in Brooklyn, where he says there are thousands of young people trying to figure out how to make it as designer-woodworkers. He hypothesizes that many of them grew up like him, on a college-preparatory path that ignored the value of hands-on work.

At the workbench across from mine is Beth, a software developer from Colorado who has come here, she says, because though she is pretty good at a lot of crafts, she wants to focus on one and develop some mastery around it. In my view, she is a woodworking wunderkind, able to grasp concepts quickly and possessing the emotional and physical stamina necessary to achieve excellence. She is also warm and supportive of my ongoing struggle with this new world. Even operating the vise at my bench is a challenge for me, let alone paring down the sides of my mortise so they are perfectly straight and square, allowing the tenon to slide into it securely. But Beth’s encouragement is unwavering, as is that of Peter and the other instructors. That mood of commitment to excellence and positivity is ingrained in every aspect of how the school is run—“If you don’t work that way, you don’t stay here long,” Peter says—and is naturally absorbed by the students.

Although Peter, at seventy, is planning his retirement in a few years, he is not slowing down. Instead, he is gearing up to make sure the school he founded has a rich future. The goal is not growth but to make it better, which means increasing its social contribution. He is spearheading an endowment campaign to fund more of the fellowship positions as well as a new scholarship program called Teaching the Teachers. With excitement, he tells me: “We are going to partner with institutions around the country that teach woodworking to benefit disadvantaged communities, primarily secondary schools, community colleges, and vocational schools. The idea is for them to send one of their teachers here to take a course, to have the experience of our learning environment, curriculum, equipment, and facility. We hope that the experience will enrich their own teaching for a lifetime.”

Senior fellow Yuri Kobayashi at the band saw.

As I prepare to say a grateful good-bye to Peter and return to the bench room one last time to clean up, I mention how reflective his goals today are of his early Quaker schooling. “I completely carry it with me,” he says. “I’m not a Quaker, but what I absorbed there is that what matters is the spiritual dimension of your life, which expresses itself not by becoming rich and famous but by what you contribute to the well-being of the world as it is, or what you do to tidy up your little corner. Independent thought and service to community are parts of that Quaker ideal.”

Early on in his career as a fine furniture maker, Peter reflected on his personal values and identified integrity, simplicity, and grace as the qualities he was aiming to achieve in his work. Years later, he realized that the reason he became a furniture maker was, in fact, to try to cultivate those very same qualities in himself. This realization led him to write Why We Make Things and Why It Matters as a way to share his ideas. It also guides the way he runs the CFC and the way he is working with his team to prepare the school for his retirement so that it will live on far into the future. No bullshit ever.

Yuri’s workstation, with a close-up of her experiments bending wood, studies for her sculptural work.

Yuri assists two students in the twelve-week Furniture Intensive with clamping and gluing.

Each morning, I entered our workshop through this welcoming, flower-lined pathway. Lunches and the Thursday-night potluck/lobster boil are enjoyed at the picnic tables to the left.

At the end of our two weeks at CFC, our class stands proud and happy in front of finished benches.