JA’s still in my head

To continue some of the introductory material here, I want today to write about Jennie Alexander's influence on my career. I mentioned earlier that I met JA (then John Alexander, later transitioning to Jennie - it’s all the same person) and Drew Langsner when I went to Drew’s place in 1980 to take a chair-making class. The back half of the 1980s I was there a lot and during that time JA & I somehow connected. In our book Make a Joint Stool from a Tree, we described how our collaboration in joined furniture started. Because we lived far apart, we wrote it all down, complete with sketches and slides. These notes below are typical - sketches, diversions, theories to be tested and results yea or nay about tested theories. My favorites have the JA signature with the sketch representing Theodore - the bear JA kept near at hand most of the time. 

It was a cumbersome undertaking by today’s standards -for me, it meant a trip to a photocopier, often the library. But it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I had nothing to compare it to, so didn’t think about it. JA told me to make copies of my outgoing letters so we would each have the whole back & forth correspondence. She had taught me rudiments of photography (later, digital cameras made a world of difference for me) including bracketing our exposures. So we usually had 2 or more shots of each image, enough to share. 

I must have deep-sixed some of my copies at one point - thinking that I’d end up with 2 copies upon Alexander’s death. As it turned out, her papers went to the Winterthur Museum and Gardens Library. I did find one full 3-ring binder today, mostly concerned with drafts of our book and preparations for various workshops and demonstrations. This stack of pages spans April 1992 to early Nov 1993.

Ultimately our correspondence shifted to emails late in the 1990s. And eventually JA’s health deteriorated to the point where shop work was a thing of the past. My wordpress blog served as a way for us to keep up our banter, JA was a regular commenter to posts there. 

It’s coming up to five years since her death but I still think of her all the time when I’m working. There’s no way for me not to…all this oak furniture I’m making started with her prodding me to test her ideas. Alexander was a lawyer in real life and never had enough time to delve as deeply into woodworking as she’d have liked. So someone with a young(er) back and an interest was a perfect match. I used to say we taught each other joinery without either of us knowing how to do it. 

I have been reading the earlier notebooks and parts of them tell the story of JA’s woodworking. I have some of her papers here too, when I’m done with them I’ll add them to the collection at Winterthur. What I found out is that she’d write letters in her notebooks and send the recipient a photocopy. So I’ve been able to piece together some great bits of that story. The pandemic interrupted that research and now this year I’m sticking close to home for different reasons. But more time in the library at Winterthur is on my “to be done” list. 

The joint stool book is through Lost Art Press https://lostartpress.com/products/make-a-joint-stool-from-a-tree