photo by Barbara Swell
How do you describe an experience you’ll remember the rest of your life? With great difficulty. My ten day trip to North Carolina was so dense with experience that I have to break it up into manageable parts. First up is at look at the John C. Campbell Folk School where I co-taught a Pie Camp with author and teacher Barbara Swell (who I’ll write about in detail in a later post).
Barbara invited me to co-teach Pie Camp at the John C. Campbell Folk School, a treasure of a place where you can spend a week surrendering to whatever craft interests you. It’s a camp, built according to a non-competitive Danish model 90 years ago in the midst of the mountains and farmland of Southern Appalachia in North Carolina. Name a craft and it’s taught there in a week long session by a skilled and passionate expert. The non-competitive basis of the classes, combined with the beauty that surrounds at every glance opens you up to new experiences with people, your craft and your environs. Everything you touch at the camp is created through the workshops. The hand rails (blacksmithing), the pergolas (timber framing), the chairs (woodworking), the gardens, the stacked stone walls you sit and lean on, the wood fired ovens and on and on. You’re fed three times a day at the communal camp dining hall so all you need to do is wake up and play. It’s the kind of getaway that feeds the child inside who is grownup enough to focus for hours on end making stuff.
Surrender to this video which gives a great idea of what it’s like to be there. Stay until the end and you’ll see several of the workshop spaces.
or check out these photographs generously supplied by Keather Gougler of the Folk School.
