Interview with Jim Escalante

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # ESCALANTE, JIM ESCALANTE, JIM (19-) Book Artist At UW: Interviewed: 2018 (2 sessions) Interviewer: Sarah Lang Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 4 hours, 32 minutes First Interview Session (April 10, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: We have it just on audio. So today is April 10, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking today with Jim Escalante, professor of book arts at UW Madison. And we're at the university archives in Steenbock Library. So Jim, I thought maybe you could tell us a little about your growing up in Mexico first. Can you talk a little bit about your family life and how art was a part of it? JE: Well I, when my parents became older and the last, one of the last times I went to visit my mother, my father had already died, my mother is of, she never really shared specifically, but she would refer to her family heritage as being some Irish, some English, some French, but they were all European. And she grew up in a very rural area of north Texas around the Wichita Falls area. But a very small community. And she met my father, I think she had gone to a west Texas town called Big Spring. She was the youngest of about eight siblings. And she was by far the youngest. There was a long range. So I suspect that she went to live with relatives in Big Spring. She found work in a bank. So this would have been early World War Two. My father, who was from Brownsville, Texas, both his parents were from Mexico. Dad's father was from around Mexico City. The city where the pyramids are, San Juan de Teotihuacan is the little town. And I think he went to Mexico City to work and live. And I don't know exactly the year, but it was 1910 or 1911. At that time, Mexico was in enormous unrest due to the revolution. And so either in 1910 or '11, my grandfather, Alfonso Escalante, went to Brownsville. And I always tell the story that he got, I never met him, he died when my dad was young. But he got to the United States, crossed the border, and [unclear] I'm here. And he must have chosen a place where he could be, feel that he was safe but he could see Mexico. Because I always joke, he couldn't 00:01:00 have gone to Houston? He couldn't have gone in San Antonio? But he stayed right on the border in Brownsville. 00:02:51 And when he married, he crossed the border to Matamoros, which is the bordering town, and he met [Maureen Oliveras?], his wife. And they got married and lived in Brownsville. And she, of course, never spoke English. And I met her as a young child. And in that time, we would switch between Spanish and English and sometimes not even think about what language we were speaking in. So for me to say that she never spoke English, I don't really know, because I would have communicated with her in what was most comfortable. But I suspect that she never did learn to speak English. My father, so sometime during World War Two, he went to, 00:02:00 there was an air field at the time somewhere around Big Springs. I don't know if it's still active. But he was, in those days it was the army air corps, it wasn't the air force. And he was a bombardier and was going through training. And he met this, he and a buddy went to meet this woman who was working at the bank who ended up being my mother. And when he got shipped off somewhere, he told my father to look out for her while he was gone. (laughs) And he did. And I don't know how they, my family, my parents didn't share a lot. But one night she was talking this story, and so they got together. And they got married during the second war. So Dad was stationed in Okinawa, and at the end of the war came back. And he had grown up on, I think it was the Brownsville Country Club. It was a municipal course, it wasn't a private course. He had grown up on that course and I think my father was one of the youngest players to become a professional player, a golfer, in the '40s. I've done a little bit of research. He would not have been the first Mexican-American to join the PGA, but he would have been an early member of the PGA as a professional golfer. And of course professional golfers in the '40s is a different, is a different sequence to join than it is today. Today you have people that work 00:03:00 on courses, and then you have people that play on the pro tour. And in those days, in the '40s, it was very different. But Dad, besides the four years that he was in the air corpus, or air force, he worked his entire life on golf courses. So after the war, he went back to Brownsville, had two children. My brother, my sister's the oldest and then my brother. And he met a businessman who used to come up from Mexico and would play golf where my dad was. And he told my dad that golf was becoming a very popular thing in Mexico. And that with his golf experience, and being bilingual, he would certainly be able to make a good life there. And I've reflected on that. Dad never spoke about any experiences growing up as a Mexican-American. I mean, south Texas is unique in that many parts of south Texas are predominantly people of Mexican lineage. But my father, who graduated from high school in 00:04:00 Brownsville, was a decorated officer from the Second World War. In 1950, made a decision that he felt he would have better economic opportunity by going to Mexico than staying in the United States. He never spoke about discrimination or the lack of opportunity. But I think if you look at his life and where he was in life as a-you know, I'm not saying a high school graduate today is anything. But I think he might have graduated from high school in the late '30s, maybe. And I think he was a recognized high school student. A decorated officer from World War Two. And he decides that he'll have a better economic life to go to Mexico. So he went first to, I've never been to it, to Torreon, which is a northern, a little bit northern, east. And then from there went to a really well known, established golf club, [Chutahusco?] in Mexico City. Then about 1954 was the year that I was born, there was an economic destabilization, to a certain 00:05:00 extent. And I think it gave my dad pause because I was born in Mexico. And at six months, he returned to his old job in Brownsville, Texas. And he never spoke why they went back. But at one point they were talking about when Mexico was having devaluations in their money, he was reflecting a little bit on 1954 when there was a devaluation. And there was something about it that must have, here again my father didn't share a lot of details. But he was at a great golf course in Mexico City, one of the premier courses, and he goes back to what is considered a little bitty municipal course, not one of the premier golf course in the United States. So then in about 1957 he got invited to work on a golf course in Monterrey. There was an established course there, and then they were building a new course called Valle Alto, in 1957ish he went back. And northern Mexico is unique in that it is very bicultural. Monterey is obviously a very 00:06:00 industrial Mexican city. But it's so close to Texas that there's a lot of, in those days there was probably a lot more interchange between tourism. You could be at the border, even in those days in older cars, I think you could be up to the border in a comfortable five-hour drive. So he worked there for five years. So if that was '57, till about '62, '61, '62. He was invited to one of the major golf courses in Mexico City. And in those days, there were only five. And he finished his working career at a golf course in Mexico City called Chapultepec. So I grew up in a bicultural, bilingual experience. My mom was, as she was a west Texas farm girl. And she married Alfonso Escalante and moved to Mexico in 1950s. She came from a very rural area in Texas. There wasn't a lot there. So for her, I don't know that it 00:07:00 would have been that much of a cultural change. Because, you know, dirt farms in northern Texas aren't different from dirt farms in Mexico. But they never spoke about what it was like for her-I mean, she came from very, very basic rural America. So it wasn't, in a sense, I think she, there was, Dad was in a uniform. Dad was, he was a handsome man. So I think a young, handsome man in a uniform can convince a lot of people. I don't know that. But they were married for well over fifty years. 00:11:00 So we grew up in different parts of Mexico City. I still think Mexico City as the founding, what shaped me. And I lived in Mexico City from about '62 to '70, when I came to the United States to go to an all-boys boarding school in Bryan, Texas. It's called Allen Military Academy and I spent my eleventh and twelfth grade. 00:08:00 My parents pretty much assumed, and we grew up with the understanding that we were in Mexico working, but when we became of age, we would go to the United States. I don't know that my sister felt that way. And of course there were very clear gender roles in my family growing up. But the two boys, we were surely encouraged to think about college. We were expected to think about college. And college in those days meant to go to the United States. And neither one of them had any experience with college, to my knowledge. So it was always this very, very hard thing to do, to get into college. So the pressure to do well in school was very prominent. School was never easy for me. So I had a friend going to this Allen Military Academy. And it got me thinking that if I wanted to go to an American college, I should probably graduate from an American high school. Which is probably a good, it probably makes sense. I don't know that 00:09:00 it was good advice. But the school I went to was a military school. And it was not as rigorous as the school that I was going to in Mexico City. I was going to the American school for high school. I went to other schools for others. And it was a very good school, and it was very hard. But then again, you grow up and you're in Mexico and you automatically feel you're at a lower tier than if you were living in the United States. So when I got to the United States, I realized that this school is not as hard as mine. And then I went to North Texas State, which in those days, it's now called University of North Texas, which in those days I don't think was very rigorous to get in. And I'm now completely confident that if I had decided to 00:10:00 go to North Texas State from my high school in Mexico, I would have certainly gotten in. But these are things that, you know, the children of first generation college people, we didn't have a clue. And we didn't even know who to talk to. And in retrospect I imagine there were good counselors at the high school I was at. There were certainly parents that had gone to college. But you just don't know who to ask and whatever. But so, when it became time to choose to go to college, I didn't, you know, the military school was very small and they really didn't have any effective advising kinds of, you know career counselling or anything. They'd get you out and they'd make sure that you made minimum requirements to get into college. But how we came across choosing colleges, my dad never talked about finances. So I 00:11:00 didn't think we were in any ability to go to, I mean, a lot of the kids at the military school. I mean, I later found out that my dad had to borrow money for me to go to the boarding school. You know, in Mexico, borrowing money is different, because I think he borrowed it from a friend. And I don't know, you know, how he paid him back or anything. But I figured that there were kids there at the school going to Rice, they were applying to Rice in Houston, Southern Methodist in Dallas. I knew those were private schools. And for some reason, I just never felt that that was a viable place for me. I can't point to anything. But it just didn't seem like something viable. 00:15:44 So I was in the library and they had a 00:12:00 collection of college, you know, the college catalogs. And there was one at north Texas, which is NTSU, North Texas State. It was right north of Dallas. And that sounded, I liked the idea. My dad was from Texas. And when my father said you could go to the United States, what he meant was, you can go to Houston, Dallas, San Antonio. You can go anywhere. But for him, I mean, if you've never met somebody from Texas, there's this, the world is Texas. And anything other than that is just like, huh? And so I told my mom that I was going to apply to north Texas. And she was really excited, primarily because she had had sisters there. But just to sort of illustrate how little we understood about college was that she said, "You know, Jimmy, that's where Gladys," her sister Gladys, "went. And that's where they teach people how to 00:13:00 be teachers." So it was a normal school. And now that I'm at a Research I, you understand the hierarchy of that one of the lowest forms of academic tier is the normal school, the teaching. You know, they're no longer normal schools. They were teacher colleges. And University of North Texas is now in a completely different. But it was interesting that my mom thought oh my goodness, you're going to go to the school where they teach people how to be teachers. And so that was exciting. My brother had gone to Texas A&M. And that was the only college that my dad had friends that had gone to. And they had all gone to Texas A&M because they learned to be greenkeepers on golf courses. But Texas A&M, my brother says don't go there. It was pretty much an all-boys school. And it was a very, very harsh military ROTC program. And it's a unique school. So I didn't want to go there. And I was also very 00:14:00 close to A&M, and I didn't particularly find Bryan, Texas all that exciting. So I went to North Texas. And my brother had gone to A&M and had come home his first Christmas, or maybe the second Christmas that he had gone away. And he had bought a camera. And he was studying journalism. And one part of the journalism, he took a photography course. And my brother was seven or eight years older than I am, so we didn't have a lot of connection. And then when he came back home, Mexico City during Christmas is, well, Mexico City in those days was ten million people. I mean, it's a city of, easily 500-year history. And it's a large city which produces an enormous amount of decorations and such over Christmas. So he said, "Let's go downtown and take pictures." And I had never even thought of that. But it was a chance to be with my brother. And he started talking about the camera. And if you do this with a camera and if you do that with a camera. And it was just one of the most exciting 00:15:00 things that I had ever experienced to hear. And it was partly my brother. Because I didn't know my brother, but I had this older brother. And in those days, of course, we didn't have any way to develop the pictures. So I don't ever remember seeing them. But he was able to really spark my imagination just by describing what the camera can do. So I teamed up with two other buddies, Joe [Peer?] and Freddy [Zoller?] in my high school. And Freddy, he was from a family where they were just ingenious. They made things. He had hobbies where they would fly airplanes and they'd make things. It wasn't, Freddy's family just didn't go buy things. They were makers, they would tinker things and they would make things. I watched my mother sew, and so I had the experience of watching her sew and make things. But I had never 00:16:00 really constructed anything. So when Freddy had this little storeroom that we could make into a darkroom, my world became exciting. So I started doing photography in high school. Joe, I think, was on the yearbook. In retrospect, there's so many things I did younger, I can't believe. But I didn't have the confidence or the, I didn't have the confidence to go even to the yearbook and join the yearbook. And so I hung out with Joe when he would develop pictures for the yearbook. He taught me how to develop. And I would help him develop. But I was never part of the yearbook. 00:20:40 So photography got my interest at that point. And so even when I was in the military school, they didn't have any art classes. But they created a requirement that after school you either had to join a sports team or a club. And a couple of us went to the chemistry teacher and said, "We'd like to create a photo club." And 00:17:00 here again, I only went to the teacher because two of my other buddies were going to be the mouthpiece, and I was just going to be hanging around as a number. So they said, "Sure, we'll create a darkroom." And so even in high school I sort of had this interest in photography and started subscribing to the popular magazines. And in study hall or in the library, they had a couple. I think they had Popular Photography or something. So I would read those and learned a lot about that. So I was very interested in photography. But everybody told me that photography was a nice hobby, but you don't make a living at it. It's not what you do for a living. So what do I do with that? So I got to college and have no idea what I'm going to major in. And I have this, at that point even a stronger interest in photography. And I started looking at schools that just taught photography, like technical schools. I'm not sure, I didn't have the courage to just move out of Denton and go to, I just didn't know what that would take. I didn't have a job, I didn't have any 00:18:00 money. So I began taking the general requirements. And at North Texas I think when you entered your junior year, you had to have a major. In those days, you went to the big gymnasium to register. There was nothing online. So you would have these checks. There would be a table to see if you-this is what was so interesting to me. There were two stopgaps. You couldn't get past the P.E. table if you hadn't taken four credits of P.E. or registered for a P.E. class. And then you'd go to the next stopgap, which would be a barrier table which said, "Have you finished your English requirements?" You had to have two years of English. And so by this time, I'd done my P.E. and I'd done my English, so I could get past them. And then you have to, what is your major? Well, the only creative major that I could think of was marketing. And I don't know why that sounded creative to me, because I think maybe I was thinking of advertising. And so they said okay, you've selected marketing. Well my floor manager in the, 00:19:00 the floor resident in the dorm was an advertising major with an interest in photography. And he saw my photographs. And he was the first person who ever said, "We have a photo major here. Why don't you major in photography?" And I was like, "Well, I was told you're not supposed to do that." So I owe Tom, Tommy Morgason. He said, "I'm going to introduce you to Don [Scholl?]." In those days, photography was really popular. And there was one teacher, and he was swamped. And he must have prepared Don. Because he told me where to be. And there was no way I was going to go up to Don [Scholl?] without an introduction. There's just no way. So I'm sitting outside and Tommy comes out-in Texas, you're Jimmy and Tommy-but Tommy comes out with Don. Not Donny, But Don. And he says, "Don, I want to introduce you to Jim Escalante." He said, "Hey, great to meet you." And he was so, not excited, but he was forward moving, that it took away all my fear. So he must have told 00:20:00 Don. I knew Don for two years. And that was really not his personality. And so Tommy must have done something. And later on I realized how much that initial, that small push for people to just be sort of given permission to do something. So I showed Don my photographs. And he said, "Yeah, you can be an art major. You have to take all these prerequisites. And all these prerequisites have to be taken before photography. But I'll let you in my photo class." And so then I had to go make up all these classes. And I was stunned that there were people there, in there, in a summer class, claiming to be photo majors. And didn't really know much about-I mean, I wasn't a genius, but I had studied enough and taught myself enough that I was amazed. I thought we were going to be at a much higher level. I mean, college was not easy for me. High school was not easy for me. So I was grateful that the intro to photo class was really a basic, there were a lot of people taking it as an intro class, not as their first class 00:21:00 as part of a major. So then after that semester, I had to go back and start taking all the, you know, drawing ones and drawing twos. So, my introduction to an art major. So I had never had an art class going into an art major. The only thing I felt comfortable in was photography. And I felt pretty comfortable, especially when I saw what the level of my classroom colleagues were. And then I met, when I was there, I met some of the advanced people. And I'm still very close with one of the people who was, was a little bit older. He had gone into the Marines and served in Vietnam. Had been in the Marines for ten years and then came out. And through the GI Bill, he started his photography studies, and we became close, close friends. So I met my wife in that class that summer. She had to take photography. She was a grad student. And she had to take it because in order to graduate with a master's of fine arts degree, you have to have taken photography as an undergrad. Seems like prerequisites in courses were a lot more adhered to back 00:22:00 then. But she had to take it as a deficiency to make up, because she didn't have it as an undergrad. And so we became friends. That was in '74 and we've been together ever since. So I graduated from there. It was a lot of credits. They had to have a lot of, they had a major, you had to have a major, a minor, and an option. And so there were just lots of credits to take care of. 00:27:49 SL: Did you, how long did it take you? JE: It was four years. I mean, I went, I had to go three summers to make up, because I didn't have a major. And then there were some creative sort of advising that I was able to-I had taken a Spanish class my first semester. And it was an advanced level Spanish. What was interesting is, I think it was the fall of '75, there was a class called Chicano literature. It was in the Spanish class. So there was a woman who taught a course, semester-long course, on Chicano, or literature by Chicanos. They weren't autobiographies, but they were-but it was, I tell people it was the only class, 00:23:00 I mean, art history we talked about three Mexican artists: Diego Rivera, Alfaro Siqueiros and [Rosco, Lavida Rosco?]. But you know, in art history, in four semesters of art history, those were probably the three only times that Mexican artists were mentioned. And so in four years of college in north Texas, the Chicano literature was the only class that I had that really covered anything about-in most cases, the Chicano experience and what was being written about was the California experience. But it was, it was such an amazing class. And of course it wasn't that the teacher was so, I mean, she was very courageous, I think, to even propose that. You'd think in Texas it wouldn't be. But most Spanish programs around the country were really looking at the golden era of Spanish literature. And most of them weren't really focusing on anything south of the United States. You know, some in Mexico, of course, but forget 00:24:00 any other Central or South American country. And it wasn't until the '80s that some schools really began to recognize that there was some amazing literature being written in Colombia and Argentina and Peru and Mexico. So that was an exciting class because it was the first time that I had heard really stories of migration, farm work, discrimination based on just working conditions and the like. I mean, we weren't rich, but Dad never, I mean, Dad had very steady work. Dad's family was never part of any migrant work. I mean, he was in the service and all. But I think he had always pretty good work. So in 1976 I graduated. And Mary's mother had moved back to Racine. Mary was born in Racine. Her mother and father married during the Second World War, and settled in Racine, where Mary's mother's 00:25:00 family were from, Greek immigrants. And I don't know if it's still there, but there used to be a really, sort of really nice furniture store called Porter's of Racine. 00:31:21 SL: I think it might still be there. JE: Yeah. And her dad worked there. I don't know if he was a salesperson. Coming back from the army, he may have just gotten work, and worked. But at some point he found that he could become a salesman for one of the vendors that they sold. And he signed on and he moved the family to Saint Louis. I think he was from Missouri. And I think it was a big surprise to his mother. Mary was real young. But they moved to Saint Louis. And they ended up getting divorced. So Mary finished high school there and went to college at William Woods in Fulton, Missouri. And I met her when she went to graduate school at North Texas. So she got her MFA and I got my BFA the same year, 1976, May. So we moved all our stuff to Racine. Mary had received a, she had been able to postpone the receipt of a Rotary scholarship where she was 00:26:00 going to go to France to study for a year. So we went to Racine. And I hit Racine in one of their many recessions. So I couldn't find summer work. And I think part of it was, I was only going to be there for about a month. So I did a lot of hourly work. I had found places where they needed someone for an hour. I mean, not an hour, but a day, and a day. So I painted houses and I mowed lawns and I did all kinds of stuff. I didn't really make significant money, but at least I was making some money. So in May of '76, we went to France and we studied an intense French for three months at the Alliance Francaise. She had a fellowship to go, so I kind of coached along. So then we went, the Rotary wants to put you in towns that are the towns that Americans generally don't go to. So she was advised don't put Paris, because everybody wants to go to Paris. So if you pick a town away from Paris, you're much more likely to get 00:27:00 it. So we picked a town called Grasse. Some people in English they call it [Reems?], But it's Grasse. It's one of the champagne, it's about 90 kilometers northeast of Paris. And they had a ceramics program, and Mary had studied ceramics. So we went there and we enrolled and went to school there for nine months. So we lived in France. And then in December, we began talking about getting married. And Mary's parents are divorced. Her dad was in, I don't know where he was at the time. But he moved around doing different jobs. He might have been in Arizona. No, he was in, I think he was in the quad cities at the time. Mary's mother was in Racine. Her brother was in Alaska. Another brother was in L.A. And my parents were in Mexico. You know, our families didn't know each other. Her family, her brothers were old enough and into their own stuff that we just didn't see that it would make any sense for everybody to come to a neutral site, so to speak, of people that we really didn't know. So we decided just to get married in France. We would just get married. And then that way it would solve our families of having to figure all this out. Well we didn't realize that you have to post your plan to get married, I think for six weeks. Well, we weren't going to be in Paris six weeks. So then we waited until we got to the town we were living in. And then you post, on 00:28:00 the side of the city hall, they post this Jim L. Escalante is going to marry Margaret Moss on a certain date. And it gets published and all this. So then it has to be posted six weeks. So I guess if you're married then someone could say, "Hey, wait a minute, that dog is married to me already. He can't-" I don't know why they have to. (SL laughs) But in any event. And so in France you cannot get married until your marriage is recognized by the government. It's very similar to Mexico, in that you have to have a civil wedding before you can have a church wedding. So we went to the hotel de ville, which is the city hall, and we got married. And we went out and had wood fired pizza with some of the art students. And then two 00:29:00 days later, we-and part of Mary's family were churchgoing folk. And the biggest concern they had was, you're not going to have a church wedding? So we went to Paris to an interdenominational Protestant church, the American Protestant Church, whatever it is. So we had two friends from the school come with us. They were our witnesses. And we got married in a beautiful, I think it's one of the oldest Protestant churches in France. I don't know. But it's, I don't need to add to it. So we got married. And when we came back, we didn't know what we were going to do. We were living in Racine. And here again I was trying to find work. We didn't think we would stay there. I think by that time we had decided that I would, she had an MFA and that I would go to grad school. So once again we find ourselves in this temporary setting where we can't really settle down. So we went to visit my friend from North Texas who was living in southeastern Colorado. And we drove down to Arizona to look at 00:30:00 schools and just to look around. And so when we came back, Mary's mother said, "You ought to go look at the University of Wisconsin, Madison." And I was like, what would she know? You know. But here again, I was not in a position to be critical. I mean, I was living in her house. I once again had found day work painting and stuff, so I had a little bit of cash. But I didn't, I didn't feel like I could say, "I'm not going to go to UW Madison, because after all, what do you know?" So I got to UW, I call up here, and I don't know if I got to talk to Cavalier Ketchum, who was the photography, or one of the staff people, the receptionist, who says, "Yeah, I'll tell him you're coming." So then I call. 00:31:00 "Yeah, he knows you're coming. He said he'd meet you at three o'clock." So I come up here a little bit early. And he sees me, and he says well-he was a unique man. And he said to me to go look around and I'm going to be in my class. When you come back, we'll talk. So I go look around. And one of the doors that was open was the classroom that I met you in, the 6451, the letterpress shop. And a faculty member, a part time faculty member there was Cathie Ruggie. And she could see that I was like the deer in the headlights. And not in the most welcoming way she said, "Can I help you?" And I was like, "Well, actually I'm here visiting with Professor Ketchum, and he just told me to look around." And that must have given here, "Okay, well, come on in." So I didn't know what I was experiencing, but this room is not bad. This is kind of neat. This is cool. So then I went and walked around. And then Cathie showed me the books that some of his photography students had made. And I was like, this is awesome! This is incredible. And here again, this is 1977. This would have been the fall, this would have been September or October of '77. And so we didn't have any communication, so I think I went to a pay phone. And you would have had to call long distance to Racine. And I think I told Mary, "Mary, this is incredible. This is where I want to go." So we got home and we looked at our finances. And I had, I had lived in 00:32:00 Texas, I'm not really from Texas, but I had lived in Texas. I expected to live my entire life in Texas. And the only advice that Don [Scholl?] gave me, well maybe that's not fair to Don, but one of the advice that I remember Don giving me, he says, "Well, if you want to hang around here, then go away to graduate school." So away for me meant Arizona. And Arizona had very, very good photo programs. Arizona State and University of Arizona. University of New Mexico as well. So I applied to Arizona State. And then I applied to UW Madison. And I think having met Cathie was instrumental in being admitted. Because I was not admitted at Arizona State. But luckily I had already made up my mind to come here, should I be invited or admitted. And we had decided, I was pretty excited. And then I thought it's going to take every dime we have to get to Arizona and then we're not going to have anything, where at least in 00:33:00 Madison it's a cheap truck rental. And in those days, rent here wasn't as bad as it is now. And we rented a small apartment above what became the Madison Knitting Work over there on Lakeside. They've expanded on it now. So I came here and started in January which we don't do. We only admit students now in September. But in those days, you could apply and be admitted and start in January or in September. So in November one of '77 we moved here, and we got jobs out at East Town for the Christmas rush. She got a job helping decorate and I got a job unloading the trucks. Because in those days, there was Prange Way and Prange. Prange Way was a discount version of Prange's And Prange's was sort of like a Macy's is today. So we got started here. And I was also able to get funding to go to school. I had actually worked, when I moved here in '76, I had actually worked here at a night doing inventory at Treasure 00:34:00 Island. So I had a w2 form. I think I made 45 dollars or something. But I had a w2 form that I had earned money in Wisconsin well before I'd ever applied to UW. And I remembered the advisor looking at this w2 form from June of 1976 with about 45 dollars of earnings. And that's all I needed to establish residency. And I remember, I said, I cannot believe this. But hey, I'm a resident! But then I was able to get what in those days was referred to as an advanced opportunity fellowship, that would have been a program for targeted, as a Mexican-American I would have been qualified to be identified as a student eligible for the AOF. And so Mary stayed working out at Prange's No, she worked at Gimbel's. And we were in this house that was for sale. It was a business that was for sale. And I think the realtor was not real happy that two women were owners and they had rented it to us. And they had given us a lease. And I think she wasn't real happy because I think anybody buying it may not have 00:35:00 wanted to assume whatever lease we were in. But one night some pipes froze and I called her. I said, "You know, you've got a problem. I'm new here. I don't know how to help." But she and her husband came over and they knew how to shut the water off. And she was so thankful that we had-so now, you know, had we not been there, that water would have run for days, and it would have caused-so she asked if we had ever thought about becoming house parents in a sorority. I was a student. And she was from a sorority house, I don't remember which one, on Langdon Street. But all of the sorority houses belonged to an organization. And they, sort of like a coop, so to speak, and they were often looking. "And I there's any opening, I'll put your name in." And we thought, yeah. So at the Tri Delta house, Delta Delta Delta on Langdon, we interviewed and got a job. And we were the house parents. It was really Mary's job. I mean, we hired help. We coordinated services and worked with the cook to order food and stuff. So we lived there for about three years. So then I came here, started 00:36:00 studying photography- 00:45:05 SL: Can I just clarify something? So when you came here to check out Madison, and you were not quite sure- JE: Right. I came here just because I was, I was in my mother-in-law's house, I didn't have a job, and when she recommended, I probably thought, you know, that's the least I can do. (laughs) SL: Did you bring photos with you to show the person you met? JE: I don't remember. I think I may have sent, in those analysis we submitted slides, you know, the transparencies. Because I remember when I called, Beth was the receptionist. I don't remember her last name, but Beth was the receptionist. And she said, "Yeah, he liked your work. And you know, he doesn't say that very frequently." And I was really honored by that. So I think he had seen some, either I had sent him or I brought, I don't remember. I remember parking at the Lake Street parking ramp. I got out. The McDonald's used to be there. And across the street was the Oak House Cookie Cart. I 00:37:00 don't know how long you've been here, but there used to be a family, I still see the cookies around. I bought three cookies. But I remember that, but I don't remember if I brought work to show Cavalier. (laughs) SL: Okay. I was just curious. JE: Yeah, no, I don't know. So I came up and he showed me books that his students made, and that was really electric for me. So I came here and my first semester here was hard. I had never seen snowfall. My brother had lived up in north of Seattle, and I had gone to visit him for a spring break. And there was no snow on the ground there, but we went up a mountain where you could go-we took inner tubes and we went to this ski resort and they wouldn't let us tube, it was only for skiers. But I saw what I referred to as recreational snow. Because we went up there and we played in it. We came back down to this little house that he was living interest. So when I came to Madison, then I realized what winter was. And I had a coat that didn't keep me warm in Texas. So I bought a 00:38:00 sweatshirt and I put that underneath it. And I was miserable for the entire first winter here. It was- over across the street where the business school is, there used to be a [unclear]. And we used to have a grad seminar. And I had an hour, hour and a half, before my last class and the seminar. So I'd go over there and buy a cup of coffee once in a while. And I remember coming out just about this time, maybe late March. And it's when all the snow has melted and it's hard and it's dirty. And I literally thought that the world had snapped and it was never going to go away. And I don't mean to embellish, but I really felt that it would never, ever get warm again. So that summer, one of the photo friends lived in a communal house where people rented rooms. And her boyfriend at the time, says, "Jim, look at this! Grab this!" And one of the guys that was in the house had left, he said, "I'll never 00:39:00 wear this again." It was a down coat, a scarf and a hat and gloves. And I remember, he said, "Take this." And I knew. And so the next winter, I realized oh, I get it. (laughter) It's not bad weather. You just don't have the right clothes for it. And that was such an awakening for me. Because like oh, I get it. I can manage this now. But I struggled. And I tell grad students your first year here, your first semester here, you put a lot of pressure on yourself. You know, you're in grad school now. You're supposed to be knocking it out of the park. And everybody around you is knocking it out of the park. Whether they are or not, you assume they are. And so it was hard. And as many people would say, and as Cavalier would tell 00:40:00 you, he was the only photo person here. And you needed to earn 60 credits. So in order to earn 60 credits, you have to take other classes. But the thing that attracted me was that there was photography, and you could make these books. And as a photographer, you always see photography in a book. But I always thought that was the editor's job or a writer's job. I never realized that there was-the first photographer, the first two photographers that I'd ever heard of that were responsible for funding their own books was Duane Michaels and Ralph Gibson. When I was an undergrad, there was a short-lived place in Dallas called Texas Center for Photography. And it was a private individual starting sort of a-I think it was more of a gallery. But since he called it the Texas Center for Photography, I thought it was more than that. But he 00:41:00 brought down Duane Michaels and gave a lecture. And boy, he could give a good lecture. And then Ralph Gibson, whose work was absolutely stunning. But both of them had self-published their work. And then there was another photographer that we found called, I think he's Puerto Rican, Adal Maldonado. We bought his book in about '75 and were just blown away by the photographs. And to jump forward to when I was chair of the department here, I get a call from one of the students at the Memorial Union Art Committee. And they're saying, "We have a visitor here. I'd like to know if you could give him a tour of the art program." And I said sure, you know. You get those all the time. I said, "Yeah, okay. Come over." And so he says, Adel Maldonado. And I said, "Oh my God." And it just so happened to be that I had 00:42:00 his book on my shelf. And I said, "You have no idea. When I was an undergrad in 1976, not only was your book absolutely amazing, but it was by someone who had a last name that I could pronounce. You know, Maldonado." He smiled and he said, "Yeah, that's right. There weren't many of us." So I had him sign it. But it's his book, Duane Michaels' book and Ralph Gibson who self-published. Now they didn't make them, but they worked with designers and then they went and paid to have them made. And so when I learned that you could make a book, I was blown away. And Cavalier was so good in that he wanted you to take courses in these other areas. So Cavalier highly recommended that the first class I should take would be 00:43:00 with Cathie Ruggie, who was a recent grad. She had studied with Walter Hamady and Bill Weege, and I think Dean Meeker. She did silkscreen. She's now teaching in Chicago. So in those days, it was harder to get into classes. There were just so many people. And I went to her immediately and I said, "Cavalier Ketchum highly recommends that I take your class." She said, "Do you know what you want to make books about?" And it was like this interview. I said, "Well, I've never made a book. But I've been taking photographs. And I recently spent a year in France. So I'm thinking that the first book, the serious book that I make, will probably be based on photographs that I've already taken." So she let me in. So my first experience in letterpress printing and hand printing was Cathie Ruggie. There were other students here at the time that were in photography that maybe never studied as much with Walter. But Susan Kay Grant had a very impressive career down in Texas as a book artist and as a photographer. Richard Zauft, who's now a dean at a school, I can't remember the name of 00:44:00 the school in Boston. But he was primarily, he had started out as a painter and was a photographer and worked a lot with Phil Hamilton. And it was Sue Grant and, Cavalier Ketchum had some books. Lawrence Miller was another photographer that had made some books. And we analyzed and figured out how they bound them. Because in those days, we used actual photographs. We had to, we dry-mounted them into the book. So there were no way-I mean, you could print them in offset. But as photographers, we really valued the actual photographic print. Another photographer who did very well, amazing work, was Gloria Baker Feinstein. She's in Kansas City. We all sort of coached each other how to actually bind the book. I mean, the printing side, Cathie Ruggie was the first to teach me. Phil Hamilton was chair of the department, so he 00:45:00 wasn't working with students in formal classes as much. So Kathy got us printing. But then amongst us, between Sue, Richard and I'm not sure, I'm forgetting, but Cavalier had samples of books and we figured out how to bind them. So we were binding photo books. And Sue Grant, I think, had already made a number of books. So she actually, when I think about it, Sue Grant did a book about, she went around to some of the small businesses in Madison. Historically, that might be a pretty interesting sort of piece of history. But she had actually, she had actually bound books before. So I think Sue may have already, when I say we figured it out, Sue, I think, had already made some. So it was my figuring it out by listening to how Susan had done them. And then I think the next semester, I think the next semester Kathy went on to teach in Chicago. Walter was away for a year. And then I think that next semester I went and took a course with Phil and would have done some more work. And then Walter Hamady was back and he was teaching papermaking. And the papermaking was really in a very minimal, practically abandoned basement where the big music performance space is going up now. That building on Lake Street was knocked down 30 years ago. Well, maybe not 30, but 25 years ago. So I learned, so my introduction to Walter, I believe, some of it gets fuzzy. But he was teaching papermaking. So then from papermaking, I then signed up to take a class from him. And at that moment, I thought I could really become just a book binder. I just loved the process of binding. But I realized that 00:46:00 wouldn't be a very smart decision. So I continued working in hand printing and photography. 00:56:48 A couple of us really got, and Kathy Kuehn I think, you know, Kathy Kuehn might have been one of them, Walter Tisdale might have been one, there were other students. Phil Hamilton might have been chair at the time. And I think we begged Phil to hire Jim Dast to teach a special topics course in bookbinding. Jim Dast was part of the library. And at that point I think that he was just beginning to get a space in Memorial where they built the conservation lab and a, they repair books and do binding repair and binding conservation. I don't think he had gotten to that point, but he was a skilled bookbinder. And so Phil was very eager. We got enough people to sign up for class. And he got hired as an adjunct and taught one night a week, two nights a week. And a lot of us learned what we knew about bookbinding from Jim Dast. I mean, Walter was a good teacher in that Walter had hired people to bind some of his books, a really phenomenal binder out of Chicago, Bill Anthony. I don't think he's living anymore. But Bill had taught some things to Walter, especially in edition binding, when we were trying to bind books between editions of 25 to 200, so to speak. And so Walter, who had an amazing attention to detail, could 00:47:00 sort of translate very well what Bill Anthony had told him. And then Walter had examples that Bill Anthony had done and we could sit down and just sort of geek out on the attention to detail. SL: Okay. 00:58:43 JE: So I ended up studying with Walter a lot. People that I ended up keeping here as a grad committee was Walter, Cavalier Ketchum, Phil Hamilton, and then a painter by the name of [Gibb Byrd?] who was just a gem of a person. You know, you need four people. So for some of us, we had worked so closely with three, and there were other people that would-I never studied with Warrington Colescott or Jack Damer or Ray Gleckler, who were the other faculty in printmaking. And I had studied with Bill Weege, but I think Bill was going on leave. And I needed the person to be here the year that I graduated. So I ended up asking Gibb Byrd. Very nice man. SL: What class did you take with Phil Hamilton? JE: Well, Phil, you know, I don't remember if I took actual class members like advanced. Phil had a sequence in graphic design classes. But I think as a graduate student, we often just took independent study. And then he might have 00:48:00 taught a class with an actual number of graphic design. But I believe if I looked at my transcripts, I would probably have an abundance of independent study. So mine were independent study with him. And they were always book-related. There was another person at the time. I don't know where he studied or where he went. There was a binder over on State Street, right off State Street. I don't know if it's Gilman, Gorman, Gilman. It's right where Los Gemelos is. But I think that building has changed. But it was Al Delarosa. And he had a little stall, a little room, up on the second floor. And he did bookbinding restoration. And he taught a class, I don't know if it was through UW's continuing education, or MATC's continuing education. But I remember taking a class from him to learn a little bit more of a traditional, and I went and asked him specifically, these are the things that I want to 00:49:00 learn, and he said fine. He was glad to have students. And I had enough expertise to be directed. And then he taught me to do this, and then I would do that. But I didn't know him before or after. So. SL: Could you talk a little bit more about your interactions with the teachers? Like if you were doing a lot of independent study work, did you go to them when you ran into a problem, or how did- 01:01:32 JE: Well mostly Walter would offer this. He had a class that he really loved to teach which was called lettering. And the story I remember him talking about, he went to the department chair at the time was Donald Anderson. I think he said it was Donald Anderson. And he said, "Well, you want me to teach them lettering? What do you want me to teach them?" I don't know if lettering was required, but it was a prereq for some of the other classes. If I remember the story, Don told him, "Well teach them in this class what you hope they know when you get them." He thought that was great, because then all the lettering assignments were in book form. And so while he might have been teaching them lettering, 00:50:00 he then also got them to explore the book form. SL: Okay. JE: That's a class I never took. But Walter, I think, I don't know if he had, he had an intro to typography and advanced typography. And of course what was frustrating to some students is that when Phil Hamilton taught intro to typography and Walter taught, they were very different classes. I mean, I think Phil gave you a lot of flexibility, but I think Phil was really working with the students that were looking to work within a graphic design field. And Walter, they were really looking more as a creative, more of a, I mean, I would say specifically as a book arts experience. So if I have a class in my transcript being taken with Walter, it was a class that I could have repeated. Walter would mix it up a little bit from one semester to the next. So I went to class, almost every class that he met, even though it was repetitive, because he was, you know, a good storyteller. 00:51:00 And in most cases he would make use of his work. And each semester that might change. So like this semester he might show a book that he was working with, with an artist or a poet or bringing in something that Bill Anthony had bound. So even though it was advanced typography and I had taken it before, I would go frequently. And then you also took independent study. And then maybe you would, oh, he's going to show people how to print today? Maybe I don't need to go, because, so Walter wouldn't expect you to be there, either. But you know, in photography, I started doing more independent. And I was less frequent in going into the classrooms with Cathie. But I seemed to find it, you know, valuable to continue going into Walter's classes. I mean, I think they were, Walter responded, I think we asked him how do you price your books? How do you generate sales through books? Walter was very good at generating what he referred to as a standing order. He had a number of libraries that made a commitment to buy everything he 00:52:00 produced. So they would get the first run and they would get a discount. So he shared a lot of that with us. He really shared a great deal of that. And so it was well worthwhile going to those classes when he would, he would respond to questions. SL: So it sounds like he talked a little bit about the business side of things? 01:05:23 JE: Yeah. Yeah. I mean he, I mean, he said it's a lot easier to sell one item at a thousand dollars than to sell 100 items at 10 dollars. And so there were, you know, kernels of wisdom. But he went through his record keeping. He would talk about keeping log sheets of how much time something took, how much money you invested in something. You know, what he was deducting in taxes. But I do think there were people that said, I don't remember that. Well, I remember going to his classes on a regular basis. And sometimes something that was said for ten minutes was all you needed to hear that day, because it was important, it was valuable, let's say. But you know, others talked, Cavalier was very good at grant generating. And Phil had more experience in the design community. So I was 00:53:00 hoping to make books. At that point I really started looking and I wanted to make books. So I think I began spending more time in that classroom because I think it had information that I was, I felt more connected that I wanted. SL: Sure. JE: And then we were very interested in papermaking. The students that I worked with when I was here was Kathy Kuehn, I mean, the ones that I, there were lots of students. But Walter Tisdale, Jim Lee. When I left, about the time I was leaving, Ruth Lingen came. But I didn't have as much connection with her. Bonnie O'Connell, I think it is, is that Bonnie O'Connell? I think it was Bonnie O'Connell. So I guess, gosh, I think there were more. But there was Tisdale, Jim Lee, Kathy Kuehn. On, Stephanie Newman, she ended up going out to Wyoming, I think, or maybe Montana. Maybe Montana. She got a job. But she finished up after I left and she went out to Montana. I 00:54:00 don't know if she's still working out there, but I think she stayed out there the entire time. I mean, there were more people, but the ones that I-we often, I think, I think most people would agree that when I think of the experience in Walter's class, it was remarkable. It was great. But I learned as much if not more because of the people that he brought together. I learned. And it was very, everybody was very free. I mean, I'm starting to sound like a hippie. But everybody was very free with their knowledge. And you know, in those days you couldn't just go to Google and find stuff. So information was a lot harder to come by. And in some instances, some people guarded their information. But I never felt that. I mean, I think Walter Tisdale, Kathy Kuehn, Ruth Lingen, actually went way farther after I left. Because I moved 00:55:00 to Springfield, Missouri in August of '81. And Kathy, I don't think, started graduate school until '81 or you know, '81 or maybe September of '82. And Walter stayed, he met his wife, Katie Beard, and she was a PhD student in what we used to call cartography. But she was probably doing things far greater in geographical information systems. But from our standpoint, well, that's a map, right? And so she stayed several years. And so as Walter either finished up or was finishing up, he was working. But he stayed in contact with Walter. I think Walter Tisdale actually worked as one of the master printers at the Silver Buckle Press when it was over in College Library. And then he stayed in contact with Walter, but yet was not as embedded, let's say, in the classroom, because he was working. 01:10:27 The other name, one of the first people that I met was Barb Tetenbaum. And she was an undergrad student. And then when she left here, she ultimately went to Chicago Art Institute and graduated from there and 00:56:00 then I don't remember at one point, I think from here, from UW Madison she went to be an intern at Twin Rocker, which was one of the first independent hand papermaking studios. As hand papermaking was reinventing itself in the United States, she was somewhere in central Indiana. Right outside of where Purdue is. Brookston, I think Brookston, Indiana. I don't know if they're currently in that city. They may have been in a farm place next to it. I don't know where Barb actually did [unclear]. But she worked for them for a while. And I think they were looking for Barb because she had letterpress experience and they were looking to expand that. But I think after her internship there, she went to Art Institute. So Barb would have been in that cohort of people with-but Barb-see, I was here like three and a half years. So I think Barb was earlier. I met Walter earlier. I met Kathy earlier. And then Barb graduated and left 00:57:00 town. But other people that I met later was Marta Gomez who's here. You know, an exquisite book artist. But I didn't meet her until I came back. Tracy Hahn I didn't meet until I came back. But Barb, when Barb came back to town after graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, at one point, I don't remember when it was, but when I came here in '89, Barb was the printer at Silver Buckle Press. SL: Okay. 01:12:16 JE: So there was this, a little bit of a pattern of leaving and coming back. And then so Barb, I had known Barb as an undergrad and the Barb came back and was a printer. And when I came back, Marta Gomez, I think, had just finished. Tracy Hahn was just about to finish in '89. So I knew them from that era. And, yeah. SL: So you mentioned that you learned a lot from your fellow students. JE: A great deal. SL: Could you expand on that a little bit? Were there certain techniques? JE: Well, yeah, one of the things 00:58:00 about books is it can be intensely collaborative. I mean, there are people who do everything. But when I talk to students, I say there's one of three starting points. There's the structure of the book-I want a book that's an accordion, or I want a book that's a scroll, or I want a real thick, bound book that looks real traditional. There's a structural starting point. There's another starting point of the imagery. I have these images and I have to figure out a way to present them. Or you have a text. I have this text and I need some illustrations, or I need someone to help me with the structure. And so early on, Kathy Kuehn, who was so generous, I collaborated with her. And another student at the time was a young woman by the name of Sheila Webb. Now Sheila had a, I think she had a master's in communication, I think. And she was also, I think she actually, she might have been a T.A. in communications. And she was also connected with some of the other writers, some writers in town. And so I don't remember exactly how it happened, but Sheila knew a poet who was either part of the women's studies program, which then was the women's studies program, and the English, I don't know if her friend was in the creative writing program, but her name was Andrea Musher. I think 00:59:00 that was her name. I should know, because I published a book of hers. So Sheila had this friend who was a poet. So I think while I would love to publish, you know, I wasn't a poet. So I think Sheila had given me a manuscript. And by manuscript I meant a collection of poems. And so we set type by hand and we make type by hand. So we often start with maybe a project that has one poem in it. And I think the name of the poem, I mean, I published it in about '80 or '81. So Sheila brought the manuscript. I had never met the poet. And Kathy said, "Oh, I'd love to illustrate that." And I don't remember if Kathy and I made the paper, or Kathy already had the paper, or I had some paper. But, so at this point now, I have Sheila, who has a friend who's a poet, so now we have two people involved. And then Kathy and Jim. And so there's four of us involved. Now Kathy and I are working more closely. I didn't meet Andrea until I actually went and delivered the books. In our method of payment, one of the things Walter would talk about was there was between 10 and 15 percent of the actual printed copies. So there was no form of payment to the poet. But yet I didn't ask the poet to help 01:00:00 me with any of the costs. So I think, obviously if there's only 50 books, 10 percent, well, that would be five books. I don't remember in Andrea's case if it was 50, 60. I mean, and I think, but so that's where the intense opportunity for collaboration. Walter and Kathy were exquisite printers. And we took a lot of pride in setting the type and making sure that it was carefully done. I mean, typos haunt us regardless of your attention to detail. And I have some typos that are extremely embarrassing to me. But Kathy was an exquisite binder. I mean, I left here in '81. And I know that another artist who came after I left was Diane Fine. And Diane Fine was here for a while. And Diane and maybe Ruth and Kathy and Barb and Walter would often help each other with bindings. But I was gone by then. So I guess that's where, when we think about each other as having taught each other, part of it was we actually worked on each 01:01:00 other's projects. Now when I say they helped me, I don't know how much of help I was to them. I mean, I certainly helped Walter with making paper. I never illustrated anything for Walter. You know, sometimes we were just there for each other. But you know, and I think Kathy actually illustrated and helped me make paper. I don't know that I ever returned that. So I guess I owe them. (laughter) SL: Well I wanted to ask you if you could give me a definition of an artist's book. Because I think in your own words I imagine you must explain that. 01:19:08 JE: Well for us, I think for us it had to do with one, I think it's not a given, but I think for us, one of the things that Walter, I think, really stressed, was that you weren't reprinting classics. While we were preserving a historical method of working, that wasn't the purpose for it. It was there because we could use it, but we weren't going to reproduce a classic 19th century poem in the classic way that it would have been done. That was not ever a point of, you know, motivation. So for Walter, it had to do with publishing new work. While you're using a historically proven method, it was never meant to not be used in some new form. Now how people followed through with that might have driven some points of conversation. But I think that it was, if I'd ever come to class and said that I want to reprint Henry Longfellow's poem, I would have been laughed out of the room. So it was pretty new work. But I think what also drove us is that we were the actual maker of it. Now I didn't design the 01:02:00 illustration. Kathy did that. But I would have not sent that to a printer to get printed and then-I mean, artist books employ a multitude of collaboration. But I think we really valued the fact that we were making decisions as we were actually, we were the actual designer maker. And with that brought some criticism in that, you know, whose book is it? If the poet wrote it and then you're kind of taking on this real daring design of it, is it the poet's book? Is it your book? And I think I read an article by Harry Duncan, who was, by some accounts, in the United States, one of the revivers of fine printing and small press production. Harry Duncan once said, "Well I think the book belongs to the people who buy it." (laughter) And I've always like that. I mean, there were criticisms of the book because we took, I mean, one criticism that people used to use about our books often was that we would use different color papers in a book. And if we were making handmade paper, we just made handmade paper. We weren't really trying to make-you know, in many cases when we made handmade paper, we made it out of clothing that was available. So if we had white shirts and blue jeans, our clothing was going to end up light blue. It wasn't until, I think Walter was doing a book about cooking, 01:03:00 that I think he really started experimenting with pigments because he needed to make paper that looked the color of blueberries or raspberries or something like that. But prior to that, we would certainly pick clothing of a certain color. But we never really tried to match something specific. Pigments have been around for centuries. But I think today people are a lot more savvy in terms of how to use pigments and retention agents to keep paper a specific color. But artist books, I guess, are, I think it's a book that an artist-and what do you mean by an artist versus a designer? But I think an individual that makes a book for a very specific purpose and a specific audience, and generally in a limited edition. Generally artist books range from 25 to 01:04:00 100 copies. Occasionally, 200. I'm trying to think. Bonnie Chen was here two weeks ago. And I think she started out with what is an artist book. I'd have to go watch-I did record her lecture. I videotaped the lectures. So I'd have to go revisit it. Because she's certainly high on the artist book artists in this country. But I think for us, it was always that we were responsible for making it. And of course, it left an opportunity for the form of the book to take on any number of things. So I've been asked-in an academic setting, when you go up for annual reviews and your tenure review, one of the tried and true methods is peer review. So if I'm a poet and I've been reviewed by my peers, and my poetry has been included in an anthology, and it's an anthology that was selected by an editorial board of recognized experts, that impartial third party group brings validity to my selection. If Jim publishes your book, who the heck is Jim? So it is challenging that-I mean, the meanest thing that people say, 01:05:00 and I wouldn't say it's mean, but they'll look at some of the work we do and refer to it as vanity publishing. Because, I've never published a book of my own words. But if we create a book out of our own words and we publish it, it's seen by some that you're doing that because another publisher wouldn't publish it. However, I'm the only one that can really bring the form that I feel this needs to be presented in. And so I do get requests from other schools when it's, which is common when you go up for tenure, outside reviewers evaluate your work. And there are sometimes that I've been asked to write a review, primarily because I can speak to the issue of why an individual is, in a sense, self-publishing their work as an art form. I mean, I'm not sure that I could bring any validity into the quality of the poetry if I'm going out and publishing my own poetry books and not being reviewed. But as an artist who's conceiving a structure, a presentation, a binding and sequencing with illustrations or different shapes and forms, yeah, I think that that's something that we can look at. I mean, we do have other book artists in the country 01:06:00 who can also in an impartial third party say yeah, that's pretty good. SL: I wonder if you could expand a little bit. When you were talking about your definition, you mentioned having an audience in mind. And maybe thinking, I'm taking this a step farther, thinking of the reader. And I know Julie Chen mentioned a lot about the relationship to the reader in her talk. When you're creating an artist book, do you have the reader in mind at all, or some specific audience in mind? 01:28:04 JE: I was working on another, I mean actually my record in publishing has really diminished since I've been doing administrative work. So I go back to an early example when I published a book called Scales and Weights by Todd Moore. And I'm not trained in creative writing but I was intrigued by his work because he was writing interpretive poems on historical photographs. And anytime there's a photograph involved, my ears perk up. But he wrote in the shortest line length I've ever found. And it presented a design challenge for me. Because if you look at the traditional shape of a book, it's rectangular with 01:07:00 comfortable height and width relationship. So you know, it's six by nine. Most books aren't three by twelve. You know, real long, narrow. And I just couldn't find, I was trying to figure out how to put that narrow on what was more of a traditional page format. And of course now what I'm going to transition to is a different problem. But I found it very interesting. I'm not sure how these all relate, but it shows a little bit how Jim's mind works. I was so puzzled by the short length of his poetry. You know, the line widths were maybe three words long. And as I was printing, as I was setting the type one day and trying to figure out the format, I began to read it out loud. And then once I began to read it out loud, I 01:08:00 began to see that he wasn't writing, that he was writing a long sentence but he was just breaking it up. So you know, you read a poem and you look at a poem and you try to figure out maybe how to help the viewer. Poetry, for some people, is very intimidating. And you hope to find a way for them to become engaged enough to overcome any hesitation they have to read it. I admit that sometimes it takes me three or four passes on a poem to really understand it. And I think that if you invest time and materials in it, maybe the reader will understand that maybe this is something that I really need to sit down and feel the paper for a moment. And if it's inviting enough of a form and experience, they might read it multiple times. Now, in the world of book arts, it's like anything else. I mean, you have a full array of experiences. You have 01:09:00 the fine printing side. And I think that's where I grew up with books was in fine printing. But what I see today, it's more of a fascination with the fact that people can make it themselves. I mean, if you look at young printers today, they're incorporating laser cutters, CNC machines. And they value, I think, the handmade aspect of it, where I think we-if you were to see, especially with people that are so excited with using wood type. It's not a fine printing experience. And I don't mean to put value or a hierarchy. But it's so encouraging to see, when you go to Hamilton's wayzgoose, the number of young people that are there. I think hand papermaking is really, as a group, is concerned that we are aging, but we 01:10:00 don't see young people taking it on like we're seeing letterpress being taken on. And the thing that has been a bit of a, you know, a realization, is that I enjoyed letterpress printing for the fine printing side of it. This generation is printing letterpress printing for different reasons. But what I value is that they appreciate letterpress printing. And the fact that, well, we never would have printed with these-that, to me, doesn't play as an important in that we are maintaining an interest in letterpress printing. I don't know if I've answered your question. Because the reader. I mean, I have to say somewhat selfishly that I love working with paper. I love working with text. And you make it in hopes that the reader values what you brought to it. But you know, if we were trying to increase an audience, is the best way 01:11:00 to do it to make artist books, I don't know about that. SL: Sure. 01:34:25 JE: I've tried to, I mean, I've worked with some students. And there was a student who graduated a number of years ago. She had started sort of in computers and animation. I think she was one of the first people to graduate from our program as an undergrad with an emphasis in different kinds of computer animation. I mean, this would have been in the '80s. No, maybe early '90s. And she's got a business here in, I don't think she's in town. But she does a lot of web development for people. She came back to study, Melanie did. And I think that she was kind of intrigued by the hand side of it. She had been working on the computer for so long. And she got very interested in hand papermaking and in hand printing. But I really tried to sort of help her find a way that she could bridge what she knew with web development with what she knew in hand making books. So we explored the way of how do you integrate web with hand making of books. 01:12:00 So she did make a book completely by hand. and then she used, she composed the text on a computer, which for me to say that today is like, well how else would you do it? Well back in the '70s, it was different. But she had composed text. And so then I think she made an on-demand like printed by Hulu, or I don't know, the online. You create a book in a page layout program like InDesign and then you ship it off and then she gets it back. So she has the handmade version, the on-demand version, and then I think she placed the on-demand printed version, since she mailed them out and asked for people to mail them out. And then tried to have people enter onto a website where they were. So the thing that, I mean, this was just part of, but one of the things that I was intrigued by was what role does a mobile device play with a handmade book? I mean, there were many people in the '80s who created handmade books who put CDs of music in them. And you should listen to the music as you look at these books, so that you have this dual experience. I don't know if it was music or if the poet was reading it. Or maybe it was a soundscape that you could hear while you were listening to it. We're not the first to integrate different media, or different experiences, from touching a book and reading the book to hearing something. I try to encourage photographers and graphic design students in my class to not make a traditional portfolio, but to make it on an iPad and then make a case for the iPad that would have come from a book arts portfolio experience. I mean, obviously you have to buy an iPad and it's a lot different. But I think most portfolios today, I think, are basically on demand books. Unless you go into a fine art gallery and selling prints, most photographers can 01:13:00 easily promote themselves through a book or a website. But I haven't had too many students really kind of try to explore- Meg Mitchell, who's a faculty member, collaborated with a woman in Florida State, Denise Bookwalter, they integrated a handmade book with an iPad app. I think you can follow whether-I mean, in some ways, why do it? Are we jumping on the bandwagon? Oh, this has an app that connects to it, oh, therefore, I am-why not just celebrate the book just for what it is? I'm not going to take a camp there. We had, I think in Dennis Miller's class and Meg Mitchell's class, a student made a book where there was metallic type. Meg is very interested in interactivity, and thinking that you could embed chips had have a PIN, and I don't remember what it would do. But there's a whole world there where you could 01:14:00 create-I mean, Meg asked me one day, and I thought, why would you want to do that? And then after I got to, you know, every time I say that, then I begin to think about it, it's like hey, wait a minute. I think someone, if you've ever seen marbled paper, you have a pan, and then it uses just the simplicity of oil and water repel, or I don't remember exactly. But there are natural products, either [oxygol?] and seaweed and stuff that are put into inks and on paper sizing. And you create a pattern on the top of water, and you drop a piece of paper on top of it and it removes the paint. And that's how paper marbling is done. And when paper marbling was an actual profession, people from around the countries developed different ways to repeat patterns. So you had this, an English cockerel, I think it was, I think they were from England. I 01:15:00 don't know if they were England or Ireland. But they had this series of combs. And they would run the comb one way back, then the other way back, and then drop-they had a choreographed sequence. And then they would put paper on top. And they could repeat it. So when you ordered cockerel paper, you knew what to expect. You knew it wasn't going to be a perfect reproduction. But they followed the same choreographed sequence. Well, Meg had said that somebody was developing electronic vibrations to go on water so that when you put the paint down, you could either randomize it or you could repeat it. And I thought, that's silly. But then as I've started now to look at the history of marbled paper, you know, they were creating 01:16:00 something that could be reproduced. So there are areas where people are trying to integrate technology. There are a number of letterpress printers that-you know, one of the challenges for all of us is where do you get type? You know, we don't make a lot of type anymore. So people that are in old print shops that have type, yeah, great. But if you're a young person and you're able to find a press and you go make a press, where are you going to get your materials? So they're looking at laser cutters and CNC machines, and computers that will print out on film so you can make polymer plates. So young people are forced to try to find a marriage between technologies that allow them to generate imagery and text. As opposed to in the 01:17:00 older times, you just had type. Handset type or wood type. 01:42:26 SL: I wondered if we could go back-are you feeling good? JE: Sure, I'm fine. If you're not bored to death. (laughs) SL: No, I'm not at all. But I know in, well, actually, first I wanted to ask you about Iguana Press, the name. Like how did you come up with that? That's your press. JE: I've only told this story publicly twice. One was to a reporter here in town. You know, people call you up and they don't have a lot of information. And they ask you pretty simple questions that would have been real easy-how long have you been here? (laughter) You know, you have some good information here. But I don't remember his name, but he was writing for one of the 01:18:00 Spanish-language papers. And I figured well if he's from Mexico, he'll remember that. Cathie Ruggie was my teacher. And Cathie Ruggie ran a very, you will have, we have three deadlines. If you don't meet those deadlines, just please drop the class. And boy, that motivated me. But the first assignment was to create a letterhead. You know, stationery we typed on and wrote letters on. Do you remember that? SL: Yeah. JE: Well that was our first, and I found that awesome, because I loved to write letters, you know. So she said you can either find a business or create a business for yourself. Well, I didn't have, you know, I sound like, in some ways I'm very insecure and very shy. So I didn't have the confidence to go to a 01:19:00 business and say, "Can I design a letterhead for you?" One of the persons did, and he became a real good designer. So one of the things that she offered as a suggestion was to create a press name for yourself. Well that's all I needed. So Mary and I had a collection of these Dover publications. They were kind of like copyright-free, or whatever you call it. They were copyright-free books that, you know, they were just catalogs of imagery. So we had one of Native American designs. And prior to that, Mary and I, we'd visited Mexico a number of times. Gone to see our family. Visited the anthropological museum and loved some of the graphic, the graphic imagery from pre-Columbian. Not so much the graphic images of Mexican revolutionary. You know, today you see graphic images of the Day of the Dead. You know, Jose Posada and others. But I was more interested at that time just seeing the graphic images that had been created out of pre-Columbian artists. And I was also intrigued by, in 1967, Mexico City did two major things. 01:20:00 They brought the Olympics and they built a subway. And 1967-1968 is a highly controversial time in Mexico, one in which you know, a revolt was severely brutally silenced. And we know a lot more about it now than we did then. But one of the great things that I found in Mexico at that time had begun to really become more public with its pride about its indigenous past. And when the Olympics came, my mother started buying all of the stamps and a lot of the posters. And she, who was not an artist and was not a terribly, I mean, I don't mean to be disingenuous about my mom, but she was not the most educated. But even she started looking at the design of the 01:21:00 Olympics and said, "You know, Jimmy, this is amazing. Because you don't have to really read Spanish to find your seat and your number in the venue." It was all just very simple graphics. And it had an amazing Mexican quality to it. I later found out that it was an American, Lance Wyman, who did that. And I've never been so surprised. And I saw him at a lecture and I went up to him and I said, "You're part of the reason I'm in design, because of the Mexican Olympics identity." I said, "Where I think you were a master of that is that as a young man in Mexico, I was sure that a Mexican had done this." And a designer, I think in one sense, wants to not be known who they do, what they do, they want to be able that it projects a certain amount of honesty to whatever it was. So I think my intro to things was in a 01:22:00 very flat, graphic way. So we had this book, getting back to the story, and there was a symbol of an iguana. And I mean, it was a symbol of a lizard and I read it as an iguana. SL: Sure. 01:47:46 JE: I don't know what the symbol was. But, and Mary and I had gone down to Oaxaca and we had seen iguanas being sold on the side of the road. So when I was in high school, my sister would come home and she would turn, on, TV didn't really, there were three or four channels then. And TV didn't actually come on until about two o'clock in the afternoon. There was no TV programming before that. And there was a zany comedian by the name of Loco Valdez. And he had this show, a variety show. And he was zany. And he was zany-I mean, this would have been '64, '65. But he had an occasional stuffed puppet. And he would do this silly, zany stuff. And he called the stuffed puppet the La Iguana Rana. And it rhymes. Iguana being an iguana, and rana being a frog. So the stuffed puppet was kind of like this frog. And he called it 01:23:00 the iguana rana, I think, only because it rhymed. And of course we're talking '60s television. So there's no animation, there's nothing. There's just him moving this. And he was a master of zaniness. So I always loved the iguana rana. Because it was funny. And so when I saw that, I thought, oh, I'll call this iguana rana, I'll be Iguana Press. And I told one of my friends I was going to become Iguana Press, and he says, "Why don't you become Tortilla Press?" And I said, shut up. So it was the fact that I found something, the fact that it reminded me of a funny comedian in Mexico. And then, on my little truck I still have the vanity plate Iguana. And I've had that forever. And people used to 01:24:00 stop me in parking lots and ask me about my iguanas. I'm like, no, no, no. I mean, I was coming out of, you know the McDonald's there on Regent Street and Mills? It's right off of Regent? SL: Okay. 01:50:10 JE: I was coming around. And this guy comes running out. And he's almost choking on his Big Mac, you know? (imitates guy panting and trying to talk) "Do you have an iguana?" No. No. I don't. The look of disappointment, like why would you have that on your car if you don't have-I don't have time, buddy. (SL laughs) 01:25:00 So that, I mean, I wanted something in Spanish, first and foremost. But and then I found this image that I could easily, I wanted to use something that I found. I didn't understand the production side of how to get something reproduced. So I took this thing to Kathy and I said, "Can I have an engraving made of this?" And she said yeah. She was emphatic that you could either have a letterhead for the critique, or you're a drop slip, basically. So when she said I could reproduce this-later on, Mary and I drew something more unique. And to this day, I don't know if that little symbol is actually an iguana. But it looks lizard-like. SL: 01:26:00 Okay. Thank you. I also wanted to ask you about some of your early collaborations that we have in special collections at Memorial Library. I know there are some books that you worked on with Mary, who was illustrating. And also with Walter Hamady's wife, Mary Laird. JE: Mary, his first wife, yeah. SL: Can you follow one of those projects for me? JE: See, the first, it's been so long, and I haven't actually, sadly I haven't been printing so much. Mary's father was an avid reader. And he was at someplace, and someone was asking, and he had not lived up to, I think what he wanted to. And so someone asked him some questions. And I don't want to go into all the details. But he went home and wrote this little piece. All the 01:27:00 things that he had done and traveled. And they were all out of, I don't even remember the text, but they were all out of books that he had read. He was an avid reader. And unlike I, he was able to retain. I mean, I can read a book and then I don't remember. Someone says, how's that? I'm like, oh, yeah. But he had a pretty vivid recollection of his books. And so he would say, he wrote this long poem based on what he had done with his life. And it was all through the books he had read. I climbed a mountain and I surfed the world and I did this and I hunted. And it was, I don't know, it was kind of interesting for me to see that your parents had dreams and aspirations, too. They just weren't these practical people that just got up and went to work. They had dreams and lives and hopes and everything else. And so I wanted to print a text that I knew I wasn't going to write. So I think the first book that I actually did with text was "Letter from [Grand ??]" which is Mary's dad. And then I think I did the piece, I don't know, the piece with Andrea. And then Walter came in one 01:28:00 day and said, "You guys have got two weeks to print a book." Beatrice Ward, this is a printing office. And it's sort of like the chest pounding, you're in the chapel of truth. I don't remember what it is. But Andrea Ward. And then she, I think it was later on I found out that she had a male pen name because as a woman was not going to find success in writing. And so she chose a man's name. And I don't remember what, most people today would know her as Beatrice Ward. But if you look up Beatrice Ward, you'll find out that she had a male pen name. And you know, Walter had always been this really casual, "You know, whatever you want to do," but just do it really well. But he came in one day and he said, "Everybody's got to print a book in two weeks." So I don't remember if we all finished it, but I ended up doing "This is a Printing Office." And I think it may have been one of the first ones that Mary illustrated. Because Mary has an MFA, did a lot of drawing, but her MFA was in ceramics. So she illustrated that book. And then I began to think about I need 01:29:00 to find, you know, someone else to publish. And I was still subscribing to Texas Monthly. And way in the back was someone who published a review of young Texas writers. And the only one I remember was Naomi Shihab Nye. There were two others. And so I went to the university bookstore and I said, "Can I order a book?" And they said yeah. So I ordered, I think the name of the book was Hugging the Jukebox. Because he was reviewing a book by Naomi Shihab Nye. Mary and I read it and we thought wow, this is great. So I went to the reference library on the second floor of Memorial Library. I got out the San Antonio, Texas phone book and I looked her address up. This is how you had to do things. And I wrote her a letter. And I wrote her this sheepish letter. 01:30:00 You know, gee, I'm nobody. (laughs) And I sent her a book of Andrea [Mushes?], the In Training. And it would be such an honor if you would even touch my letter, you know. So she wrote me right back. And she said, I'm so glad that the forwarding, because the phone book had an old address, and then the post office, so I didn't want you to think that I wasn't interested. You know, she was a young poet. I didn't want you to think that I wasn't interested because the letter may have taken longer because it had to go through a forwarding. So 01:31:00 she sent me, she was very eager. So she sent me a series of poems, far more than I could actually print. Mary and I read through them and we picked out the ones that we thought would work as a cohesive group that we could do. And set off to make paper. And Mary illustrated that one. That's On the Edge of the Sky. SL: On the Edge of the Sky. 01:57:07 JE: I think that's it. So we got those printed and sewn and sent off. And I sent them off to her. And Naomi's really done very well. And you know, it's not like, it was a Texas Monthly reviewer. We ordered these books. Naomi's the one that we liked the best. And then I wrote, and then I think that might have been the last book I printed here. I don't know if I-yes, I did finish that book here. And then I wrote her and said, "Do you have any other people you'd 01:32:00 recommend?" And she recommended Rosemary, I don't know how you pronounce the last name, Rosemary Catacalos. I think her father might have been Greek. And this is a story that you know, it saddens me for one sense because, but I tell students this story. So she recommended Rosemary, so I wrote Rosemary. And I think Naomi had probably given Rosemary a heads up. So Rosemary was very eager. And so I wrote her, well these are the poems I'd like to write, and I'd like to have my friend illustrate the book. She wrote me back and said, "No, no, no. No. You can't illustrate my work." And I was like, what the heck are you talking about? Did you not see what we did? So she told me it, and I didn't listen. So I think we moved, I had made 01:33:00 all this paper. Okay, so we made all this paper. I'm pretty sure we had moved to Springfield. So we made all this paper in anticipation of making the book when I got down to Springfield. So I go through the book and I generally send the author some form of it so that they can proof it. And even though authors aren't necessarily good proofreaders, at least they've had a chance to proof it. So then I said in these pages, I'll put the illustrations. And she wrote me back and said, "What part"-and this is exactly the quote-"What part of 'I don't want the poems illustrated' was not clear to 01:34:00 you?" (SL laughs) Well I had already asked someone to do the illustrations. I felt, you know, somebody said well, either publish them or not, or just stop the project. Well, I had too much time, too much invested. And you know, so I published the book without the illustrations. And then in the years later, about three years ago, I get this email from somebody. "Hey, do you still have any copies of Rosemary? We want to buy one." Because Rosemary ended up being the poet laureate of Texas. (laughs) Man, can I pick them! And I've lost contact. I haven't had any contact with Naomi or Rosemary in years. But I was proud of that. And then I think I did two other books with- So out of that experience, I asked, Naomi had sent me some work. And so I said, "Naomi, I want to publish this poem." I think it was coffee, it was about fortune telling with coffee. So I just came up with a little structure. It folded, but just a little touch of the illustration. It's not going to show up on the audio. But you looked at the page and the page was folded slightly shorter, and you could see a sliver of that illustration. So that if you didn't want to see the illustration. But Rosemary's point was this is my poem and I don't need anybody to interpret it. I don't know if 01:35:00 that's how she said it. But she figured she didn't need any other, any vehicle to either clarify or confuse what she was trying to write. And Naomi's never had any problem with the illustration. So I made this book where if you didn't want to see the illustration you never had to pull it out. But if you wanted to extend out this fold, you'd see this tray that Mary drew with these cups. And at that point I began to realize there were still people making moveable type, or handset type. But I began, as a teacher I was actually teaching in a graphic design curriculum in southwest Missouri, at Southwest Missouri State. And it was very clear to all of us that computers were going to come into play. And I had a chair of a department who in no subtle way said that if I expected to have any future here at Springfield, then I would 01:36:00 learn about computers. And he could be very imposing. He made it very clear to me that if I didn't get computer savvy, I was not going to be there much longer. So I had tried to learn some programming. That frightened me because I had no interest in programming. And I could see no real application yet of how programming would help me design printed communication. So when the Mac came out, I mean, it was not affordable. But when the Mac came out and the laser printer came out, then I could begin to see that, it wasn't programming so much, but it was to learn how to use the software. SL: Sure. 02:03:11 JE: So I did everything I could to buy a computer. I mean, I funded it myself. Paid that off for years. I bought a Mac, one of the early, not the very 01:37:00 first Macs, but one of the first Macs that was kind of powerful. And it took me forever, but I got the university to pay for, for my classroom, a laser printer. And those were extremely expensive back then. But what I did learn was that I could compose text on a computer, and there were different services. One ultimately in town in Springfield, and other services, one in Michigan and one in Wisconsin, here in Madison, where I could transmit the file through a modem and they would send me a negative. And then I could take that negative to a plate maker. So I began to experiment. I had some movable type. But I began to experiment with how I was going to integrate the computer into my bookmaking. And then I published a book by a man in Springfield by the name of David Coy, who was a young poet in the creative writing program. And then I went to Naomi again. And The Miracle of Typing was a book that she had written, it was a short story. It 01:38:00 was one of, I'm not going to say it was her first short story, but she began to write short stories. And I was intrigued by that because I mean, actually, I designed the book on a computer. But I realized that it helped me, the computer helped me design it. But playing for the film and paying for the plates didn't save me that much money than writing to a company in San Francisco called McKenzie & Harrison, having them compose the metal type for me. And then if I had the metal type, I could reuse it. So I designed that book on the Mac, but then I just had metal type made in San Francisco. But that one was where, I think sometimes, I mean, it was so minimal. But Naomi had written a story. It was a young girl who wanted to be a writer. I mean, it 01:39:00 sung to my heart. A young girl who wanted to be a writer in a traditional Mexican family. And the dad doesn't know what to do. But he goes out and, he mows lawns, I don't know if he mows the lawn, but he buys her a typewriter. And it's sort of like my dad when I started showing an interest in photography, they did everything they could to help me by buying Sports Illustrated, Life Magazine and National Geographic. To them, that was the pinnacle of what photography was. And of course they weren't fine art, but my family was doing what they thought was the most helpful thing. And so in this story I related to the dad saying, well let's go buy you a type-she wants to be a writer. And the method to become that was to own a typewriter. So she talks about doing random key strokes. Well, the keystrokes that Naomi did were not random. So I tried to randomize it. So I wrote her back and said, "Now recognize that 01:40:00 I've changed the exes and ohs in all of that because I think this is more random." And then also I think she did it a little bit longer, and it broke oddly on the page. So I thought if you could let me take out some of these random, because it's no longer random, but as long as you let me take out some of these, then I think on the page it will look better. Well, you know, she didn't have any concerns with that whatsoever. But I think that was the first book I did that wasn't poetry, other than some photo books that I made. I forgot where we were. SL: Well, we were talking about some of your early works. And then you were talking about how you reached out to a couple of poets from Texas. 02:07:28 JE: Well Todd Moore was someone who Kathy and/or Walter, Kathy Kuehn and Walter Tisdale. They had stayed here in town. And there was a group Walter later-when I left, I don't know who it was, but there were a couple of creative 01:41:00 writing people that sort of connected with some of the students in the book. I don't know if they connected with Walter. But he talks about an author, Joe Napora and another guy by the name of Dan something. And they've stayed together as correspondents. Joe Napora I've met because I think he was at Walter's wedding. Tisdale's wedding. But he's maintained a connection with a lot of people that I don't know. But Walter had written me about Todd Moore, who was a high school teacher, a middle school teacher down in Belvedere, Illinois. But, you know, an active poet. And he had written all these poems based on historical photographs. Civil War photographs and other photographs. Sadly, I've lost my train of thought. Wow. I guess we could replay what you asked me. SL: (laughs) Well actually I was wondering if, because I think we're probably going to wind down for this session. I wonder if maybe, because I know that you did some teaching as a graduate student here before you went on to get your job in 01:42:00 Missouri. JE: No. SL: You didn't. JE: Well, the only teaching, I mean, it was an odd situation. I had this advanced opportunity fellowship. And they believed strongly that if they were going to support you at that level, at that level meant I had tuition costs. They covered my tuition. I don't know what we did about healthcare in those days. We just didn't get sick. At least, Mary and I didn't. So I never had any healthcare issues. Probably I might have gone to the student health services a time or two when I had a cold or something. And then they gave me a certain amount of money. And then Mary and I worked at the sorority house. And so we were never, I mean, we were frugal, but we weren't every cashless. Because I had my tuition covered. I had a little bit of stipend nine months out of the year and Mary and I worked at the sorority house. So we were flush. I mean, you know, as flush as graduate students can be. Well I'm really having a hard time keeping a train of thought. Oh, so they would not allow me to apply for a TAship. And then, I wasn't qualified, really, to teach. The classes that were available were Drawing 1, I wouldn't have done well in that, 2D Design, I probably could have made my way through. But we didn't have any TA programs in photography. So a man by the name of, I think he's still here in town, Tom McInvaille ran a photo courses through the, what we used to have here in town was the UW Extension. I think now it's Continuing Studies, but it was much bigger then. So I was desperate to find something that I could claim as 01:43:00 experience in teaching. So Tom McInvaille was very generous and hired me. I think there were two six-week classes, and they were Intro to Photography. One was in Baraboo. So I'd drive up to Baraboo on a Wednesday night and come home. And then another one was here in town. I don't remember actually, I think it was, I don't know where we actually taught it. I think in Vilas. I think it was in Vilas. And so we would, that was so when I went for my first job, I learned that, it was in August, so they needed to find somebody. They had made three offers. And each offer had accepted and then got a better job and backed out. So they were desperate. (laughs) And they asked me in my interview, "What makes you think you can teach?" Well I had to come up with some answer. And I thought well, number one, I've always been involved, I mean, it's not a good analogy. But I've always been involved with sports. And I've always been sort of an assistant to a coach. And I've always had that ability to connect in a working environment. And it's not art, but I have a comfort being in that position of being a mentor to people who are older. And I taught two classes that were six weeks in photography. And although I'm not going to be teaching photography, I feel that I've been able to-and I've been in school for a long time and I'm well aware, I've always been one of the people to volunteer to help people in a class. If I thought they 01:44:00 don't know how to do it, I would always sort of offer that. But I was not a TA here. And partly because I had funding that wouldn't-so actually I had to take a pay cut. The money that I earned from the extension, I had to take out of my stipend fellowship. And Phil Hamilton, bless his heart, had to go to bat. And I couldn't understand. I mean, he said, "Well, we think we're giving you this money to be successful." But if I don't have any teaching experience, they're going to hold that over my head. So I'm actually willing to take a cut in pay for you and supplement that with that, simply so that I can say I've taught. You know, the state has a lot of regulations. And they want to make sure that nobody 01:45:00 overly benefits from something. But I really felt that that was unfair that I was being told I couldn't teach when I knew that my likely career projection was to be a college teacher. And I knew that I was going up against students- And I was going into a field that was growing. Graphic design was growing. And there was a shortage. I mean, had it been something else, I may not have been as fortunate. You know, I'm the result of very good timing in certain things. I came out of college as graphic design. And I didn't have a lot of experience in graphic design. But I was going into a program that were very suspicious of graphic designers because they were predominantly fine artists. And when they saw that I was producing a fine art-like 01:46:00 thing, they were very comforted by that. And I don't mean to say that disingenuously, but in a program that was resistant to bringing in graphic design, at least Jim at least publishes artist books. So we began to, there were other people there. We began to form a curriculum that was pretty much a graphic design curriculum for people to go in. In those days, it was all pretty much based on print. SL: Okay. Well, I thought maybe we could finish off with kind of a bigger question. How do you think that your time as a student here at the UW impacted your career as an artist? 02:15:22 JE: Well I was a little surprised when my first job in Springfield, Missouri. I didn't realize to the level of what Madison's reputation was. You know, I think if you come out in printmaking, which I wasn't in printmaking. But the printmakers all knew what Madison was. At that time, Iowa was also a very well-known school. But you're coming from an 01:47:00 institution that has high recognition. I never studied with Ray Gleckler, with Jack Damer or Warrington Colescott. You know, those were three of the pillars within the American printmaking educational system. And so I didn't really know when I got out the impact that Bill Weege and those others had in the printmaking community. I mean, Walter was a book artist. But Walter would always say, well, people may have different quotes, but I remember him saying, "We're not a book art program. We're a printmaking program. And what brings a unique aspect of ours is that our students study down that city long block on Park Street within all the printmaking facilities. Because the students mixed wood engraving, relief, silkscreen, lithography, etching, with books. You know, amongst all the big, at least Big Ten universities, we still have one of the smallest photography programs. But yet, you're still coming from an institution that people would say, "University of Wisconsin?" And they would say that in a really sort of way of respect. And I didn't realize that when I was here. I mean, I was here and I was doing all this stuff. But it really carried with it a certain amount of cachet. What I also valued was just you had a lot of freedom to do things. Which if you're motivated 01:48:00 is fine. If you're looking for someone, I mean, Kathy was one of the few people that, Cathie Ruggie was one of the few people that said, "If you don't have your letterhead, just bring a drop slip and get out." That, you don't hear too much. I don't know if people are doing it today, but even back then you didn't hear it that much. So there was a lot of flexibility and a lot of freedom. And with that comes, there's a lot of things that we may not have been exposed to. But Jim Dast would take us over to the special collections and show us historical book bindings that were amazing. Bill Bunce at the time was the director of the Kohler Art Library. And he was, I think, the first one to really start building that collection of artist books. And so you had resources. And they were available. And then you began 01:49:00 to realize that a lot of people that came out of here were from Wisconsin. I mean, you have, I mean, the list goes on. And if I list three people, there's going to be four I don't. But in the papermaking world, Paul Wong and-they created Dieu Donne in New York City. I'm going to be a little, I'll tell you her name is-they were, she was from Neenah. I think Paul was from Fond du Lac. Steve Miller was from Frond du Lac. Joe Wilfer, who went on to work at Paste, did amazing things, was from Racine. Fran Myers, who was a faculty member, colleague for many years, and sadly died about two years ago, she was from Racine. It amazed me how people from this area came to this institution and became world-class artists. I'm going to turn on a device, because I'm going to be embarrassed that I can't remember her name. So, but I 01:50:00 think there was an accessibility to things. Well, we used to call it the rare book room. But Walter Tisdale and I-I'm sad, I don't remember her name. But if she was a predecessor to the current director of the, she's the predecessor to the current director of special collections. Sue Gosin. SL: Yeah, that's what I was- 02:20:38 JE: Sue Gosin. She was from Appleton. And you know, Sue Gosin and Paul Wong, Paul I've only met briefly once. Sue I've met a little bit more, but I don't really know either. But both of them went and set the world on fire with an undergrad degree from here. And you know, with time that really became, that came to impact me. I do feel extremely fortunate. I'm fortunate in so many ways. I've maintained the same marriage for over 40 years. That's pretty darn fortunate. (laughs) I have three great kids, and so I'm fortunate. I have my first grandchild. But I feel so fortunate to have gone to school here. To work with the people that I did. For all the bumps that we all had during the way, I met some of the most incredible people that I still, I'm not the greatest connector. I'm not on social media, so there's so much about the world that I don't connect with, because I'm not on-and I don't write letters so much anymore. But having studied with some really class people here. And then, 01:51:00 of course, in American academic settings, it's not looked upon well when your home institution rehires you. So I'm an alum from this program. And now I've been chair of the department for a total of eight years. I feel, I mean, I was gone for eight years and I came back. But I feel extremely loyal to this place and very fortunate. So when I've been asked to be in leadership, you know, I was an associate dean and I was chair of the department, part of it comes from because you know, you really value what this has brought to you. I feel extremely blessed to have spent, I spent 28 years here as a faculty member, and three and a half as a student. You know, people say, "You're from Mexico." Well, I've lived in Madison longer than I've lived anywhere in my life. So my kids all graduated from high school here. So I do feel a lot of really good feelings towards this place. But we're not perfect. SL: Thank you, Jim. I'm going to stop here. 02:23:12 [End Track 1. Begin Track 2.] Begin Second Interview Session SL: Okay. So it's May fifth-I'm sorry, May eighth, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang and I'm talking with Jim Escalante from the art department. And we're going to get started on the second part. This is part two of Jim's oral history. So Jim, we talked a lot about your background as a student here. And then we kind of left off 01:52:00 with your move to Springfield, Missouri for a teaching position. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how that happened and how you felt about getting the job at Missouri State University, Southwest Missouri State University. JE: There are a lot of things you never really recognize in terms of, people talk about the connection to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And there are opportunities that tend to appear simply because of the connection. And then I guess that goes as well, as much with timing. You know, I am where I am because of timing, because of luck, because of association. And so there's no, there isn't any one factor like oh, I worked so hard. But since it was the 1980s, it was events and timing and my connection to here. But a faculty member, I don't know when he left UW Madison. Maybe sometime in the '60s. A faculty member by the name of Bill Armstrong was a teacher here. He's not a 01:53:00 name that I hear a lot connected with, when I hear faculty talk about the oral history of our department. His name doesn't come up that much. So I don't know how long he was here or if he was, I don't know the nature of his position. But my wife and I really liked living here. We were house parents on a sorority on Langdon Street. So we had an opportunity to continue staying there as we maybe built a life here. I had applied for a number of positions. Not that many. Teaching, faculty positions. And it was early in August of '81, I had graduated in May. And Bill Armstrong, who taught graphic design at Southwest Missouri State which was then called Southwest Missouri State, I think it's now Missouri State, he had, I think he had, he was divorced and he had some children here. And I don't know if he had any property. But he would come up here occasionally in the summers from Springfield and happened to walk into the etching studio where Warrington Colescott was teaching. And bill asked Warrington if anyone was around looking for a teaching position in graphic design. And I never studied with Warrington, 01:54:00 but Warrington turned to one of the grad students. And she said, well, I think Jim, Jim's over in the, where the new Chazen is, I guess it's, maybe it's now where the, it's actually where the new music performance space is going. We had some studios in the 700 block. So he walked into my studio and just said, "I hear you're looking for work." And I had a letterpress printing press set up there and I didn't know if he was looking for someone to print something for him. And I said, "Well, what do you have?" And he said, "I have a teaching position down in Springfield." I was like, "Come in, come in, come in." So they had a growing program in the '80s, graphic design as a component in the art department really grew. And they had offered a position to an individual. And then that person decided to go someplace else. And they had gone down their list of three people, and they had just received word that the third person was going to go someplace else. And Missouri was 01:55:00 appealing because Mary had grown up in Saint Louis and she had family in the Kansas City greater area. So it sounded like if we went there, we would be close to some of her family and that was comfortable. But I hadn't really taught graphic design. I had done a lot of letterpress printing. Which letterpress printing is, if you study typography and you study printing, it gives you a little bit of an entree into how print communication is done. Graphic design has many more components than just print design. But I took an interview. And I took the interview, I went down there. Much to my surprise, he offered me the job at the end of the interview. And I sort of said, "Well, I feel like I should bring my wife down before I accept." So she came down and we looked around. And it seemed like a great place to start. So I ended up teaching there eight years. And I probably would have stayed, had this position not opened up. It was a very 01:56:00 comfortable, I mean, it has some challenges living there. But the university side we enjoyed a great deal. So we stayed there eight years. But it was clearly a connection, the Madison connection, so to speak, because Bill had come back. I believe I had seen the listing, but in all honesty, I wasn't that aggressive in looking for a place. Because we had some stability here and weren't desperate for something. And a move always involves expenses and stuff. So, yeah. 00:06:55 SL: Is there anything else that you wanted to add about that time? JE: Well, timing was critical, at least for the success of my-I remember going to, we haven an annual conference called the College Art Association. And I remember going to one sort of in the mid to late '80s in Toronto. Yeah, it was in Toronto. And I ran into several people who had been 01:57:00 students here. They were looking and they had gotten short-term, one to two to three-year. And I remember, it was sort of awkward. "So, where are you?" And I said I'm at Southwest Missouri State. "You're teaching?" And I don't know if it was like, you got a teaching job? Or wow, someone found a teaching job. But I said, "Well, I'm teaching graphic design." And it was always this like, yeah, right. That's what departments were hiring in the '80s. You know, they were pretty well established in other areas. And as graphic design grew as a part of the design, I mean, a part of the art programs. And so where jobs might attract 80 to 100 in some of the fine art areas in graphic design depending, in a school like ours, we seldom got more than 16 applicants for a job. And I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but I've always, since I had studied sort of fine art photography and I was making handmade, fine printed books, many of the fine art faculty found comfort in the fact that I valued a fine art approach to print design versus just a straight commercial advertising position. And so I think many faculty had always looked at the advertising side of 01:58:00 graphic design as something that they didn't welcome so much in a fine art program. And so I was always able to navigate that. And of course we can all say that we all navigate the duality. But in some ways, I've often thought of the relationship between being born in Mexico and living in Mexico, growing in the United States, being bilingual, having parents from both countries, there's always that, you manage that duality. And I found the same, at least whether it was necessary, I used my comfort in balancing duality when I was in a fine art program teaching design because I valued important components of both. SL: Okay. That's really interesting. 00:10:01 JE: There was a dean down there who we used to chuckle would ask interviewers to, well, when we brought candidates in to interview, he would ask them to describe themselves with one word. And we would always chuckle, what word would we use? But then the more 01:59:00 I thought about it, the issue of duality for me was really, yeah, that was an important part. SL: So I thought maybe today we could talk a little bit about some of the exhibitions that you've been a part of. And I know one of them that stood out to me was the Breaking the Bindings at the Elvehjem in 1983. JE: Right. Right. SL: So I wondered if, you know, it was an important in showcasing a number of the book artists and their works. Could you explain your involvement? JE: Well that was one thing that I really was sorry that I was not here in Madison at the time. There had been conversations about trying to create something. I'm not an individual who usually looks for exhibitions. So I don't know that we had seminal sort of arena-changing exhibitions. But there was a conversation-there had been a little bit of a history 02:00:00 in our program where a seminar, in a graduate seminar, when what was then the Madison Arts Center, the Madison Arts Center, whose director was Joe Wilfer, who was one of our program's alumni, as a seminar the students would look for a trend, contemporary trend in printmaking or drawing or something. And then they would borrow artwork. They would install a show and they would create a small catalog. So there had been a little bit of a tradition here. And I don't know, I think Warrington Colescott maybe had done that, maybe Bill Weege. I don't know if others had done it. I had only seen it from the side. But as, I mean, the term "artist books" came around, at least in my knowledge, more so in the '80s. I think we used to look at it as small presses and fine printing. And that's kind of how we would 02:01:00 talk about it. SL: And when would that time? 00:12:56 JE: You know, in the late '70s. SL: Sure. JE: Walter, I think I mentioned last time, Walter Hamady was asked to teach a class, an intro class called Lettering. And the story that I remember him telling was he asked Don Anderson, who either was the chair or had created that class, asked him what to do with that class. What am I supposed to teach in that class? And Don said to him, "Well, teach him the things that you hope they know when you get them later on." And that's really where I began to see, I don't know if Walter called those artist books. I never took that class. But he would always be very excited about it because the students, he would just give them these open-ended assignments in book structures. And then they would come up with these very innovative or playful or, in a sense, breaking the tradition, in a sense. I didn't take that class. We 02:02:00 used to talk a lot about the people that were early in the field. Harry Duncan. There were others that might have been more in printmaking who sort of brought about paper, re kind of integrating papermaking in an art program. But how that class came about, I was already out of Madison. SL: Okay. JE: But I don't, and I'm sorry to say I don't remember the director's name. If Breaking the Binding was in '83, she may have died in '85. The story I heard, she was driving to Door County and had an accident and died. So Walter, this went beyond what the seminars normally did. Because Walter, I don't know where he was able to raise the money, but he raised the money from several places. Because the catalog is pretty impressive. And I'm sad to say that I never saw the show. I was in it, but I didn't see it. So Mary and I didn't drive up to look at it when it was installed in the, in those days what was the 02:03:00 Elvehjem. But they worked, and of course I know Walter Tisdale, maybe Kathy Kuehn, maybe Ruth Lingen. I don't know who else was part of it. And then when they put up a show, I think they installed, the people who curated it, installed an exhibition at the Union. I think they felt that since they were curating a show, they shouldn't put their work inside it. Which is pretty [unclear], you know, if you want to be part of that show when you're doing it, then you're telling yourself well I don't want to be in it because I'm one of the curators. So they created a separate show. And I didn't see that one. And then, of course, Walter was able to generate or raise the funds for a nice catalog. And I didn't have anything to do with it. The only part I had was in that I was thankfully included in that show. 00:16:23 SL: Mm hmm. Do you recall who contacted you about it? JE: I don't remember if it was part of a, in those days, it would have all been through the mail. There would have been no internet, you know. SL: Sure. JE: I don't know if I just got a general call. It wasn't, I'm using memory here. But I don't believe that they said, "Jim, we want to include a book." I think they called and said, "Submit work." Now I also think that they probably knew examples that they wanted in there. So I don't think that the entire thing was juried, because I think they definitely, in order to establish that certain artist 02:04:00 have, you know, been doing important work, they may have called. Now maybe that's not a good thing to say, because I don't know that. But I'm pretty sure that they, they may not have written guarantees to anybody, but I do know they wanted submissions from people. There were certain people they wanted submissions from. Now that's, if I write you and say I really would like for you to submit work for the jury, it's different than if you submit a work [unclear]. But I know that they were keen on getting submissions from certain people. But I think I just, in those days we all submitted slides. And I remember submitting some slides. Yeah. SL: Okay. JE: They produced a really nice catalog. You know, we have them around, but I haven't seen it in a long time. SL: I wanted to switch gears a little bit. I'm kind of going 02:05:00 chronologically here. JE: That's fine. SL: And I know we talked a little bit about your collaborations with Naomi Shihab Nye last time. And the Kohler Art Library has Tomorrow We Smile from 1990. JE: Okay, okay. SL: I don't know if you recall this project, because I know you've worked on several over the course of your career. But I wonder if you could recall this project in particular, if you could share a little bit about how that came about. 01:18:51 JE: Well I think Tomorrow We Smile was about the same time that I did The Miracle of Typing. And I'm not sure if they have a copy of that or not. But I had written Naomi asking her if she had done any short stories. That came with, you know, as a faculty member, you balance this, what we call the trinity of, you do your creative activity or research, you do your teaching and you do your service, whether it be to the students or community or to the profession. And I was teaching in a heavy graphic design curriculum. In those days, we had been transitioning from the 02:06:00 old curriculum to the new curriculum. And one of the things that I was always, one of the things that I felt very different in my career was through fine printed books, letterpress printing and such, I had always worked with the actual text. I had become invested in the text because I liked the text. And in teaching graphic design, sometimes you're teaching the theory of how a publication can be done. And in those days, we didn't have any way to really generate text. So we used dummy copy and we used, you know, pencil drawings of what the text would look like. So you design it but you don't actually make a finished piece with the actual text. In those days, the design education involved a lot of prototypes in the sense that we would have dummy type, but we wouldn't have the type. So one of the areas that I found very sort of challenging within teaching design was that we didn't really get to work with the actual text. And then I think it was in about, I don't know what year those books were made, but it 02:07:00 would have been the second half of the '80s. I'm losing my train of thought here. But one of the things that was always challenging to me was that we didn't get to use the actual text. And mid '80s, the Macintosh computer began to be spoken about. And as I looked at it, I wasn't sure I could fully grasp how it was going to be revolutionary. Everybody was convinced it was. But in the first stage of it, you had a dot matrix printer. And coming from a fine printing standpoint, where I had this traditional letterform that I could print into paper, and I was comparing it to a dot matrix printer. And if I talked to a student today, they wouldn't even know what a dot matrix printer looked like. But it would go back and forth and it would hit these dots. And it would create the letter. But it was like to look at that and to look at something that was fine printed, it was just so different. Then I began to, then I learned about a piece of software called PageMaker. I saw an ad at a computer store. And PageMaker you could actually see nearly what it was going to look like on a page. And then there was this new thing called the laser printer. And then that began to make sense to me. Because now 02:08:00 I can actually arrange text on a screen. And when it prints out, it's a much higher quality. And also I had a chair who had a very, I had a department chair who had a way of making me feel very insecure. And it was said to me in numerous different ways that if I did not become somewhat computer savvy, that my likelihood of being successful there would be highly diminished. And of course he couldn't explain to me what the computer was going to do. But he at least understood that in design, the computer was going to become. So I ended up, luckily I waited till the Mac got to a certain level of power. It was the Mac Plus or something like that. And I think I borrowed money from my mother-in-law and bought a Mac. And all I could afford was the computer. So I had this computer and I laugh because I used to write on it, and then I would hand write what was on the screen, because I didn't have a printer. (laughter) So I could do all the word processing. And then eventually I got a dot matrix. But laser printers in those days were very expensive. So we finally got the university to buy our classroom one. So we had one computer 02:09:00 and one laser printer. And that's where I began to learn that I could create something on a screen in the computer program called PostScript. And PostScript, it was independent of the printer. So I could print those letters on a dot matrix. I could print those letters on a laser printer. And then I found a, I'm not sure where I had it done, but I found a company that I could send my disc, or send it on a modem, and then they would send me the text. They would send the text to me in a negative and I could have plates made from it. And it was very high resolution. So The Miracle of Typing was a transitional piece. Because I found a typeface that looked similar to something that I could get in metal. So I just laid, I arranged all of the pages on the screen and printed it out and made a dummy. And looked for places where I could break pages and put in a few, there were very few illustrations. But then I kind of designed the book and then I ordered the type to be composed in metal. I don't know that, there's still a company in San Francisco. In those days it was McKenzie and Harris. I think today it's called M&H Type. So that text was actually printed from metal, or metal type of type called monotype. Then when I did Tomorrow We Smile, it was another short story from Naomi's. And that one I actually set the type, by set the type I typed it on this little bitty Mac with a nine-inch monochrome screen. And then printed it out and arranged things. And 02:10:00 then I sent, I sent that file called, in PageMaker, and had a negative made and then had plates made from that. 00:26:55 SL: Okay. Interesting. JE: Yeah. And then there was, and that one I actually finished up here. Oh, that's right. I finished that one up here. I started that down in Springfield. Then we moved here. And there used to be a place in Madison called Port to Print. And you could take them a disc and then they would give you a negative. Yeah. And it was very, very high resolution. You know, people still do those and it's almost like, it's old school, but the resolution is very, very sharp. So, that's right. Port to Print was the one that made the, and I printed Tomorrow We Smile here. And a colleague that taught printmaking down in Springfield by the name of Rodney Fruit did the illustration for that one. Yeah, yeah. So I was, I mean, for a couple of reasons, I was motivated to learn about computers because I had a 02:11:00 chair who basically told me I wouldn't be there very long unless I did. And of course, the challenge for a faculty member in a position like that one is you're expected to do all of this. But their amount of funding for research was minimal. And so I kept thinking, well how am I going to learn about computers if I don't have one and if I-and I quickly realized that I didn't have the patience or capacity for learning how to do programming. And at that point there was, when people said computers, they didn't really know what that really meant. Or they couldn't express it. And I could not see a fast, practical application in print design by doing, by writing code in Basic. I mean, I just couldn't see how by learning Basic. So when, I can remember, I was sitting at this computer. It was a computer store that was selling 02:12:00 Apple gear in Springfield, Missouri. And they had this wonderful poster that was kind of a poster that sort of brought Aldus, which was the software company, Adobe, which was making PostScript, and Apple, which had the computer and this laser writer. Now Aldus and Adobe joined forces, and PageMaker ultimately became InDesign. But I can remember seeing that and that finally, it wasn't so much the computer, but it was the software. So then it made sense. Then I could see an application in my teaching and even in my own work. So I found a great deal of comfort in finding like okay, I'm expected to learn computers. Now I can begin to see how-I began to see a reason for wanting to know how to do it, and I began to see [unclear] because I couldn't learn to program. When I got here in '89, people said to me, "Oh, you know a lot about computers." And I said, "Well, no, actually. I know how to use software. I don't know anything about-" I mean, I knew how to connect them and stuff. 02:13:00 But I didn't really understand computers. I just began to understand how, I had a reason to use software. And people come and say, "Should I learn Photoshop?" "What do you want to do with it?" "I don't know. I just think I'm supposed to learn." It's like well, if you don't have something you want to do with it, it's going to be really boring. And so yeah, I guess it was Miracle of Typing. And then it went to Tomorrow We Smile. SL: Okay. 00:30:53 JE: I had done another piece, smaller, one single poem by a Springfield author in town at the university was David Coy. I can't remember the name of that book. But, yeah. SL: And those were all done similarly? JE: Well they were done primarily as a way to learn how to integrate computer software with hand printing. Yeah. And David Coy's book, I think in my colophon, I made a point of making it very clear that the type was not handset. Because you're hand printing it the same, but the type was not composed by hand. I composed it on a 02:14:00 screen, had a negative made. And then in Springfield, I think he's still there, there's an engraving company that you can take a negative and they would make a plate for you. It has to be mounted to a very specific height in order for our printing press to print them. And he was actually still in business because of, the Dixie cup used him to make plates that they would print on disposable cups. SL: Interesting. JE: Yeah. So he did a number of things. But he wasn't making his money making plates for Jim. He was staying in business because of, I think it was Lily, I don't know what the, I don't know if it's still there, but it was a big paper cup company. SL: Okay. Well speaking of your returning to Madison, I thought maybe you could start by talking about the classes that you started teaching when you returned as a professor? JE: Well here again, it's timing and luck, you know. Without a doubt, it's 02:15:00 timing and luck. Late '80s, I don't know when it was that Donna Shalala came. She was the chancellor. I don't know who she was, Irving Shain or I don't know who. When I left in '81. And as a student here, you're not as in tune who the chancellor is, even. But it was in, Donna Shalala came, I'm going to say, '84, '85, '86. And she created a program called the Madison Plan. I had just heard about this later on. And if I understand now what she did, and I'm only piecing this together, so I'm not a historian. But as positions began to vacate here, retirements and people leaving, she took some of that money and then allowed departments to find people of color or people from diverse backgrounds or targeted groups. And I was talking to Bruce Breckinridge at a, it might have been that Toronto CAA. He said, "Donna Shalala comes, and she's really sort of changed the way that we're hiring people." I don't know if it was Toronto. Maybe it was '87. I don't know where it was I ran into Bruce. He was chair of the department. SL: And can you say what CAA is? 00:34:20 JE: College Art Association. It's an annual conference 02:16:00 that we have. It's like the second week in February. And College Art Association attracts scholars and artists who go to talk about college level education. And in those days, it was actually used as much by people looking for work. You would go there, you would apply for jobs. And then [unclear] if you can go to CAA, we'll interview you. So it was almost as much-those of us that used to go there went there more for hiring people or looking to get hired. So I ran into Bruce Breckinridge and he told me that Donna Shalala had created this Madison Plan, and that it was, that departments could actually identify someone they might want to interview and then bring to campus and such. And I don't know if I was, I used to come up here, because I had a real fond memory of Madison. And Mary's mother was still living in Racine. So we used to 02:17:00 come, we'd come to Racine and then when we'd drive back down to Springfield we'd come through Madison sometimes and we'd check with friends and such. I think Cavalier Ketchum, who taught photography here for many years, I talked to him about it. So I wrote Cavalier and I said, you know, Cavvy, there was this conversation about the Madison Plan. What do you think that might present for me? And so Cavvy said, yeah, so I had remained in pretty good communication with Phil Hamilton, Cavalier Ketchum and Walter Hamady, to a certain extent. About this time, I don't know when, I don't remember when he got divorced. So he was managing that and also had taken a couple of different types of release from the department. So even when I came, of course, he lives way out of town. So sometimes when I would come to town I wouldn't get a chance to see him. But I think Cavalier and Phil looked at my ability to 02:18:00 teach within graphic design and photography, primarily. And I came up in October of '88 to give an interview. And it was a little bit weird. I mean, we have formalized the interview process a little bit. And I remember getting on an airplane. And I had two trays of slides. You never went to an interview by putting your slides in a suitcase, because likelihood that suitcase would get lost and then you'd get to your lecture and you wouldn't have anything, you'd have to be doing shadow puppets. So Cavalier picks me up out at Dane County Airport and we're driving in and he starts talking to me about the two interviews I'm going to give. I was, "Cavvy, you said tonight I'm giving-" "No, no, no. Tomorrow you give-" not an interview, but "tomorrow you give a lecture on your teaching. (laughter) I said, "Well, I had no knowledge of that. I'm going to need a little bit of time." Luckily I had two parts to my lecture. And luckily I was, so then I need to kind of 02:19:00 separate my slides. I'm going to need some time to do that. So I came up and gave a lecture next day. Met with a committee. And then talked about my teaching. And then I went home. And that was in October. And you know, I knew that they'd have a meeting in November. And the department, I don't know, I mean, I've heard enough, but the department, number one, was not sure how they felt about hiring somebody without a large search. You know, someone was bringing Jim's name and coming forward. The department has always had arm wrestle sessions between which area should get a faculty member, whether it should be within drawing and painting or sculpture or photography or graphic design or whatever. And there's always been sort of 02:20:00 arm wrestling based on all of them, but there's also been another arm wrestling even nationally between whether we should grow the graphic design programs or grow the fine art programs. But my first presentation to the faculty ended up in a tie vote whether I should be invited or not. So I had been told that I would hear by such and such of November. And so I was really excited with the opportunity to come here. So the day went by, two days went by, three days went by. And so I called Phil and I said, "Phil, I'm just trying to, my life's a little bit in a-" And the phone kind of went blank. It went silent. He said, "Well, things aren't finished yet, Jim. We're going to have another meeting and have this discussion." So then the next time, I had a narrow margin of approval. So then I had to prepare all my documents. Because I did come as a tenured faculty member. And so when I first got here, I was a tenured faculty member. I was kind of this added on person. So the department doesn't have an abundance of space. So I didn't really have an office. I 02:21:00 ended up teaching photography class and I taught an intro to graphic design class. I can't even remember. But I've often referred to myself as the utility player in a baseball team. You get move around. And I was perfectly, I was just glad to be here. I was so appreciative to be here that, "You want me to go teach that? I'll do that." So I did kind of move around. And Walter, I think, was, I can't speak specifically to what Walter's, where he was in his phases of retirement. But he began, even when I got here in '89, I think he was already looking to exit. And so the papermaking facility, which is on 1313, which is now where the Wid is, was an abandoned, I don't know if we talked about it last time. But it was an abandoned building. There had been a bar. Someone once told me it was Dos Banditos. And I don't remember that bar, because it was up on-and so it had not been, I mean, papermaking was never something that was aggressively built. Papermaking started in the classroom that 02:22:00 I'm in now. And I've asked alumni who had come through, "How did you manage it?" Well now I can figure out how they did it, and it was bare bones. It was bare bones. So at one point, where the music performance space is, there was an abandoned house that they had converted into painting studios. And in the basement there were three small rooms. Two of them had water. So they moved it over to the basement of the painting studio. And then when they got the storefronts in the 1300, they were given a really big space. And then when they hired Dan Ramirez, who was the first Madison Plan hire here in art, I don't know if he was the first- 00:42:54 SL: Okay. JE: They took half of the space and gave him the studio, and then papermaking. So I kind of taught paper. I think maybe the first semester I was here I taught paper, 02:23:00 photography and intro to graphic design. And you know, everybody, I think, because Cavalier said to me, "The reason we brought you here was to help me with photography." And I said, "Well, Cavi, I appreciate that, but I'm teaching," at that time I was teaching in print production room, papermaking and photography. I had these three separate labs. We had no grad student support. And I was like, "I'm running three facilities and you're asking me to help you with one. I'm doing everything I can." But I've got, everybody, and then when you come, it's going to help me. But I moved around quite a bit. But I did teach graphic design. We had John [Rebin?]. John [Rebin?] came the same year I did. And Phil Hamilton and I. and then as I began to do more administrative work, I tried to focus more on the book arts side, papermaking side. I haven't taught photography in a long time. But I teach a class called How to Photograph Your Artwork. But it's different than a full semester of photography. SL: Could you talk a little bit more about what it was like to come back and work among the teachers that you studied with? 00:44:29 JE: I'm glad that I was gone eight years. And I'm glad that I had, I was given an opportunity with a colleague there, Dennis [Retrobe?] in Springfield. I was glad that the two of us had been given an opportunity to 02:24:00 re-visualize a curriculum. And so, you know, you get a sense of what it's like to try to take a curriculum that had been born out of one person, maybe two people, in a specific time. And then as it begins to grow and the profession expands, and you now have, there were three of us there. We began to see how we might create a major with specific kinds of emphases. And so you go through all of that and then you get to a point at that university where you're starting to be given committee assignments that are campus-wide. So when I finally came here, I did come back to be in a facility, and the same facilities, with mostly the same faculty, but I at least felt that I had been sent out to do the work and come back and have proven some things that I was able to do outside of here. I worked with Cavalier Ketchum, Phil Hamilton and Walter Hamady 02:25:00 extensively when I was here. Bill Weege a little bit. And then I took a couple of seminars with two painters. So when I came back, the only three faculty that I had really been a student to was Cavi, Phil and Walter. And so a lot of the other printmaking faculty, I didn't know Jack Damer, Dean Meeker, Ray Gleckler. I heard about them through the work that they did and my colleagues that studied there. But for some of them, I didn't know them. So I hadn't studied with them. But I was conscious of, I knew from a student standpoint, the histories that some of the faculty had had. But I really tried to make sure that that was their experience, that was their history, it wasn't mine. But you know, Phil, well, Phil was very, very kind to me 02:26:00 as a student and as a colleague. He welcomed me very openly. And as Phil was chair of the department, he put me on very early on a committee that was being formed to try to visualize a new art building. And then when Phil went back to the classroom, Truman Lowe came in to be chair. And Truman asked me to be undergrad advisor. So it was very quick for me. Then that next year, I was asked to be interim director of Chicano Studies. And I did that for two years, and then went back to be chair of the department. So it would have been different had I gone through a tenure track process as a returning student. But since I came back having been one eight years, and came back and immediately began given other governance. I mean, the undergrads is not much of a governance, but it is one that, we don't use an undergrad. We have fulltime advisors now. 02:27:00 But I was aware of it. I mean, it was easy to accept it because I had two children and I knew that Madison was going to be a much better place to raise a family. So even though you might have these challenges being in the department because you were a student from here, that far outweighed, you know, the benefits of being here in Madison and having the kids grow up here. So it was a no-brainer for me. 00:49:10 SL: Okay. JE: And you know, in the academic world it's always thought of, you don't hire your own. We've done that, right or wrong, quite a bit. There are few of us left. I may be, at one point there was George Cramer, Truman Lowe, Bill Weege, Jim, Michael Connors, Nancy Mladenoff. So that's six that I can think of at one point. It's Nancy and myself right now are the remaining Madison grads. Now we have Barry Carlson, who teaches adjunct. He stayed in town when he graduated in about '83. He worked 02:28:00 university publications. But I guess it's now just Nancy and I. So at one point, we were quite a few of us. And people would always remind us that we were that. But I'm still in Madison, you know. So what's your next point, you know. I don't ever bow my head and look at my shoes. SL: Well I could see where if you studied here and really liked it that you might want to stick around. JE: Yeah. I think it makes a lot of difference to go away and then come back. SL: Sure. JE: I mean, I rationalize it because that's what I did. It's worked out pretty well. SL: I wondered if you could go back a little bit. And you mentioned that you initially, that Cavalier Ketchum wanted you to help him out with photography. JE: Right. SL: But that you were kind of doing a little bit of everything. And then you kind of gradually found 02:29:00 yourself teaching more about the book arts. JE: Right. Right. SL: Could you talk a little bit more about how that evolved and why you went that way? 00:51:10 JE: Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of our programming has evolved because of individuals. The university never decided that they wanted to be the first department with a studio glass program. You know, Harvey Littleton, I never met him. I think I met him once when he was well past retirement. But Harvey Littleton, I think, was a ceramics person here and then began to, I think he came from a family of glass. So he began to think about making glass in a studio facility, in what would be an art studio glass program. So the university didn't come to the art department and say, "You know, we could be the first studio glass program." You know, Harvey Littleton probably, against people's better wishes, began to create a glass program. Walter Hamady created a book art program sort of 02:30:00 out of his own specific, I mean, he had done, if I understand correctly, he made a book when he was an undergrad student at Wayne State. And then I don't know what he did when he went to Cranbrook. But from the very beginning here, he began to look at books as a way. I'm trying to think. I mean, there are other important members of our department. [Ernie Mall?], I think, began doing fiberglass sculpture. So our department has never really thought of how are we going to build, how are we going to expand the book art program? I mean, when I came here I felt, I was part of photography, I was part of graphic design. I taught, when Bill Weege stopped teaching print production, which was how offset lithography could be used in fine art, I began to teach print production is how it is used in what we now call, what we used to call prepress as it goes into graphic design. So I sort of moved that class away from a fine art production to a graphic design program. So the point that I'm trying to get at is, no one in the department did an evaluation of whether we should maintain book arts, or now that Walter's leaving, how are we 02:31:00 going to revamp that and then do a national search. I lucked into that, in the sense that he began to offer one fewer class, or at least he began to-I think, the frustration in teaching letterpress printing is that it's a hands-on intensive area that needs a certain amount of money to replenish things. And the department as a whole, if we have anything that we principle or value, we tend to try to maintain as wide of an offering as possible. We had a sort of a strategic initiative planning along maybe 20 years ago. And out of that came this commitment to make sure that we can offer as wide of a range, so we have from glass to woodworking to art metals to ceramics. And the department has never come back to discuss maybe we should shed some of those so that we can focus in a core area. So the art core area is to produce breadth as much as possible. Now there's some depth in certain areas. So I never had a conversation with 02:32:00 Walter why he began to offer, I mean, his own interest in his own, he began doing a lot more collage and less and less of the letterpress. And part of it is it's just, it's very demanding in terms of maintenance of equipment and stuff. And when he was here, there was very limited amount of graduate student support for supporting that area. Or just about any area. And so as he moved away, I had the opportunity to take over the classes. So the department never had a conversation like, should we look nationally? I mean, we do have situations where we propose areas that we want to hire. And I moved into teach some of those book art classes. And that opened up the possibility for other areas to hire somebody. So I never really said well, we need to hire a book artist. I don't know that the department would have, as a whole, supported 02:33:00 that. Any decision in hires, we try to have a discussion that's as wide as possible. There are factors sometimes that influence who we're going to hire. And that's a complicated-it's not complicated. It's just tedious and boring. Sometimes we have a retentioner. We have a dual career hire, a partner hire that has to be involved. Not every single hire is the result of a long deliberation. But we do have long deliberations where we have rankings. And I don't know if a book art faculty line would have been raised up there. I mean, would have risen high. And I think about that as I approach retirement. Will the department elect to replace someone who does what I do? I vision two things. One, they'll replace with a short-term faculty member until they can decide what to do. Or they'll do someone who can do this and something else. And papermaking is the same way. I mean, papermaking came out of a growth from Walter's classroom. And then it moved to an abandoned house basement. And then it moved to this abandoned building's restaurant. And it wasn't until the Morgridge donation to build a WID (Wisconsin Institute for Discovery) that, I mean, I often joke that when WID came about, the School of Education also received 30-some million dollars for it. If I was a landlord, I had spaces in education. I had spaces all over that block where the WID is now, man, I would have been, if I would have been the landlord of those, landowner of those, I'd have been sitting in the catbird's chair, whatever they say. Because they moved all of the art 02:34:00 programs out of education and they moved all of the programs out of the where WID is and moved it to the remodeled warehouse. And out of that is where we got that new paper facility. It was a fun day when I met with a team from the engineering group. And they said, what do you need in a paper lab? And I was embarrassed, because I didn't know how to answer it. And I paused, and I said, "I don't know that I know how to answer that, because I've never been asked that." I've always been asked, "Here's this abandoned restaurant room. Can you make it work?" "Sure, we'll figure out a way to make it work. But I had never been asked. So that was our initial meeting. And I said, "Let me, I think I can tell you there are five things I hate about that room. And one was we had this huge air handling unit which you know, I couldn't do anything around that. And then I had all these doors. So I had to keep all this traffic open. And then, there were other things I hated. And they said, 02:35:00 "Well, that's the best place to start." I said, "The only thing that's good about there is that when you go out this room and you go out this hall and you go out the back door, there are times in the summertime when we can go out there and do something. It's outside. You've got light, and it dries." So then they gave us, out of that they gave us this big garage door, placed it to the edge of the- And so papermaking, in a sense. I mean, just to show the history of our department. We never got together and said, "We want to become known as a papermaking facility." And you know, Walter sort of cobbled it together. And it grew and it grew and it grew. And campus has this method of, it's an efficient 02:36:00 method, it's frustrating. But they have this efficient method of okay, at 1300 University, you have a thousand square feet, so you're going to get a thousand square feet. And you'd say well, we arrived at a thousand square feet because that's what the footprint they could give me. It was never arrived out of a design. And so they'd say, "Well, that doesn't matter. You have a thousand square feet, and you're going to get a thousand square feet." (laughs) And so then you're trying to, you're trying to stretch the measure. "Well really, [unclear] it's not 900, it's 975. Can you give me a thousand?" But that's how that came about. You know, we were one of the few programs with a papermaking facility. I mean, I think there are schools around. We used to think in the '70s we were one of the few of them. But there are, you know, there's Arizona State and there's several in Chicago. And some pop up in, some it's based on who's teaching there. One of the beauties of being a faculty member in a school like this, it's like, if that's what you want to explore, you can explore it. And I think we have one thing in our department, which we've never been staunch in creating tracks, like a printmaking major and a photography major, sculpture major. We have concentrations that we'd like to see our students kind of [play?] focus. But in order to graduate, they have a wide array of choices that they can make and they can still graduate. And so because of that, if I want to teach papermaking one semester, it doesn't come at the expense of letterpress printing, which is a 02:37:00 requirement. None of my classes are requirements. They have to take a certain number of studio classes. But they can take a studio in metals just as well as they can take it, and they can still graduate. SL: Okay. 01:03:40 JE: So I think there were people all over the country-Walter's going to retire, Walter's going to retire. It's a dream job. And I think that there were probably a lot of people that were very frustrated that that job didn't get announced nationally and they could have applied for it. I was able just to sort of move into it. So, you know. SL: So how do you think that, this might be hard to say, but how is your, how did you teach the book arts that was maybe different from how you learned it? Like what kind of style or approach to teaching do you take? JE: I mean, I think a lot of us looked at the legacy that faculty left through their teaching. You know, Walter, without a doubt, in some way was able to inspire people. Part of it was through his own example of what he did. But it's something I've never, I mean, I hope that something comes out with talking to 02:38:00 everybody. It's something, I mean, he had very high standards. And he had maybe, I mean, there were some contradictions in the sense that he would, I think if there was anything that he said with absolute certainty was that in the making of these books, we are really trying to move new literature forward. It was not about, you were preserving a craft, but you weren't doing it to preserve a craft. I think he really encouraged everybody to print new work and not reprint the old classics. There was a level of let's look at what new innovation and new technology brings. But on the other hand you would come back to this standard of whether it was, if it was created in a fine enough method. And so sometimes I felt that there was, at least maybe I didn't fully understand it, but there was embracing new technology, but yet in certain ways 02:39:00 it came back to certain traditional-how things got evaluated might be using some traditional values, maybe in printing and craft. There were certain issues of legibility that I think he felt were-I don't want to get too specific, but there were certain types of typefaces that you'd just never mix. SL: Sure. 01:07:11 JE: But yet, you know, so in a sense like let's be playful, experimental and new. But yet on the other hand, there's still some rigid, there still seemed to be a level of rigidity. But everybody was given the permission to break the rules in some capacity. But he had a very specific personality. So I think that you, many of us that teach college have talked about, as an MFA program, we, I was not a TA, so I had no experience in teaching. So the only model you can use is the model that you learned from. And when I went to teach in Springfield, Missouri, I realized that there was a lot that I had been given as a model that I couldn't use. Because I didn't have any way to print. I didn't have any handset type. I didn't have any printing presses. I had to teach graphic design with a very different classroom. You know, we had drafting tables. So from the very start, I had to figure out how to teach this material with a whole new set of tools, or limited tools. But there were certain behavioral within either how you, expectations or, and you used that because that's what you, it worked for you. But then you realize that the students are different. You're in a different part of the country. Not that that makes any 02:40:00 difference, but it plays on it. It was a different university. I think when I first got there, we were one of the campuses that if you graduated from a Missouri high school, they would admit you. Where if you wanted to go to the main campus in University of Missouri, Columbia, you had to have a higher GPA. Or higher test scores, or whatever. I think early on, our university would admit any high school graduate from the state of Missouri. I mean, I think that's within the public university system. If I graduated from high school, I should be able to go to a college. And most states will honor that. But there's a tier. If you want to go to the university of campus, versus the university at such and such campus. So we had a real range of students. And they had a very different-I mean, I had come from a fine art program. And these students were looking to get in graphic design and go right into advertising and such. So I quickly had to find 02:41:00 a balance between who I was, what I could teach, what I could offer, and what the curriculum was there. I to this day wonder, I look at, many of the people you are going to be talking to were people who found enormous inspiration from his classes. And I'm not sure how he was able to do it, you know. Phil Hamilton was much more, let you do what, you design what you want to do. And so you would-but I would, they were very different. But I could-and I think there are a lot of people who would speak that Phil's method worked very well for them. I think I had a great deal of admiration for Walter because his level of craft in his work was superb. And his vision was superb. He could articulate it very well. But I never really saw him working. He, I actually, I think I said this last time, the person that really taught me how to actually print was Cathie Ruggie. Cathie Ruggie Sanders. I mean, she ran a very task, you got to class, you got there on time, and you would do this. And everybody would do it. That really was my first introduction to how you would print and how you would work these presses and maintain, you know, cleanliness and craft and such. Walter, after I left I think he said he used to give an all-day workshop. Because he says, you can't really do a lot of this in two hours, two and a half hours. So he would come in on a Saturday. But I never witnessed that. But Walter would describe his printing method. And then he would show you the result. And you knew that he knew, I understood that he knew exactly what he was doing. And he set a standard by like okay, this is what you want to achieve. I can remember, my only time with being frustrated with him was I bought a printing press and I rented a truck and I went to Chicago and brought it back. I would show him that as it would print the intensity, the saturation or the darkness of the ink would start dark and then it would get lighter as it would go down. And I had spent, from my 02:42:00 standpoint, a lot of money. And I mean, it wasn't on him. I was just trying to figure out what it was. And Walter says, "I don't know what it is. It's not supposed to do that." And I was like, for crying out loud, I know it's not supposed to do-(laughter) So there were sometimes when he could show you how he did it, but in a sense, there was a limit to, you know. I mean, I think all of us that have one printing press, we know how to use our machine. And of course Walter would say, "Well, that would never happen at mine. I'm not sure why it was happening." Yeah, it would be interesting to hear if people can really point to what it was that he was able to do. And I will always talk about the fact that he brought a group of people together. And we were somewhat on the same, we had similar aspirations and we really helped each other. So I think all of us helped each other as much if not more than Walter did. But Walter was, you know, I think Tisdale used to call him, it's out of a Herman 02:43:00 Hesse book. He was a leader of the game, or something like that. You know, he was there. And we all came to be there. And then you know, we helped each other a great deal. I mean, all the people that we've talked to, each of us have different levels of connection. Walter Tisdale and I, he was my closest friend here. Kathy Kuehn as well. And then there were others that would kind of come in through Kathy or Walter. Yeah. I can't answer how it was. I mean, and becoming a teacher, I tell my young students, the students that go out to teach, that you may start by trying to model who taught you. But don't be scared if you find you can't teach that way. You'll have to find your own way. And that will be partly within who you are, what you're most comfortable with, and the situation of what you're in. Because 02:44:00 you know, it's just different. I mean, everywhere you go is different. And of course, then the technology changes. I mean, that's, I mean, it's such an interesting, when you think about my generation. We started either with rub-on type or letterpress. And then we began with the computer. And now you have this whole interactive web world. And you think about, I guess from when I began working with this stuff, and I began 1970 working with yearbook. Learned how to print. Mostly through photography. But when you think about 1970 to 2020, the technological changes? It's just amazing when you think about in the world of print communication. 01:16:27 SL: Yeah. I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the 02:45:00 changes and how they affect the classroom, the book arts classroom. So like today, are your students using computers to lay things out? JE: Well it's both frustrating and rewarding. I'm not participating as much nationally in the cohort of hand papermaking. And then there are different pockets of letterpress printing organizations. About five years ago, I went to a retreat with Sue Gosin and other people who have been instrumental in hand papermaking. And one of them, I was sitting around like god, this is like old hippie days when we would have potlucks. And it didn't dawn on me when another person looked around and said, "You know, the only person here who's under 55 is this one 30 year-old. And unless we interject the younger people into it, there's no-" So we were talking about how do you do that? Well, you do 02:46:00 it online. Well, this is hand papermaking. This is papermaking. And how can you have papermaking as an online community? I mean obviously, there's parts that you can. So I think it's been a little bit harder for that group to sort of bring in the young person. Where I go almost annually to the wayzgoose that takes place late October/early November in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, where they have the wood type and printing museum. And what you see there is far more activity by young people. And it's been an education for me to understand that what they want is not what, they want from the letterpress experience, is not what I valued as the letterpress experience. And that was the fine printing side. But yet I would go back, fine printing, but not to preserve a craft, but to produce new literature in a fine printing method. But for them, 02:47:00 it's just like I get to do it by hand, and if it's clunky and it's what I might say is bad printing quality or whatever, as I told my daughter, my daughter who's 25, six, "Yeah, Dad, those are the hipsters." You know, they're interested in creating something in an old-fashioned, low-tech method. And the young person doing it nationally-not so much here-but the young person doing it nationally has embraced the CNC router and the laser cutter. And partly because they've grown up with digital. So it's like the first thing you think about is, well let's just go use a router of some sort. But also, they're fascinated with the wood type, which is a rare commodity. And they just can't go buy wood type. So they find a way to make a lot of it through CNC routers. And so the young person is there, but they're not as interested in setting the type by hand. And that's where 02:48:00 I've been trying to get my classroom to sort of-because I'm struggling with enrollment. Where I see letterpress tends to be a discussion nationally, in my department, it isn't. And I'm trying to figure out is it because, you know, what is it I need to do? So it's really exciting for me to see the number of young people still doing it. But on one hand, I had a student, not in my class, but she was talking about she needed a piece of paper that was nine-inch round. A circle that was nine inches round. She said, "So I went down to the laser cutter and I cut it." I'm like, what?! She said, "Yeah, I wanted it to be nine inches, so I just went down." And I was like-(laughs) "So you needed a laser cutter to 02:49:00 cut a nine-inch-what happened to the compass?" Well, she probably never used a compass. And so in one sense it's like we're using these thousand-dollar items to do things very quickly and very precisely. But I'm trying to sort of-and that's where I don't, I mean, we just had Julie Chen here a couple of months ago, two months ago, who does a lot of laser cutting of paper shapes. And I think she would say it's been probably one of the most important tools that she's introduced into her own work, because she has the ability to make complex shapes very, very quickly. And I think that's where our department has really struggled to try to make that technology available to the students. Easily available. I mean, we have a limited, I think the room is only open half a day three days a week, and then how you 02:50:00 schedule it. So the access to it impedes the easy inclusion of it. But I'm, I would love, you know, here again, I've reached a saturation point of trying to bring new technology into the room on my own. I have a polymer plate maker in the room, which you know, is manageable. But I don't have the room. You know, one of the things about CNC routers and laser cutters is they need ventilation. And they, CNC router throws sawdust everywhere. So you need a vacuum system. And the laser cutter tends to need ventilation. Because depending on what you're laser cutting, you're producing smoke. And so, I think if our department could come up with a longer availability to these tools with support, it would be very helpful to me. But, yeah. You know, I don't know. We do have, we've slowly been adding it. But access to it is still on a limited basis, so. 01:23:35 SL: Where are those tools, then? JE: Some of them are, you saw where my classroom is. SL: Yes. Mm hmm. JE: Well, we had this big horseshoe of a building. And Jim on the table is drawing a rectangle. In the corner by the University and Park Street is where my classroom is, 6451. On that Park Street side, if you walk down, the first door is a room where Bill Weege taught. And we used to call that the print production room. And now that's become a room, Faisal teaches in there. Mike Connor's taught in there for many years. But it's 02:51:00 become a room where we've begun to make it as a service bureau. So there are large-format printers. You can burn plates in there with ultraviolet machines. You've got a laser cutter. It's basically like anything else. It's like, we have this room, can you make it work? Well, okay, we're going to convert this office to the CNC router, and we're going to make this office for the laser cutter. And then we're going to bring in some new ventilation. And I don't think there's going to be soundproofing. So it's just right down the hall. SL: Okay. JE: And that's where I have, when students want a plate made, we make the negative down there. Then we come down into my classroom and we make the polymer plates. Yeah. SL: Okay. Well I wonder if we could go backwards a little bit. In 1992, the Silver Buckle Press published a printers' exquisite corpse. And that included a number of the 02:52:00 people- JE: Right. SL: --in the book arts program. JE: Right. SL: Could you talk a little bit about this project [unclear] 01:25:27 JE: Yeah. Well, Barb Tetenbaum was there. And I don't know how it originated, because Barb Tetenbaum was the director or the-I don't know what their titles, curator or printer. And I'm trying to think, I don't know, I don't recall when they moved Silver Buckle from College Library to the Memorial. I don't know when that was. But it would have been under Barb's direction. And at that time, she had hired one of our graduate students by the name of Carol [Herford?] was who was, a really good, really good student. Sadly she committed suicide years later. And that was really hard for a lot of us, 02:53:00 because she was a great person. And unbeknownst to many of us, I think, I didn't realize that she suffered from mental illness, depression, or I don't know what it was. So they did a call. I think there were, I don't know if it was 50 printers. There were four pieces to the exquisite corpse. I think Barb and Carol did the top title page. So I think each of them did two. So if you have four, I don't know how many it was, maybe fifty. But they just, that was actually by invitation. They invited us. And you know, it was one of those print exchanges. You commit to a size. You commit to a number. I don't know, sometimes when you do those exchanges, sometimes there's a fee associated with shipping and making the box. I think Peter-no, I don't know if Peter Dast made the box, or if they had them made down in Austin, Texas, at a place called Book Lab. I don't remember who made, it might be on there. SL: Okay. 01:27:39 JE: But it's an exquisite box. I mean, it's got these four dividers. I 02:54:00 mean, it's masterfully done. But you know, you got a piece of paper, I got the feet. So it was the last one. So I got a piece of paper to the size and then the entry points where the feet would go, or the legs would go. And then other people who had the neck to the waist and waist to the knees, they got entry points. And then you just filled it in and then you could move them around. But there were a lot of the usual suspects, so to speak. A lot of Madison grads. There was, there's Susan Kay Grant, who was an undergrad here and a grad here. Bachelor's degree and a master of fine art degree. She was from Jefferson, Wisconsin. And she predominantly, she started out primarily in photography and then made a lot of books with Phil. And she's gone on to be pretty well known in the book art world. And my recollection is I think the only class she did with Walter was in paper. Paper. She made some paper. But she made lots of photo books while she was here. Her work may have taken on much more of installation, larger size. But she was in there. But I can't remember-and then there were other people that Barb, Barb was pretty, well, Barb graduated as an undergrad here. And I don't know is she went, oh, I think she went directly down to be a intern at Twin Rocker in Indiana. And at a certain point went to, left there and went to Chicago Art Institute. SL: Okay. JE: And then Barb, you know, through that connection, and then also through Art Institute, really started networking a lot. So there would have been people in Barb's networking that were non-Madison connected. And they would have been through, I think Barb, I mean, Barb probably used some other people to help her sort of, 02:55:00 maybe she would ask can you participate, do you have anybody else? But I could be completely wrong. And there's a risk of giving an opinion without knowing. But I think she was pretty much instrumental in selecting who went into that. And I think years later, Tracy did the exquisite horse, which is a- SL: Yeah. 01:30:37 JE: You know, it's easier, because you either get the front or the back. But I don't remember how Tracy sort of refined that one. I think Tracy maybe wanted to do other people, or maybe different kinds. But it's a great project, too. But, yeah. Yeah. SL: Well speaking of Tracy, I know the two of you worked together on the Wisconsin Book Festival Book Off in 2006. JE: Yeah. That was a lot of fun. SL: Could you talk a little bit about that? JE: I wish we could do that every year. Well, we had a student by the name of Carol Parker. And I don't know where Carol and Tracy-Carol said, "God, it would be so great if we could have like the Iron Chef of book arts." And Tracy thought that was a great idea. And Carol's graduated, and Carol's moved on. And at one point, Tracy was finishing her degree when I came back in '89. So I never studied with her. And then I came back and she was finishing up, so I was never even her teacher, really. But then she stayed. And I don't know at what point-Barb was here for a little while. And then when Barb left, Tracy took over at Silver Buckle. So we would get together occasionally to have lunch. And 02:56:00 I'd bring students over there, or we could get together. And at one point she suggested that we should do something like this. And I'm not a real daring individual. But it's like doing something you've never done was like, I don't know. (laughs) But we've got enough time to plan it. And Tracy, I think, so we have this vision. And so I've got a class. And of course the Wisconsin Book Festival generally happens in October. So you don't have a whole lot of run-up time when you create this class. So I think we had talked about it before the start of the semester. So then we said, let's do it. And I think very early in the semester we decided that we would limit it to the class. Like we were going to have this big call for contestants. We'd limit it to the class and we'd actually do things in the class to prepare them to do this. So then we started coming up with what can we actually manage? There was 02:57:00 a woman by the name of Terri Carr, I think it was Carr. Kerr? Maybe it was Kerr. Maybe it was K-e-r-r. Terri Kerr. She had spent a long time, I don't know if she's still down at the American Players Theater down in Spring Green. So she helped us sort of, this is like a production and you need to have a script of what's going to happen so that you know. And so she really helped us kind of, so none of us had ever done this. And so then we needed to find judges. So we called Amy Newell, who was at Tandem. And Tracy Dietzel, who was one of our alums but was teaching over at Edgewood. And then we called Phil Hamilton to be sort of the master of ceremonies, so to speak. And then Tracy, we came up with three structures. And the students, we didn't tell them which they were going to be. But we made sure in the classroom we had made these. And we did a dress rehearsal, so to speak, where Tracy has this project she does with the exquisite corpse, but you do it on a book. And you fold it. And then you say, okay, what's the title of your book? It was, My Life as a Dog. And then you'd turn and say, okay, what's the opening line? It was a dark, dark, damp day, you know. And then you introduce a character. So she has these eight things. And then so when it comes back to you, you read yours. 02:58:00 So we did that as an experiment just to sort of get people. So then we started out, we were going to do three different stages. We were going to start out with six people. And there were certain people that were really, "I'm in, I'm in." They were very, "I'm in, I'm in." And there were other people, like, "I don't want to do it." So I think we might have had 12 people. And we started out with six and then we eliminated two and then we eliminated two and we were down to the last two. But Tracy, I think Kohler had just, Kohler Art Library had just finished a big part of their digital collection of the, artist book collection. So with the help of Terri Kerr and Tracy, we were trying to visualize. So these kids are going to be sitting up there on tables. And are the audience going to interact? So I think they envision that they would project books from the Kohler Art Library's art collection, or book art collection. And then we hired a guy from the L&S support system to walk around with 02:59:00 a video, he videotaped it. But then he would walk around with his camera and he would project, so what he was videotaping was actually being projected. And then it later on got edited. I'm not sure I've ever actually seen it. And in retrospect, everybody looked at it as a real competition. And I just thought it was the zaniest, craziest thing. So I walked around as this photographer shooting all these photographs. And Tracy had said it was going to be like the Iron Chef. So I really thought that we were doing a parody. (SL laughs) But yet it was a legit competition, you know. And it turned out to be a lot more expensive than we thought. Because I think we figured certain costs, and then we never figured the cost of the actually renting the theater. (laughs) So Tracy, I don't know if Tracy got some money out of her budget or 03:00:00 whatever it was. Tracy was like, "We're never going to do that again." So we've never actually tried to raise the money to do it again. But I think it might be time. It was so much fun. SL: Uh huh. 01:37:39 JE: And then Carey Watters, a student who's now a faculty member down at Parkside. She made these incredible like you know, the blue ribbon, you know, like you go to the dog show and you get the blue-and she made these incredible things out of paper. SL: Nice. JE: They weren't handmade paper. I don't think it was. But I think the winner got this like gorgeous, it was this prototype of one of those blue ribbon, you know, with the ribbons coming down. But it was all handmade. It was really, really beautiful. It was so much fun. Yeah. We've done that once. It was free. The turnout-well, I mean, obviously the 03:01:00 book arts, the Wisconsin Book Festival, I mean, that's a pretty big deal, and there's a lot of venues to pick from. But we had a decent audience. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I can't remember her name. The only person on the table that was an undergrad is the one that won. (SL laughs) And then Amy, I don't know if it was, Amy and Tracy Dietzel, we might have only had two judges. So we removed ourselves form the judging. Yeah, we should do that again. Amy's now living in New Orleans. So we could have the return of one of the original judges. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had forgotten about that. I have a lot of photographs because I was walking around taking pictures. Have you seen the video of that? SL: I haven't. No. It sounds like a lot of fun. 01:39:15 JE: I don't know where it is. I don't know where it exists. Yeah, anyway, so I 03:02:00 know there's a video but I've never seen it. I still have a lot of photographs on my website. But I don't know how much-=my website is not connected with any kind of social media, so I don't get a lot of traffic. SL: Sure. Sure. Well I thought just maybe a couple of wrap-up questions left here. But we talked a little bit about technology specifically. But how would you say that artist books have evolved since you've been making them? Besides maybe technology. JE: Well I think part of, for us, for some of us, and I don't know who the "us" is, but for those of us that came to this through fine printing, you know, there were certain things that we really valued. One was fine printing and one was making editions. 03:03:00 What is an edition? Is it 25? Is it 250? It varied. I think we began to see, at least we began to recognize that there were many artists making one-of-a-kind books. And that's something that I've never so much embraced in. But there are some examples that are just stunning. Could I ask what the question was again? SL: Sure. I asked how artist books have kind of changed over the years since you've been doing them? JE: And then I think you began to see the one-of-a-kind, and whether it has to do like a big, modified sketchbook. I mean, that's one thing I realized, that in all the years of teaching, I've never told the students to go out and buy a blank sketchbook and then, you know, fill it with either drawings, writings or artifacts. I've always told them, "Let me show you how to bind a book." And where you have this whole altered sketchbook kind of world, where people buy a blank sketchbook and then they 03:04:00 just fill it. And it becomes as interesting as anything else. Then the other thing was, mass-produced, not so much mass-produced, but being produced with photocopies or different kinds of high-speed printing, that is an, like the zine. I've never been, I understand it, I appreciate it, they're all part of the extended family. But it's not an area where I, I mean, even graphic novels. I mean, I've had some students I've tried to encourage to do graphic novels. I've only really had one. I think when Tracy taught, there was one or two that did it. In my actual connection to students, not too many had actually done it. Now we have Lynda Barry. And those students who do graphic, comics and graphic novels, they tend to stay-at one point they would take the book structures class. I don't have too many of them now. And 03:05:00 I think it's because they're so engrossed in and involved with the drawing side of it. The actual structural side is very simple to [unclear] that they're not as interested in the book structure. I mean, I think that what you've seen is this expansion of what it includes and what it involves. And it almost involves just anything and everything. I mean, it's an overwhelming array from flip books, you know, the kind of old, you flip them and as the pages turn you see a rocket ship moving or a ball bouncing. I have seen a little bit more, a little bit of a return to trying to make a book out of photographs that are printed with an ink jet. I mean, I love that side of it, because when we made books out of our photographs, and that's when I knew Susan Kay Grant, she made mostly books that had photographs when she was here. I'm not 03:06:00 sure what she's done after. But we would have to use a process called dry mounting to put the actual photograph in the book. And it's a heat, you have a material between the paper and the photograph that metals, and it holds it together. Where now the student can find a nice quality paper and print a high-quality photograph on it and bind that in a book. And I'm working with a young woman now in our photography, Sarah Stankey, and she's looking, she's made a couple of them. And next year, I met with her yesterday, and next year she hopes to make more books from ink jet printed books. But I think you've, one thing that has really expanded is people's exploration just of binding. And you have people making books with some really highbred binding attempts. Whether they're blank or they have, you know, printed pages, there's just, I mean, and it boggles my mind. I don't, as I've said many times, too many times, I don't participate in too much social media. But when the students bring, most of the students will say, "I found something on Pinterest." And then I say, well, what is it? And then I'm overwhelmed with the array and variety that they can find, and it's all shared online. So it really covers just about anything. And our department has students that make prints and such. And there's such an array, and such an availability of online tutorials, that there are students in the printmaking area that make their 03:07:00 own books based on the fact that they have a sequence of images that they can figure out very quickly to make a very simple book. I mean, if you're going to print prints by hand, you're normally not going to print so many that your binding is going to be complicated. But I mean, I think, I don't know how many, I haven't produced that many tutorials. But I know there are students in the department that will watch, and then make a book and not even have to take a class. So it's just- But as I say, what's encouraging to me is how young people have found technology to help them maintain continuing in the letterpress world where I think papermaking-papermaking is a different level of commitment. And the tools. It's hard to make a lot of paper without a certain amount of industrial-level machinery. But, you know. 01:47:25 SL: I forgot what I was going to ask you. I'll think about it in a minute. But you did mention one of your students. And I wondered if you could, like if there are other like memorable projects over the years that you wanted to touch on, or other students you worked with. JE: Well, it's interesting. I mean, I had a young woman. She was an athlete. She was a sprinter. And for a final project I said they could do-they needed to do something that they designed themselves, they envisioned themselves. And she didn't, she wasn't one of 03:08:00 these real extroverts in class. But you know, it went from, "Yeah, okay, I know what I'm going to do." "Well, can you share with us?" "Well, yeah, I know what I want to do. I'm working on this." She had found a text that her mother had written years ago. I don't know, as I said, she wasn't an extrovert. But I think her mother had been a teacher. And had written a couple of stories. And as a way to encourage her mom to continue writing, she snuck the story. And she edited it down, I think, in order to be able to complete it in the semester. I don't know that she was making an edit. We don't need 03:09:00 this character. But I think it was like okay, I've got four weeks, I can only illustrate this much. And so she made this book for her mom. And I was just blown away. What it illustrates is the individual student needs to feel a certain amount of ownership in whatever project it is for them to really want to go above and beyond. Because it was a book arts structure class. It wasn't a letterpress. So right next to my classroom is one of the graphic design classes. And she was taking a class in there. So she would come in and she would say, "I'm here. Do you mind if I go next door and work on it?" And I'd say, "That's all right. Just go over there." I didn't want her to just feel like she was over there so 03:10:00 Jim wasn't going to reach out to her. So I'd go in there and I'd say, "How's it going? Do you have any questions?" "No. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine." And so I was almost wondering, I had no idea what it was going to be like until she came in. But I was, I was really, really impressed with that project. And in terms of really what, I often wanted to know what the exchange was like when she surprised her mother. You know, just because here you have a child now-I mean, I'm making, I don't know, but I'm assuming that the daughter is trying to encourage the mother to do something from, as opposed to the parent oh, I want to encourage my daughter. This is where the daughter was really 03:11:00 trying to be encouraging to her mother. I mean I guess, here again, that had to do more with just the daughter/mother connection more so than, I mean, the project was, she invested more time in that than probably all the other projects all semester long. And it was well done. But I think what impressed me most was just sort of that-I mean, I guess it illustrates, I mean, a piece of artwork could do it as well. But I think it illustrates that, what a book can actually do. You know, her mother would sit down and look at this book and be amazed that a story that she made is now a book. But here again, I never, I wasn't a fly on the wall watching it. But I can just imagine. That one really stands out to me. I mean, there's been so many projects. There was another project that a graduate student two years ago finished where, and I'm still trying 03:12:00 to finish a video of that. She took, in our department as a grad student you have to take an out of the department class. And so she took a folklore class. I don't know what the assignment was, but she wrote origin of the universe story. And of course she loved blackbirds or crows. So it's based on a crow. But I don't know where she found this structure, which I think she called it dragon scale. But she'd only found one structure. And basically I can't, I'll try to describe this for the audio. But it lays completely flat. And then each page, and if you're familiar with book vocabulary, each page is attached to a hinge. So the page is a folio with a folded fore-edge to the right. And the two folded edges are attached to a hinge. So you turn each page on this hinge, so you have the action of turning the pages, but yet the book is really flat. Now she made it so you could roll it up as a coil. But I think that was almost more for transportation. And it was just encouraging. You know, she said, "Do you know anything about this dragon scale?" No. I've never heard of it, I don't know what it. So she showed me a picture. And of course it was some picture she found on the internet. But then yet she figured it out. And I've always talked about the structure connection to 03:13:00 the meaning of the book. So she has this, you see every one of these pages with about a half an inch overlay. So the left to the right dimension is about two and a half feet. And so you only see about half an inch or three-quarter inch of the edge of each. So she's cut part of this drawing. So you see the panoramic drawing when the book is first approached, you see this panoramic drawing. But only about a half an inch of it is on the edge. And as you turn it, then you see the text. And I think the projects that merge structure with the content are the ones that are so surprising. I mean, anybody, I mean, I can teach anybody to take a stack of paper, fold it into sections, and sew it. And that in itself is a great thing to use for a journal. But in Cynthia's case, when you bring the content and you discover a structure and you find an image with text. Of course, she wrote the text. That stands out. Now there's so many books that students have made. And it's generally sometimes when they're very-I mean, 03:14:00 I've had a number of students who have managed different mental illness. I've had students during the semester where they're going through different kinds of prescription, trying to find a prescription drug that will help them manage their day-to-day. So they make these books out of all these, if you ever pick up drugs at a drugstore, there's a bag and there's all this, you know, paraphernalia that comes, not paraphernalia, but all this language that comes with it. And so it's always been meaningful to me to see people make books out of them. In my book structures class, they're mostly one-of-a-kind books. And they'll make books out of something that they're managing, whether it's, I mean, I had one student that had raised two children, three children? Let's just say two. Let's say three. And every single one of those children, she had used cotton diapers. Which I was like, we did that with my first one. The second one, we tried to. The third one, I don't think a cotton diaper ever touched her bum. But she raised all of them. And so she had all these diapers. And she made paper out of them. SL: Oh, interesting. 01:57:08 JE: And then she made this really huge coil, not a coil, but a huge, long book because every page symbolized one day that she had changed diapers. So she says, well, each one of them went two years. I mean, she didn't have a log, but she estimated that everyone maybe went two years, so that's 750 days, or 700 and whatever days, times three or times whatever. So she has this book made, by the time you sew them all together, it is massively long. And it's reappropriating those diapers into a book. And then each page symbolizes each day. And you know, it's just like, it's not the kind of book, "Okay, class, what we're going to do today is we're going to figure out how many days in your life you may have changed diapers." It's that, the student getting so interested in the book form, in the book structure, to kind of create an idea that comes from them self. So there are a number of books like that one. SL: How many different structures do you cover in your class? JE: Well, I like to start the class with how to make a book out of a single 03:15:00 sheet of paper. And the one that really resonates in my life is two years ago a woman who's got her MFA show up in [Sohi?] right now, this is not in it. But we talk about what can you do with one sheet of paper. And of course if you just go to the photocopier and take out a pieces, it's going to be eight and a half by eleven inches. But a sheet of paper can be much bigger. And a sheet of paper, you might be able to make it bigger just by taping the edges together. So don't say well, it's got to be eight and a half by eleven. So she lives in a multigenerational family. Her grandmother, I don't know if her grandmother is still with her. But for many years, her grandmother lived with her and her husband, and I think her parents at some point, and her children. So there's three generation, grandmother, father, there are four generations in that house. Holy smokes! But her grandmother sewed all the time. And so she 03:16:00 comes to class with a little round bobbin that goes inside a sewing machine. And I watched my mother sew. My entire life, I watched my mother sew. And I often credit her for, my watching her make things to give me the idea that I could be an artist or make things. I mean, I always thought my mother was awesome because she could make things, you know? So I don't remember the text. But on that bobbin was a piece of paper about a quarter of an inch tall by a yard long. And she had handwritten some phrases from her grandmother. Now I bring that book up as an example because it hit me at such an emotional level. It's not a beautiful book. She didn't 03:17:00 make the bobbin out of gold and diamonds. She didn't use the most exotic paper. But it brought her grandmother's story in a form that her grandmother probably didn't, you know, she had used bobbins all of her life, so she didn't even think about the bobbins. And I was like, is that a book? Or is it a charm? Shut up. I don't care. It's text. And it takes a single strand of paper and it connects me with a personal history that has such an impact on me. So we start with a single sheet of paper. And then I, whether that's, I'm a little bit of a stickler. I want the students to understand the vocabulary. You know, that's a sheet of paper. When you fold a sheet of paper, you create a folio. It's one sheet of 03:18:00 paper. That's now a folio. And a folio has four pages on it, because you have the left, one. The inside of the fold is two. The inside of the fold is three on the right, you know, the recto page on the right is three and the back page is four. So then when you have folios, and you start to put folios inside of folios, you create signatures. And then from the signatures, as you start to sew them, you create the book. But at some point, (coughs) excuse me, at some point you take, you know, there's a transitional stage from the single sheet book to the folded codec book, where you have accordion. And then when you start to accordion, from an artist standpoint, you can start to put inside each one of those folios or valleys, you can start to put other material in there, or other shapes in there. So there's the traditional book forms. But then how do 03:19:00 we as artists begin to explore the playfulness? And then you start to ask the student, what content would go in here to justify the need to create this, whether it's a drawing or you know, shapes or color or text. Or maybe you have-I mean, I've always said like growing up, we always saw books that were in English and Spanish. Sometimes they would, you turn the book over and you read it this way in Spanish, and then you turn the book over and you read it this way in English. And then there are other methods for doing multiple language. So we start with a single, to a folio, to a signature, and then we go from there. SL: Okay. 02:03:30 JE: And then, I 03:20:00 always let the class kind of take it in a direction that they, I have models. And they sometimes will like-the one that, it's hit or miss, how do you make a hard, like a very traditional hard cover book? Everybody loves, people tend to like the Coptic stitch. Which is easy to sew a cover onto it. So it's a pretty low tech. But it amazes me how some people who've never sewn just get totally into it. You know, they just, oh my God, they just start sewing books and sewing books. And then some people, you know, I teach them how to make a portfolio box usually. And I have one young woman who this semester has really taken to sewing books. She says, "I'll never make another box." (laughter) She doesn't like the box-making 03:21:00 part, which is a part that I kind of like. So then you show them these. And then you encourage them to mix it, like what I call create a hybrid book. And you're going to use some accordion, maybe different shapes. I don't teach a lot about pop-ups. Because it's not technology, but I don't know a lot about pop-ups. But I've had some students do pop-up books. I have some models. And then of course Memorial Library has some examples. And I have a couple of books in the classroom that they can use. SL: Well, I think, I just wanted to see if you had any final thoughts, or if there's anything that we haven't already covered that you wanted to talk about. 02:05:31 JE: You know, I am approaching sort of the end of my time here. It's been somewhat excited that a lot of this material in book arts is being discussed 03:22:00 and taught and done elsewhere. I worry how the department will maintain any kind of legacy. I'm not going to, I think when I retire from here I'll be able to just walk away. I mean, we'll see. The university has been an amazing place for me. I feel extremely fortunate to have been here 28 years. I'm not sure when I will be, I guess this is my 29th year. So much of what's come to me, I think, is timing and luck. Being in the right place, right time. A certain amount of connection. Meaning having connection, not through the wheeling dealing connection. It will always puzzle me how, I would say Walter was an inspirational teacher. How do you, it's not, how do you maintain that? How do you pass that on? Yeah, I don't know that I have anything. But I'm delighted that you're collecting stories. It will be 03:23:00 interesting to hear. You know, we were very close with a lot of people. And then time and distance has its way of, I mean, people going, I mean, people get married. I have my first grandchild. So now there are other factors that sort of pull at you. But thank you very much for doing this. SL: Yeah. Thank you, Jim. 127:44 End of Second Interview Session Total time = 272