Interview with Diane Fine

SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview #1772 FINE, DIANE FINE, DIANE (1960) Book Artist At UW: 1984-1988 Interviewed: 2018 (2 sessions) Interviewer: Sarah Lange Index by: Sarah Lange Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 3 hours, 7 minutes First Interview Session (June 1, 2018): Digital File 00:00:01 SL: So today is Sunday, June 1, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the Oral History Program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Diane Fine, Book artist, UW alum and professor of art at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. I'm at the UW Archives in Steenbock Library, and Diane is in New York. DF: Hello. SL: So Diane, I thought maybe if you wouldn't mind starting off talking about your early life. Maybe you could tell us where you grew up. DF: Sure. I'll be happy to do that. And then of course, just ask me any questions if I'm not hitting on what you're looking for. I was born in Brooklyn in 1960. And I grew up on Long Island in a town called Bellmore, North Bellmore. And that little town was a bedroom community of New York City. So not everybody worked in New York, but you know, there was a train station and, you know, like, I assume at least 50 percent of those families, people commuted into the city. So it was a quick and easy ride into New York, into the City, as we referred to it. I'm the youngest of three girls. And my father, Charles Fine, owned a laundry and dry-cleaning business. He had served in World War II. And came back from the war. And his father had a laundry business and his other two brothers were still away in the service. And so he was the lucky one (laughs) that got to work in this business. I'm saying that a little bit facetiously. But he ultimately loved that work. But it was difficult work. And I'll explain that in a moment. My mom, Marylln Fine, was first a teacher and then an office manager. She stopped when she met my dad. She was working, actually, for RKO Studios in New York. And when they decided to have children, she left that job and was home with us probably for about ten years. And while she was home with us, you know, and this was in the 1960s she went back to school to get her master's in education. And I have memories of being with my sisters in the back of her classroom if she couldn't find childcare or something like that. So that was something I always respected about my mom. And we had besides being the three of us, both my parents are now deceased and the oldest of the three of us died of breast cancer, sadly, when she was only 41. And one of my books, two of my books, is actually about that loss and that experience my sister was going through. We have a large extended family, lots of first cousins. And we were all really close. So all holidays, you know, we had the benefit of having these eight or nine other cousins that were in some ways like siblings as well. I mentioned about my dad's business. So we lived in a small house that was like a post-World War II, I guess you would call it a tract house. It was the kind of, like GI housing that they built right after the war for people coming home. And everyone on the street had the same house, that at the time was just sort of blah, and now is like wonderfully retro looking, you know (laughs). 00:03:36 And my dad's business was in a neighborhood that transitioned from a middle like working-class neighborhood to a poor, very crime-ridden area. So when I was young, in a five-year period, my dad was held up at gun point like 11 times in his business. So it was a really, really stressful time. I remember my mother, if my dad wasn't home precisely when he said he would be, she was nervously waiting to hear, you know, had there been another holdup in his business. So that was really difficult. My dad, as a result of business, you know, we went through some difficult financial times. And my dad, to his credit, just, you know, kind of weathered that. He was brave. He didn't you know, he didn't want to work for anyone else. And you know, that was sort of part of this family business that he wound up with, that he kind of saw it through and eventually switched gears. It had to become a business that wasn't over the counter, because it was too dangerous. So in any case, that eventually resolved itself. But that was a huge part of my growing up, that not having a lot of money in the household, and nervousness from that. Still I want to say we were definitely privileged. Like I got to grow up in a really nice neighborhood, you know. We had excellent, excellent public schools, and it was just an easy train ride to New York City. Therefore we did have regular access to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and all New York City art museums. And the school had a really wonderful art program. And I just took that for granted, the access to original art. Now I teach way upstate New York at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. So we're 300 miles from New York City. And many of my students like haven't seen original artworks, or certainly not the great masterpieces that I took for granted. And that's been something I need to understand about my students. What it's like to only ever see things in reproduction. So I was really, really lucky to have access to New York. Then, what else did I want to say? Oh. That there were no other artists in my family, or at least in my family in the United States. There was a great-aunt, my Uncle Benny, my great-uncle Benny was married to a woman who was an artist. And she wasn't very well thought of by the family. She was kind of a selfish person and quirky and just, you know, sort of a problematic member of the family. And so there was always, like did have this maybe they'd be like, "Well, you know, she's an artist." (laughs) And I just remember sort of getting this message that somehow being an artist--they happened not to have children, and it was because she was an artist. And, you know, I came to understand once I was an adult that that just happened to be this aunt who was stingy, and not very nice, and blah, blah, blah. And then later I came to know we have a very large family in Israel. Because when our families left Europe, 00:03:00 Eastern Europe, some came to the United States, some went to Palestine. And the ones that remained were killed in the Holocaust. So that Israel family grew and grew, as we did in the United States. And it turns out that among all those relatives in Israel, like a huge percentage of them are artists. SL: Oh, interesting. 00:07:32 DF: Yeah. That was kind of neat, and really wonderful later in life. I mean later in life being college, we went and visited that family when I was in like sixth grade or something. But then I went back as a student when I was in college. And that's when I was like oh, this is nice to know. So that's the story of--you know, anything else you can think of? SL: I wondered, you said that your mom taught and you were in the back of her classes. What was she teaching? DF: Oh, we were in the back of her classes when she was attending school. SL: Oh I see. DF: She was getting her master's degree. And I think about it now, because finally things are sort of more family-friendly at universities and stuff. But I think it's pretty neat that, you know, she would have had to vet that with her professor. She was, you know, going back to school, so she was a mom where other people were traditional age. And again, this was in the 1960s. And I think to her credit she wasn't like, I'm not going to miss class or not get this degree because I have children at home. And then as soon as I was old enough, I guess, to go to school, she went back and taught. Then she went back to work. And I remember always feeling like proud of that. Like as a result, my dad worked like 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. And my mom was working outside the home, which now seems like not a big deal. But I would say half of my friends, that wasn't the case. So as a result, my mom, and I was the third one. So I remember her being like, "Do you mind if I don't come to every single open school night?" You know, like just "been there, done that". And I remember not having a problem with that at all, just being really proud of the fact that she worked outside the home and had gotten this degree and all of that. Yeah. SL: And what about, you mentioned having access to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. DF: Right. SL: Did you go there often? Or was there a favorite place that you or your family went to to look at original art? 00:09:47 DF: You know, that's a good question. My memory of going to the art museum was on school trips more than with my family. So I think, and I hadn't really thought about that till right now, I mean, at least when I was really little, I'm sure we went to like the Museum of Natural History both with school, and my parents certainly weren't negative about art, but they weren't like art connoisseurs. My mother perhaps a little bit more than my father. I mean, my mother was interested in things like the ballet and the opera, and took advantage of that when she could. But my dad, less so. Not in a hostile way, but in a funny way. I remember my mother dragged him to the ballet and he was like, you know, "That was the most expensive nap I ever took." You know. (laughter) But with school, I have this really strong memory of being in those like school buses that I think are still like that, no seat belts, and you're bouncing around, and going into the city to go to these various museums. And then, once I was old enough, you know, it was also a different time. But by the time I was probably 13 or 14, I'd just go on the train by myself or with my friends. You know, you didn't need parents. And go to the museums. And then once in high school when I was 00:06:00 interested in art, then I just started going. I could access those things myself. And also my sister, Beth, who is the one who died, I remember as soon as I got interested in art, which was like late in high school, so she was already off in college, she was, and she was a science person. She would come home and visit and say, "Let's go see the Impressionists show. Let's go see Judy Chicago's Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum." She always, she was interested herself. But she was the kind of person that really wanted to facilitate her, you know, baby sister getting to see these things. And also she was taking interest in it. She was like an intellectually curious person, but also because I was interested in it. So that's a really, I actually get a little choked up just whenever I talk about her. So that's, you know, just the way it is. Its actually, we just had the 20-year anniversary of her death. And it's still, you know, it's definitely a loss in my life that defined, has defined my adult life, was losing her. And she had young children at the time who are now grown and very much a part of my life now. So anyway, she was the kind of person that was like, "Let's go do this." Wherever she was living later on, and I'd go and visit, you know, she would have set up all the, "Let's go to all these galleries." Anyway, that was the access to those museums. 00:12:50 SL: She sounds like a lovely person. DF: She was. Lovely. SL: I do want to talk about the books that you did later on. I wonder if, you started to mention that you got interested in pursuing art in high school. DF: Right. SL: Could you talk a little bit about when you decided to major in art, and what your bachelor's program, your BFA at Syracuse? DF: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, because other artists that I've known and then also now that I've been teaching art students for a really long time at the college level, it's interesting to see who, you know, from the time they were little they were always the kid that was drawing, versus who came to it later on. I would definitely say that I came to it later on. Also when I thought about it, when I first got to graduate school, I realized that when I was really little, I used to, I used to, I always told myself stories. Like I had these various, they were episodic. And I made up like a family, or there were several different ones I could go to to like pass the time. And I would just, you know, going to sleep, and actually sharing a bedroom with my next sister, who's between me and Beth, my sister Janet, she would say, she was a couple of years older, but she was like, "All right, tell another story." And I would go like the next chapter in the story about these made up people, okay? So I realized that while I thought I didn't really start drawing until late in high school, or making art in one way or another, that for years, and I don't know, my guess is when I was maybe eight years old, nine years old, that time period, I would be by myself, let's say after school or whatever. And I would draw these characters. And this one story I remember was that they lived in a cave. They were like people who had retreated from society. I'm sure I was influenced by the sort of like hippie commune thing that was going on, like I was too young for but I knew about. SL: Sure. 00:15:05 DF: So this idea, so it was sort of like some kind of counterculture thing in my head. And it was this family. And they built a home in a cave, and they had children, and this and that. And I would sit down and draw the picture of this cave with the different rooms in it, different furniture. Just on a little piece of notebook paper. And then let's say it would take me five minutes to draw it. And then I would just stare at the picture, like I stopped drawing and just stare at the picture and tell myself whatever episode I was telling. And then my mother would be like, "Time for dinner," or whatever. And I'd just crumple that up, throw it away. And the next day, I would draw it again. So like, I wonder if I, in order to then tell myself the story. So I wonder like later I thought wow, if I'd saved those, would there be hundreds of the exact same drawing of this like weird interior or whatever. So that wasn't anything I was, like at the time I just took for granted. It was just something I did. I suspect no one around me even noticed I was doing it. 00:09:00 You know, we were just way more on our own it seems to me than kids are now. Our parents are like, "Go out and play, and don't come back for hours." You know? SL: Yeah. 00:16:25 DF: So in any case, I don't know whether it was safer, or whatever the deal was, but my parents did not know like what we were doing. I mean, I'm sure they knew about the most important things, because we all turned out okay. But in any case, it wasn't until later, in art class, that I remembered I could picture this image. Like, I don't know. I did some kind of stipply Seurat-like painting. I'm sure the teacher had shown us Impressionist paintings. And I handed it in. And the teacher like loved, loved, loved it. And I was like, what? (laughs) And I think it was her praise that made me look and say like, say. That was fun. And I really liked getting the reinforcement for it. And I was a good academic student, so I got reinforcement other places. But I just remember that being like, oh, like a surprise that the teacher liked what I had done. And I wasn't one of those kids that could like look at anything and draw it. I went later in undergraduate school, I took all the drawing classes, and it was not easy for me. I was like middle of the pack, and would have to really work on drawing well. It didn't just come very naturally. But anyway, so from then on, that, I think, was in ninth grade, because I kind of can picture the teacher. Then I went into the high school, and we had a really great high school program, including some printmaking, which now I think wow, like I can picture the press and the teacher that taught it. Then I totally got into like anything to do with printmaking. Or even we did like graphic design stuff. Which then meant using a magic marker and an X-Acto knife. (laughs) And you know, the printmaking thing, I just remember seeing that reproduction thing for the first time was for sure the kind of bug you get bitten by. And the other thing was, I was in all the like advance track classes for academics. And in the art classes, it allowed me to like interact with different kinds of people, you know, that were from, you know, whatever that track system is. I don't know if they still do it. But you'd be early on, like oh, this one's a smart kid and that one's not so smart. And this one's college-bound, and that one's not. And, you know, so I suspect they don't do that quite like that anymore. I don't know. But as a result, you would be very sort of like only interacting with people of a certain sort of like demographic or from a certain, I don't know what the circumstance was. But in art, it was people from all the different sort of strata of the high school. And I really liked that. I really liked getting to know people that were sort of more different from me in those ways. 00:19:26 So as I was getting ready to apply to colleges, and definitely the time period where I'd go to my guidance counselor and say I wanted to be an artist or I wanted to go to art school. And they would be like, "Why? You're such a good student." You know, as if those were mutually exclusive. So I remember not feeling confident enough. I wound up applying to schools for academics. And then applying to art school. And in fact when my dad moved out of the house that we grew up in, you know, now quite a few years ago, my sister and I were helping go through things. And I found all the like acceptances from like Cornell and this school and that school for completely academic. Nothing to do with art. Because I was so certain that, you know, I just didn't trust that I would get into an art school, or an art program. And so, anyway, so I did both those things. That was sort of a backup thing. And so I applied, the schools I wound up choosing between were SUNY-Purchase, Syracuse University and Carnegie-Mellon University. And one thing I always remember is I wound up choosing Syracuse. And my mother, as I said how financially my parents weren't in a position to pay for our college. Like we needed to do that ourselves. But my mother, who was really educated, my dad was also, my dad had a college degree. But my mom was so good at finding grants and scholarships. And it's like what parents have to do now, filling 00:12:00 out the, you know, whatever all the paperwork is, all the red tape to get funding. And the circumstances were, because we were in need, like I always thought like they couldn't help me, but what they did do, or my mother did, was find ways for me to get scholarships both on merit and need. And so I was able, I remember my mother saying to me don't not look at private schools, because I bet you'll be able to get scholarships, etcetera. And that was true. And that was because she did a ton of research and pre-internet, you know, like figuring out different things I could apply for. So I was able to go to Syracuse for four years, which is an expensive, you know, really nice school program, blah, blah, blah. But I could do it myself, with just a little bit of loans and working and the funding I got. 00:21:54 And the other thing is, I see with my students, there just isn't the resources that there were when I was--I mean, Syracuse itself had a lot of resources, and that may still be true because it has a big endowment. But the federal government and the state government were way more generous and supportive than they are now. So the idea, I remember when I first started teaching here, thinking like oh, I put myself through school. These kids should be able to do that. And then I realized how many fewer opportunities they had for funding than I did. So the whole thing that we're all aware of, of like crazy amount of debt that students go into unless they're from basically independently wealthy families, pretty much, I didn't have to deal with that. I'm really sensitive to that on behalf of my students. But anyway, so I applied to Syracuse and went there. And I went as an advertising and graphic design major. It was called visual communications was the major. And actually, I think you had to be accepted. First you just got accepted to art school. And that freshman year you did, you know, all your basic foundation courses. And they did a nice thing there that I always remember, which was in that first year you took, there were a ton of art majors. It was a big, big art school. And you took the same, let's say, 2-D design, 3-D design, those core programs, drawing, you know, figure drawing, all of those basic courses, with the same like 15 students. It was called your section. And maybe there were twenty-something sections. So what's neat is, I'm still friends with a couple of people that were in my--like how am I friends with them? Because we were in the same section freshman year of like Syracuse University, 1978. SL: Okay. 00:23:45 DF: So it was a neat thing. Like you got close with these other students. And so the reason, I mean, I was interested in graphic design. But for sure, and I see it with my students all the time, the only real reason I was majoring in that instead of say, studio art or printmaking, was the idea of how am I going to pay the rent. That's like a constant with my students as well. So I took as many printmaking classes as I could. But my major--which I liked, you know, I liked well enough, the advertising and graphic design. It's something still, I certainly do a lot of graphic design, you know, or use those kinds of skills in making artists books. But it wasn't what I was, you know, I really, if it wasn't a question of how am I going to pay the rent, I would have been studying just printmaking and just studio art. And I also, and I feel this is, I see it with my students, too, I remember thinking well then I can pay the rent doing graphic design and make my own art sort of separately or on the side or whatever. I mean, very few people support themselves completely, of course, doing studio art. And what I realized once I was doing that, when I was between undergraduate and graduate school, that it was better in a way to just do 00:15:00 something completely unrelated, for me, like waiting tables or something like that. Because it's almost like used, it was like taking from the same bin. And so then it was hard to have energy left over in that same area to like do my own work. At least, at first. You know what I mean? So anyway, so I was in school. And doing the graphic design and advertising design stuff, and then taking a printmaking class whenever I could. And I remember getting this weird feeling about this advertising thing. Like we were doing television commercials and print ads and all this stuff. Which was interesting. How to use typography. But then when we took some courses that were about the advertising medium in general, and often the faculty, there was core faculty there but a lot also commuted from New York City up to Syracuse. And I remember taking this class and the teachers, who were like some ad execs from New York City, asked something like, to the whole class, and it was like a psychology of advertising kind of class. And they said, so you were supposed to have a unique selling point, USP. What is the unique selling point of this product was like how they were always, for you to come up with like ideas about how to sell it. And they used as an example Charmin bathroom tissue, toilet tissue. And I don't know if you, you're probably not old enough to remember these ads that were like, there was this weird guy in a store, Mr. Whipple or something. And he would touch the Charmin and it would be so soft, you know. And other people would be like, "Please don't squeeze the Charmin." Like this was this big ad at the time for this like soft toilet tissue. SL: I remember that, Diane. 00:27:02 DF: You remember. Right, he was like some creepy guy. So I remember in the class they said, "So what's the unique selling point of Charmin bathroom tissue?" So our hands shot up and like, "It's soft." And they were like, "No. The unique selling point is you are a better mother if you provide this soft toilet tissue for your family." And then I remember getting, like my heart sinking and being like, ew. This is really not what I want. You know what I mean? I was like, oh, that's right. Not that there's anything evil about selling your toilet tissue over somebody else's. But I was like, oh, it doesn't really matter how soft your toilet tissue is, or whatever. So I was already starting to kind of wane on that in terms of like, in my soul, kind of. But it was just there. And then I worked with, in the printmaking area, I had lots of friends in that area. And one of the professors was Don Cortese, who made artists' books. And I don't remember being particularly close with him. But I remember making my first book, first and only book while I was at Syracuse. And there was a student, a friend, Mary Holland, I remember her, I still have her first book. And she helped me. I remember she more than the professor. Not that there was anything negative about the professor. But that happened at Madison as well. Like so much working that happened from your peer, you know, instead of the professor. So I have a really strong memory of her helping me. Like I don't really have a memory of him showing me how to sew the book. And the book I did was a book about my grandmother, Gertrude Fine, who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania when she was a child, in like 1906. And I made all these like abstract etchings. And I made a text about her and her story. And that was this book. I still have a copy of it. It's like really kind of terrible. It's all like overly glued and very stiff. It's all decisions I would have made, you know, differently. But it was the start of something and that feeling of paging through it and sequence of images and so on. So you know, Syracuse was a really fabulous experience. And I graduated from there. And then I moved home. (laughs) A common thing now as well. And my parents, as I said, lived right outside of the city. So I commuted from their house and was like beating the pavement and looking for advertising jobs. Advertising graphic design jobs. That was what my degree was in. And eventually I found--oh, I just remember the whole like dressing up, and I had a big, heavy portfolio to tote 00:18:00 around to like go to these meetings. And you know, doing that. And eventually I got a job at like a little advertising agency on Madison Avenue. The pay was terrible. I still remember. It was like long hours, and I made like eleven thousand dollars a year. And I didn't like it very much. And it was really stressful. There were all these deadlines. It was a small office and the boss was always kind of like looming. And I remember realizing after like let's say a year into that how stressed I was about, like as carrying the stress of that office around with me past the working hours. And then I remember one day being like on my way into town, into the city, commuting, and being like stressed about whatever was waiting for me at my desk there, I mean, on the drawing table. And then I was like oh, you're stressed about this thing that you don't even care about. It was a nice client. I think it was like some kind of Scandinavian furniture like manufacturer that I happened have that, you know, that's what I was doing the ad for that. So it wasn't like doing like you know, alcohol or cigarettes or whatever. But I was like (groans), you know, not, I was like, I don't care about this. What am I doing? You know? So once I realized that and I knew, you know, what I want is to be a printmaker, I wound up, I remember talking to my mom and just saying, I want to apply to grad schools. I'm going to want to apply to grad schools. And I want to give this thing a chance, even though it was scary. Because it was like, what am I going to do with a printmaking degree? And I wanted just like, what I wound up doing, I remember my mom saying like you need to absolutely follow your heart and follow your dreams, but you know we don't have any money to help you. And I'm like, of course, I know that. and she's like, so make that decision, but be aware that, you have to know like you're probably never going to have like a fancy car or a fancy--you know, is all of that okay with you? And I'm like, well it certainly seems like it's okay. You know, I don't want to be on the street. (laughter) But it wasn't like I had you know, aspirations to be wealthy or anything like that. SL: Sure. 00:32:30 DF: Absolutely not. So I remember she was like, you know, do what you need to do. And again, the ways in which they helped was I didn't pay them rent, you know, and then like from time to time I would have housesitting things in Manhattan. That helped, actually, at this place, a print studio. So once I shifted gears, and what I did was I started doing temp work for like a couple of years. And it was really cool. You would just get a call and say for two weeks you're going to go do this job at this place. And it was just nine to five. And you're like, "See you later" afterward. And then I was taking, I took, I mean, it was New York. So I took a couple of courses with Hedi Kyle at the Center for Book Arts. It was on Bleecker Street in the Bowery at that time, it was a totally sketchy neighborhood. I took a course on papermaking from Paul Wong at Dieu Donné when it was on Crosby Street. And these were very kind of sketchy neighborhoods at the time. And I could do all this because work was just nine to five and then I would go take the classes or work in the studio afterwards or on weekends. And in fact, I remember being in, so the Center for Book Arts at the time was this like storefront right near the Bowery. And it was like ew, you know, we'd sort of have the door locked when we were in there. And one night we were working and someone, like totally scary-ish type person was like banging on the door. And we finally like opened the door and it was just this kind of random person who opened up his coat and said, "Does anybody want to buy some steaks?" (laughter) In my head I'm like, well first of all, I'm a vegetarian. But 00:21:00 second of all, if I was going to have steak, I don't think it would be from your coat. (laughs) Like that had fallen off a truck somewhere, I'm sure, or like whatever, wherever he got his steaks, like oh, no thank you. But in any case, so, I had the opportunity, like I took classes every semester through the New School, or the School of Visual Arts. And then I also found a print studio, because there were lots of cooperative print studios to work in. And this was down in Tribeca. And this woman, Cheryl Pelavin had a little gallery there, and a studio that she published out of. And then also a studio for people to like rent, that were printmakers. So I started working there. And then she asked me, then it was great, like I wound up sitting in the gallery in exchange for my fees for using the studio. And she really helped me like being able, I learned a lot from her to use that printmaking facility. And I would housesit for her sometimes, so I could stay right there when she was gone. And I took these classes. And then, like I took a two-week course with Joe Wilfer who, you know, is a Wisconsin--yeah and it was through Parsons School of Design. And you signed up, and that was what was good about working temp, also, because I could just say, "Oh, I'm not going to take work for these two weeks. You know?" SL: Okay. 35:45 DF: So it was a course in papermaking, of all places up here in, Lake Placid is right near where I live now. Like so it's in Lake Placid at this place called Lake Placid Central CR. They had a whole papermaking facility. And they had a dance studio and different things. And they asked Joe to like teach a two-week workshop. And I remember I found these people that, somehow they had like a ride board. Like I didn't own a car or anything. And I wound up like in some hippyish van driving up to Lake Placid with these people that I didn't know, because the woman was going to be taking a course and I think her boyfriend was dropping her off. And we spent two weeks up here, like just fabulous, doing this papermaking with Joe Wilfer. And I have a very clear memory that he was working on the matrix for the Chuck Close pieces he eventually did. He was doing these like shimming of, like brass shims where he was making these little cookie cutters, that Chuck Close eventually like squeezed different colored pulps into and stuff like that. So he was working on that, and then teaching us. And it was a gas. It was like so much fun. And Joe was having a good time. And he was just the most lovely, hilarious, knowledgeable guy. Definitely ultimately saw him as a mentor in a way. He made a difference in my life. And one of the things I remember is he, oh, he would buy everyone drinks until he had no money left. He was always like, "No, that's on me. No, that's on me." And one time he took us, like I don't know, we must have been like twelve people or something. And we stayed at some little like motel and then went and made paper during the day. And he took us to like a paper mill in Newton Falls. I don't think they're even there anymore. But in these areas, because the Adirondacks is where they harvested a lot of wood, and we're right in the foothills of the Adirondacks here. And so we went and saw like a commercial paper mill, which was really cool. And he clearly knew all the guys on the line, you know what I mean? He wasn't, like even though he was a professor off and on at Madison, he was just this down home guy. Anyway, I just remember like going with him after that, going to that paper mill, we stopped at someplace in Cranberry Lake. And we were at a little inn. And then he was like buying everyone drinks, blah, blah, blah. And flash forward, years later, I'm done with graduate school, I'm moving out here to Plattsburgh. My friend is driving with me, Mario Laplante, who I collaborate a lot with. We're driving a big truck and trailing my car, because I've taken the job here in Plattsburgh. And we're driving through the night and we're in the Adirondacks. I mean later I realized like with that truck and trailing that car, like there were other ways we could have gone. But we were going like winding around. We 00:24:00 couldn't find a place to stay. We didn't know it was like a vacation area, and it was the summer, and we were like exhausted. And we pull in, I think I was sleeping and he was driving. And he's like, "Maybe this place has something." And it was like one o'clock in the morning and I get out, and I'm like, "This is that place that I was with Joe Wilfer, like millions of years ago." Not millions of years ago. Probably it was like six years before. And I had no idea then, I had no idea that that place was ultimately like right near where I lived, whatever. Where I would live. But anyway, so while I was there at that workshop, Joe started talking to me about graduate school. And he's like, "You should go to Madison. You should go to Madison." I'm like, "What's Madison? Where's Wisconsin?" Like, "What are you talking about?" He was like, "When you get back to the city, contact me," blah, blah, blah. And so then I was starting to research grad schools and I of course looked up Madison and it was a fabulous program. It was like the program at the time, probably, in you know, papermaking, book arts, letterpress, printmaking. And so I decided to apply there. And he wrote a letter for me. Hedi Kyle wrote a letter. And I remember I was, I applied to a few places and I got in, I think, to the places I applied. I honestly can't even remember the other places. And Madison I got in, but they didn't offer, it really was hard to get fellowships and T.A.s. And some other place I applied to, I kind of think it was Colorado, I got an offer to be a teaching assistant or whatever. And I remember having to make that decision. And I decided to go to Madison, take on the debt, I mean, borrow money to go, because of how strongly I felt, and felt about Joe's recommendation. And there was also a sense that once you got to Madison, you could keep competing each year to get, so I was hoping once I was there I would get some funding. And that's something, by the way, I would never recommend to my students now. Another sign of like different times. I would never, I be like, you only go where they're going to help support you, you know, or support you in your degree. So I went, and I ultimately I did get a T.A. And I was trying to think about this in preparing. I wound up spending four years in grad school. And I think two of those I was a T.A. I was trying to think if it was three or two. But I think I had several jobs while I was there before getting the T.A. So those included, I worked in the CCBC, which I looked up and saw is still there-- SL: Yes. 41:44 DF: The Cooperative Children's Book Center. So I worked there like my first year, and I worked at a restaurant, waiting tables. Shanghai Minnie's. I don't think that's still there. And I worked at the Silver Buckle Press under Kathy Kuehn. So that, I was doing that for two years, and that was really helping support me through school. And then I did compete and get the teaching assistantship, and I did that for two years. Which was good, at least, in Madison. I mean, the experience that led to this next job that I'm still at now was you know, we were the teachers of record. It wasn't assisting someone, it was like we taught foundation courses. Like I taught 2-D design and 3-D design. And this with, I might add, very little guidance from anybody, you know. (laughs) 00:27:00 I wonder what it's like now. I don't know. So that was a huge, first of all, it paid my way, and it gave me that teaching experience. And, you know, took me through that experience at Madison. SL: Diane, do you remember like how many classes you would teach a semester, and then how many classes you would take? 43:07 DF: Yes, two. Two a semester. Which is why I stayed that fourth year. Because it slowed me down. Well, first of all I kind of wanted more experience. And we were allowed to have that option to like renew it for a year. And they were so few that it was also this, and the program was so big. There were so many students, which was one of the reasons I chose it. There were, I don't know, when I was there there were probably sixty plus MFA in graphics students, which that was a huge graduate program. And that was wonderful. But there were only a handful, I think the year I got the TA, there were like five spots for sixty-something possibilities. And I remember the system was bad. It was really kind of created this competition between people, understandably. And they also did this weird thing. You know, I don't know, as part of a culture, I would probably say like old boy network at the time. I had teachers that I really loved. And my experience at Madison was, I can't say enough positive things about it. What it did for me in my life at the time and afterward. But the faculty was almost all male. It was like we were, our group of students that were all together, many of whom I'm still close friends with, and collaborate with several of those people still today-- I remember one of the professors, Jack Damer, being frustrated because we all kind of like helped each other and were supportive of each other's work. And I remember he got like really frustrated one time in a critique. I mean, we were serious and good students. He was like, "You know, in my day, everybody knew who was the best artist in the room. And everyone knew who was the second best artist. And everybody knew the third best artist." And we all looked at him like he was an alien being. Like we had no interest in that kind of, you know, what do you call that? Like that pedagogy, you know? (laughs) It was like yeah, not--you know. So we were sort of transitioning from that, I don't know what you would even call that. A postwar, male-dominated within printmaking, like it would also be like a certain kind of physical and technical prowess, you know. So, one of the things they did about this TAing was, it was very difficult. And you submitted an application. And then they would post--how did it go? You submitted an application. They would post the top 20 people. And they would be like posted, literally posted. SL: Oh, wow. DF: Like go look and see. And you'd be like looking at the list and you're like oh, I'm number seven. Oh, Myra, you're number five. And then all the other people walking away because their name wasn't even on the list. And the list would be one to twenty. And it was like your friend wasn't on the list, but you were on the list. It was really gross. And it was one through twenty. And then they would interview all 20 of those people. 46:24 SL: That's a lot of people to interview. (laughs) DF: That's a lot of people to interview. And they usually only had like five spots. So there was no way, unless someone turned something down, there was no way they would get past like ten. But they still insisted on putting 11, 12, 13, 14. So you still knew if you were number 20 and not number 11 when it didn't matter because you weren't going to be able to get a TA anyway, an assistantship anyway. And then I remember when I went for the interview, maybe they ranked you after the interview, I can't 00:30:00 remember how it worked. But when I went for the interview, I think it was over in, like it wasn't at Meyers, that's my building now, wasn't in the humanities building. I feel like it was in like that red gym? Were there meeting rooms in there? I don't know. But I walked into a room. The tables were set up like a horseshoe. And there were probably ten men like sitting there, ten middle-aged and older men. And then you like sat in a chair in front of this horseshoe of guys, blah, blah, blah, asking you questions. And I remember I was like going to leave. If I didn't get that TA, I was going to just get my M.A. and leave, because I just didn't want to pay any more tuition. You know, I didn't feel like I could go into anymore, I mean, in the end I think I borrowed $15,000, which by today's standards is nothing. But I was not prepared to do anymore. So you know, you're also hanging on. It's not like some little thing. This is like a major, it could be a change in the course of my education and my life. So, in any case, but I did get one. And then did that for a couple of years. 48:18 SL: Diane, when you were in the interview situation, was it just one interviewee with ten interviewers? DF: Yeah. Exactly. And then you know, you left and someone else came in. And I always remember some guy that got on that list--I can't remember what his name was, I can picture him--and it was like a big deal to have even got on the list for an interview. And the interview--(laughs) Sorry, this isn't funny. But the interview happened to be on like whenever we were changing from daylight savings time or the other way around. SL: Oh, no. DF: Whichever is where like he showed up and it's eleven o'clock and it was supposed to be at ten. That kind of thing. And then he like lost his chance. I remember that. They were like yeah, well, you don't deserve it if you didn't change your clock. (laughs) SL: Oh, wow. DF: But yeah, that whole competitive thing was really icky. Yeah. And I remember that. But luckily my class, I know the couple of years, I was there for four years. Later on, some of our professors said they were among the best group. I mean, they always had, really. Because I've come to know people that were there before me and people that were there after me. It's really interesting that I think of my connection is oh, I was in school with them. Oh, no, I wasn't. We just both went to Madison. You know what I mean? Like you met through other people. So one example of that, and someone I've collaborated with, is Pati Scobey, who had already finished her MFA when I started mine. But she's still living in Madison. And I came to know her, though we never were in school together. And then Gretchen Hils, who like started Madison, started the program after I left, but she was great friends with Tracy Honn. I came to know her. And you know, it's only once in a while that I'm like, oh, wait, we didn't even actually, weren't in school at the same time, but that Madison connection was so strong that it kind of seeped before and after as well. So that's one of the things about that program, it's incredibly, the networking that was possible as a result is really, really strong. 50:28 SL: I wanted to clarify the timeframe when you graduated with your bachelor's degree, and then how long you were taking classes while temping and working afterward, and then when you were actually in Madison. Could you share that? DF: Yeah. It was two years only. So I was pretty young. So I went, I started Madison in the spring of 1984. And I graduated from Syracuse in the, no, no. I started in the fall of 1984. And Syracuse I finished in the spring of '82. So it was a little over two years in between. And then I did my graduate show and moved away in the, from Madison, in the summer of '88. So I was at Madison for four years. So it was just two years in between. And I don't know what it's like now, but so 00:33:00 I started, I was just about to turn 25 when I started. And I was for sure among the younger people in the program. I remember that was really wonderful, too, because I think the average age were people well into their thirties. So people had really done--I don't know if that's, and when I have students here that sometimes are like, "Oh, I'm going to go right to graduate school," in my head I'm like, ay yi yi, I just don't think that's a great idea. You know, so many of my peers had had lots of life experience before coming to the program. Really knew what they wanted to do and brought, you know, all of their knowledge and expertise to the table, which is great. 52:10 SL: So I guess the other thing I wanted to ask you, because you were there for longer and you had mentioned you were going to get your MA and you would possibly leave if you didn't get funding for your MFA-- DF: Right. SL: Is that kind of how it worked? Like you would spend two years getting your MA, and then if you wanted to stick around, you'd get an MFA for another two years? DF: Oh. Um, no. So you could, they had a program, you could get an MA or you could get an MFA. And there were different hoops to jump through, I can't remember. So I had gone as an MFA student. But I had seen, one thing that had happened was some students that were paying out of state tuition, you know, as you can imagine or you may know, like University of Wisconsin was very careful about people just saying, you know, oh, I've lived here--you know, it was hard to get residency. So some students started this thing where they would get, they would take the MA and stop. And then stay in Madison for a year or two and work. And then go back. And they would say, "See, I completed a degree." You weren't allowed to get residency if you were in the middle of a degree. But if you completed a degree and walked away and then came back a year later, then you could be. At least, that's what some people were doing. I didn't have--I think what I did, as I'm thinking about it, I think I applied to other schools. Probably not a lot, probably one or two. And I'd gotten an offer somewhere to go finish my MFA there or get an MA and then go get an MFA somewhere where I was offered a TA there, or fellowship or whatever. And it's weird to me that I don't know where. And I didn't want to do that, I remember. And I also remember making it very clear to my professors that I was doing that. Like I remember, it's weird saying this, but I was like, "You need to know that I'm leaving, so like how much do you value my being here?" I don't know, I feel stupid saying that, but--(laughs) But I remember, like I don't think I was really subtle about it. And I don't know. I don't know if that made a difference. I always thought that that did make a difference for whoever was on my committee, you know, who also was on the--I don't know. No one ever said anything to me about, you know what I mean, that they pulled for me in particularly. But whatever. I remember that I was prepared to leave. And I wasn't going to be, I would have left, I believe, with the degree. Would have stopped and got an MA, just so it wasn't a waste, kind of. SL: Sure. 54:52 DF: So that you would have like your degree from University of Wisconsin. I think that's, does that answer your question? SL: Yeah. I wondered because you said that the students in the art program were very collaborative and helping each other out. As a TA did you also connect with the other TAs and try to figure out how to teach the classes, since you didn't get a lot of guidance elsewhere? DF: That's a good question. Maybe a little bit. The other TAs were, they were from all, so let's say, I don't know, at any given time there were, let's say there were a dozen TAs or something. So they weren't all from graphics. So I certainly knew people in other areas. So there are painters, sculptors, clay, you know, people. So I knew people in other areas. But we 00:36:00 were, the guidance was nonexistent. And I think we talked to each other a little bit about it. I remember a few of us sitting around and saying, let's say the classes were like three hours or something, a studio class of 2D design or 3D design, and a few of us were talking. It was Mario Laplante, me, and I remember Phyllis McGibbon was there. And we were like, "Oh, well on break," blah, blah, blah. And Mario's like, "Oh, do you give your students a break?" And we looked at him and we were like, "Yeah, it's a three-hour class. What do you mean? You don't give your students a break?" (Lang laughs) And he's like, "Oh, no, I didn't think of that." And we're like, "Mario, you totally have to like take a 15-minute break. A lot of people have to get something to eat." Or in those days, have a cigarette. Or whatever. And then the very next day we were teaching, because I remember he taught in a room next, I think he was teaching drawing and I was teaching 2D design. And there was a fire drill in the building. And so we were all like walking out to get out of the building. And on the way down he's like, "Do I still need to give them a break?" (laughter) I'm like, "I don't know, Mario. Were you counting the fire drill as a break?" So that's all I remember. I don't remember talking. And we were so, I can't believe now, like I've been chair of this department and been teaching in this department for years, how hands-off they were. It was like, no one gave me a syllabus. And I was teaching 3D design. I mean, I think I did an okay job. But anyone, I'm sure I was not teaching necessarily at all the same information that somebody else teaching 2D design was teaching. So there was no assurance that students getting to whatever the next level after, it was all undergraduate students that we were teaching, you know, would have the same information at all. Whatever. It was a really great experience, and I loved teaching, although it was hard work and again, kind of scary without any guidance. But they definitely just threw you in there. SL: So, when you got to Madison, what did you think of it? 57:57 DF: Oh, I actually went early to look for a place to live. And my sister Beth had a friend that lived there, so she put me up. And she lived down in Schenk's Corners, I remember. And I found a place to live that first year, just like a little studio apartment. And then later I found a roommate that lived somewhere else out on the east side. But the studio apartment was like on Gilman Street. Something definitely close to State Street or whatever, so I only was there for a year. And then when I moved there, one of the things that's really, well, a couple of things. So I didn't know anyone. I mean, I did that with college, too. It's not like I knew anyone else going to Syracuse. And here I moved across the country. And just you know, finding my way. I was 24, going on 25, and whatever. And I remember they also did this thing of--so, Warrington Colescott was teaching then, and I wanted to take an etching class with him. And even though you had applied and gotten into grad school, for each class you wanted to take, to register, you had to wait on a long line with your slides. So pre-digital, so you have your slides and a little slide sheet. And you're waiting one by one to meet with Warrington Colescott. And he would look at your--either he knew you or didn't know you. If you were new, he didn't know you--look at your slides and say yes or no, whether you were like worthy enough to take his class or whatever. SL: Oh, wow. 59:32 DF: Do you see what I mean? So you could be paying for grad school, and applied and gotten 00:39:00 in, but not be able to get into Warrington's class. So in any case, like I remember like oh, you know, I remember going like registration was by hand in the stock pavilion. And I remember that's when I realized I was in like an agriculture, because I was like, hmm, Stock Pavilion, where's that? And I was like, oh, probably some building donated by Mr. and Mrs. Stock, you know? (laughter) And when I got there and it was like a dirt floor, I'm like, oh, stock, oh, stock! That's what they mean. Like cows, you know. So we registered there for, I don't remember. I just remember like handing a card to someone there. I'm sure I never went back to that part of campus for whatever reason. And then waiting on that line. And while I was waiting on that line nervously, Kathy Kuehn, like I just remember she turned to me and she's like, "Oh, can I see your--" And she was a third-year student at that point and I was just beginning. And she said, "Can I see your slides?" And I said, "Oh, yeah. Okay." And I handed them to her. And she like held them up to the light. And she saw my name. And I was so like nervous inside, like not outwardly. And she said, "Oh, Diane Fine. Joe Wilfer told me to keep my eye out for you." And she like totally put her arm around me and was like, "I'm going to help you figure everything out." And they also had this random system for getting a studio. That was like--and it was all about knowing the right person. She was like, "Let me show you how you can get a good studio. There's a spot in between me and someone else." You know, this sort of like in. And she did that. And I guess she was working at the Silver Buckle Press. And I believe--I'm not sure how quickly I got hired there, whatever. But I do remember that. Joe was living in New York at the time, but he'd been like, "Look for this person." And she did. And then she was like, "Oh, so and so, this is Diane Fine. Joe Wilfer sent her. Oh, look, Joe Wilfer sent her." And it was like so, so special, and helpful. Yeah. And the other thing that was wonderful for me about Madison was, you know, I grew up in a progressive household like politically. But I for sure my political consciousness was raised in Madison, as you can imagine. And you know, just different, like I can track a lot of new ways of thinking or looking past what I was taught about certain realities or something in the world. That was really eye-opening. Like I met people that were--you know, so it was the '80s, that were going to Nicaragua to help with the coffee crop. And other kinds of people that were just doing different kinds of political work that I was just learning about. And it was really, really meaningful to me like to be part of the University of Wisconsin. This was a great state institution with a really progressive history that was really, really important to me. And I didn't know anything about that, really, until I was there. Yeah, and it's still something I can, in fact, knowing how it's been decimated in a lot of ways because of your governor in the last few years is sickening to me. Because it just was such a place, I mean, hopefully still, incredible research. And when that kind of thing takes place at a place that's public, instead of a place like Harvard--you know, not that there's anything wrong with Harvard--but to me it's really meaningful. So I have a great respect for the institution in general. 1:03:34 SL: Well, what about, well, first of all, I want to find out, did you get to take etching with Warrington Colescott? DF: Yes, I did get to take it with Warrington. (laughter) I don't think Kathy had to say anything. And then he was great. I worked with him for two years. And then he retired and Frances Myers, then I worked with her for two years when she was in fact the chair of my committee for graduating. SL: Yeah, could you talk a little bit about Frances Myers and your work with her? DF: Yeah, she was, so Warrington, I think by the time I really came of age 00:42:00 maturity-wise with my work, I was working with Fran more than Warrington. I just remember, and Warrington was this sort of jovial character. I don't remember having any like close interaction with him, other than superficial. But in a fine way. But Fran was, first of all, that was the first, she was our only female teacher then. And she was a feminist. And there were lots of women in the program who were close to her age. So she was, let's say she was in her forties when she started or something. And it was really kind of a revelation to work with someone--you know, all my professors had been male. And that was true of undergraduate as well. I mean, it's hard to believe now, but it's just the way it was. And she was very generous and, like generous with her, not just her criticism, but her like support in whatever you needed. And both she and Warrington were known for this, that the minute you graduated, you were their colleague, you were no longer their student. And they did anything they could to help you in the field. And I felt that really strongly from Fran. And definitely was invited up to her home. Had meals there from time to time. They were generous that way. And, yeah, just a very positive experience. When I took this job here, the first visiting artist that I brought in here was Fran. And I remember like picking her, and she had friends in Montreal. I'm only an hour from Montreal here. And I remember picking her up at the airport and, yeah, and eventually going up to Montreal with her to see these friends. And I was young, you know. So I was like still in my twenties. And she was like, "Oh, these really good friends, really, really close friend of mine lives in Montreal. Can we get up there while I'm there?" I'm like of course, of course. 01:06:18 So we go up to Montreal and she's telling me about them on the way up. And I remember she's like, "I haven't seen them in like 15 years." And I remember at the time being so young that I was like, in my head, how could they be such good friends if you haven't seen them in 15 years? And now, I'm like I know that that happens. You know what I mean? Like you're in touch in other ways? Whatever. But I remember I went up and had a really nice time with her meeting these friends of hers. So I felt like I could count on her. I know she really like did good references for me. When I got tenure here, she wrote for me for tenure. At other points, other junctures, in things I was applying for here, she wrote for me. And then I was really honored when years later, years later, I was really struck by this and surprised, but she was applying for some grant, some fancy faculty grant there that was maybe going to be like a $75,000 grant. I forget what it was called. And I think she applied twice and she may not have gotten it. But she needed like one former student to write for her and she asked me. And we were by no means like that close. I remember wondering like why. I mean, we were you know what I mean? We weren't socially, and I hope that doesn't sound weird, because I just said how much like I enjoyed working with her. But I remember I was really honored that she asked. And I remember doing that for her. I had to find out more about her, because it was quite a comprehensive kind of thing that I had to write. And so that was neat, because there were certain things that I just didn't know about her work, and etcetera. So that was a good experience working with her. And then the other people on my committee were Jack 00:45:00 Damer, Ted Pope, I don't know if you know, he was fabulous. He was a painter and taught like, that was one of the things that was nice was that you didn't have to have just printmakers. So it was Frances Myers, Jack Damer, Ted Pope, who was sort of like a--I don't know what he taught, but he was a painter himself. But I think he taught like, I don't know. Like some kind of visual thinking kind of class. I can't remember. I know I took a seminar with him. And then George Cramer, who was in sculpture. And Richard Long, who taught like drawing. So the five of them were on my committee. And I worked with Walter Hamady. I took several classes with him. But he was like on leave, and then back, and then on leave. And I think in the end that's why I wasn't clear whether he would be kind of present for my committee, you know, when my committee had to work. By the time I was there--I mean, I had only a positive experience with him, but he was definitely on his way out. Like sort of in his head, you know what I mean, he was close to retirement and not really fully present, I guess I would say. I remember, I don't know where this oral history's going to go, but I do remember that we had a good relationship. But when I would ask him to look at my work, he would always say, "I have no idea what you're doing, but I know that you're really smart, I know this work is good. But I have no idea what you're doing. That's what he would say about it." Like the way I always took that was like he didn't want to take the energy to kind of figure out what I was doing. And I totally only, I mean, I had positive feelings about him. But I didn't really learn book arts from him. I learned it from Kathy Kuehn, you know, like mostly. And again, not because he was--there were things, like I remember I traded him, I did some work for him and the paper mill was shut down for a while. So one of the books, the book Lists that I did was his paper. Like he traded me Shadwell paper from his own mill if I would do this other thing. He knew the projects I was working on. But he was more like a jokester. He was more--and my sense was that he also had a very thin, like who he worked with and the kind of work they did. People always could tell who had worked with Walter Hamady. And that work is beautiful. But I think he wasn't, you know, particularly flexible in terms of what art is or what it should look like or whatever. But my experience was positive with him. It just wasn't, it wasn't in his heyday, I guess I would say. 01:10:50 SL: Sure. And when he said what he did about your work, that he didn't understand what you were doing, did he make time to look at it, and then that's what he said? Or was-- DF: Oh, yeah. He looked at the work. And then he was like--like I think about that, as a professor. I certainly look at work and mind you, I'm looking at undergraduate work. So graduate work, much more mature. And sometimes you have to like work to be like, hmm, what's going on here? It would involve asking some questions. It would, you know, blah, blah, blah. If it's not just, especially when there's like content there. It's not just about like oh, did you hang this key in the font over to the margin or not? You know what I mean. When it's not just a design question, there's concept involved, he wouldn't--so I'm doing that all the time, like reaching just to connect with the person to see how I can help them. And he clearly was not interested in doing that. And not because of me. I think at that point in his life with his teaching. In fact, I had a very strong feeling that he liked me and we could joke around and have a good time. And he would say this thing, like he'd give me an A. And he'd be like, "I don't know what you're doing, but I know you're really smart. You're on to something. I don't know what it is." And it was more like, I didn't have like, maybe now I would say, "Well, I'd like you to--" You know, I would assert more. And then I was just like, (makes ambivalent noise). You know, just like, next? I guess I'm not going to really get a response from him. And then you know, I'll put that he 00:48:00 was like, "But I think you're doing fine." I'm sorry, in the oral history, that tone of voice is going to be in there. (laughter) So definitely I loved his work, or some of it in particularly I can think of. But he wasn't interested in talking about those concepts. And I don't know if he ever would have been. You know? Like, I don't know. But you know he's really interested in poetry, obviously, as was I. So, it was fine. I don't remember it being a problem at the time. If I didn't have other people on my committee and other people that were supportive, and people that worked with him, working, you know, like Pati and Kathy, I maybe would have felt differently. But, you know. And he had a beautiful studio, you know, that was like his doing. So it was a beautiful studio to work in. 1:13:30 SL: Did you take book arts classes with anybody else? Because I know you mentioned Hamady was kind of on leave here and there? Did somebody else-- DF: Yeah, on leave. I must have. I was thinking about that for sure, although I can remember a couple of projects I did with Hamady. But I must have. I kind of want to say that maybe I did with Ruth Lingen, but I can't, like she may have been--definitely the year I arrived, he was on leave. He wasn't there. So I don't have a strong feeling, I mean, I don't have a strong memory of that. SL: Sure. DF: But I know that I must have. And then I made work, I think then, once he was back, and that was the way that program worked, too. You could just take credits with people but not necessarily be in their class. So that meant that they were going to give you a grade and they were going to critique your work. So that in fact, like when I say that George Cramer and Richard Long and Ted Pope, I mean, I did take a seminar with Ted Pope. But being on my committee, that meant they came and met me at my studio and critiqued the work. But I didn't take a sculpture class or a drawing class or a painting class with those people. They just looked at what I was doing. SL: Okay. DF: And that was true for Walter, too. Like I think I must have always had credits with Walter. I think it also worked like you would take credit with Walter so I could use the studio. And I kind of get that, too. I have like independent study students sometimes where I'm like, I'm so busy doing other stuff, if they're on automatic I'm like fine, see you later a little bit. And I'm sure that that was the case for me with Walter, you know. He just was like--but if I needed something, like I remember I was setting this book that needed a lot of type, and he kind of helped me figure that out. Like so technical stuff he would help with. SL: Okay. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add at this point? 1:15:26 DF: Let me see, I'm looking at--well I said about Kathy Kuehn being an incredible mentor at the Silver Buckle Press. And you had a question here, the very last one was how did being a UW student impact your career as an artist. And I just wanted to say that I make my own work and then I do a lot of collaborative work. So there are four, so I have an ongoing collaboration with Mario Laplante, who I met there, since 1985. Tracy Honn, I collaborated with there, which is how I really learned about collaboration, and we're still very, very close friends. And right now she's curating a show that will be viewed here at my college in the fall all about wood type. SL: Okay. DF: Kathy Kuehn and I have collaborated on books together. Pati Scobey and I have been, we went to two residencies together. We went to MacDowell Colony together. We went to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts together. And this all has to do with Madison. So, and then two of my very best students over the years here went on to graduate school and got their MFAs in Madison. And worked with Tracy. You know, both of them became very close with Tracy. Worked at the Silver Buckle Press. So the whole networking thing and the connection has been, you know, completely invaluable. 1:17:03 SL: Who were your students that you kind of sent to Madison? DF: Rachel Davis, who now lives in Chicago and is a working artist. And Kathy O'Connell, who now is an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University. And she teaches book arts there. And she and I have been collaborating in the last couple of years. We have a whole body of work we've done together. So, yeah, the fact that they then became really close with Tracy and had some of the same professors that I did, I mean, was just really important. I've had other students go on to graduate school but they just, but just not to Madison, but it was perfect for both of them. SL: I wondered if you could humor me and tell me in your own words how you would define or describe an artist book. DF: Oh. Right. I had that question here. I wrote, a 00:51:00 book made by a visual artist, at least in part. And you know, as I'm sure you're well aware, I think that is a whole spectrum, from like something you might Xerox and hand out on the street corner to, you know, a $25,000 you know, however you say it in French, livre d'art, you know. And my own interest, so I teach a book arts class here that is not letterpress. Like I don't, I mean, that's how I came to the book arts. But the book arts class I teach here is, you know, one of a kind books, like concept-driven, people from all different, you know, not even just artists, you know. So people with an interest in sequence, that's what interests me, the idea of, you know, sort of existing in time in a book. The combination of text and image. These are things that really, I don't think you have to have text or you have to have image for it to be an artist book. But for me, that's what draws me to it -- the room for collaboration; producing something that, you know, like in a maybe simplified way is not unlike a theater production in that people have different roles. Like some of the books I did early on, one person made the paper, someone else set type, someone else designed it, someone else did the illustrations. Like that whole production thing is a little bit different than doing, you know, a flat print. I have been really interested, typically, in like fine materials. Things like letterpress and Japanese paper, and a nice binding. And then what that needs then for someone to hold that piece of art in their hands, and the handheld nature of the book. But it's just, I mean, I think in the most simple way, I would just say a book made by a visual artist. Because otherwise, a book is a book. You know, a novel, that's a trade publication. It isn't an artist book. But as soon as anyone that defines themselves as a visual artist puts their hand to it, I think--and sees it as an art object, an art experience, you know, a coming together of like many different sort of disciplines or skills or "readings," quote unquote, of something. So sorry it's not clearer, but it's a hard one, in a way. 1:20:53 SL: It really is. That's why I've been asking. I'm interested to hear how people define it. Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about today? We certainly have time for another session, so you don't have to. DF: Right. SL: But if there's anything else you'd like to cover-- DF: No, I feel good. I feel like it really helped to have these questions in advance. I'm glad--And I appreciate first of all your interest in me. But also the questions that you sent to me made me like revisit and think about things. Which was, you know, basically think about something that was--I mean, the experience at Madison, a really wonderful experience. And then just in general, my career. You know, this really is an honor. So, thank you. SL: Thank you, Diane. I'm going to turn off the recording now. DF: Okay. [End Track 1. Begin Track 2.] First Interview Session (June 7, 2018): Digital File SL: Today is June 7, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Diane Fine, book artist, UW alum, and professor of art at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. I'm at the UW archives in Steenbock library, and Diane is in New York. Diane, your press is called Moonkosh Press. Can you talk about founding it and how you chose the name? DF: Sure. And I may, I was trying to think if I'd already talked about this a little bit. So if I'm repetitive, just forgive me. But Moonkosh, I talked a little bit about my mother's father, my grandfather, Joseph Klein. And he immigrated to the United States when he was a child from Hungary. And the place he was from in Hungary was called Moonkosh, although it's spelled differently in Hungarian. SL: That's right. DF: I spelled it phonetically, because that's how I always heard it. And I think I talked about the fact that he didn't have much formal education at all, but he was very much a storyteller and very, I 00:54:00 don't know, literary, if that's even appropriate to say, in the oral tradition. So he was, I mean, I loved him so much. He was much beloved kind of grandfather. I was one of three girls, as I said. And he used to refer to us when we would write, because he first lived in Brooklyn and then he moved to Florida. And so much of what, you know, so he was far away. And we would always write letters in the day when people wrote letters. And he would write to us, "Dear Angel Number One, dear Angel Number Two, dear Angel Number Three." It was very very sweet and funny and debonair and a ladies' man, and just had a lot of charisma. And when he, you know, one of our favorite things was for him to tell us stories that he would, you know, repeat over and over, and share with lots of other kids in the neighborhood. So years later, many years after he died, when I was in graduate school and as part of that program as you start to make decisions about publishing. I was working in the letterpress studio. Everyone's like, "Well, you have to choose a press name, and it's going to be your name for your career." I mean, from time to time, people change their press names. But an example of that is Walter Tisdale, who was the Landlocked Press, because he was in Wisconsin and then he moved to Maine and he changed his press name to Tatlin Books. But so you know, sometimes maybe it doesn't seem appropriate anymore or whatever. But pretty much, you're not going to want to change that. And somehow I remember just wanting to honor him because he was so, you know, as I said, he was a really proud and vivacious person. But I know he always felt badly about his lack of formal education. And because I was now embarking on what was going to be, to some extent, involve like literature and writing, I wanted to honor him. So instead of like using his name or whatever, I just remembered so many times he would say, "Well, back in Moonkosh," so I decided to call the press the Moonkosh Press. 0:03:37 I've thought about how--I mean, I haven't thought about this that much, but you know, some people's press names are really obvious, like what they're about. And I wonder, I don't know how people make heads or tails of mine. If they ask, I've told them the story. But otherwise, it's probably pretty, what's the word, like an abstract word, you know. But it has stuck. And I'm proud to be also known as the Moonkosh Press. So that, I remember taking on. And my mom was still living then. And I'm sure she was really, that was her beloved father and she was, I'm sure, honored by the fact that I did that. So that's how I came to call it the Moonkosh Press. And the very first book I made was a book called On Being Read, r-e-a-d. It was the text written by Craig Saper, S-a-p-e-r. And he was a fellow graduate student, but he was in, I think he was in like film studies, something across the street from the humanities building and the communications building. And I met him because we were in a seminar together. He must have decided to take a seminar in the art department. And that was the seminar with Ted Pope, who I mentioned was on the committee, and was a really great instructor and thinker. And for some reason, in that seminar, so I was new to graduate school, I was new to the idea of publishing. And Craig did this piece, he wrote this piece for the seminar, which was actually like a, what's it called, like a tribute or after William Gass' On Being Blue. And he just sort of performed it. I mean, I used to know it by heart. It was a long text. On Being Read. I'm not even sure I'm going to remember it now, but it was using a play on words between reading, read, r-e-a-d, the color red. The book I designed was on red paper. It started something like, "Red noses and" something, red noses and--I used to know it. But something about, he makes a reference to Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. And then he uses like red in relationship to Mao's Little Red Book, and communism and red hot love. You know, he just really, really plays twists and turns with the words "read" and "red." So I heard him perform that. And you know, it was the first time I had this like oh, connection directly to a writer. And I approached him and said, "Has that been published" or whatever. And the next thing you know, we were working on that together. It was my first book. I definitely did that with Walter Hamady. And it was quite an undertaking, because I was handsetting all the type. And it was a lot. It was a long text to do handset type. And I remember Walter helped me a lot with that with finding type. At the time, oh, boy, it would be, we didn't necessarily have enough type of a certain font in good enough shape to print 00:57:00 as much text as I was printing. So a lot of times it involved setting a page or two and editioning that and then breaking down that type and resetting. And I remember, so that was possible that Walter bought some new type for it or something. He did something really that was helpful to me with it. Oh, yeah, because red nose is a persecuted deer, and the effects of too much beer. That was how that starts. (laughter) Right. Persecuted deer. So I did that book, and I designed it. It's like a little pamphlet, but it unravels. You sort of, it folds, folds, folds. It's small, handheld. You keep on raveling and unraveling it. And then when you get to the end, it's a pamphlet stitch, you know, just with more pages. It's hard to describe. But the clasp I used was, when you get an envelope, especially inter-office mail, you have that like a circular thing and a string that clasps it. So I remember I decided I wanted the book to close that way. And again, it was pre-going online. This was in the late '80s. And looking at suppliers. Like sometimes it's really hard for me to even imagine now how you do things like that without the internet. (laughter) But no luck in trying, like wherever I called to see can I just buy those fasteners? No, I couldn't. So I wound up having to buy, you know, about, I think I published maybe between 100, 150 of those books. And had to buy that many envelopes and cut off the little clasp of all these envelopes that were useless. And I couldn't get red ones, so then I was like dying them red. You know, like just little sort of things like that. And I remember the text was proofed and proofed and proofed and proofed, there was so much of it. And then when it was all done, a little time after I finished, I was visiting New York and I was with my sister Beth, riding on the train. I had talked about we were going in to see, go to the Met or something in New York City. So I was like, "Here, I want you to look at this," whatever. And she really did have a good eye. And she found like three typos, I remember in that-I don't know, ten people had read it already and proofed it and nobody had seen those. Like, "Oh, here, here and here." I'm like argh! Whatever. (laughs) Although I have since -- I remember that was so devastating. But the ship had sailed on it. And then I've since realized, you know, there's so many things I read, especially if the text is lengthy where, you know, there's a typo. And it's sort of, you live with it. I mean, depending on the circumstances. So anyway, so that was the first book published as the Moonkosh Press. And, yeah, that's all I have to say about that for right now, unless you have something to ask me specifically about it. Oh, I wrote down here that there are, at least when I counted, between when we spoke last and now, I have 23 books that are published with the Moonkosh Press imprint. 0:11:04 SL: Oh, good. DF: And many broadsides and postcards, things like that. Limited edition broadsides and postcards. SL: Thank you. Would you like to talk a little bit about some of your collaborations with artists who are here? I know you worked with Tracy Honn and Mario Laplante, like you said last time, and Kathy Kuehn. DF: Right. And Kathy Kuehn. Yeah. And the other, well, not on books, but I've also collaborated with Pati Scobey, who got her MFA there. Although she and I collaborated on works on paper, and also on a book that we did together at some point, a very limited edition book. She, Pati Scobey and I, had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony together. We purposely went together to collaborate on our work, which was wonderful. That was in 1999. That was when I was on sabbatical. And the next sabbatical I was on, which must have been like 2007, she and I applied and went to and had a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In that body of work we didn't make a book, but we worked on a series of basically drawings that were related to the idea of translation in poetry. So we read a lot of poems, and then poems in translation. And then we were sort of examining, what we did was translate the poems into visual language, and what did it mean to not have it be direct illustrations, but some kind of capturing what the artist, illuminating, perhaps, what the poet was presenting. And we had a lot of discussions about that. So it's definitely though 01:00:00 there was no text in that work, we worked specifically, there was a series we did on some Pablo Neruda poems about the sea. And then did another series that was from, again, sort of our visual translations of the poet Li-Young Lee's poem, what's it called, "A Battle Rose?" Or, "The Rose?" I'll have to look it up. Hmm, now it's bothering me. And also Mary Oliver's, some of Mary Oliver's poems that we worked on. So that was kind of interesting in that there was no text, but the foundation of the work was with these poems. I remember we discussed, we made up little things about what it means to translate for poets. And we'd learned, for instance, that like some people would, let's say, translate word by word and then try to capture the feeling. You know, I can't imagine translating in general, but certainly poetry. Like how, how do you do that? And then we learned that someone like Ezra Pound, who apparently translated Chinese poetry, did not speak Chinese. So there was like a whole, it was like, what? Like how is that even possible? And I think, the way I understood it, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it, was that there was a process of, let's say, someone would basically, you know, now you might do it in Google Translation or whatever. But for Pound, say, here's what every one of these words means. And then he's like making it back into poetry in English. But it's sort of like hard to even imagine doing translation without knowing the original language. But that was done. Anyway, so that was with Pati Scobey. 00:15:14 And other people, oh, so Tracy was, I'm trying to think. Like early on, as I said, I collaborated in a more like role separated way. Like Craig Saper was a writer, I was the artist. I mean, you know, the book artist. Then the next book I did, I collaborated with Mario Laplante, a book called Lists, and a poet, actually a visual artist I knew in New York, Keith DuQuette, who wrote these sort of list poems. So in that case, it was a collaboration. Certainly what was modeled by Walter Hamady and his students, or that legacy, which was doing these kind of role separated collaborations. Like this person's the designer, that person's the illustrator, that person's the writer. So in the case of Lists, it was Mario Laplante, who I had just met, did not know very well. But he was clearly very adept at lithography. And so I approached him, having just met him, because he had just started in school like a year after I came to Madison. And he was there, he's French Canadian, and he had grown up in Montreal and done his undergraduate work in Montreal and then had come to University of Wisconsin. So I approached him and asked if he would consider illustrating these poems. And so he did that lithographically. And I think we, again, it was a large edition. I don't do those really large editions anymore. But maybe 75 or something like that. So that was a lot of editioning, because they were multicolored stone lithographs. And then Keith DuQuette contributed the text. And then I was the production person. I designed the binding, designed the book. That was an example where, I think I talked about trading with Walter Hamady with his handmade paper. So that was for that project, because our paper mill was closed at the time. And so that's what I wanted for that book. So we traded for that, although I do remember somehow I managed to 01:03:00 make--well, did I?--the cover stock for that. Maybe not. Maybe it was all Walter's paper. And I designed this binding that was really quite involved. It had these little Japanese paper pockets in it that got sewn in. And then the illustrations got slipped into those pockets. And then that got glued afterwards to make it like a little Japanese paper envelope. It was really, really involved, tedious, pretty, but also the kind of thing I would never do again. Like partly, not because I'm averse to labor. But in the end, the book was sort of stiffer than I would have liked it to be. You know, there were some flaws. It was like I had, you know, I was trying to do something really innovative and I liked my ideas, but they weren't engineered as well. I mean, they were okay, you know. But later I remember thinking oh, I would have done that differently. So I was still really learning about binding and the, you know, the sort of anatomy of the binding. And later I became less interested in experimenting with binding. In fact, I think I was never that interested in it. And I think it was something I thought I was supposed to be interested in. You know some people get into book arts and they're all into like pop-ups, and fancy like fold this in and that does that. I see that with my students, also. Certain people that really get into the form of the book. And I'm interested in that in other people's work. But really, the bottom line for me was ultimately just rather streamlined designs. Like a simple accordion, you know, with something sewn into it or whatever. But early on, it seemed like, I don't know, other things have been like that in my life where oh, I'm a book artist, this is what I should do, I should be innovative with the binding. And then having done it, I was like, all right, not that interested in that. You know. 19:48 Anyway, that was List. And it was this collaboration with three people. But what was different and new for me was Tracy. Tracy had just moved to Madison. I didn't know her well. She remembers that we met, I have a vague memory of meeting her at the Silver Buckle Press. She had come and offered, I was working there. I was being paid to work there. And, you know, which was an amazing--I think somewhere we were going to talk about the Silver Buckle Press. SL: You can talk about it now. DF: Okay. So the Silver Buckle Press at the time, Kathy Kuehn was the director. And it was situated in the Helen C. White building. And so eventually, but it was after I left Madison that it moved to Memorial Library. And you know, it's a working museum of 19th and 20th century printing equipment. And beautiful collection of type, wood type, ornaments, etcetera. And Kathy hired me to work there. And that was the most fabulous experience. I mean, I can't think of a better teacher than Kathy Kuehn. So the experience of working at the Silver Buckle Press, which I did for two years, was, you know, having her tutelage and also access to the collection itself, I mean, I actually, something that might be a little bit of a "no-no" later. I know when Tracy took over the Silver Buckle Press she was, I don't know, I don't want to sound wrong she was a little more attentive to the preservation of the collection. And was much more, as probably should have been, less likely, if there was ever something I wanted to use from the Silver Buckle Press collection once Tracy was the director, I would make a copy. You know what I mean? Which totally makes sense when it's a museum. But we were a little more cowboyish about that, and so I used lots of things in the original state for my work. Which was fabulous. 01:06:00 And so, let's see, so I met other people there, other people that were working. And again, had just time to learn from Kathy and talk and get to know each other even better than we did. And we did things at the Silver Buckle Press like print, I know that depending on who was the director, certainly books were published out of the Silver Buckle Press. But we did a lot of broadsides and certificates. Like I cannot even believe that. I think Tracy was still doing them. Like a service to the library and the college, was doing like letterpress certificates for various things. You know, for the mathematics department or in the, I can't even remember what they were, but we had these sort of setup sheets and then we would set the person's name and drop it in. You know, it was really old-fashioned in that way. And you know, often we had that question of did the person receiving this letterpress certificate have any idea how labor-intensive it was? Or you know what I mean, it just was, it was kind of a funny thing. We did calendars, as I said, broadsides. And I don't think when I was there for those two years that we published, I don't remember that we published a book. Although Tracy came and volunteered as an intern, and she published like something about the Silver Buckle Press or some kind of you know, about its holdings or whatever. I have that book somewhere. It was like a charming book. 23:37 So anyway, we got to know each other. Tracy says I gave her the cold shoulder. I don't remember that. (laughter) But I just, I think I was a little more intent on, you know, and I was like oh, who's this person? Whatever, there she was. Anyway, so Kathy often worked, she had published, as had Walter Tisdale, work of the poet Joe Napora, who was from Ohio. And I forget. All those people that kind of came before me, like with Walter Hamady, studied with him before I did, Kathy, Walter Tisdale, I'm trying to think of who else. But it was clear they had, Walter was so much about relationships with poets. And they all knew all these poets and were doing, that was something they were committed to doing, was publishing, describe it as underground, but lesser known poets and maybe poets that were a bit experimental and so on. And I know Walter Hamady had made entrees between them and certain poets. So Kathy one day said to me, "Oh, I have this manuscript from this poet Joe Napora, but I'm not going to have time to do it. Maybe you want to read this manuscript and see if it's a book you'd want to work on." So I was like oh, thank you. Because like I needed those kinds of connections. And I read this journal of Elizabeth Jennings Wilson and loved it. And what it was was Joe's, Joe did a lot of work from primary historic documents, I guess for lack of a better way of putting it. So this was his daughter's, his children's, great-great-great-grandmother. So it was on his ex-wife's side, who wrote this journal like in the 1850s and '60s. She was like a pioneer woman in Ohio. So then he used her words to make poetry. And the way he described it, and this is in the book as part of the introduction, and he did this with other work, too, was like a process of removal. He didn't add anything. And definitely we would often have questions of like who's the author? Is it Joe Napora? Or is it Elizabeth Jennings Wilson? And basically it was a collaboration over time between Joe Napora and this person that he never knew who lived more than a hundred years before. 26:13 So I loved the poems. And then apparently Kathy also gave that manuscript to Tracy and said the same thing, unbeknownst to either of us. And then I was like, "Yeah, I want to do this. I would like to work with this manuscript." And then Tracy's like, "I'd like to work with this manuscript." And then Kathy was 01:09:00 like, "Oh, well, why don't you work on it together?" And we were both a little, like we hardly knew each other. And we've talked about how we were a little like, I don't know, I don't really know her. A little bit like that. But we decided to do that. And we started to get together. We wound up working on it for, I don't know, I would say three or four solid months. It was like over a summer and maybe spilling into the term a little bit. And we decided to make all the paper ourselves. So it was going to be on handmade paper. It was all handset type. And it was a lengthy manuscript, like many, I don't know, twenty-something poems in it. And design the binding, etcetera, etcetera. So it was really an incredible experience. It was about sitting down, really figuring out that production. So for instance, we had decided we wanted to print 200 copies of the book. In the end there were 160 copies, which was my fault, because I'd messed something up where we'd lost like I don't know, 35 copies or something like that. SL: Oh, no! 27:40 DF: Yeah, totally weird. Like it was, have you printed on the letterpress, like on an SP15, or have you seen-- SL: I just did like one little swipe when I went to the museum in Hamilton, the Hamilton Type Museum. DF: Oh, cool. Now was it with a cylinder press? Or were you using an old-fashioned-- SL: It was the Silver Buckle Press. DF: Okay. So like the carriage moved along and came back, right? SL: Mm hmm. Yes. DF: So if you remember, there was a paper guide. Like you knock your piece of paper up to the guide that tells you where to place the paper. And one of those, there's the ones that are right on the drum itself. But then there's one that's up on top of the feeder, that that's what you would move if you wanted to move something over an eighth of an inch. You would adjust this thing. It goes back and forth. (laughs) So you know, you get all your stuff set up and you're adjusting that, and you're adjusting the furniture in the press. You're moving something an iota this way and an iota that way until you get it all set. Then you're ready to run the edition. So when I was running something, and again, it was a lot of pages and a lot of printing, I guess that guide wasn't tightened down enough. And as I was printing 200 of something, it wasn't till like, again, 40 had already gone by where Tracy walked by or something and was like, "Um--" So it happened so gradually that the text was moving slowly across the page because that thing was like moving a hair each time I was sending it through the press. Do you know what I mean? SL: Okay. Mm hmm. 29:16 DF: Yeah. So we were like, uh-- and in that kind of binding, there was already something printed on the other side. You know, we already had this paper made and cut down. It wasn't about, it wasn't about like oh, we can redo that, you know. It was like, oops, just like, just shortened the, significantly cut off the edition size. We would never, Tracy and I have talked about, we would never print that many of anything again. A hundred and sixty was certainly enough. And I think it's only in the last few years that that's out of print. So we had figured out how much, you know, you do this math. Like we want to make the paper for this. So, okay, so this book is going to be this many pages. So we need this amount of paper to make 200 books. What size is the sheet of paper that you're making? How many pages can you get out of that sheet of paper? Okay. So now you've got those calculations. So how much, how many sheets of handmade paper do you need to make to make 200 copies of this book? And then, we're beating the pulp. So how much pulp are we going to need to make that much paper? And how do you make the pulp from cut rags? So how much rag, how many rags do we need and cut up? Like when you're using the paper mill, you know, when you're using a beater, the rags need to be an inch by an inch. They have to be cut small. So it was like a sheet, right? You're tearing and tearing and 01:12:00 tearing. And cutting. People would set things up with a vice and a razor blade. And you'd be like cut, cut, cut, cut, right? Or you'd sit there with scissors. So we did all this math and we came up with what we were going to need to do. The inside paper was sort of a yellowish. The outside paper was sort of on turquoise. And we intend to dye, they sort of discouraged us from dying. Paper pulp, first of all, can screw up the, you know, that dye can get into everybody else's paper. So usually the way you colored paper was getting 100 percent cotton, you know, colored cloth. And I remember yellow, you know, we used to go to St. Vinnie's and Salvation Army and all that stuff, just looking for anything that was yellow that was 100 percent cotton. And yellow was not as common a color as other things. So I remember we would, you know, our friend Bruce Crownover was like walking to go swimming one day. And he had like a yellow towel. And we're like, "Is that cotton?" And he's like, "Yeah, I think so." And we're like, "Can we trade you this towel for that towel?" And then we cut up his towel. So when we figured, I remember we were like, oh my God, we have three months to work on this. Just making this paper could take three months. Especially cutting all that rag. And so we decided we'd, I remember exactly where we were. It was on the porch of this building that we used as a studio. And we made like a party. We just said everyone come. We baked some pies and stuff. You know, so in keeping with Elizabeth Jennings Wilson, now that I think of it, of that time period. So people came with a pair of scissors. They had pie and beer. And in one gathering, we cut all the rag that we needed for the project, because everybody pitched in. So that was cool. We had big, big garbage bags full of the chopped up rag. So then we made all the paper, and set the type. And it's such a beautiful manuscript. As we were setting the type, you know, we would each be like, "Oh, this is my favorite, this is my favorite poem." And then I'd move on to the next one. "No, this one's my favorite. This one's my favorite." It was just a wonderful, wonderful process. 33:04 And we made all the decisions together. Later we said, we didn't role separate, because we didn't know each other that well, so we didn't know what each other's strengths or weaknesses were. So we did everything side by side. So we, for the first time, both had these collaborative experiences that was very seamless. You know, meaning like blended, you know? And we became, you know, the best of friends. Which is now like, I don't know, let's see, we worked on that in 1987. So whatever that is, thirty plus years of friendship. So that was an incredible project. And from there, then, right when that was done, I moved away. I got this job here in Plattsburgh and moved away from Madison. And we continued, Tracy and I haven't worked on art together in a long time, but for years and years we, I would go back and forth. You know, we would go to each other's studios and we did a postcard series for, I don't know, three or four years where we used letterpress. We wanted to be able to make these beautiful things that we could just give away. And we would have a mailing list of people. I mean, as if they were subscribers. You know, that would just get these postcards. And that was how we kind of, so we could really put up, pick up and put down printing sessions. It wasn't like working on like a production, like the Elizabeth Jennings Wilson. So we did that, and also with broadsides, we did that. And then in 1994, so we made that first book in 1987. And then in between that, we were doing these broadsides and postcards. And then in 1994, I was on sabbatical and spent extended time with Tracy in Madison. And we made a book that we wrote the text for called Doubly Bound. And it was about the lives, kind of like the choices women have to make in their lives. We used this character that we called Buster's mother. We both collect, we've collected like a lot of printed ephemera. We would send each other things. Like oh, I found this neat needle case that was printed in the nineteen teens, and I'd send it to her. Or we'd be antiquing together and find this really neat--you know, a matchbook. I remember we sort of had to flip a 01:15:00 coin, who got to buy this for their collection. It was like a matchbook that was completely intact from some Chicago nightclub, probably 1930s. And you opened it up and every matchstick had like a Rockette, like a kick line woman printed on each of the matches. It was really, really beautiful and amazing. So we were interested in those kinds of printed objects when there was a lot of illustration going on. Not everything was photographic. Oh, so one of us had this deck of cards for some game. We didn't know what it was for. And there were all these characters. And it would say like, this is John Smith. This is Roger, whatever, give me a last name. This is Roger Black. This is you know, whatever. But then the female characters would be like, this is the cook. And it was a woman. This is the maid. SL: Oh. (laughs) 36:53 DF: This is Buster's mother. So none of the female characters were named, and all of the male characters were. And you know, we didn't know what the game was. So there was this woman, and she was clearly, the card, it must have been like turn of the century, because she was wearing, it's pre-1920s clothing. She's sort of like oh, you might call it Victorian or whatever. So she was, it just says, "I am Buster's mother." So there was a character, the boy. I think it was like Buster Brown. Like whatever his deal was, whatever that story was. I mean, I only associate it with like shoes or something. But I think he was some kind of serial character, popular culture. So we wound up making this book about Buster's mother. And we only ever called her Buster's mother. And that was, and we wrote that. There were like 13 little volumes in it. And it was really a labor of love. And just learned so much. And Tracy and I got, you know, even closer. We were really happy with the product. I still feel like it, so it's 1994, I still feel like it holds up in its content now, all these years later, about the lives of women. So and then we eventually did another book called The Art of Simple Note-taking. So we had written the text for Doubly Bound. And the text that we used for The Art of Simple Note-taking, Tracy had found in the library there. Some like book about teaching that was in a section called like, it was Cornell. I think it was like from Cornell's education school or however that would have been, whatever that was called, about teaching junior naturalists. So it had that, thought that a lot of us did growing up, where you plant a bean, you know, and then watch it grow. So this they had reproduced in this Cornell book for educators some little kid's experiment. An eight year-old. Like a third-grader. You didn't know if he was male or female, if the child was male or female. And it was so beautiful, his/her little drawings. And it was sort of his misspellings. "I planted a been," b-e-e-n. "I watered it." You know, it was this very, very simple text. And then his or her little drawings of the sprout. And there were a few pages and we reproduced. So we pulled from this child's text and kind of plunked it into our book. The book's format is like a reporter's notebook, like where the binding is at the top. Like a notepad. SL: Okay. 40:11 DF: My favorite page is, it starts with these little drawings and then eventually it gets to, we figured out that it was about 100, when we published that book, which was like 1996, the child would have been like 100 years old. So it was like from, you know, the turn of the century. And one page was, you know, February 21, no change. February 22, no change. February 23, no change. No change, no change, no change. It was this really diligent, scientific observer, you know? And so we worked on that together. And we put our own text in towards the end. Anyway, I mean, it's sort of hard to talk about without having the, you know, people obviously have to experience the book. But it went from a very, I mean, Doubly Bound was really, really involved, as I said, 13 little pamphlets. And then we went into a drop spine box that opened a certain way. It was just really labor-intensive. And then this was a much kind of lighter, simpler piece. Once we stepped back, 01:18:00 we realized we did that periodically. And the last book we did together is a book called Rubies & Pomegranates. And it was a very limited edition. Eight copies. Big, heavy. Very printmakerly. There were all these editioned prints in the book. And the name is from a quote that, of Pablo Neruda from his Book of Questions, I think, which was published posthumously. But one of his questions was what does the ruby say, wait, how does it go? Hmm. What does the ruby say standing in front of like the pomegranate seeds? It was something like that, except more beautiful. And I just said, what does the ruby say standing in front of pomegranate seeds. Something like that. But we were so touched by the red and the red. We talked about either the ruby is like, hey, I thought I was the most red, you know, wonderful red. It could be sort of a jealousy. But it could also be like simpatico. You finally found something as wonderful. You think of pomegranate seeds and rubies, they're actually quite similar in their glisten and beauty and all that. What did the ruby say standing in front of, maybe it's the juice of pomegranates? I can't remember. But that's quite a big, involved book that was at the time like sort of a quite an indulgence. And I think at the time, yeah, it was probably about, we started it to be like the tenth anniversary of us working together. And I think we finally finished it like a year later. So those are the projects I've done with Tracy. 43:42 And then the other long-time collaborator, Mario Laplante and I have collaborated uninterrupted since 1985. So 15, you know, over 30 years of, you know, a project always in progress. And that includes books. I think we've done, let's see, one, two three, four, five books together. And then we do a lot of works on paper together. We have a quite extensive body of work that we exhibit that's slab work that we make together. And then Kathy Kuehn, like working with her, we've worked on two books together. One we started back in like 1993, using the poems by a poet Dan Giancola. It's called POOL Sonnets. We had his manuscript. And I was relatively newly here in Plattsburgh. And Kathy and Walter Tisdale came to Plattsburgh. And they wanted to learn lithography. We decided to do the illustrations. I did the illustrations for the book. And we did it lithographically on stone. And it was really nice. It was the summer. It was quiet here. I wasn't teaching. And I got to work with them. And we printed all the images, and we did the, we did almost everything. And then got put on a shelf. Because it still needed blah, blah, blah, this part of the letterpress. And then Kathy Kuehn moved to New Mexico. And I went out to New Mexico and we printed some more of it. And then it got shelved again. And eventually, I think the very last thing, yeah, it needed to be bound. Blah, blah, blah. And so much time passed. Eventually it was just like, I don't even know what happened to that project. It never came, I mean, there was so much work put into that project. But Kathy moved. I don't remember what was going on with Walter. And you know, just disappeared. Eventually I was like, I didn't even know where it was anymore, who had it. And I remember, and I haven't learned my lesson with this, saying to Kathy, like we had printed the title page. 01:21:00 And the title page said 1993 or 1994. And time passed. We were already in the 2000s. And again, I would periodically come across proofs from that book. And I was like, what ever happened to that? And it was, not that we were irresponsible. It was mostly, it's not like a blame thing, but I think Kathy was moving a lot. Like from New York to New Mexico, then she went up to the Northwest. Like it was just, I think she had the book. You know, what was going on? I don't know. And then we all were busy doing other projects. And then just a few years ago (laughs) Kathy said to me, maybe two or three years ago, she's like, "Guess what? I was up visiting Walter Tisdale in Maine." I'm like, yeah? And she's like, "And our book, he bound our whole book and it's sitting there." I'm like, what?! And she's like, he just like, he's this incredible craftsperson. And he was also like, like both are, Kathy's totally like this, a facilitator of other people getting their projects done. Walter, whose name wasn't on the book or anything, had been like oh, they're busy, Kathy's moving, I'll just bind this book. So he bound the whole edition, which was large. And it just needed like some kind of enclosure. It was the very last thing. I'm like, you're kidding! And she sends me, so I think she designed the enclosure and then I wound up printing, hopefully, because I know that the Kohler has this. And I printed like an announcement for it. Because there it was going out into the world, I don't know, 2014, 2015, but the title page said 1993. So I printed some, it was really fun, making this little piece of ephemera that went with it which had, I found an image of like an archeological site. And it was about like digging up something that had been lost, you know. And bringing it out, and blah, blah, blah. So that was really nice. I never thought that would see the light of day again. But it eventually did. I would say, yeah, like 20 years, at least, in between. 48:30 And then Kathy contacted the poet and was like, "Guess what? We have your book." It was like a long time in coming. (laughs) And then the most recent book I did with Kathy, which was also really involved, Kathy, like she's taught me so many things. And one of the things in her own work and her own studio practice, she does a lot of work sewing. Like sewing text, embroidery. And at some point, she was having a show at Woodland Pattern, actually, in Milwaukee. In the last ten years sometime. And I went to the opening. And she set it up. There was an opening reception, but she also did like a little sewing bee. And I had always had an aversion to sewing. I had a terrible experience in homing economics growing up. Terrible teacher. Everything got all tangled all the time, she's really yelling at everybody. I just was like oh my God, I'm never going to pick up a needle ever again. And Kathy did this thing of like gave everyone embroidery hoops and was like, here, just, you know, just sort of taught everyone how to do a simple stitch. And it was such--I really loved it. I was really moved by it. And then what happened was, she and I got together. She would often come and visit. She would often come and visit. And we started writing a text together that went through many iterations. We'd not see each other for six months and then get together again and revamp the whole text. And when we finally--and the text was a little bit of a what if. It wasn't, it wound up being if only this or that. And it's sort of about moving through life and certain kinds of regrets. But they were really, I mean, some of the text, like if only my Russian weren't so rusty. It wasn't like, if only I had gotten married and had four kids. (laugher) It was just sort of like all these, if only I had kept that mirror polished. So there were, so it took a long time to refine this text. And once we did, we went back to our own studios. She at that point was in where she is now, which is Portland, Oregon. And we both agreed to sew that text, sew the text that we wrote, we each would sew each one twice. So I don't know, let's say there's 14 texts. So I don't remember, we both have talked about, why did we say we were going to do it twice? But we kind of editioned it, but like on a different piece of fabric with a different font or whatever. And we didn't even know what it was leading to. I mean, we thought it might be some kind of textile piece. But in the end, once they were all finished, 01:24:00 she came back here and we scanned them all. And scanned them like folded and in different ways. So the book that we did wound up, the images are digital. They're the scans of our sewing. And then the text is letterpress. And oh, it's just a really, I think, beautiful book. And sweet. Like when something just touches the right, there was so much refining and refining. And one of the things I love about working with Kathy and Kathy in general is like things are elegant but really simple. So did that book. She did the binding, which is beautiful. And that book has been around now a couple of years. And I know that's in the collection at Madison, too. SL: Yes, it is. 52:31 DF: Yeah. I could go on and on. It's terrible. I'm sorry. I'm like blabby, blab, blab. SL: No, this is wonderful. DF: And you know, Mario, the work we've done together. I mean, Sojourn was a book we did after my sister died. That had a lot to do, was very spiritual. He's from a Catholic tradition. Me from a Jewish tradition. And it was sort of like in some ways, like we have a lot of common ground spiritually, even though the traditions are different. So it was where a lot of those things, not like anyone would recognize it as either Jewish or Catholic, but our own vantage points from like connecting with the divine, for lack of a better way of putting it. And it was done in the summer, let's see, my sister died in May '98. It was done not that summer, but the following summer, we camped in northern California in a really remote place on the beach and we made these. Every day we'd make these sculptures that when the tide came in would get washed away. You know, with stones. Or we brought spices with us, so we were drawing with turmeric in the sand. You know, things like that. And it's sort of a blur. It was very misty. You know, not like a southern California beach. And I was so grief-stricken. And Mario was so able to be there for me with that burden. So like my memory of that time is it was, in fact, misty, and it was like the tide was going in and out. But it was also like my head was clouded. My sadness was so profound. And this was kind of a healing thing. But when I remember that time, it's very sort of foggy. And pieces. I mean, the images are kind of like that. And those images are, they're photo etchings that are in it. You know, just a lot of technical things that we'd learned that we took on that now those kinds of things are done a lot more simply, digitally. It's something we may have, wood have possibly done digitally if it was the right, you know, if those things had existed. Anyway. So Mario's and my work, at least the books we've done, tend to be--only thinking this right now. But other than Lisst, tend to be, other than when someone else's text was involved, there's three books we did together where our text, those books are, I don't know, for lack of a better way of saying it, certainly connected to like religion. Yeah. So. SL: Well and also, I think that kind of segues nicely into some of the books you worked on, on your own. And I'm thinking of Forever & Ever. DF: Right. 56:06 SL: Which I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce this correctly, but it has tefillin? DF: Tefillin. Yeah. 01:27:00SL: And you wrote in the book, "This book's source is the desire to understand the role that Judaism plays in coping with breast cancer in our family." DF: Right. SL: Would you be able to expand on that, and talk a little bit about that? DF: Yeah. So, as I said, like Beth, my sister, was diagnosed. She was 37 years old. There was no family history of cancer, breast cancer, anything like that. And she was diagnosed. She had two little boys. And at first it seemed like it might be fairly run of the mill, if you can even say such a thing as breast cancer. It seemed like it was going to be treated conventionally with chemo. And early in that process they discovered that it was, what they thought was stage 2 breast cancer was actually stage 4 breast cancer. It had already metastasized. And we've since learned that what she had was some kind of very virulent and probably pretty rare kind of breast cancer. So she was treated very aggressively. And then, like maybe had like maybe two years cancer-free. And then she had a recurrence. And they knew that if there was a recurrence, under the circumstances, because she had had some experimental treatment that was very, very high-dose chemotherapy, like it just was not, you know. If it survived that, it was not going to, she was not going to be cancer-free. So she was going through kind of indefinite treatment, which was also so, I mean, I know people still go through it now. But it was just so, I mean, I really look forward to the day when people won't even believe that people ever did something like chemotherapy. So she wound up, she died in May of 1998. But in, so she was someone that was much, much beloved. She had a million friends. And was really close to all our cousins and the three sisters. The three of us were really, really close. And I remember like people were helping in different ways. I was like what can I do that's uniquely for me and Beth, or some way I can help Beth that has to do with me. I mean, not me like it's about me, but that's unique to she and I. She and me. I get that confused. But so around that time, I really can't remember which came, I think that there must have been a call from Judith Hochberg, who was a curator, book artist, curator. She has since died. And she was Jewish. And she was putting together a show that wound up actually having many iterations and traveling for years called Women of the Book. And it was Jewish women book artists. So there was a call saying I'm starting this project, I'm going to be looking for this. And I'd never used Jewish content other than, you know, as I said, with, well this predates Sojourn anyway. You know, other than in the most sort of vague, where it's like a personal way, but it wouldn't necessarily be obvious to other people. 01:30:00 So anyway, I thought oh. And my sister Beth, who I said always took me to art museums, and this and that. And her field was genetics. She was a genetic counselor. She was president of her national organization. She was like really, you know, quite an involved professional. And on top of those kinds of things, she would, when she lived in Nebraska, she took like a letterpress class at, with Harry Duncan, who was a well-known letterpress printer. Just because she was interested. And then she gave tours. She was a docent for, like when she lived in Chicago, architectural tours of Chicago. You know, blah, blah, blah. So she was always interested in so many different things. 1:00:45 So she had done letterpress before I ever did letterpress, actually. And she was like, "I'm doing this neat thing," just as this sort of like hobby. And then I came to find out that Harry Duncan was really well known in the field, you know. And in any case, so I approached her and said, "How would you feel about us doing a book together about what you're going through?" Like with Jewish content for this. And she was like, "Oh, I love that idea. I love that idea." And the other thing with her, I mean, this would have been true whether she was sick or not, but she was so stretched thin. I mean, she had these two little boys. She was, I would say, the primary caregiver to those boys. Her husband was a little bit absent. And then she was like had a fulltime job at Northwestern University and ran the graduate program for their genetic counselors. And, as I said, was active in her national organization. And etcetera, etcetera. So it was also about finding time with her. Like I always remember being a little bit jealous, a little bit like, I can't get to her. You know, like there's just so much going on for her, and she's so loved by so many other people. And this was a way of like let's do this thing together, and come out and spend time. Which she did not have very much of, both in her day to day and, as it turned out, to be like in this world with us. 1:02:20 So somehow, how did we come up with this? We were writing back and forth to each other. I think we were emailing, of course. I mean, finally that had kicked in. And we started talking about tefillin. I'm trying to think how in heaven's name we would have ever gotten to that. They're called in English, it's actually a Greek word, phylacteries. I don't know what the hell, where that comes from, what it means. But what it is, and you may have seen pictures of it. And you saw the book with us. But typically the imagery is like an old Jewish man with a prayer shawl wearing them like at the western wall in Jerusalem or whatever. They're absolutely associated with really religious Jews. Like for sure I go to a reform synagogue which is, you know, nobody's putting on tefillin, right? But it's like, I don't know. I learned, I would have thought it dated a few hundred years to Eastern Europe or something. No, it's well over a thousand year-old tradition. And what they are, there's leather straps, very odd looking, I guess, leather straps. And there's like these leather boxes. And I think there's two. And there's a central prayer in the religion called the Shema, which is basically, I would say unless a Jew is completely secular, it's like the one prayer they would know. And it's just like the central, it's like stating that there's one god, that's what the prayer is. "Hear, oh Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one." So it's just like reiterating. Which at the time must have been like a unique concept, you know. It's like, it's in Deuteronomy. So it dates back to, you know, biblical times, right? So very long time ago. So that prayer is written by a scribe and put in those little boxes. And it's sealed. 01:33:00 The boxes are sealed. And when you put on the tefillin, there's a way to do it. And the prayer translates to, and I don't know if you're familiar with like Jewish people's homes sometimes have a mezuzah at the door. It's like a little, people have different, it's like on the doorway when you come in. And it's, it looks like usually it's about two inches long. And it's, people who are religious, when they come into their house they would probably touch it and kiss it or something. But I'm not religious, but I for sure have one on my door. And it's funny because a lot of times I'm watching like NYPD Blue, or Law and Order, and they're just filming in a, you know, they're like, "Let us in! It's the cops!" And you can see wherever they're filming, that there's a mezuzah on the door just because someone didn't, like when people move out, you're not supposed to unscrew it. It's like bad luck. You leave it wherever you are. So for sure, sometimes I'm like oh my God, the art director missed the fact that there's a--or maybe it's fine that there's a mezuzah on the door. It's not like Jewish people live inside there anymore or whatever. It's like a meth lab or something like that, but I'm sure they just picked like some, wherever they were filming. So you see it. Or like, anyway, it's this thing you see. Like when my dad moved into an assisted living and I'm walking down the hall to go to my dad's little apartment, I'm like oh, there's like three Jewish people in the hall, because you see three mezuzahs outside their doors, you know, whatever. So anyway, that comes from a part of Deuteronomy that says they shall be, you should hang these words on your gates, and upon the door posts of your house. So that's how it's interpreted. So in those little mezuzah, mezuzah which in Hebrew, is that same prayer that's inside these little boxes. And it says in that prayer you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. So when you're putting on these tefillin, you're like wrap, wrap, wrap, and the box lands on your hand. And then you wrap around your head and it lands on your forehead. So those are answering, those are like literal interpretations of that. 1:06:48 When I was reading about it, when Beth and I decided to take that on, and I'll tell you why in a second, I read about it. And it was very much apparently, so I'm going to just say a thousand words. It could be more. I don't think it was less. But it was very common to kind of wear amulets. And it was definitely like that kind of thing, like wearing your prayers. So we had been, we grew up in a conservative tradition. You know, there's reformed Judaism, conservative, orthodox. We grew 01:36:00 up conservative. And women were not included in the service in the same way that men were. I mean, that has all changed, thankfully. But we grew up not learning to read the Torah, like doing something else. You know, because that was for men. It was definitely really sexist and creepy and gross. So we had both. Beth and I had both subsequently in our adult life learned to read Torah, you know, taken those things on as they became open to us. So we had never--so the way we got to tefillin was we were talking about prayers. And she was talking, I distinctly remember this, about living with the unknown, how, and I suppose this would be true of all of us, and you can always say that when someone's dealing with a terminal illness, that we all don't know what tomorrow holds, and we all are mortal and blah, blah, blah. But in her case, she had to really let go of, you know, she couldn't, it wasn't the kind of thing where they're like, "You have three more months," or, "You have three more years." They're like, "We're going to see if this medication will work." You know, it's a big question. So we talked about how the answer, somewhere the answer was. I don't know that either of us would say oh, we believe in a very specific kind of god. But the answer is there, it's just not known to us. It's out of our reach to know that answer so you have meaning. In her case, how long would she live. So you have to be okay with not knowing that answer, but you carry around that question. 1:09:07 And so we talked about those sealed boxes. Because once that prayer is put in those boxes, it's sealed. You never, it's not like you ever handle that prayer or touch that paper or anything. It's tucked away in this box and you can't reach it. For all you know, like what's in there? You know what I mean? It's sort of hidden. And sealed. That was the important thing. It wasn't like, if you wanted to look inside that box, you'd have to cut it open. And it's made of leather, you know. So we started likening that, that's what we said, was that that's what she--I mean, all of us, but it was about her and what she was going through so specifically was she doesn't have the answer, even though the answer is that close, like reachable, but out of, not knowable. So we decided to learn how to put on tefillin. And she came here. We went to see my rabbi, who was a young woman. And she didn't know how to put on, she was in a different tradition. Like reformed Judaism. But she very sweetly, like we looked it all up together. So normally a father would teach his son. You know, it was this male to male thing. And she helped us learn how to do it, and then we practiced. And then my friend Sue Lezon, who's a photographer, photographed us, just did a big photo session of us doing it and helping each other because that box is supposed to land right in the middle of your forehead, and blah, blah, blah. When it lands on your hand, the way you wrap the strap on your hand, you spell, there's two Hebrew letters that emerge. Which are shin and dalet, which spells, in Hebrew, 01:39:00 Shaddai, which is one of the names for God. So it's like quite involved. It's not just like wrap, wrap. It's like wrap, wrap, and get, you know, it would be like if you had to get the letter "G" and the letter "D" to be like on your hand using these straps. So, anyway. But once someone knows how to do it, they're like, you know, it's easy peasy. (laughs) So in any case, it was not easy peasy for us. And we were, I remember we were late at night like in my studio and we were practicing, because Sue was going to come by the next day and take these photographs. And then I had mine on. And Beth like, "Go into the bathroom and look in the mirror." So I go down and I look in the mirror wearing these things. Nobody was around, thankfully. And I came back. I was like, "Oh my God, I feel like I'm in drag." Because I'd only ever seen men wearing them, you know. Anyway, so we did that. We had the photo session. And then we wrote the text that went with it. And which some of that was an excerpt from a letter she'd written to her oncologist talking about her uncertainty. Some of it was prayers we had for each other. Some of it was about her first finding out, or what she was living with, the kinds of questions people were asking her. You know, she found out people were always asking like, "Oh, when did you find it? Did you find it yourself?" I mean, I've definitely noticed this about people in general, but certainly women and breast cancer. She had to field so much of people saying, like it was so much about them. I mean, she didn't even fault people, but they were like, "Oh, were you checking in the shower? I should check in the shower." Like that. SL: Oh. 1:12:39 DF: Just like a lot of like, oh, or, "Oh, is it hereditary?" Because they want to know like if theirs isn't hereditary. Or people that are like, so and so got lung cancer. "Oh, did they smoke?" or they had, you want to know like well, I don't smoke, so I'm safe. Or so and so was killed in a car crash. "Were they wearing their seatbelt?" You know, because like I wear my seatbelt. So she was talking about like dealing with that all the time. She wasn't even like upset about it. It was just more like an observation. Anyway, so then we worked on it. And I was rushing, deadline-wise, because I really wanted it to be in this Judith Hochberg-curated exhibition. And I think it was going to be in Chicago, which is where Beth lived. Like I totally wanted this to happen while she was living. Which it did. But then toward the end, let's say she came and stayed here for three days when we were working on it, finalizing the text, having these photographs done and all that, I remember towards the end, because I was always following her lead. So she was like delving into how scary this was. But then, I don't know, by the time she was ready to leave, I think she was kind of unnerved. I mean, kind of remember that I was driving her to the airport in Montreal. And then I was going to be editioning. Like we designed it and all that stuff together, but then I was going to be like printing and editioning, and the edition was 75 copies. And I said, "So when I'm done, like how many copies do you want?" She's like, "Oh, I don't know. One?" I was like, "Really?" But it could tell she was like distancing herself from the project a little. Like suddenly this wall came down and I felt like oh, I think this was too much like emotionally 01:42:00 or something. So I said, "Well, we'll talk when I have it finished." You know, whatever. So when it was all done, I think I sent her ten copies. And then, so as I was working on it, I was glad we did it, but there was also this part of me that was like, oh, did I push her? Was this about me? Does this feel good to her or not? You know, all of that stuff. And then mailed her her copies, which she had been like oh, I only need one, you know like. And then I'll never forget coming home to the answering machine for the next few weeks. She was like, oh--in my family, they call me Deanie, not Diane. So she was like, "Deanie, I showed the book today to so and so. We had a really long talk." And then beep, the next day, "Oh, so and so came over and I showed them the book. And, la, la, la." And all of a sudden I was like weeping on the other end, because completely unbeknownst to me, it wound up being this tool for her to talk about what was going on, and for her to give to people and share with people. I know she gave one to her rabbi when she like died. We were with her when she died, as was he. And he like opened up his coat and sort of showed me that he had that book in his pocket. Like it just became this, I guess its own kind of talisman, amulet or whatever. And yeah, it was really, really meaningful in that way. And then it kind of traveled around for a long time in that show, it's out of print. And that was the other thing. Like it kept selling. Of all the books I made, I would have been like oh, this won't be of interest to anyone because it's so, so personal. And it was like, "Can you send us more copies of this?" It was like bizarre to me. Like I did not--I was like, oh. I never thought about it, because it just felt so personal. But apparently, you know, it was meaningful to other people, too. But I was so grateful to have done that with her. You know, it was published in, you know, '97, probably the fall of '97. She died less than a year later. SL: Did she get to see the book at the show? 1:16:50 DF: She knew the book was in the show. And I kind of feel like she didn't. Like I remember, but only because there was some kind of conflict schedule-wise or something. It wasn't because she was wasn't well enough. And then, yeah, I kind of, but she saw the pictures of the gallery. She saw the invitation and the little catalog and all of that. So that was really nice. And she was definitely proud of it. Yeah, it was really an important, important thing. And, you know, still kind of obviously, you know, as you knew when I talked to you before, still very much, you know, the grief is still very, very strong. And missing her. And she, as a matter of fact, I don't know why I'm saying this in this, but when my other sister Janet was engaged to be married in the October of '98, and Beth was, she and I were working on, you know, doing things you do for the bride, blah, blah, blah, and then as she got sicker and sicker, she was like, "I don't think I'm going to make it to the wedding. I hope I'm going to make it to the wedding" kind of thing. And she was 41 at the time. In May, when she realized she was dying, and she knew it was imminent, she called us to say that. And she said something like, when Janet told me that when she called Janet, she said, "I know now 01:45:00 I'm not going to be at your wedding." And Janet had already asked her fiancé. And she said, "Well, would Rabbi Wilken," her rabbi, "marry us at your house tomorrow in Chicago?" Janet lived in Boston. Beth was like, "What?" She said, "Yeah, I told you I wouldn't get married without you there." Because when Beth was saying, "I don't know if I'm going to make it," Janet just kept saying, "Well, I'm not getting married if you're not there. I'm not going to get married. You're going to be there because I'm not going to get married without you being there." So we all flew out. And she and Larry got married in like 24 hours. Beth's friends found flowers for them. They found a dress for Janet to borrow. They got cake. You know, they had music. Lots of Beth's friends came over. And they got married in Beth's living room. And that's when the rabbi was like, he took out that book and said like I have this here. And he conducted the wedding ceremony. There was like 30 of us jammed in her living room. Also as like a goodbye to Beth. And it was really, you know, really, really very moving and special. Yeah. 1:19:51 And then within that year, I had sabbatical the following year. And I was at--where was I? Oh, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. And I made the book called Beautiful Little Bird, which is also in the collection. And that was my response to her death. And it's also a limited edition book. A lot of prints, printmakerly, like not done on a letterpress, but hand printed in a different way. Relief prints and lithographs and etchings. And the text I wrote for that, there's two texts, one at the beginning and one at the end. And the first text just is about the phone call between us when she called to tell me she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And then four years later, the last text in the book is the phone call when she called to say that she was dying. And you know, that there was nothing else that they could do, disease-wise. I built the book around those two conversations. And it's called Beautiful Little Bird because our grandmother, who we were all really close with, spoke Yiddish and English. But she would call in Yiddish you say sheyn faygele, which means beautiful little bird. So she would call all of us, it was like, she has a lot of grandchildren. So it was like of course she knew all our names. But she would just refer to you as sheyn faygele. Like, "Oh, come here, sheyn faygele," so she probably wouldn't have to be like, which one are you, or whatever. So she always called us beautiful little bird. So the book is called beautiful little bird. And the bird in the book, like it starts flying into the composition. And then the center of the book, the bird is fully in the composition. And then at the end of the book, that's the wings leaving. And the coming in and coming out are white on white. And, you know, it just says, "Beautiful little bird, I can hear your song." And that was really, I don't know if that's correct to say a cathartic, it was cathartic to make that book. I don't know if that's the correct use of that word. So yeah, that was really special. And very limited edition. I saved copies for her boys, who are little, which I have yet to give them, even though they're grown men now. But I have them here for them. SL: How old are they now? 1:22:45 DF: Josh is a dad, has a two year-old who's named after my sister, he'll be 32 this summer. And Aaron is 29, he'll be 29 this summer. And he's getting married this summer. And they both are very much like their mom, and totally beautiful, beautiful people. And little Aviva Beth, who's named after Beth, looks a lot like my sister. (laughs) And you know, her temperament seems similar. And my sister Janet and I, we 01:48:00 spend time with little Avi, as we call her. And we like just can't even believe how much like Beth she is. And we're still, as I said, 20 years later, I'm just in my head being like, I can't believe Beth isn't here to see her granddaughter, you know. But it just never, it's still so shocking, even though it's been a long time. Because we were really a threesome. And you know, I don't know if you have siblings. But we're so close. And we live in relationship to each other. And one person is taken out of that equation. But boy, would she be proud of her boys. SL: I bet. DF: Yeah. (laughs) Sorry. SL: No, that's okay. Do you want to take a break? DF: No, I'm okay. SL: Okay. DF: What else? 1:24:28 SL: Is there anything else you wanted to add about your books? Or would you want to talk more generally about how you, because you've been making them for many years, how do you think your work and your approach to it has changed? Like technique-wise, or otherwise? DF: Yeah. I, what did you just say. Like, what? SL: I just said like technique-wise, or otherwise. DF: Oh, right. Okay. Well, a couple of things. One thing is, I do things are simpler. Although that's probably true for a long time. I have less interest in things like innovative binding or working on handmade paper, or some of those, what do you call those, accoutrement or whatever. Like things are more streamlined. I for sure mix a lot of digital, I use ink jet printing along with letterpress and other techniques. And I feel really good about that. Like it's really about mixing the analog and the digital, and knowing what works best for it one way or another. There's even things that I do letterpress a lot are thought out on the computer first. And that's been really wonderful tool. I mean, I sometimes think people that are like, ew, sort of concerned about transitioning to digital output aren't, like I think a good craftsperson, an artist, knows when it makes sense to use one medium and when it makes sense to use another medium. And it's like folly. Then I have a student that will say something like, I'll say, "Oh, why don't you just do the text digitally, and do like," blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, "Oh, is that allowed?" (laughter) I'm like, "You're the artist. Yeah." It's like in printmaking if you're running many colors or something, so each time it's going through another press another time, and then it's, a student needs like one little red dot on something. And they're going to like what, grain a stone, draw it, process it. Like and run, you know, 12 copies of the red dot instead of just taking a red pencil and going like 12 times, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. I'm like, at some point it's folly, you know what I mean? Just there's no, you're not an idiot. Who would do that whole process for a red dot? At least that's how I feel, you know. I'm not a purist in that way. So it's sort of about, it's not like rules. It's like, what makes sense with your imagery? With your idea, with your concept. To some extent, I mean, every now and then, with Detours, I remember Kathy was sort of more insistent about the letterpress text, and she was absolutely right. And I did that with the book Mario and I did called Offering, where we did letterpress type and the imagery was digital. And you know, I think there are times when I have to remind myself how beautiful letterpress is, and the way in which the digital doesn't replicate that. And then kind of get my butt into the letterpress studio. But there's also things that are just, I don't know. I mean, I knock wood I can still do letterpress and all that, but there's also, you know, I don't know. It would be a lot easier to print a hundred of something digitally than physically, you know, physically. And again, depending on what you're looking for in the final product. So there's that, like mixing it up with the digital more. A little less, although I have continued to work with manuscripts. Like more in broadside form than you know, a book working with a poet. But I have definitely, I did a book called, A Broth for Two Parents with Eli Goldblatt, the poet, and I've done broadsides with him. And it's not so much new, but I would say sometimes I'm working with a manuscript, and then sometimes I'm doing collaborative writing. The writing that I would say I'm the author is done collaboratively. I haven't--well, that's not true. In Beautiful Little Bird, that text was my own. But it wasn't a lot of text. But Beth and I did the text together for Forever & Ever and Doubly Bound, Tracy and I did the text together. Mario and I did Offering. Kathy and I did Detours together. So yeah. I 01:51:00 also don't, you know, I have, working on this color series, I have red and green. But yellow's been sitting there floating, and it's vaguely in progress for a lot of years now. So it's also like production. There's a lot of other things I'm doing. And I think the size of the undertaking of a book is, you know, I don't know if it's my energy level or whatever. I'm still committed to it, but it takes a while. It takes a while to get it all done in a way that it didn't earlier on. So I think that that's a combination of interest and what else I'm doing and then also the aging process. So that's how I think things have changed. But I do have intentions of continuing with the color books. 1:30:25 And I know Kathy and I, Kathy Kuehn and I have started working on another text that's about our fathers. We both have lost our fathers. And that's in progress. But if the past with Kathy and I is any sign, it's going to be a long time in coming. But that's okay. Yeah. SL: Well, I imagine you're also busy with your teaching career. DF: Yes. SL: And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your approach to teaching book arts. DF: Okay. So I have been teaching here for almost 30 years. I love this job. I've been really lucky to be here. I love the kind of college it is. A state, small, state college. Smallish. It's five or six thousand students. I have the honor of being a distinguished teaching professor, which means my picture is up in the library here. (laughs) And I feel that has a lot to do with the relationships I've had with, you know, we have distinguished service professor, we have distinguished research professor. And I have been really dedicated to all those things. But teaching has been really at the heart of my career. Over the time with teaching, you know, when I started teaching I was 27 years old and easily confused with some of the students. And there's something that now goes with, now that I'm an oldster, sort of, what's really nice about that, there is a little bit of built in authority that there didn't used to be. And I really enjoy being around, I mean, obviously there are non-traditionally aged students. But for the most part, you're with students in their early twenties, or people in their early twenties, over and over and over again. So I like being able to, you know, if I wasn't doing this, I would have no idea what was going on in that world. And I think that's important to know, to sort of like be involved with that energy. So teaching book arts, so it's only recent in the last, I don't know, five, six, seven years, that I actually have a course here that's specifically book arts. 1:33:00 SL: Okay. DF: I used to teach as part of my printmaking class. So in printmaking, we would do sections on making books. And then, I just got, things changed in what the demographic was, who was in that advanced class. Anyway, so I wrote this new course a few years ago. And so once a year I teach this class. And it's not, we don't really have, I have a letterpress set up here. But it's really just one or two advanced students can use it at a time. It's not like I could teach a whole class letterpress. But I do have like a book binding room. And so this class has been mostly making one of a kind books, which is great. Or if we do something editioned, we're doing it digitally. But the students come from various disciplines, both within the art department, so we have graphic designers of fabulous working with them. And then drawing and painting people, and printmakers. And then we have people, you know, from the English department, there's always one or two non-art majors in the class. And I try to teach that from, you know, we make objects, book objects. But none of the work, for the most part, there wouldn't be an expectation that the finished work in this class is like refined, finished, ready to exhibit artwork as much as it is like working ideas. So that took some, what would you call it? You know, I had to kind of wrap my brain around that, that that was okay, that that was going to 01:54:00 be a good way for them to learn. That it didn't have to have those kinds of outcomes. It wasn't like being in Walter Hamady's studio where, you know, you're editioning things, which was different. So wanted to work with these students for them to have an opportunity to combine text and image. You know, all the things that I embrace about the book arts, medium of book arts or the discipline of book arts. Text and image to work with sequence, to play with form, to be sculptural if they want to be sculptural. We do a project of altered book and we do a project, we do things that would take a lot of, obviously, thought, but where I feel like they're getting reacquainted with what a book even is. And the other thing is, there's quite a difference, I mean, thankfully I don't think any of my students even today are not book people, in that they had books read to them or they handled books. But a lot of students' relationships to books is just very, very different now than it was 30 years ago, that's for sure. In terms of, you know, maybe they only ever read online. So that's been kind of interesting to kind of bring that sort of into the fore, you know, for them. And for me to learn how is it different? How is their relationship to books different than mine is? You know, like I can't make assumptions that I used to make. But anyway, so it's taken a little while. I think when I teach it in the fall, it will be maybe the fifth time I'm teaching it. I think it's getting better and better. I'm getting more comfortable to what my expectations are and how I can design it and like hone it to be its own thing. For it not to be modeled after how I teach printmaking, for instance. So I've been enjoying doing that and students--and I like working with all the, it's an opportunity for me to work with students that are active in other disciplines besides printmaking. SL: Do you think that the book will kind of have a period of a comeback? I think that there are other, like I talked some time ago with a writer who went back to using a typewriter, for example. 1:37:45 DF: Oh, interesting. SL: Do you see something like that happening? Or not really? DF: Yeah, I don't think, I don't think books are, you know, I mean, I don't know, a publisher, blah, blah, blah, people of that world could tell you more about that. But I still think, so, for instance, my students, they all have, one of the assignments I give is to think of like a favorite children's book, and to create either a prequel or sequel to it. So no one comes, I'm trying to think, I mean, someday that might happen, and I have to be careful about assuming everybody has that experience. But you know, they all bubble over with, you know, there's still that. Like the books that they were attached to as a kid, or the stories they were attached to. So I don't so much see, you know, the book as a form, how much people actually hold a book. I don't believe that that's ever going to stop. But what do I know? I don't know anything about it. The best thing I can think of that might relate to this is I have noticed in printmaking, let's say, there's a process called mezzotint. Are you familiar with it? M-e-z-z-o-t-i-n-t. SL: Mm hmm. 1:39:07 DF: Okay. It's an old process. It doesn't involve the use of acid that etching uses. So it like predates even that etching technology, which is, I don't know, like Rembrandt etched, and that was the 17th century. But I don't think, you know, it's not much older than that. So what mezzotint 01:57:00 is, and mezzo, I believe, means half in Italian. And you know, if you cook at all, I don't know if you ever have that tool to chop herbs, that's like a half knife. You know, it's like you rock it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That's called a mezzo something or other, also. So if you can picture that, so a mezzotint is taking a piece of copper, taking what's called a rocker, so a tool that is like a sharp arc, a-r-c. And you rock the plate. And every time you go swish, swish, swish, swish, you're digging, you're gouging a line into the metal. And when you rock the plate completely, meaning swooshed swooshed back and forth in like 12 different directions, you've created a plate that is so full of lines and burrs, b-u-r-r, which is like the metal that was in the lines kind of sticking to the side of the lines, that when you wipe that plate with ink, like an etching, it prints like velvet. It is so, so rich and gorgeous, okay? Unlike, for sure you can't reproduce it digitally. Completely tactile and just, you know, rich and sublime (laughs) that very word. And the way the image is created is that then the artist draws a subtractive drawing by burnishing down some of that metal. So they pull the whites out. So if you've ever been in a drawing class, and often there's an assignment that you cover the page with graphite and then you draw with an eraser, right? So you pull out the whites. So mezzotint is done with, like you then use like scrapers and burnishers and push down those burrs. And you create this gorgeous, gorgeous images that are-- Okay, so, when I was in, so mezzotint, nobody did it, pretty much, when I was in grad school, for instance. It's incredibly labor-intensive. It's kind of old-fashioned. I mean, they're beautiful. They're usually very small. Because to wrap rock a plate even that was like 8 ½ by 11 would take you, I don't know, hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. It's just like, and then once you have rocked your plate, it can only go, like it has a limited life. Because every time it goes through the press, it gets a little bit pushed down. So mezzotints are usually small in size, and also small editions. Because they don't last very long. So there has been in the last 20 years so many more people doing mezzotint. Like in every printmaking show that I'm in, or seeing the catalog or whatever, it's like mezzotint, mezzotint. I'm like, wow, like I can't believe it. I can't believe it. And not too long ago I was like, you know what it is, it's because we're living in a digital age. It's like the antithesis of the digital. And I just feel like people are like--and it's not like a hostile thing. It's just, they're just hungry for that surface. They're hungry for like the other thing or whatever. And so all of that to say that like if you'd asked me 30 years ago do you think suddenly people are going to be doing a lot of mezzotints, I'm like, no, never! That seems crazy! And lo and behold, it's like, "The new book is out on mezzotint." I'm like, wow! And I can only, I mean, I'm just making that up. But, you know, I think that's got to be part of the appeal. And so I think with books, too, if like you're only ever experiencing something on a screen, 02:00:00 you're going to love the feel of that book. So I don't think it's going anywhere. It's just different, I guess. 1:43:46 SL: Well, is there anything else that you'd like to add? Any final thoughts? DF: No. Except just you know, thank you again and to wish you really good luck with your project. And also I think I said this earlier. The University of Wisconsin was an indispensable chapter in the development of my life and my career. And my time there is close to my heart, and the institution in general is something I support as best I can financially, but also will always hold dear. And I'm glad that you're doing this project. And whoever listens to this, if anybody ever listens to this, I hope they know how great the University of Wisconsin is. And I hope it's still really great. SL: Thanks so much, Diane. DF: Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure. And I'll look forward to hearing when I can listen to myself. (laughs) Bore myself. Thank you. 104:55 [End Track 2. End Session.] Total time