Interview with Katherine Kuehn

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # 1776 KUEHN, KATHY KUEHN, KATHY (1956-) At UW: 1977-1987 Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lange Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 1 hour, 15 minutes First Interview Session (May 21, 2018): Digital File 00:00:01 SL: So today is May 21, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Kathy Kuehn, printer, print maker, book artists and proprietor of Salient Seedling Press at the university archives in Steenbock Library. So Kathy, I wondered if you could start by telling us a little bit about your background before you got to the UW Madison? Maybe tell us a little bit about where you grew up. KK: Okay, well, for me to be back in Madison is always a little bit overwhelming. I'm staying with friends out in the far east side of Madison. And I not only have a connection to Madison as a student, an undergrad and a graduate student, but my family is from Wisconsin. Both my parents were from Sheboygan. And my father was from a large family. The whole entire family worked at the Kohler company. My mother's father was a lawyer and became a judge, and became a judge here in Madison on the Supreme Court. And we lived here. I lived here until I was six, while my parents were in graduate school. We lived in Eagle Heights, married student housing. We all had a great time (laughs) at Eagle Heights. And then when my father finished, my mother got a master's degree in history and my father got a PhD in literature. And following that, he took a job at Yale University, so we moved to Connecticut, to Hampton, Connecticut. But every single summer, we got in the un-air conditioned Rambler-we owned a Rambler for a long time, because my father wanted to own a car that was made in Wisconsin, his loyalty to his state-and we drove to Wisconsin. And we spent 10 days in Madison and ten days in Sheboygan, Sheboygan Falls, with my father's large family. And I actually had some childhood friends that I would see when I came back. So I had this real connection to this place as being the place that my extended family was from. And when I went off 00:01:00 to college, I started college at the University of Toronto in Art History. And they had a very intensive Art History program. And after three semesters, I figured out that that really, I wasn't really cut out to be an art historian, learning all sorts of foreign languages and doing all that research. I mean, it was fun. But I found a place to take a printmaking class in Toronto, a public access workshop and did that. And then I went home to New Haven and was there for a couple of years and was working. And I took a lot of classes at Southern Connecticut State College. So I was just sort of like filling up my dance card with all of those prerequisite classes that I would need to go back to school when I figured that out, made that decision. And I took printmaking classes at a wonderful place that still exists in New Haven, called the Creative Arts Workshop. Which was public access. I had some really wonderful printmaking instructors. Evan 00:02:00 Sumner and Keith and Flo Hatcher. And that was a great situation because it was just all sorts of different people taking these classes for different reasons. There were university professors and moms and it was a lively place. And I became really interested in printmaking through that experience. And thinking about going to a program that focused on printmaking, I thought about the University of Massachusetts, which wasn't too far from home. And I thought about UW Madison. Well, in 1977, the spring of 1977, my father got a job in London, an academic job in London. So my family were moving to England. It didn't make sense for me to go with them at that time. We had lived there for one year when I was in high school. We all loved it. But how I would fit into like a college system in London, I didn't know how that would work. So I made the decision and applied to come here to Madison. In large part, I mean, because I knew the 00:03:00 campus, this big school. And my parents had been to school here. But also, I had two sets of grandparents living here, in southern Madison and in Sheboygan. So I would be with family, and in a place that was familiar to me. So I came out in the summer of 1977. And that summer, I lived in Witte Hall. And I took two classes, two summer classes. One was 3-D design with George Cramer, who was a sculptor professor. And he was a wonderful teacher. I loved that class. And subsequently at some point later on when I got to teach design and 3-D design, I remembered things that he had done. And actually, it was a favorite thing for me to teach as well. And the other class I took was with Bill Weege. He was teaching the class called lettering. And it was not calligraphy. I am now studying calligraphy, which is a very different thing. But he took us through this adventure in letter forms. And I think because I had the whole summer just to focus 00:04:00 on these two classes, I put a lot of time and effort into my classes. And subsequently Bill said to me, he said, "I think you might be interested in studying typography, or taking a typography class." And I had no idea what typography was. I had never heard of it. And he explained. So I signed up for typography in the fall of 1977. And I had the good fortune for that year of having Cathie Ruggie as my teacher. Walter Hamady was on sabbatical. And Cathie was a wonderful introductory teacher. In Walter's shop, there were also lots of people who had studied with Walter who were there taking one credit. People like Steve Miller, and people who were like far along, who were publishing. But they were around. And Cathie, you know, we studied book history, and she took us to the libraries. And my second semester, I took papermaking with her. And I made these little books where I wrote my own poetry or my own stories and made handmade paper and stitched things together. And just had a wonderful time with her. I mean, I 00:05:00 was taking classes in painting and sculpture and other disciplines as well. But I think from the moment I walked into the type shop, I just fell in love with that. It's its own little world, and this nexus for people who came from different disciplines. So someone like Steve Miller was a poet, was a writer. And there were people from other departments, graduate school and undergraduate. People just came together and made these little objects. And I loved everything about the process: how intimate it was, and just how it allowed, you know, this quiet, intimate means of expression. So I was hooked. And some of the people who were Walter's students teased me a little bit. They were like, "Oh, are you going to take classes with Walter?" They sort of led me to believe it was going to be a terrifying experience. And I thought well, I can't really pass this up and I really enjoy doing it. So I signed up again for typography. And in the fall of 1978, Walter came roaring back to the type shop. And he was a completely transformative person for me to know. Especially, I mean, Cathie had introduced 00:06:00 publishing to us. But Walter was a publisher. And had all this connection. And was gathering manuscripts from contemporary poets. And I had grown up in a household full of books, with my father being a literature professor. You know, books were all around us. But the idea of being able to make books. And then also, through Walter, the experience of getting to meet poets and know poets. And one of the things that became very important to me was being able to go and hear poets read their own writing. So for me, many of the manuscripts that I published are things that I've heard poets read. And I think that experience of poetry coming to you through your ear, or even reading it out loud to yourself, became a very important thing for me. So Walter, he didn't, I mean, he basically taught his class by telling us and showing us what he was doing 00:07:00 in his own studio out at his farm at the Perishable Press. And that year I met Barb Tetenbaum and Walter Tisdale. They made their way. And Jim Lee was in graduate school. And Jim Lee and Jim Escalante were the grads. Anyway, it was just this wonderful group. And we sort of didn't really know what we were doing, but we were trying it out. And Walter was never there in the middle of the night when you needed help. I mean, it was very collaborative that people sort of helped problem solve things right there in the type shop together. We constantly, it wasn't like you went away and made your work and came back and critiqued it. It was true in the other print shops, too. You just all were working at the same time. There was that wonderful kind of energy. I think, I mean I know as an undergraduate I also hoped to work with Warrington Colescott, who was a hero of mine. But there was no room in his classes, because he had so many 00:08:00 grad students. And you know, but of course you would like see in the door, and you'd see their work in the hallways. And that was an extremely important thing for me, being an undergraduate and having this like really strong graduate program. You saw their work. I mean, you saw like where you needed to get to. (laughs) You're a long way away from that. And that year, the end of that year, Walter Tisdale and I purchased a press together. And Walter set it up in, there was this one extra funny little room in his apartment. And we set it up then. And I can't remember when I went to work for Walter. But I have to say, as soon as I learned these techniques, I got to stop waitressing. I mean, I had other interesting jobs on the campus, because the campus offers a lot of employment opportunities to students. But my employment scheme 00:09:00 from that time on became asking people if they would hire me, professors if they would hire me. (laughs) And some of them did. So I went to work for Walter. SL: I'm sorry, Kathy. You bought a press with Walter Tisdale. KK: Tisdale. SL: And then you're talking about working with Walter Hamady. KK: Walter Hamady. Yes. So Walter and I decided, Walter Tisdale and I decided, we were just going to pursue what we were doing. And I was on this rather undisciplined pathway to my degree. Because once I learned how to do these things, that was really sort of all that I cared about. And my parents, although they were academics, they didn't put any sort of pressure on me to like, when are you going to get that degree? I mean, I was living in Madison and doing this thing I wanted to do, and they thought that that was fine. And you know, I really 00:10:00 considered this to be my home, and saw my grandparents frequently. So I went to work for Walter. And I just remember, I can't even remember what, I think I drove probably my grandfather's car, I'd drive out to, it's a beautiful drive out to Mount Horeb. And assisted Walter. And that was really an education in itself. I mean, when you get into a studio with an artist. And Walter's press and the type was set up in, it must have been the parlor of his farmhouse with these beautiful views. And he knew all about the birds. And he would be writing in his journals. Walter had the most incredibly synthesized life. Like everything just was this organic piece. And it was such a privilege to be there and just kind of soak that up. And I learned about, you know, he did everything so superbly. I worked for Walter while he was writing and typesetting the history of Perry Township, this tiny, tiny book. And he'd be 00:11:00 listening to Sarah Vaughn and telling stories. And he'd be writing and justifying this text with all these tiny ornaments while all of this other stuff was going on. He had the most amazing focus and design sensibility. I mean, just absolutely extraordinary. And he was so generous with me, I just, you know, he loaned me lots of poetry books, contemporary poetry books to read. It was during that time that the poet Jerome Rothenberg came to Madison. I'm pretty sure it was Madison. It was either Madison, I'll talk about the bookstore in Madison or Milwaukee. And he was just the most dynamic reader of his work. I mean, very, very exciting to hear him. And Walter introduced me to poets that he had published. He had published Jerome Rothenberg. And he encouraged me to write to him. you know, write a fan letter and ask for a... And because I had heard Jerome Rothenberg, I mean, I heard him read the little manuscript Letters and Numbers, I 00:12:00 asked him for that. And you know, I was a student and he sent it to me. And I was making paper. I was making paper for Walter. So I became one of these people like Steve Miller and these other people who then just, Walter would let us sign up for one credit. And we would have use of the shop, or use of the paper mill. So I was doing, I was doing that. And at some point in that era, Jim Dast, who was also extremely important to our whole community and sort of moving us along, he started taking, he started commuting down to Pullman to take classes. He was interested in book conservation and learning basic book binding. And as soon as he learned how to do that, he started offering classes in his home so we all took classes with him. Because the bindings we learned from Walter, Walter was a great publisher of the pamphlet. And when Walter printed a multi-signature book, he gave it to a binder. Which was a typical thing that publishers would do. It was only through things like Paper Book Intensive, and book artists meeting conservators, and all of this sort of activity, you know, generating together, that all of these other structures formed that our book artists now make use of. So I took book binding with Jim. And like I still have my first cased in, hardbound book that I wrote my grandmother's recipes in, that I continue to write recipes in. It's all kind of right there in my kitchen. And it was great getting to know Jim and for a certain amount of the time that I was taking classes with Walter, and working for Walter, and on my own, the Silver Buckle Press was sort of dormant and 00:13:00 didn't have-and Walter was always sort of working to get someone in there to be printing. So John Bennett did some printing, and Walter Tisdale assisted him and then we'd get in there and sort of assist on projects that got introduced to the press. But Jim, I remember Jim used that space and set up a little bath to deacidify books, and had a little rack that he was drying. This was before he had his lab in the basement of Memorial Library. And so the Buckle was also always on our radar as this fantastic resource. And Walter had been instrumental in getting it here. But it hadn't quite like gotten its sea legs to be up and running. But as I said, many of us got in there to assist on this project or that project. So, as Jim was getting the conservation lab set up, I asked him if I could work for him. And he got some funding for me. And 00:14:00 I can't remember, I can't remember distinctly whether working for Walter and working for Jim, whether those two things coincided. But they may have. And I got together with a man named Richard Mayhan, who was studying geography. I mean, he's now my husband. (laughs) But he decided, he had done the same thing that Walter Tisdale had done and I had done when we'd taken some classes. And what eventually happened for me is I took enough of these one-credit classes, and this class and that class at the university, that the university sent me, they sent me a letter, there was no email, they sent me a letter saying, "Come pick up your diploma." I had obviously done my requirements. (laughs) I never had any meetings with anybody about any of this. But I was entitled to my diploma. So at some point, I went and got 00:15:00 that from them. My husband, Richard, he was working in bookstores in Madison. He'd worked in a bookstore with Walter, he worked at the university bookstore until he tried to start a union, and then he was let go from that job. And he decided to go to graduate school. And I hadn't really given much thought to graduate school. I was just kind of loping along. And we were, we were this little community where Walter and I bought a press, and Charles Alexander bought a press, and other people had presses. And Steve Miller was still in town. It was just, then he moved off to New York, which seemed very exciting and adventurous to all of us. And so we just, we shared type and we helped each other. You know, we provided illustrations for each other. We made handmade paper and we'd trade that. And Walter lent us lent us type and gave us paper. So there was always kind of this exchange and round robin going on, and getting together in each 00:16:00 other's studios or homes and helping each other with book bindings, because they're more fun to do with other people. But anyway, Richard decided to go to graduate school. And I thought, oh, you're going to be mighty busy in graduate school. Maybe I'll go to graduate school, too. I mean, I really didn't give this much thought. And subsequently, when I became a teacher and my students would say to me, "How did you decide where to go to graduate school?" I was like, "Uh, I just decided one day I would apply. (SL laughs) Maybe that would make sense." So I did. And then I started graduate school in the fall of, this must be right, the fall of 1982. That's right, because I graduated in '85. And graduate school was a completely different experience. I mean, it was so intensive. I mean, I 00:17:00 loved every minute of it. But that was a real program. (laughs) Like you're in this program, and you had x number of classes that you needed to take. And it was theoretical and all sorts of other elements in that. And the thing I really wanted to do in graduate school was study with Warrington Colescott. So I got my foot in the door in graduate school in studying with Warrington. And that became my focus. Although I continued to make books under the imprint of the Salient Seedling Press. And it was through that program that I met Ruth. She was in Madison. She was two years ahead of me, I believe, and Patti was one, Pati Scobey was one year. So I knew these people, because they were coming and working in the type shop. So I knew some of the characters who were already in the big grad program. And, yeah. So in that, in that era, well, one of the great things that happened in that era was that my first year of graduate school was 00:18:00 the year that Walter Hamady led the year-long semester for breaking the bindings. And that was fantastic. Because then we did, you know, Walter thought there's other stuff going on around the country, let's find out what it is. And had an exhibition. And he got a little money and a little funding. And we met every week. And students traveled around the country. Mostly they went home or to places where they had friends where they could stay and sleep on people's couches and then went out-you know, it was a process of you had one person doing something. And they'd say, "Oh, you need to talk to Larry across town." And so it just grew in that way. And then we put out a call for entries. And then the really exciting thing was when those boxes started arriving in the Art Department. I think we drove the secretaries crazy, 00:19:00 because stuff was coming in. And we would come and get it. But it was so exciting to like open up those boxes and see those-and also to be able to jury that work by hand, by seeing it in person, rather than through slides. We did allow people to send slides. And we juried in some of the work. And some of the work, when it received, we juried out. Because things can look quite different. But it was, that was a big collaborative. We all had one vote, which sometimes Walter Hamady found annoying (laughs) when he would be outvoted, or we wouldn't go along with something he wanted to do. And then the exhibit, the exhibit was installed at the Elvehjem and it had a tremendous, and we did a catalog. Had a tremendous number of visitors. And for years and years and years, people, when they found out that I had something to do, I had participated in that seminar, like, "Oh, Breaking the Bindings! That was key, that was so important." 00:20:00 And actually, I assisted Pati Scobey to photograph all the work in the show. And then we got copies of those slides made, and they went all over the place. So that was a great event in graduate school. And working intensively with Warrington. And then the other key, key, key event- SL: Can you talk a little bit more about what classes you took with Warrington? KK: I just took, I just took etching. I mean, Warrington taught etching. So that, you know, the way it was organized, the printmaking department was well that each professor had their own studio. And you took that class and you went in there. When I was in graduate school, I believe, there were over 50 people in the graduate program in printmaking. Some people were studying with Jack Damer, of course, and like all the people. And Weege I mean, all the people who were printing. And many people went sort of back and forth. But lots of people, you know, like me, you just like found that place and you stayed in there. And Warrington, and it was, it was really exciting because I mean, we weren't fighting for the presses. But it was a 24-hour activity. I mean, some people worked all night. Pati and I lived way out on the east side of Madison. We'd take the 00:21:00 first bus into town together, into the studio. We'd get into the studio and do some work before the union opened. The union opened at seven a.m. We assisted each other with editioning and printing. And just, we were like printing partners. And there was just all sorts of activity going on. I mean, there was ink and paper everywhere. The critiques were, there were so many people in the classes and in the critiques, this was one of my favorite things is that when Warrington had critiques, he would put all the work up. And there wasn't really time. And we'd seen each other making our work. We kind of knew technically what was going on, we didn't have to talk about that. Warrington would go up to your print, and then he'd make up a little story about your print. That was your critique. (laughs) Anyway, it was totally, it was just totally great. So energizing. Yeah, people making big prints. Just all sorts of things. And with this book with Patti evolved out of that. And I could talk about that now, or I 00:22:00 could talk about that you know, maybe as a little bit of closure to the interview, I'll wait and do that. But, oh, the key thing about me going to graduate school was that I was then working for Jim. And he had gone out and gotten funding. So I worked for Jim 30 hours a week. SL: Oh, that's a lot. KK: Yeah. He had gone out and gotten, yeah, I was his assistant. We sat at the same desk across from each other. And that was really the reason why I got to go to graduate school. Because I had this job. I had this flexible hour job that made it possible for me to be in graduate school and have an income and not have to worry about rustling that up doing different things every semester. And at one point, Jim decided he wanted to teach a class. And he was ready. I mean, he kind of warned me, he was like, "Oh, the funding might run out, 00:23:00 funding might run out." And at one point, he taught a class. And what he didn't realize is that you can't work as a staff member, you can't work more than 100 percent of your job. So he couldn't add that class in on top of the job. So what he did was he talked the university into taking that income and putting it into the fund for my position. So he went to some lengths to keep me employed with him. And it was during that time that I found that amazing little 350-page book of Aesop's Fables, that Spanish book, and took it all apart and washed it. And totally fell in love with those woodcuts and xeroxed them. And then the whole ball got rolling on that very, very fun project, The Fox and the Farmer. So I continued to work for Jim until my very last semester, when the funding ran out. And I took out a loan, a small loan, to get through my last semester of graduate school. But the other really, really important thing that happened was I believe I graduated in '85, so I believe that it was in the spring of '84 that Joe Wilfer came to Madison. Walter Hamady went on sabbatical and Joe agreed to come 00:24:00 from New York and be Walter's sabbatical replacement. And I think every single person that studied with Joe or got to know Joe still talks about him as this amazing influence. And Joe, Joe was just the kind of person, you'd have some idea and he'd be like, "Of course you can do that." He'd be like, and then he'd be like, "Okay, let's go to the lumber mill." Or, you know, "Let's go buy some lumber," or whatever it was. And you know, he was just here for a semester. And he was living with friends. And he loved, loved, loved, Wisconsin. And he was so, so energetic and enthusiastic. And he had the time. So he put in all this time with his students. And, yeah. He was, he was really transformative. And at the end of that semester, the Art Department wanted him to stay on and become the chair of the art department for the university. But at the same time, Dick Solomon, who ran Pace Editions, offered him the position of publishing director at Pace. Joe had worked for years as an 00:25:00 independent publisher in New York. And that was not an easy thing to do, lining up one project after another. At one point, he had his shop in the basement of a VFW hall. He started making paper in that basement with Chuck Close. And on the weekends, he had to put it all away because they had bingo and other activities. And then on Monday morning, he'd come back in and like set it all up again and get it going. But when this opportunity came for him to be the publishing director at Pace, he decided, and you know, his family was in New York and his wife wanted to stay in New York. So he went back to New York. And shortly after that, Ruth followed him and she moved to New York. And was assisting, she was working at (trails off) she was doing all sorts of jobs. There wasn't any real job at Pace. There were no studios yet. Because Joe's job was to be the go between person between artists and printers, and put together projects. But he just wanted to be working again, and making things again. So he talked Dick Solomon into an in-house publishing situation and got a space, got the space renovated. And Ruth had been 00:26:00 hanging, he had been like getting her things to do on the side. And so he hired her as his assistant. And this very famous French publisher, French printer, Aldo, not publisher, printer, Aldo Crommelynck, they lured him to come from Paris. And then set up an etching shop for him. And so when I, and Ruth wrote me, I still have this whole stack of letters, these enthusiastic letters that Ruth wrote to me from New York. She's like, "Oh, you've got to move to New York. Think of moving to New York." And I went and visited Joe and Ruth a couple of times. It really seemed like fun. And Joe gave me some freelance work while I was there. I remember, I had to cut down a whole series of these beautiful, beautiful portraits, or these beautiful prints that Aldo had made for Jim Dine. And they were perfection. And then Jim looked at them, there were four of them, and he said, "I just want them cut into a grid. Make it into a grid." So I got to do that. I mean, it was completely terrifying. I didn't, 00:27:00 fortunately I didn't make any mistakes. But I had to grid up these four like they cut off these gorgeous, gorgeous deckles on these four perfectly amazing prints. But so when I moved to New York, I didn't know exactly what I was going to be doing. But Joe said, "Well, come on in. They've got this French printer, and you can help him out." And I thought, wow, this is great. I got this, I studied with Warrington Colescott, and I got etching, blah, blah, blah, blah. The minute I walked into the shop, Aldo totally did his own thing. And I realized at some point oh, I got hired not because I had this background or I got this degree which included etching and printmaking. It's because I didn't have any professional studio experience before I got the-I mean, that's really sort of what Aldo wanted. He needed someone to be a go-getter. I went to like all these shops and businesses in New York to find things for him. He tried to approximate things that were as close to the things he used in France. Joe was always 00:28:00 teasing Aldo about the bitumen of Judea. He was like an alchemist. He made his tools. I mean, he was just such an incredible, incredible person. So you set the shop up to Aldo's specifications. He had a press built in France because Joe took him to all these shops in New York. He bought this beautiful little test plate and he would test all these American presses. He's like, "Not quite right." So Joe got a press from France, and like we just set everything up for Aldo. And the that became the Pace prints etching setup. It's still up and running, basically, according to Aldo's specs. I mean, obviously things have evolved over time. SL: Kathy, when about was this that you went to- KK: I graduated, okay, I graduated from Madison in 1985. And I stayed for an extra 18 months because that last semester that I was in school, I got the job running the Buckle. So I ran the Buckle for 18 months. And I was working for Bill Weege, which was totally a blast. I would drive out to his barn. I remember the first day I was there, he was making prints with Sam Gillian. And the first thing that Bill does is he 00:29:00 gets out these big cans of ink, these big five-pound cans of ink. And he flips them up and he's like, "Take a big scoop of ink out of each of these cans. This is not letterpress." (laughter) And Bill, like everybody else, was so generous and taught me so many things. And cajoled me, and bought some of my work. He, again, it was this revelation. I mean, I think Bill has a degree in engineering. I mean, there isn't anything he can't make, or he couldn't make or engineer. Anyway, yeah, those were great times. So I moved to New York in the spring, early, early spring of 1977. And I stayed at Pace for-- SL: Nineteen eighty-seven. KK: Nineteen eighty-seven. Sorry. So I was in Madison for ten years. and in that time, three of my grandparents died. And I remember very distinctly when my grandmother, who was 00:30:00 my last living grandparent in Madison died. I felt like an orphan. I felt like a different relationship to the city, because I'd always had this family here. And then I no longer did. But I worked at Pace. And the situation with Aldo is that he would come to New York and work on projects. And then eh would go back to his studio in Paris. So he's probably coming for a total of three to four months a year. So in the interim, I would go back over to Joe's shop, and help out, help, assist Joe and Ruth on projects that they were working on. And then I was given artists to work with myself at the etching studio, collaborations. So I think that whole background in collaboration has been the model that I fell in love with and have stuck with. And even in making my own pieces, my sewing pieces, I stopped writing poetry over that first year. (laughs) after Walter Hamady introduced me to all these real poets. I dared not. I really am not 00:31:00 a writer. I can write, but not a writer at heart. So now when I, you know, sit and sew, I still feel like it's a collaboration with the writer writing the collaboration for excerpts that I'm sewing. And yeah, I loved it in all its different forms. So I was in New York for five years. and then I married a poet named David Abel. He had a bookshop in the East Village called The Bridge, a wonderful bookshop. And we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Which is where David had, he had family in New Mexico. And he decided we should get out of New York. So we moved to Albuquerque and lived there for five years. And I had a job shop there. Had two presses. And my friend, a woman who became a close friend, Anna Hepler, came and joined me there for a couple of 00:32:00 years. Three, three and a half years, something like that. She had worked with Barb Tetenbaum. So Barb and I, you know, were always kind of swimming around each other. I worked for Hamady and then she worked for Hamady. And then I got the position at the Buckle. And she was away. She went to the Art Institute and went and worked at Twinrocker in Brookston, Indiana. But we were always close. And then she came back to town just as I was deciding to move to New York. So she took over the position at the Buckle, where she stayed for seven years and did fabulous projects. And then Tracy took over. And she was literally the best steward that the Silver Buckle could ever possibly have. So I'm just glad, I mean, I'm so, so glad that the Buckle had the run that it had. And I just had this wonderful little-I haven't talked to Tracy about this. But I'm friends with people who are printers, younger printers, in Portland, Stumptown Press. They mostly do printing for music packaging. And they help run the CC Stern Type Foundry, which is in Portland, which is a really great thing to have in our town. But they came because they 00:33:00 wanted to see broadsides. And I got out broadsides, things that, Walter Hamady didn't really so much publish broadsides, but he published the most incredible ephemera that accompanied his books. So I got those things out, and some for Walter's books, Walter Tisdale's. Oh, he published all these broadsides for writers visiting. And I sat down and reread them all. And they're so beautifully designed and conceived and the writing just, the poems just like pop off the page. I mean, I think that really was also the thing, especially with Walter, is that I mean, the text was the thing. I mean, Walter bought just the most beautiful type. As I said, he was extremely generous about it. And we had good type in the type shop, too. And it got a bit worn over the years because we all used it. But it was really about-and this I've really, really stayed extremely loyal to this idea-is that this is a reading experience. And you want the text just to come up and meet you. So in Walter's books, and in, I would say, most of the 00:34:00 books, or the books that Hamady students have made, that remains a kind of gold standard. So I got out all these broadsides. And I got out broadsides and things that Tracy had done at the Buckle, and then just other friends, friends of mine. Diane Fine, while she was a graduate student, I was a graduate student. I gave everybody I knew, you know, I lured people in. Ian, and they worked with me. We had these little budgets. So maybe people had the experience of the Buckle. And when I looked through that series of broadsides, I saw how deep that was. How many of us like loved to use the wood types and ornaments and cuts and all those historic typefaces. That we just wouldn't have had access to those things or known about those things if they hadn't been part of the Silver Buckle. Which were especially alluring when you were printing broadsides. (laughs) But it was just like a nice moment to kind of see, like oh, the Buckle really had this reach in like all of our work and aesthetics. Anyway, I moved to Albuquerque. I ran a job shop. Anna came in and joined me. In 1995, I took a year off from Albuquerque and I 00:35:00 went to Whitman College. Barb helped me get this fantastic gig setting up a book arts program there. With their printmaking, 2-D, like major 2-D professor woman named Kate O'Hara, whom I'm still very, very close to. She is still a dynamo. So I did that. Came back to Albuquerque. I did projects with Tandem Press that included manuscripts by local writers. Poetry and prints and editions of boxes and that kind of stuff. All which I learned from Jim Dast, who learned the multiple signature book and making boxes. And that's served us all well like over all these years to be able to know how to do that. And then Barb lured me to come to Portland and be her colleague at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. I did that from 1997 to 2000. The school did an odd thing. They hired five faculty and they didn't, thinking, they grew the program in sort of the wrong way, the dean did. They hired faculty without enough students. But I was happy during that time to help take the program from these little 10-week 00:36:00 trimesters into semesters. But of course doing that it meant that we got to combine a lot of our classes. And then I went and taught, I mean, within the program I then taught seminars and design classes. We all taught evening classes, public access classes. And that was a really fun and intensive three years. And that's when I became totally enamored with fibers department. I think I would have been totally enamored with the fibers department had it been within the art department here at the University of Wisconsin. (laughs) But that's when I started to sew text and do indigo dying. And just became completely enamored with that process as it relates to spending time with text. Sewing text, dying text, and the weaving experience on ribbons, some of which I have on spindles that Tim Moore built for me. And just to be able to have that activity, be immersed in poetry and the formation of letters. You know, clean and portable thing that I could take with me everywhere. But in 2000, the same five people who had come to Portland, we all went other places and the faculty shrunk back down. Now the school has grown to the point that 00:37:00 they have MFA programs and BFA programs and post-bac programs. They have so many programs, which is really delightful to see. But then I moved back to New York. Was lured, again. It was Ruth Lingen. But I'd been asked in that eight-year interim would I consider coming back. And I had family, my two brothers lived on the east coast with their families. I don't have children, but they did. So I went back in 2000. It was a great decision for me. The studio had been moved, Pace Editions had been moved up to 18th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. But then we were all in one contiguous shop together. And just did lots of fun collaborations. And our boss at Pace made no objection to us using the studios. All the printers using the studios at night and on the weekends, which is a rare situation. So we all did that. We were all there all the time. And the artists would ask us, "Are you guys artists?" And we were like, "At 5:30, we are." (laughter) So you know, and we worked on projects with each other 00:38:00 and on our own, and did freelance. And Dick was happy for us to do freelance publishing, as long as we weren't invading his territory, or working with his, weren't undercutting him. He just thought well, we were getting more experience doing these things, learning more things. So that was great. And working with, you know, younger artists and younger printers. So I did that until 2014. SL: Can I ask what kinds of freelance projects you were doing? KK: Well, the fun thing for me, we worked on all sorts of, we worked on prints. So I published a series of prints with artists at that time. But in terms of book arts, I moved, Anna Hepler and I moved ourselves across the country from Portland. She was then teaching out at Whitman College. (laughs) And we were like (laughs) you line your friends up for the next position. And her parents very generously housed our printing equipment in a beautiful little greenhouse building that they had 00:39:00 on their farm up in Pelham, Massachusetts. So I would go up there and work on my press. We had presses, of course, at Pace. And I did that. But the Salient Seedling Press was dormant in those years because I had the opportunity to work with my friend Steve Clay of Granary Books. So he had done a number of projects with Ruth. She had done a number of really cool projects for Granary. And when I got to town, I'd known Steve since the late '70s, when he had Granary Books in Minneapolis. He's one of the first persons to sell my little pamphlets and poetry. And so he had been in New York for many years. And so he hired me, and I did a number of projects for Granary. And those were really, really fun projects. They were really fun because Steve was a great boss. He gave me a lot of latitude. There weren't, there were never, you know, there 00:40:00 weren't really hard deadlines. But as Steve would say, "We'll be in constant communication." He had really, really interesting projects. Some of the projects I just advised. We'd look at the project or get together with the writer or the artist. And some of the things were things that I could do in the studio. But we'd decide okay, okay, do we really think screen printing is the thing for this, or some digital printing, or some combination. So I got to go out and find those people and make those things happen. Some of the projects were letterpress. And I did those or designed the bindings, or designed bindings and someone else would execute them. I got to do one project with Daniel Cowam, which it still just like blows my mind to look at it. Because I had an idea for something, and then he made it happen. That was so, it was a book with Kiki Smith and Leslie Scalapino, you know. It was a really, really satisfying, successful project, I believe. And the thing that was nice about those projects, really, was inventory. So Steve was very careful about the numbers. You know, we 00:41:00 decided okay, we've got standing order customers, which we had all learned about from Walter Hamady. And then beyond that, how many more, they were expensive books to make. How many more to make beyond that? So I'd make these books and get a copy, but then know that these books were all going out into the world. And I didn't (laughs) other than doing that, I had to try to sell. So those were really, really satisfying, fun projects that I did with Steve in those years. And I was sewing. I was always doing some sewing. These projects just like slowly accumulated. I didn't really think about them as finished. You know, I knew that they were finished things. I had numerous opportunities to show them. During that time, Jim Lee, who was at the University of Hartford, one of my heroes, he put together this big book show where he invited Pati Scobey, Barb, and this other guy whose name I can't remember, to invite another book 00:42:00 artist to have a big show. And they had a beautiful gallery and they did a wonderful job. Patti invited me. so I got to show, I showed primarily the sewing pieces in that. And Ruth Rogers did a really great panel. And yeah, it was just wonderful. And Barb came out and worked on her Willa Cather project, which incorporated etchings. So I went up there and made etchings with her, and brought the plates back and printed them at Pace. So I got to spend a little more time up there, and did some stuff with the students. It was all really fun. It was a wonderful project for Barb. Just beautiful. And then in 2014, my husband and I were both dealing with aging parents and failing health. And Richard's father died, and my father had a severe stroke. He was living in London. And then my mother died in 1988. But my father had very happily remarried, a French 00:43:00 woman named Denise, my stepmother. And so, but I started going to London much more frequently to help out with my dad. I would go for like a month at a time. And Pace, my boss Dick and my colleagues were so generous about my coming and going, and then like re-slotting myself into this print collaboration and schedule that never stopped. I mean, that was 12 months a year that that goes on. And that became increasingly difficult to kind of figure out and manage those two things. So I left Pace. But I worked for them on a freelance basis when they needed a hand, assistance with printing. Which is always fun because you always get a printers, you get to be with your pals and you get a printer's proof as well. And then I looked around at setting up, finding a studio space in New York. And like we looked in Astoria in Queens. My husband said to me, I was then married to Richard. And- SL: I wanted to ask you, when did you get married to Richard? KK: I got married to Richard. We've been married for ten years. So that was in 00:44:00 2007. So we had been together here for five years. And then we were apart, but we kind of were on each other's radar. And it was through Pati Scobey that we saw each other again after many years and immediately started dating. He commuted for years from Chicago to New York to see me. And he started working at home in my apartment two days a week. And I would go to Chicago. I loved Chicago. Still love Chicago madly. And then he completely moved to New York, and would go back to Chicago for monthly meetings with his staff. So Richard thought it would be easy for me to find a little space for my press. (laughs) It was like Richard, if there was a little space for 200 dollars a month that I could have in New York, there'd be 50 million people up here. 00:45:00 (SL laughs) Anyway, but I looked and looked, and it was not feasible. If I'd taken a space in Brooklyn, living in Queens, that was like a four hour a day commute to get back and forth. It was just really nutty. So Richard doesn't drive. He's a city person. And so we were looking at cities. And I thought we would probably move to Chicago. But he wanted to live somewhere new. And in the summers, I was printing in summers, and sometimes the spring, yeah, spring and summer, for a month at a time I was going out to Walla Walla, Washington, where Jim Dine, Ruth Lingen and Julie D'Amaro had set up a print shop specifically for Jim. And they had ben going out there for a number of years, working with him. And then they asked me to come out when I was available. So I was doing that. And Richard went on a road trip with a friend who's now retired from the University of California, Berkeley and they made their way 00:46:00 through Walla Walla and went to Portland, where they stayed with Barb. I mean, Richard's known Barb as long as I've known her. And she must have rally acted like the chamber of commerce. Because after that, Richard said he wanted to move to Portland. (laughter) We have some debate about who said they wanted to move to Portland first. But anyway, we decided to do that. And we moved there four years ago. And converted, bought a house with a one and a half car garage that we converted into a studio for me. And it's absolutely heavenly. Heavenly to have all my things around me. Heavenly to unpack everything and organize all my things, and all these books and materials. The one thing about publishing is you're always able to trade with people, exchange things with people. And Walter Hamady was vastly generous with his publications. 00:47:00 I have a whole drawer. Walter gave me at least one copy of every book that I helped. And he was printing like many books per year. And then at one point, my dad was visiting. And Walter invited us out to his place for a meal. And then my dad and Walter would correspond. And after my father died, I realized there was this box, this nice box that I had made. And my father had all these books I'd forgotten that Walter had, every time I went home to see my father, Walter sent me with a copy of his books or a little stack of books for my father, which he loved. So I have all these materials. And when Ruth did the typography lecture at Cooper Union about Walter's typography, I got out and reread all of Walter's books. And it's really when you read his books, when you read all that poetry. I mean, of course they're so beautiful, the sensibility. But when you read the poems, I mean, then the whole thing really comes to life. Like 00:48:00 the types that he's chosen and the layouts and the illustrations that accompany them. And just everything, just everything about them. So I'm now taking classes. SL: Are you? KK: I'm studying calligraphy. I'm absolutely terrible at calligraphy, but I'm really enjoying it. So finally this whole thing has kind of come full circle. And like all these things about letter forms have really come to life for me. Especially in my sewing, because since I've been taking calligraphy and showing my friend, who's my calligraphy teacher. She took classes from me years ago. Not in calligraphy. Portland is a famous town for calligraphy because a man named Lloyd Reynolds was on the English department faculty and learned calligraphy and then taught everybody. He became a famous calligrapher and taught everybody in Portland 00:49:00 calligraphy. So it's like this big, big place for calligraphy. So my friend Marilyn has been doing calligraphy since she was in high school. And her calligraphy is amazing. And that's really when you want to learn, actually, make it a lifetime activity. But now in sewing, in my showing her my sewing, she's like, oh, you understand the stroking, like you go down, and you go up. Anyway. So that's a pleasure. And I'm with a great group of people who take a, also taught by Marilyn, independent book binding group. And I'm like okay, these are the people I want to do these things with for the rest of my life. So that's really great. And Detours that I collaborate on with Diane, that's the first book that I've made, well, since I made my books with Kathy Ruggie that includes my own text. So we wrote these. We went back and forth and wrote these "if only" phrases. We wrote, I think, about 100 of them total. And we cut them out and we had them in an envelope. And we would just sit at Diane's kitchen table and read them back and forth to each other until we had culled them to twelve. And 00:50:00 then we put them in the order that they're in. And then Diane wanted to learn how to sew them. So we each sewed, we each sewed a version of each phrase. SL: Okay. KK: So that meant we had four options for each of the text. And then Diane has become a real pro at all the digital stuff. She scanned them. And then we looked at, because they're different in person than they are scanned on the page. And then we, some of them, the book, all the phrases are in a particular order. But there's a variance in the digital prints. Because in some cases, we liked three variants of the sewing. In some cases we decided we liked just one. So when we put them together, that was fun. Because there are variants in the edition. SL: That's interesting. KK: And now Diane's a sewing fool. (laughter) She sews all kinds of beautiful things, yeah, which is really nice. So, yeah. The things I learned in Madison and the people that I met have been my community for my entire life, have been my, you know, means of making a living 00:51:00 and meeting all these people and collaborating. Yeah. It's, that's the whole picture. SL: Is there anything that you'd like to add? KK: I think, I hope I haven't left any, you know, Walter and Joe Wilfer, and Jim Dast, and Warrington Colescott. Yeah. All my pals. I think I'll just talk a little bit about Dorothy during Wounded Knee. Oh, here's the piece I haven't talked about. I haven't talked about the Woodland Pattern bookstore. SL: That's right. KK: And when I talk about my education here in Wisconsin, I like to say I got half my education in the Woodland Pattern bookstore. I can't remember, unfortunately I don't remember the very first time I went to the Woodland Pattern bookstore. I know it was because they hosted poetry readings. And Anne Kingsbury was just the most extraordinary magnet. I mean, she wrote all these grants and lured all these people to come to Milwaukee and read at the Woodland Pattern bookstore. And subsequently I taught for ten summers at the Jack Kerouac School 00:52:00 of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. And so many of those poets there are like, "Oh, the Woodland Pattern bookstore. Oh, Anne and Karl." Like, "Oh, that's the best gig you can get." Anyway, they're so, so fondly thought of all over the country. But I can just remember sort of like walking into Walter's shop. Like walking into the Woodland Pattern bookstore and being greeted by these two amazing people. I mean, this is the other thing. Anne and Karl are not, they're just a little bit older than I am. But they seemed like the grownups. They ran this store and they had this wonderful big house. And they were doing this great thing. And we were just students. And the same thing's true with Walter. I mean, I met Walter in my early twenties. Well he might have been in his mid-thirties. I mean, he was this incredibly energetic, hilarious person. You just like ate it up, you know. What Walter was reading, what Walter was listening to, what Walter ate. You know, strong coffee. He took me on errands with him. we went to wine shops and liquor stores. (laughs) I was with him one time in 00:53:00 Mount Horeb when he was voting, when he like took the paper and folded it up and put it in a box. But Anne and Karl, I think they were dazzled by the work that Walter did, the books that he published. So they carried all these small press books. Steve Clay was at Granary in Minneapolis. And then there was Anne and Karl. So there were all these materials there for us to see and buy. And I just remember Karl with like such enthusiasm would bring something over and put it in your hands. He's like, "Oh, this is really, you're really going to love this." I know that Karl introduced Walter Tisdale to Joe Napora's writing. And Joe was really, he was really the Madison, he really became the Madison poet. I mean, so many of us got to know him. 00:54:00 He's still a dear friend. And he was the poet we all got, became the closest with. Of course, his books with Walter Tisdale are just sublime. And Joe and his wife Barbara actually came to Portland last summer. I'll see him when I go home with Patti to Michigan. He's going to come up and hang out with us. So he's a treasure. And it was Anne and Karl, Karl who introduced me to Lorine Niedecker, who's been like such a tremendous influence on me. And at that time, you know, she was a poet's poet. Just, you know, beloved by this little group of people in Fort Atkinson. And now hundreds of people have written dissertations about her. But, yeah, a great, you know, that was a great, great find for me. So we would get, we would figure out whose car would make it to Milwaukee. (SL laughs) And we'd go down there. And some of the readings were on Sunday afternoon. And we'd go down and just load up on all of 00:55:00 these wonderful things at the Woodland Pattern. And I think at that time I thought oh, there must be a place like this in every city in America. And then you learn the Woodland Pattern, no. It's like absolutely unique. Anne and Karl were the first people to show my work after graduate school. They showed my etchings and books. And subsequently, Anne wrote grants and brought me out there for various things. And I had another exhibition there in 2006, which was there and also at the UW campus. That was really, really a blast. And instead of Anne asked me, you know, we have an opening that week when I was there. And I said, "Anne, why don't we have a sewing bee?" And she was like, "Oh, goody." So I printed out all these phrase, because I collect child's primers and samplers. So I had printed out phrases for people. And I brought all of this embroidery stuff. And it was my grandmother who taught me just the few embroidery stitches that I still know to this day. And all these people came who hadn't been to the Woodland Pattern bookstore before. SL: Wow, that's great. KK: And we sat around and stitched and I talked to people about my work. Anyway, it was the sweetest event. 00:56:00 And at the end of it, one of the women said to me, "Oh, so we'll do this every Friday." And I was like, oh, I wish, I wish! Anyway, that was great fun. Anyway, Karen Snyder was a poet who worked at Woodland Pattern at the time in those early days of my visits there. And Karen is a really larger than life character. I'm no longer in contact with her. But she was writing this big series of poems about this character Dorothy. And they were an homage and a rewriting of the Frank Baum Wizard of Oz books. So there are lots of characters that appear and reappear in her poems. And she gave me, she gave me, when I asked her if I could, I heard her read, and she was a knockout. And I loved her work. I mean, it was funny. Hilarious and accessible and just really, really wonderful work. So I asked her if I could publish something. And she gave me, I mean, she probably gave me, it was like an inch thick full of manuscripts that she had. She was so enthusiastic. And I chose this one, "Dorothy During Wounded Knee." And I don't remember if I asked Pati right away if she would collaborate with me on this. 00:57:00 And this is set in Palatino that we had in the shop. So I set the whole, I was able to set and proof the whole poem. And then I gave the poem to Patti and I said, "Well, what do you think about layout and illustration?" And it was Patti who took the poem-I'm trying to remember, I'm trying to remember how it had appeared in Karen's manuscript. But she very logically broke it down and figured out placement for illustrations. And Pati at that time, Pati and then I, because I was following, Pati was-she was making this great big relief roll etchings. And so we all started making them. I don't remember how she got on that. Well, she was also doing lots of relief printing, woodcuts. So I think that was an easy sort of carryover for her. So the rhythm of this, I read it this morning. The rhythm of the book is really, lives on the page and then is punctuated with this, or highlighted with these wonderful, wonderful relief roll etchings that Pati made. And then I can't remember how we made the little decisions about color. And then I drew a little fly, because there's some flies in this little cafe. So it's a story that takes place, it's a Native American girl who's 00:58:00 working in a cafe, a coffee shop, a diner in South Dakota. And you know, it's a crummy job and she works with these two other women and the customers make her crazy. And she brings her guinea pig to work with her in a box. And then a car runs into a train outside and this huge whistle blows. And then she completely loses it and yells at everybody, which is the climax of the poem in Pati's little foldout here. But it was one of those projects that just came together so easily and so much good fortune. I mean, sense of we were all just happy to be working on this together. And this is something Barb and I were recently talking about is learning about non-adhesive bindings, which is what I used for this. And she's like, "We did those with Hamady." I was like, yeah, I guess we did do some of those. I had 00:59:00 forgotten. And I had forgotten until I looked again at this book that this was one example of one of those that we- And I continue to make paper. And I make paper the way Hamady made paper. I just made paper and it became stock. And I still have some. (laughs) And then there was a little paper cooperative here in Madison after, the time that I was working at the Silver Buckle, after I had left school and after Patti was still here in town, we were members of that. And together we made paper like one day a week, something like that. some little activity, a little activity took place. So, yeah, for me on all levels, this was just a wonderful collaboration. I mean it got done while we were in 1984, so that was while I was in graduate school. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's it. Unless you have anything else you want to ask me. And I'm afraid it's a bit rambling. SL: No, no. I think this is wonderful. Thank you so much, Kathy. I really appreciate it. 01:14:51 End of First Interview Session End of Oral History # 1776 Kathy