A painful reminder of how hard it is to make things by hand

SAM DINGMAN: You’re listening to Season 2 of The Analogs — stories about people who make things by hand, and what those things tell us about those people. I’m Sam Dingman, and this is Episode 5: I Write it Down.

The first thing I remember trying to make by hand is a wooden racecar.

I was about 10, and a Cub Scout. The annual Pinewood Derby was coming up, and it was the first year I was eligible to enter. The way it works is that they give you a block of wood, a set of wheels, and some paint. The goal is to build the fastest toy car you can, and then run it in a race against your fellow scouts on a table-top track.

I spent two days hacking and sawing and painting, growing more anxious by the moment. It seemed like every cut I made took off more wood than it was supposed to, and every stroke of the paintbrush seemed to somehow smudge and bleed into another color. I’d decided to give my car the number eight, after my favorite baseball player’s uniform number, but the black paint dripped so badly it just looked like a runny splotch against an equally splotchy background. On derby day, as the other scouts’ cars zoomed along the track, mine slid erratically down the initial hill, and then keeled over on its side.

This would’ve been humiliating under any circumstances, but I felt particularly ashamed because I grew up in what our family affectionately referred to as “The Homemade House.” We drank our coffee from mugs my mom turned on a pottery wheel, and ate dinner off a table she built in her woodshop. The walls were lined with photographs she made using a pinhole camera, printed on film she developed in a wet darkroom. She even built the frame for our living room couch. I remember sitting on that couch when company came over. They would drink out of the mugs, and marvel at the art on the wall - abstract images heavy with black and grey. They clearly thought she was the coolest person they knew. Making things, whether they were functional or expressive, seemed like second nature to her. And I couldn’t even make a toy car capable of rolling downhill on wheels.

When I was 15, I got my first job, scooping ice cream. Like a lot of 15-year-olds, I was awash in yearnings I couldn’t quite name, and trying to find meaning in every single thing that happened to me. One day, on the way to work, I bought a pocket-size notebook. People were constantly doing and saying these absurd, insufferable, and sometimes beautiful things at the ice cream shop, and that night, I thought, maybe I’d start writing them down. A few hours later, the captain of my baseball team — who was, at the time, the coolest person I knew — came in with bloodshot eyes and a slack-jawed smile. “Dingman,” he slurred as he ordered his cone, “you ever feel like no matter how hard you hit a ball, it’ll never quite go far enough?”

I wrote it down. I started carrying the notebook with me everywhere, filling it with moments like that. Little by little, that daily anxiety — that I didn’t know how to do anything that really mattered to anyone — started to fade. I didn’t exactly understand why until I was on an Amtrak train a few years later, and the guy next to me — this bear of a man with blurry tattoos reminiscent of my mom’s photographs — started telling me about what it was like to serve in Vietnam. His eyes welled with tears as he described the isolation he felt when he came home, surviving a series of drunk-driving incidents, and losing his relationship with his daughter. As soon as I got back to my house, I pulled out the notebook and wrote down everything I could remember, as fast as I could. It filled almost half the pages, and as I flipped back through it, it occurred to me that maybe this was my version of making things by hand. That there were people out there with stories to tell, wondering if anyone else cared about what they’d been through. And that if I could somehow capture those stories - give them form and shape in the world, it might remind all of us that we all matter to each other.

Not long after that, I discovered radio journalism. And as I began to tell stories on the air, I told myself that they should always start on the page of a notebook. Even though their final form would just be soundwaves drifting through the atmosphere, I convinced myself that if they had that tangible origin, they would be more significant somehow. And so, last year, when I saw that Walter Studios was hosting a journal-making workshop at Changing Hands bookstore, I thought this might be my chance to make up for the Derby debacle. If I could start my stories in the pages of a notebook I made myself, maybe I’d experience something like what the subjects of this series — The Analogs — often talk about. Like book maker Dan Mayer.

MAYER: It’s really an extension of the self.

DINGMAN: Or blacksmith Richard Connolly.

CONNOLLY: When I really get into work, the rest of the world just goes away. And it’s peaceful.

DINGMAN: Or a certain ceramicist slash furniture maker slash pinhole photographer…

MOM: I like when something looks like it was made by hand. Because that’s, to me, what making things is.

DINGMAN: Hello.

JULES BRANDENBURGER: Are you here for the workshop? 

DINGMAN: I am. 

BRANDENBURGER: What’s your last name? 

DINGMAN: Dingman. Thanks for having me.

BRANDENBURGER: Yeah, of course! There’s a spot right there if you want to join …

Jules Brandenburger, whose voice you just heard, was running the workshop, along with Mary Strawn. To start, they handed me a bundle of writing paper, which I was instructed to fold in half. Each folded bundle is called a “signature” - and when you stack those on top of each other, they make a series of facing pages in my eventual journal. Once I finished folding my signatures - ten in all - it was time to start poking holes through the spine with an awl, so that I could thread string through them and bind them together.

That’s where the trouble started.

DINGMAN: Oop! Are you supposed to stab yourself with the awl?

PERSON AT TABLE: I think the goal is not to do that.

DINGMAN: I definitely did that.

PERSON AT TABLE: Not the desired outcome.

PERSON AT TABLE: Unless you like that kind of thing.

PERSON AT TABLE: To each their own, I guess.

DINGMAN: No judgement, no judgement.

I was certainly trying not to judge myself, but my awl technique was getting worse with each signature. The holes I was making were ragged and mis-aligned, and I kept poking additional holes in myself.

DINGMAN: Ah, f-ck!

PERSON AT TABLE: It’s not a real craft project unless you poke yourself! If you’re not bleeding, it doesn’t count.

DINGMAN: This is where that phrase “Blood, sweat, and tears” comes from, right?

I wasn’t quite crying yet, but I was definitely bleeding and sweating. And it turned out, poking holes wasn’t even the hard part. Next I pressed cardstock on either side of my signatures, and started trying — and failing — to sew them together with a long piece of string. Thankfully, one of my tablemates had done this before.

TABLEMATE: So how many do you have?

DINGMAN: I guess 10 of these, plus two? 

TABLEMATE: OK, so you wanna go, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten, all the way out to 12. And you wanna leave yourself, like…

DINGMAN: A little extra?

TABLEMATE: A bunch at the end. Now wrap that around 12 times — so that’s one …

DINGMAN: Oh god —

TABLEMATE: Two …

DINGMAN: With a little more coaching, I somehow wound my thread through the signatures and the cardstock. There was just one problem: just before I got to the end, the string disappeared.

DINGMAN: What does it say about me that I ran out of string?

TABLEMATE: You can’t count to 12.

DINGMAN: That may be true …

DINGMAN: Jules, one of the facilitators, swooped in and added a bit of extra thread to my binding. It meant we had to tie a giant knot at the base of the spine of my journal, but she told me not to worry.

BRANDENBURGER: If you cover the end with tape, then you’re not really even gonna see it! So as long as that holds up, you’re good!

DINGMAN: I pressed a thick layer of tape along the spine, and walked to the front of the room, where Mary, the other facilitator, was waiting next to an enormous papercutter.

DINGMAN: Hello!

MARY: Hi!

DINGMAN: I have a potentially difficult project for you, here…

MARY: OK, I’m takin’ it on! Let’s see…

DINGMAN I handed Mary my journal — which was really more of a paper sandwich held together with tape. She looked at it for a moment, and then slid it onto the paper cutter. She lopped off some of the errant edges of my signatures.

She didn’t ask how I was feeling, but I decided to tell her anyway.

DINGMAN : I just kept feeling like every choice I was making, was like permanent? So then I got choice anxiety.

MARY: So it’s, like, scary?

DINGMAN: Yes.

MARY: Yeah. 

DINGMAN: Oh, and you’re gonna make it look like I got my signatures even.

MARY: Because you did!

DINGMAN: You’re too generous. [CHOPPING SOUND] 

MARY: OK, that looks better.

DINGMAN: Wow, it looks like a journal!

MARY: It is a journal.

DINGMAN: It is a journal.

DINGMAN: Now you can probably hear in the tone of my voice how disappointed I was in the final product. When I tried to open it, it wouldn’t lay flat — which is kind of a prerequisite for a journal, especially if you want to, you know, write in it.

But in the months since I made my journal, I’ve come to see it as less of a journal, and more of a reminder. I don’t find peace from making things by hand - quite the opposite. And it will always break my heart a little bit that the stories I tell on the radio only really exist for the split second I speak them into a microphone.

But as long as there’s another blank page in the notebook, there will always be another story to tell. And sometimes, in the course of telling one of those stories, someone will say something that does bring me peace. When that happens, I write it down.

As I was working on this story, I opened my notebook and flipped through some of my favorites - and I found this one, from the singer-songwriter Neko Case.

NEKO CASE: All the radio broadcasts that have ever been made are still echoing out into the universe. Even now, the radio waves carry into the universe, which I think is so comforting and beautiful. It never stops. They’re traveling through the universe, like beautiful ripples on a lake.

DINGMAN: You ever feel like when you hit a ball, you have no idea how far it might go?

The Analogs is a production of The Show, on KJZZ 91.5 FM, in Phoenix, Arizona. This episode was produced, written, and edited by me, Sam Dingman, with additional production by Amber Victoria Singer. Special thanks to Jules Brandenburg, Mary Strawn - and to The Show’s executive producer, Amy Silverman, without whom this episode - and this entire series - would never have happened. Thanks also to you, for listening. Hope to see you somewhere on the lake.