Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

At the edge of the mulched paths winding through the woods at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown — far out in the westernmost reaches of North Carolina — hundreds of daffodils push up, bright yellow, swaying in the wind. Maybe they’ve been here a hundred years or more, lighting up the early spring. Maybe Olive Dame Campbell saw them, too, back in 1925 when she first stood on this land and imagined something that wasn’t here yet: a school in the southern Appalachians, a place where people could work with their hands, where something lasting could take root.

The first building constructed, the Keith House, still stands. It’s the heart of this 270-acre campus, woods and fields stitched together by paths leading to workshops where the old skills still hum with life. Inside, there’s hot coffee available all day long, and in the mornings, people gather for music, one of the Danish traditions on which this school is modeled. Someone pulls out a guitar or fiddle, and voices rise into the rafters before folks head to breakfast and then on to a full day of classes. Wood carving. Blacksmithing. Basketry. Weaving.

At dinnertime, a heavy iron bell clangs, and people file into the dining hall. Long wooden tables, big bowls of food — meatloaf and rosemary roast chicken, beets and cabbage. A blessing is given and then a song — “Simple Gifts,” an old hymn I first heard at my grandmother’s Quaker church — is sung before the bowls make their rounds, hand to hand, and the room swells with lively talk about what we’re all making, what we’ve come here to learn.

I came to learn crochet — a small thing, an old thing. My mother ran a crafts shop for 20 years, and even now, in living rooms all over Asheboro, I bet you’d find hooked rugs, cross-stitched samplers, and stitched pillows made from the yarn and patterns she once sold.

She tried to teach me years ago, but I was too impatient, too restless. There was always something else to do: a mall to wander, a movie to see. Now, I look down — typing, slicing a tomato, flipping through the mail — and I’m startled to recognize my mother’s hands as my own. The same shape, the same movements. But hers were always busy making something — a pan of biscuits, a blanket, a garden. I want to learn the kind of work her hands knew by heart.

The instructor tells us that crochet is the only fiber art that cannot be made by machine. It must be done entirely by hand, stitch by stitch, loop by loop, the way birds weave their nests, the way roots find their way through dark soil.

Why does a place like this still exist, a hundred years after its founding? Surely Olive Dame Campbell could not have foreseen the world as it is now — computers in every pocket, an electric car charging out front. But maybe she knew something deeper. That people will always need to make things with their hands. That we’ll want to press our fingers into the dirt, to plant something, to knead dough, to carve wood, to stitch cloth, to feel the satisfaction of turning raw material into something that will last.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief