At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, which we attended in San Jose, California, two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend a session with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln’s Meloncholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. He is currently finishing another book entitled The Power of Two: Creative Chemistry, and at the conference he talked about this work in progress.

According to Shenk, the traditional paradigm of the lone genius has recently been countered by a more nuanced story of the complex network out of which genius emerges. While he doesn’t deny the existence of either the loner or the network, he asserts that a very specific electricity arises from creative pairs: think John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Georges Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. He also argues that there are several predictable acts in the stage life of a creative pair, the first of which is often an attraction of the familiar to the unfamiliar.

And while the two partners must in some way merge, each partner losing his or her particular identity to the other as in the confluence of rivers, “creativity proceeds from dichotomous exchange,” as Shenk says. Roles that become fixed or static signal a dying fire. This dichotomous exchange often involves an asymmetry of power in the partnership and consequent tension and unraveling. Those generative sparks can be extinguished without moments of what Shenk calls repair, moments of returning to the pure joy and delight of the original sparking.

To illustrate one of these moments, he played a clip of the Beatles’ famous 1969 rooftop concert, their last live performance together. During their rendition of the song “Don’t Let Me Down,” John forgets the words to the beginning of the second verse and improvises several syllables of gobbeldegook instead, exchanging bemused smiles with Paul. Shenk identifies this as a moment of repair in a torn relationship—by the time of this performance the friendship between John and Paul had nearly frayed to the breaking point—a recapturing of delight.

While Shenk didn’t use the word “marriage,” marriage easily qualifies as a locus for creative energy, although not necessarily marriage as it’s envisioned today, with its focus on equal rights and equal work loads, of two people completing each other’s deficits into some measurable whole. I hasten to add that fairness and equality, in some form, are necessary to any fruitful marriage; however, the asymmetries and tensions and inequalities that also occur within marriage are often the source of a relationship’s generative genius. Shenk’s taxonomy of creativity between pairs appealed to me instantly because I found immediate evidence to support his structure, not in the pairing of people but in the sparks that fly when unexpected disciplines are rubbed together.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Teri Rofkar, a native of Alaska and a member of the Tlingit people. She began her career as a traditional weaver making baskets from such materials as the roots of spruce trees, maidenhair ferns, and native grasses, an art taught to her by her grandmother and which she is now teaching her grand-daughter. These baskets, aside from being beautiful, can last for hundreds of years and are woven so tightly they can be used as water vessels. When she took a class at a local community college on traditional methods of textile weaving, she realized that she already had most of the skills she needed to make the leap from weaving plants into baskets to weaving goat hair into traditional robes, a skill that had almost disappeared.

To practice her new craft, she needed mountain goat wool, and lots of it, so she befriended local park rangers who worked with a herd that had been introduced in 1923. The rangers informed her when they found spots where the animals had shed or when they found one dead. She became aware of a study of the genetics of the mountain goats, which discovered a herd genetically unrelated to the introduced herd and dated it to the last ice age, indicating that the species had not been “introduced” but was, in fact, native.

This genetic drama was unfolding as she was beginning work on a new robe. In addition to the traditional patterning, she added mathematically correct renderings of the distinctive DNA strands of the two herds. Although in some ways the addition was a design innovation, she knew from her many years of basket weaving that her ancestors had always transmitted a deep knowledge of the natural world through their art. On her website she writes:

Decades of weaving have opened my eyes to the pure science that is embedded in Tlingit art. The arts and our oral history together bring knowledge of ten thousand years of research to life. My goal is to continue that research, broadening awareness for the generations to come.

She wore the robe as she presented her keynote speech, dipping each shoulder and spinning so the robe rose up like smoke around her. “Who knew science could dance?” she laughed. Her delight communicated itself to the audience as we witnessed a moment of repair between ancient art and modern science.

Martin and I returned to Austin just in time to attend the last day of the Texas Book Festival, a spectacular intersection of people who love to read and write. We attended a session facilitated by one of Madroño Ranch’s first residents, Juli Berwald. She interviewed Alan Weisman, an environmental journalist and the author of Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Fiercely researched and beautifully written, Countdown follows Weisman’s travels through more than twenty countries asking four very loaded questions: how many people can the land carry? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystems be to ensure our continued existence? What species are essential to our survival? What kind of economy would serve a stable human population, rather than the current exploding one? Despite the complexities of the questions—which Weisman addresses with sensitivity and intelligence—a uniform answer presented itself in virtually every context: education of girls, which almost inevitably leads to lower birth rates and to fewer ecological pressures on the planet.

He tells a story about Esmail Kahrom, an Iranian ecologist whose interest in biology had its roots in the Persian carpets he saw in the museum his father took him to as a child, one in particular, dating back to 1416. It depicted a Tree of Life, and among its branches the boy found an extravagance of intricately woven birds, animals, and even insects:

The depictions were so detailed that zoologists could determine each species. He was looking, Kahrom understood, at creatures now extinct in his land. The eyes of ancient carpet weavers are how Iranian biologists know today what once lived there.

One of the animals that has almost disappeared is the Asiatic cheetah, which exists now only in Iran. Visiting the United States for the first time, Kahrom found himself in a sixth-grade classroom in San Diego, invited by the teacher, who was married to one of Kahrom’s cousins. She showed her students the Iranian flag and Iranian coins and then unrolled a Persian rug, one that Kahrom could tell immediately was ancient and expensive. She introduced him to the class as an ecologist, someone who studies the ways in which all life is connected.

Then the classroom door opened, and in walked a curator from the San Diego Zoo with a muzzled cheetah on a leash.

The teacher asked her astonished class what would happen if the endangered cheetahs disappeared altogether. Would the students suffer from the loss? Would they still be able to live their lives? The class agreed that they would, even though they thought the cheetahs should live. The teacher pointed to the beautiful rug she had brought in, noting that it was years in the making, with its more than one and a half million knots. What if someone came in and cut out one, or even two hundred, of the knots? Would you be able to tell? No, she said. You wouldn’t even notice.

But what if you keep cutting, she asked, as her students and the cheetah watched her. Opening her arms to include the space beyond the classroom walls, she said:

All this is the carpet of life. You are sitting on it. Each of those knots represents one plant or animal. They, and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our groceries are not manufactured. They are produced by what we call nature. This rug represents that nature. If something happens in Asia or Africa and a cheetah disappears, that is one knot from the carpet. If you realize that, you’ll understand that we are living on a very limited number of species and resources, on which our life depends.

These stories weave together many things, but what struck me was the union of the textile arts with modern science. So often the realm of women and household, textiles claim a lower rung on any cultural-status ladder than the hard sciences, but their marriage can strike all sorts of generative sparks. Jewish mystical theology identifies the work of the chosen people as the restoration of God’s shining shattered dwelling place, associated with the feminine principal, with God’s exiled self: tikkun olam, or repair of the world, whose signal marker is delight. In a culture that so often measures itself by efficiencies of scale and measurable, predictable outcomes, I wonder if we wouldn’t be well served to seek out irregular marriages between powerful and humble enterprises, between unlikely partners like science or technology and the arts, rather than seeking to separate them, as so often happens in times of economic stress. In these unlikely partnerings perhaps we’ll see some repair of our moth-eaten world.

What we’re reading
Heather: Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening
Martin: Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City

Point One: When we attended the Alliance for Artist Communities conference in Chicago several weeks ago, I found myself eagerly awaiting the start of a session entitled “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies.”

Point Two: The other day, as Martin and I drove past the Kerrville Tractor Supply Company parking lot, always stacked with neat piles of gates, troughs, feeders, and such, I looked carefully to see if there was any nifty bit of equipment that we needed but hadn’t thought of.

I understood at that moment that someone must have performed a brain transplant on me in the dark of the night. Here are the kinds of sessions I would have expected to look forward to at the conference: “Why We Need More Poets”; “Why Food Should Be the Center of Every Residency Experience”; “Why All Residents Should Be Required to Stare at Bugs and Birds for Three Hours a Day”; “Remedial Programs for Residents Who Don’t Like Chickens.” Here are the kinds of stores I normally eye with pleasure: book stores, kitchen supply stores, stores with great selections of cowboy boots. Earned revenue? Farm equipment? Huh?

Points Three through Five or Maybe Seven: Recently I’ve read a number of interesting articles in the New York Times, some of them in the business section (more evidence of a brain transplant), about such issues as the transformative power of excellent design in the public places of poverty-stricken communities; the involvement of the Danish government in the redesign of unsightly power towers in rural Denmark; the surge of young entrepreneurs (examples: the practitioners of “Gandhian innovation” in India, the Unreasonable Institute) who see that for-profit business and social justice are not at odds with each other; the powerful but unfocused energy of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Also, the proposed Christo project over the Arkansas River in Colorado in which environmentalists, government agencies, and artists are tussling over how, if, and why the project should proceed.

What has linked these disparate subjects in my mind is a sense that we are witnessing a radical shift in thinking about the nature of commerce. In my lifetime, business has been a stand-alone subject, like medicine or law. As an academic discipline, it has been completely separated from the humanities. There may be writing requirements for business majors, but they’re usually specified as such. Studio art for business majors? History? Philosophy? I haven’t seen them cross-listed in any departments I’ve studied in. Business has been cordoned off and cordoned itself off.

One of the reasons I enjoyed the session on “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies” was its underlying assumption that there is a fruitful overlap between the arts and business beyond the mere sale of art objects. Most of us attending the session represented residency programs, ranging from very urban to very rural, from huge to tiny, from brand-new to venerable. Given the roller coaster of the economy and the shrinking of foundation funding, there’s a real sense of energy around the question of how residency programs might become more, or even fully, self-sustaining financially. What for-profit goods and services might residency programs provide, especially when they charge artists nominal or no fees for their residencies? The arts are so automatically relegated to the nonprofit world that the question frequently doesn’t even arise.

One of the participants in the discussion runs an organic farm outside Toronto and is able to provide space for artists and make a comfortable enough living between farming and renting space on her farm for workshops and events. An emerging program in Ajo, Arizona, is planning to use some of its space—an old public elementary school—as a motel that will feed its paying guests excellent local and organic food (they’ll have their own garden), making use of the cafeteria kitchen already in place. In fact, the twining of food and its place in the production of art was a persistent sub-theme of the conference.

All of this led me to wonder how Madroño Ranch could more closely unite the business of the ranch with the mission of the residency program, which was why the Tractor Supply inventory suddenly looked so interesting. What on the ranch could supply the artists in their work? And how could the artists contribute to the function of the ranch? How might the art and writing produced at Madroño waft beyond the perimeter fencing and generate appetites for new business and beauty in the community around us?

Wondering in a vague way about Nice Big Questions is one of my favorite pastimes, which is why I was so pleased to find the very concrete story about power lines in Denmark. The rapid growth of wind and solar energy production in Europe has led to the need for much larger power poles, which are undeniably unsightly. Even as people understand the need for them, no one—especially in rural communities—wants them spoiling the views. (These nasty things are going up all over the Texas Hill Country, every bit as blighting as huge billboards.) To help mitigate the NIMBY response to the power poles, the Danish government commissioned a contest among design companies to see who might come up with a less intrusive structure than the starkly utilitarian poles. While I can’t say that the winning design is anything I’d want on my own property, the very fact of the contest pointed to a way of thinking that’s foreign not just because it’s Danish: aesthetics matter, even when it comes to the most practical of issues.

Of course, the most practical of questions behind the most practical of issues is: what will it cost? How are the costs justified? Most of points three through six I watched in the fields inside my head related to those questions. In Denmark there seemed to be a shadow bottom line floating just below the financial one: can we make what we build beautiful? Can it be of a pleasure (or at least not a blight) to the community? The piece on well-designed public spaces in poverty-stricken areas noted that the addition of bright color to housing projects, or of new stairs to replace a steep, eroding dirt walkway in a slum, injected a sense of hope, order, and civic pride where it had been sorely lacking.

In these instances, government has pointed to the need to consider more than one bottom line when spending money. Many young entrepreneurs (this is a very interesting generation coming up) are aware that there isn’t necessarily a conflict between the need to make a living for themselves and making the world at large more livable. They operate with the assumption that there is more than one bottom line; their business must succeed financially. But they measure success not just in income to the company but measurable usefulness to the community in which they work. One of the impetuses behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, I think, is the (so far unarticulated) recognition that businesses, especially financial institutions and transnational corporations, have hewed to a single bottom line: short-term profit for shareholders.

Obviously a company needs to be financially profitable, but I think there is a sense that many of these shadow bottom lines need to be as visible and material as the financial ones in order to judge a business as truly successful. Does a business add to or detract from the beauty, health, social coherence, and ecological systems of the community in which it operates? A business may offer a lot of low-paying jobs and operate profitably but still gets an F-minus in the beauty, health, social coherence, and ecological factors. Is it a successful business? The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program is at least a template for how such bottom lines might be developed.

Maybe businesses—especially big ones—could offer residency programs for artists and environmental scientists, recognizing that the costs of such a program are as necessary to operations as paying for the lights. Maybe business and the arts (liberal and otherwise) can develop a new relationship, one that is more than just a charitable donation at the end of a financially solvent year. Maybe the arts are as important to business success (especially in a climate-changed world) as steel is to bridge-building. Maybe I’m standing out in one of the pastures of my mind, mooing to myself. And maybe there are some restless young business-oriented people ready to figure out how we might bring these shadow bottom lines clearly and boldly into view.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

Sometimes this whole harebrained Madroño Ranch scheme of ours seems to manifest a distinctly split personality. Last week, for example, we experienced, vividly and in close conjunction, two contradictory extremes, one exhilarating, the other sobering. The resulting psychic whiplash has left our heads spinning, or at least wobbling.

At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities in Chicago, which I mentioned in my previous post, we listened to and learned from and socialized with some of the brightest and most creative people we’ve met in years and, incidentally, enjoyed for the first time some of the charms of that great American city. We also got to spend some quality time with our youngest, Thea, who flew up from Kenyon College for a couple of days. Finally, as a bonus, Heather, that notorious insomniac, slept better than she had in months. Our stay in the City of the Big Shoulders left us feeling upbeat and energized, determined to come back to Texas and implement a whole new bunch of exciting ideas—some of them shamelessly stolen from others, a few of them original.

Yeah, all that was great and all, but who am I kidding? The true highlight of our Chicago experience boils down to two magical words: pork and belly. We managed to have pork belly for dinner three nights in a row. First, on Thursday night, Heather and I had dinner at Mercat a la Planxa, a glitzy tapas place right across the street from our hotel. The restaurant was glitzy, crowded, and noisy—three qualities that normally would send us screaming back out onto the street—but we got the last two seats at the bar, crowded up against the vast mirrored wall, and a sympathetic and well-informed bartender took great and gentle care of us. We ordered, and enjoyed, a number of different plates, but our favorite was definitely the tocino con cidra: pork belly in apple cider glaze with a Granny Smith and black truffle slaw on the side. Wow!

Thea arrived on Friday, and that night we went with our friend Meredith, who lives in Chicago, and five other out-of-towners to Big Star, a very hip (and very crowded) taco joint in Wicker Park. We were told there would be a 45-minute wait for a booth big enough to accommodate our group, so we adjourned to an outside picnic table at their carry-out operation next door. After a few minutes of sitting in the chilly Chicago fall air, we decided to order a taco apiece, just to, you know, tide ourselves over. Naturally, several of us opted for the taco de panza, with braised pork belly, guajillo sauce, queso fresco, onion, and cilantro. Wow!

After the first round of tacos, we waited a while longer, until we started getting cold again, and then we ordered another round of tacos. After 45 minutes, our table still wasn’t ready, and we three Texans had had enough of the cold, so Heather, Thea, and I got a cab back to the hotel. (Apparently we made the right choice: Meredith reported the next day that once they finally got a booth, it turned out to be the noisiest, rowdiest night she’d ever experienced at Big Star.)

And then on Saturday night we played hooky from the conference and opted for a family dinner, so Heather and I decided to take Thea to Mercat, where we once again had the tocino con cidra, among other dishes, thus completing our Pork Belly Tour of Chicago.

On Sunday morning, while Thea headed out to meet a couple of Kenyon friends, Heather and I had brunch at Eleven City Diner, a massive operation on South Wabash that a friend had assured us would offer an authentic Jewish deli experience. After a half hour wait for a table, we chowed down on massive sandwiches (a Reuben for Heather, brisket for me), followed by the shared indulgence of a thick slab of apple pie à la mode. Wow!

With all this meat on our minds and in our bellies, then, we flew back to Austin on Sunday night, only to haul ourselves out of bed at 4 a.m. Monday morning to drive to the ranch in time for our second bison “harvest.” This time we took three animals, under the watchful eyes of the state inspector and an observer from Animal Welfare Approved, from which we’re seeking certification. This harvest wasn’t quite as shocking as our first one, in January, but it was still a stark reminder that the meat we sell (and eat) is, at bottom, inextricably bound up with death.

Robert was the man with the rifle, but his daughter Ashlie, his friend Other Robert, and Other Robert’s son Travis were also there to assist. It was a beautiful morning, and the bison had thoughtfully assembled just where we needed and wanted them. Robert lined up all the necessary vehicles: the big new ranch truck, the refrigerated trailer, and the bulldozer with which he would hoist the carcasses off the ground to be bled and then into the trailer.

Robert’s an expert shot, and we’d been through this before, but it’s still a pretty nerve-wracking experience just to watch, let alone be the one pulling the trigger. The responsibility is immense; no one wants these magnificent animals to suffer, so each shot (one per animal) must be precisely aimed. On top of that, Robert had the pressure of having the state inspector and the AWA observer watching carefully—not to mention us, his employers. But he was, as always, up to the task: three times the rifle cracked, and three times one of the great creatures toppled instantly into the dust. It’s a sight that still disconcerts us, and I pray it always will.

Loading the dead bison for the trip to the processing plant is always a challenge, but after some sweating and cursing (mostly by Travis, who had to stand inside the freezing trailer and wrestle them into position) we succeeded. Robert, Other Robert, Ashlie, and Travis piled into the truck, and Heather and I followed them the thirty-odd miles into Utopia.

After our first harvest, the old ranch truck overheated while pulling the trailer up the hill on Highway 337 between Medina and Utopia; Robert poured water from a nearby creek into the leaking radiator with an empty whiskey bottle that someone had thoughtfully tossed onto the roadside, then nursed the truck the rest of the way into Utopia. This time, thank goodness, the new, considerably más macho truck handled the even heavier load (three animals instead of two) without even breaking a sweat.

Once in Utopia, however, Robert, Other Robert, Travis, and I, along with a couple of the Mercantile workers, were perspiring heavily by the time we literally wrestled the enormous carcasses off the truck, onto the small loading dock, and then through the tiny door (a regular door, not a garage door) into the plant. It was bloody, dirty, nauseating work, but after several hours we had all three bison inside, and Robert had their three pelts loaded into the trailer for the return trip to the ranch.

This is a busy time for us: we’ve got several hundred pounds of frozen packaged meat to sell; we’re looking forward to the arrival of two more residents on Sunday; and our next “hunting school,” this one for women only, begins a week from today. But I expect the events of last week—the optimistic inspiration of the conference in Chicago and the bloody reality of the bison harvest at the ranch—will stay with us for a while.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

The Windy City. Hog Butcher for the World. City of the Big Shoulders. The Second City. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and Harry Caray’s “Holy cow!” Richard Daley and Mike Ditka. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Frank Lloyd Wright and Al Capone. “Let’s play two!” and the Chicago Seven. Grain elevators and packing houses and railroad yards and skyscrapers.

That’s right, Heather and I are in windy, chilly (well, at least by Texas standards) Chicago, where we’re attending the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities. The Alliance, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is a membership association of more than a thousand residency programs across the country and internationally, ranging from well-established giants of the field like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo to tiny, brand-new programs like, uh, Madroño Ranch.

Chicago is an iconic and quintessentially American city, despite (or perhaps because of) its myriad immigrant communities. Lacking the coastal location (though that is one big frickin’ lake!) and consequent internationalist perspective of, say, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, it is perhaps the most quintessentially American of all our great cities; famously, it was the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the accidental arrival in the Bahamas of a crackpot Italian mariner in the service of the Spanish monarchy who thought he had found southeastern Asia.

We’ve been looking forward to this conference for months, for several reasons: first, having attended several previous Alliance conferences, we knew it would be a fruitful and inspiring gathering, one that would leave us charged up and full of new ideas for Madroño Ranch; second, our younger daughter is flying up from Kenyon College in Ohio to spend a couple of nights with us in the city; and third, despite its undeniable greatness, neither Heather nor I had ever been to Chicago, unless you count the many hours I spent stuck at O’Hare Airport during my college years trying to travel from Albany to San Francisco or vice versa over the Christmas holiday break. Now that we’re finally here, we’re enjoying being in a real big city (sorry, Austin), at least for a little while, though we’re trying hard not to look like country bumpkins while we’re here.

The conference has also afforded us the chance to reconnect with other members of our peculiar little tribe who have quickly become dear and trusted friends: Caitlin Strokosch, the apparently inexhaustible executive director of the Alliance; Meredith Winer, a printmaker whose TRANSIT Residency is part of a rich cultural mix in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood; Liz Engelman, who divides her time between directing the Tofte Lake Center at Norm’s Fish Camp in Minnesota and working as the alumnae relations coordinator for Hedgebrook, on Washington’s Whidbey Island, when she’s not working as a freelance dramaturg; and Brad and Amanda Kik, founders and directors of the extremely cool Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design (ISLAND) in rural Michigan, whose mission (“connecting people with nature, art, and community”) obviously resonates strongly with what we hope to achieve at Madroño Ranch. (At Brad’s request, I brought him a bottle of Balcones Distilling’s Baby Blue corn whisky, which is apparently unavailable in Bellaire, Michigan; we’re returning to Austin with two handsome blaze-orange ISLAND caps in return.)

The conference itself is an irresistible (to us, at least; maybe you have to be an art-residency nerd to appreciate it fully) combination of practicality and pleasure. The schedule is packed—packed, I tell you—with fun and thought-provoking stuff. Austin’s own delightful Sara Hickman performed at the opening reception on Wednesday night. (The proceeds from her new compilation CD, The Best of Times, benefit the Theatre Action Project, where both of our daughters have worked.) The keynote speakers include Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestselling There Are No Children Here and coproducer of the new documentary The Interrupters; Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway; and Audrey Niffenegger, visual artist and author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. The breakout sessions to which we particularly looked forward included “Engaging Local Communities: Artist Residencies and the Relevance of Place”; “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies”; “Supporting a Creative Practice: Solitude, Solidarity, and Social Engagement”; “Taking Stock: Outcome, Assessment, and Measuring the Unmeasurable”; and “Where Art Meets Earth: Integrating Arts, Ecology, and Communities,” led by our buddy Brad.

During the past couple of weeks we sometimes wondered whether we could really afford the time to come to Chicago, especially since it meant missing the Texas Book Festival, one of our favorite annual events in Austin, and since, after flying back to Austin Sunday night, we’re going to have to be on the road at 5 a.m. on Monday morning to make it out to the ranch in time for our second bison harvest. But we’re glad we came. We couldn’t pass up the chance to visit with and learn from old friends and new—not to mention the chance to see Thea, and to explore a new and fascinating city.

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

As we approach the end of the year (and decade), we thought a look back at what we’ve accomplished and a look at what lies ahead for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment might be of interest.

This year was a significant one for us. In 2009 we both turned fifty (or, as Heather put it, celebrated our joint centennial); in addition, we experienced both great personal loss and also tremendous excitement and optimism about Madroño Ranch.

We spent much of the year networking—sort of a new thing for a couple of reclusive nerds like us. In February, we attended the Alliance for Artists Communities’ conference for emerging programs in Charlotte NC. Meeting and talking to Caitlin Strokosch and Russ Smith of the Alliance, and the other attendees, was a galvanizing experience—so many bright, creative people! So many great ideas! So many things to think about!

The Alliance’s annual conference in New Orleans in November was perhaps even more inspiring. Not only did we reconnect with some of the friends we’d made at the Charlotte gathering, we met many more fascinating and brilliant people, some of whose ideas we plan to rip off shamelessly.

But so many questions remain to be answered…. For example, while we highly esteem the visual arts and those who work in them, we’ve been assuming we’d only accept writers as residents at Madroño, on the theory that they require less in the way of infrastructure (i.e., kilns, darkrooms, printing presses, etc.). Now, however, we wonder if we shouldn’t rethink that decision. What if we were to invite, say, sculptors and environmental artists to come out and create place-specific, perhaps ephemeral, works?

And what about size? We’ve agreed that, at least initially, we should restrict ourselves to two or three residents at a time. But should we aspire to more? If so, how many more? Six? Eight? Ten? And how long should they stay? Two weeks? Four weeks? Longer?

The answers to these questions will obviously drive many other basic decisions, such as the center’s physical layout. Our working idea is to provide a central facility with sleeping, cooking/dining, and library facilities, etc., and smaller “satellite” structures (sheds, cabins, pods, whatever) which would serve as secluded places for the residents to work in solitude and quiet.

At first, we assumed we’d build this central facility from scratch, tricking it out with all kinds of cutting-edge off-the-grid technology. Now, however, we’re wondering if, at least initially, we can repurpose the ranch’s existing main house, which is, alas, very much on the grid; doing so would require some structural modifications but would still be significantly cheaper than building from scratch. (Presumably we’d still need to build the satellite workplaces.)

Another fundamental issue to be resolved is what the center’s governance structure should be. A nonprofit? LLC? Foundation? We’ve been talking to various leaders in the nonprofit and small business sectors, in hopes of figuring this out, but at this point it’s still an open question.

And then there’s the whole food thing. (Those of you who know us know that food is never far from our thoughts.) Madroño Ranch is teeming with sources of protein—our herd of twenty-seven bison, our trusty chickens, uncounted feral hogs and deer—and we hope to begin distributing some of it in some fashion. Our first bison harvest will take place in the spring, though we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the meat: give it away? Sell it to restaurants in Kerrville, Fredericksburg, and Bandera? And the meat is only one part of a larger scheme. What if we go into small-scale farming—say, pears, peaches, and apples—and set up a CSA to distribute the produce, with the proceeds (if any) helping support the residency program?

And—here’s an idea we heard in New Orleans and really liked—what if we set up a culinary residency as well, whereby a chef who wants some non-restaurant experience comes out to the ranch and helps develop a truly local cuisine, using only foods grown on the ranch or nearby, while cooking for the other residents?

And how about engaging the local community in some meaningful fashion? Could we offer classes or workshops on the ranch? Invite the ag students at the local high school out to gain experience in organic farming?

Last month we met with a couple of graphic designers to talk about getting a logo to use on business cards, a website, brochures, and letterhead—and (why not?) also on T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, etc. But even that turns out to be more complicated than we’d thought. For one thing, do we need a logo, or two (one for the residency and one for the farming operation)? Or more? Until we figure out how all these ideas and moving parts fit together, coming up with a visual “brand” will have to wait.

Sigh. Sometimes the tasks still facing us seem overwhelming. But we hope to keep forging ahead, slowly if not always surely. Perhaps our first and most tangible accomplishment to date was starting this blog, which we conceived as a way to spread the word about Madroño Ranch and keep our friends and other interested parties abreast of our progress. The fact that you’re reading it now suggests that—what do you know!—it’s working.

Obviously, we still have to do a lot more thinking about all of this. But on the theory that many heads are more likely to produce wisdom than one or two, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on these and other issues.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Martin: Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Happy Thanksgiving! On any list of the things for which we give thanks, the Austin Farmers Market (downtown on Saturday mornings and at the Triangle on Wednesday afternoons), the Sunset Valley Farmers Market (on Saturday mornings), and Boggy Creek Farm (on Wednesday mornings) rank at or near the top. They’ve become a huge part of our lives, and our consumption of weird seasonal vegetables has skyrocketed, which I personally think is pretty cool, though our last remaining teenager might beg to differ.

Moreover, Heather says, with only mild exaggeration, that she’d have no social life at all if not for the farmers markets, and our Saturdays feel incomplete if we haven’t seen Sunny Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due (that’s him in the photo above), J. P. Hayes of Sgt. Pepper’s, Loncito Cartwright of Loncito’s Lamb, and the rest of the gang at their stalls. Heck, they’re nice to us even when we don’t buy anything from them!

All kidding aside, the social aspect of farmers markets is actually one of the most important things about them. But don’t take my word for it; listen to Richard McCarthy and Daphne Derven, the executive directors of two organizations that have played crucial roles in the (re)birth of farmers markets in New Orleans, thereby helping the Crescent City bounce back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

According to McCarthy, executive director of MarketUmbrella.org, reinventing older traditions like the farmers market has helped New Orleans bridge long-standing divisions of race, class, and region as it seeks to recover in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The storm, as terrible as it was, has afforded the city a rare opportunity to rethink, not simply recreate, its civic and social institutions: “As we rebuild, all the old issues have been laid bare. Now we have the chance to address them.”

McCarthy said that many farmers and fishermen from outside New Orleans were initially terrified by the prospect of coming into the city to sell their crops and catch, but in the Big Easy, where cuisine is the nearest thing to a civic religion, talking about and looking at food brought people out of their homes and into previously scary public spaces. The city’s markets served a vital function for people who were grieving the devastating loss of family, friends, and property; as McCarthy put it, “They wanted the public place where they could hug each other, cry, see the citrus and the flowers.”

He noted that some have marginalized the local/sustainable food movement, in part because “we defined what we were against, rather than what we were for.” Instead, he advocates portraying markets as the legitimate community assets they are; as an example, he cited the Crescent City Farmers Market, which contributed $8.9 million to the local economy last year.

Despite such impressive numbers, access to food remains a major issue in the city, according to Derven, executive director of New Orleans Food and Farm Network. In New Orleans East, for example, there is only one supermarket for a population of 28,000 people (the national average is one supermarket for every 9,000 people). She added that there are around 60,000 empty properties in New Orleans, more than three times the pre-Katrina total. Her organization aims to educate and empower individuals, neighborhoods, and communities, “from the person growing herbs in a pot to urban farmers cultivating up to fifty acres,” to use the available land to grow food. She believes that “‘Farmer’ is the green job of the next decade.”

We heard McCarthy and Derven at the nineteenth annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, held in New Orleans on November 11–14. They were panelists at a fascinating session convened by New Orleans columnist, filmmaker, and food maven Lolis Eric Elie, which also featured Donna Cavato, director of the wonderful Edible Schoolyard New Orleans program at the S. J. Green School, and Rashida Ferdinand, director of the Sankofa Marketplace in the Lower Ninth Ward. The theme of this year’s conference was “Sustaining Today’s Artists,” and what better place to think about how to support the creative imagination than the Crescent City, which is once again a vibrant cultural center despite the devastating (and ongoing) effects of Katrina?

The conference was an epic win. We learned a lot, we met many smart and fascinating people, and of course we ate like royalty (high points: the “best roast beef po’ boy on earth,” as proclaimed by Gourmet Magazine, at Parasol’s; the fried okra, crawfish etouffée, and bread pudding at The Praline Connection; and the Louisiana shrimp and grits at Herbsaint). But the best and most inspiring food of all was the food for thought prepared and served by McCarthy and Derven and their fellow panelists.

What we’re reading
Heather: Denise Levertov, Selected Poems
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (still!)

But, like magic, remarkable people have appeared and pulled ideas and answers out of what looks to us like empty space. Some of them we’ve known for years; some we’ve met recently. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most magical of them:

There’s no way we could even contemplate this project without the enthusiasm, hard work, raucous good humor, and skills of Robert Selement, the manager of Madroño Ranch; his wife Sherry; and their children Ashlie, Brittany, and Greg. Robert can fix or build anything. Sherry can grow, cook, and take care of anything—witness their yard full of orphaned fawns, abandoned ducks, stray geese, random peafowl, countless dogs and cats, and other vagrant species too numerous to mention. Not only do Ashlie and Brittany do the heavy labor, they do it fashionably, and nobody knows the ranch better than Greg—just ask him!

Hugh Fitzsimons is the dueño of Thunder Heart Bison and a childhood acquaintance of mine whom I reencountered four years ago at the Sunset Valley Farmers Market. Hugh supplied us with our initial herd and has patiently schooled us in the ornery ways of bison, graciously fielded numerous panicked phone calls, and hospitably allowed us to invite ourselves to his South Texas ranch to see his fascinating and humane operation in action. Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s amazing Boggy Creek Farm have also been inspirational figures, as well as providers of wonderful produce and models for our own chicken-wrangling efforts.

Glee Ingram and Anne Province spent a weekend at the ranch with me hashing out the mission statement. Glee runs Growing Designs Inc., a landscaping firm in Austin, and is also the founder of Greenbelt Guardians, who lovingly care for Austin’s Barton Creek Greenbelt; her experience with the complex interactions of Hill Country landscapes and the built environment has been hugely influential. Annie is the vice president of the Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin; she has an M.B.A. from Texas A&M and a master’s in religion from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and was for many years an administrator at St. Edward’s University, where she still teaches. Her business background has been invaluable to a couple of liberal-artsy flakes like us.

The inimitable Steven Tomlinson, professor at the Acton School of Business and award-winning playwright, graciously allowed us to pick his brain and ask all kinds of stupid questions over breakfast at the Kerbey Lane Café. Jim Magnuson, head of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, was an early and unflaggingly enthusiastic fan of the idea. Divit Tripathi came out to the ranch and shared his expertise on site planning (and chickens). S. Kirk Walsh, the moving spirit behind the Austin Bat Cave, and her husband, filmmaker and writer Michael Dolan, also came out to the ranch and offered a writer’s perspective on what we were up to. Pliny Fisk, cofounder of Austin’s Center for Maximum Building Potential, and architect Logan Wagner offered inspiration in thinking of how the built environment at Madroño might mesh with the center’s mission and vision.

Caitlin Strokosch, Russ Smith, and the gang at the Alliance of Artists Communities continue to be an invaluable resource for us and many others hoping to turn similar dreams into reality. Peter Barnes of the Mesa Refuge in California and Jalene Case of the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon graciously gave us tours of their wonderful facilities and answered more of our seemingly endless supply of stupid questions.

All of these people have brought unexpected and wonderful things to our metaphorical table. It should go without saying that without their expertise, encouragement, and time, we wouldn’t have gotten even this far—but it’s worth saying anyway.

What we’re reading
Heather: Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science
Martin: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities