Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 401; Aimee Lee Interview, Camera 2, Part 1 of 4

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OHIO HERITAGE FELLOWS

AIMEE LEE

Q:

AIMEE: My name is Aimee Lee and the first name is A-i-m-e-e, last name L-e-e.

Q:

AIMEE: Artist is great. Artist is good. I’m also a paper maker, I’m also a teacher but usually artist is fine.

Q:

AIMEE: I was born in Flushing, New York which is a part of Queens and it’s a very, uh, Korean part of that part of the city… of that burrow. So…

RESTATE

I was born in Flushing, Queens which is a burrow of New York and

Flushing is a very Korean neighborhood in that area. My parents were Korean immigrants and so they had actually met in the U.S., married in New York City and settled in and, um, when I was about four they decided move us to the suburbs for a better educational experience, more green space and so I actually grew up just north of New York City along the Hudson River on the east side of the river. And, we literally were on the river. We didn’t for a while have a view but they have since cut down all the trees so there’s a beautiful view of the river and I actually think that had a lot to do with me ending up becoming a paper maker because there’s this moving water that is flowing all the time and actually it’s a very strange river, it’s technically an estuary so it flows in two different directions at different times depending on what’s going on, um, and so I had a pretty suburban childhood, we just… we lived in a village that was three and a half square miles and, uh, went to school. I loved reading and I was not really outdoorsy, but I fell in love with music actually. So, I wanted to get into becoming a violist and thought that that was where I was gonna end up. I actually think when I was young, I was always very creative and drawing and writing and, um, I was a very good student and it just came naturally to me. I… I think that… I just love doing things that were in the arts and so that was performing arts as well as visual arts as well as, um, writing arts and then, um, I was just lucky that I had parents who really encouraged me in terms of at least in the, um, the music and reading. I remember when I was… for any kind of gift, um, birthdays or Christmas’ or even beyond that, my parents would just give me big boxes of books and my dad would always say, when we went to the bookstore, he said, as long as you keep up your grades you can have as many books as you want. And, so I would just buy stacks and stacks or they would by stacks and stacks of books for me and, and I would just lay on the couch and read and I would stay up late and read and so I had a real love for books which I think also was a big reason that I ended up getting into paper making.

Q:

AIMEE: I grew up with Korean actually is my first language, so I don’t remember that because I was so young, but I do know that when I started nursey school when I was four, I probably didn’t speak English. And, so I also was very attached to my mother so I arrived kicking and screaming and luckily had a really lovely friend or she became a wonderful friend who kind of distracted me while my mom ran to the parking lot and so I picked up English very quickly as children do when they’re exposed to it but we would hear Korean at home, we would speak Korean at home and our parents tried as much as they could to continue that part of our upbringing. You know, whatever they could bring of their heritage whether it was in the food that we ate or in the customs and the way that we were supposed to respect our elders and respect our teachers. Um, the way we were supposed to study hard and, um, but my father taught me the most important thing which was the language. So, reading and writing. And, I still remember he had these charts where we would go through the alphabet and then he would buy books that were appropriate for our age. So, first, I have a younger sister so he’d teach us at the same time and we would read first comic books that were about parables and, um, just learn about things like the tortoise and the hare but all in Korean and then as we got older and we got more proficient in the language he would buy history books, we’d learn about Korean history and this became less fun for me but it was a great way… it was a great way to still stay connected but within a family setting. There wasn’t the pressure of grades or anything. They would sometimes threaten if we were being bad, they’d say, if you’re… if you don’t um, you know, shape up we’ll send you to Korean school on the weekends and that sounded like a terrible idea so, um, but, but we did learn that at home and then we also had a circle of different kinds of friends in terms of our family friends and also some family that had also immigrated to the U.S. at that time. So, for holidays and other kinds of occasions we’d see people, um, who were also Korean. So, that was all fine and then once I think I probably became a teenager it just, everything kicks in where you just want to be like everyone else and you want to fit in and, and when people say, where are you from? And, I say New York and then they say, where are you really from? You just want to start screaming and, and I would say, I’m American and my English is better than probably people who only know English and so, um, I really rejected all of that. I rejected that the language learning that, um, my dad actually started to link it to our allowance and that became a great thing for my sister who is very motivated my money and a terrible thing for me because apparently I was not motivated by money and I just didn’t want to do it anymore. Once… once it had some kind of connection to money, I thought well, okay, well what do I need money for? I’m still living with my parents and they feed me and house me, so, um, that’s fine I just won’t have pocket change or things like that and so, um, I also right at that time I think was when I really fell in love with music and I went to a music camp in upstate New York and it was the first time I played in a full symphony orchestra and I just thought, oh my God, we’re playing this music that I’ve only heard on the radio and recordings and it’s something that I could actually be a part of and again, that wanting to belong so badly and in music you can have that really easily without people worrying about where you’re from and what you look like cause it’s really just about making music together. And, there are people from all different states and all different countries even and, um, and so I thought, I don’t care about all this Korean stuff, I’m just… I need to practice violin, I need to keep being in orchestras and, and having chamber music experiences and playing in string quartets and, and really, um, doing as much as I can in my school orchestra music program because then I can become a musician and who cares about what I look like to where I’m from. So, I ended up really just diving into that and I didn’t want to go to Korea in the summers so every two or three summers when my parents could save up enough, they would send us to Korea to see our extended family. So, my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins and we were among the younger cousins so it was really exciting for me as the oldest child to suddenly have all these older cousins and I was the baby and I could be treated like, you know, the baby that I had never been treated like before. And, it was also great fun to, to feel like part of a much bigger family and part of, um, a different kind of culture and, um, in that people wouldn’t ask so much where we were from though they actually kind of did because we spoke with American accents. So, let’s see…

Q:

AIMEE: So, I was in the middle of being a really serious music student and I was doing all the things, all state orchestra, concert master of the school orchestra and, and then I remember in my youth orchestra at the time there was a viola player and he happened to be Korean American and so we would… we would… we were friends and one summer he went to Korea for a Korean language program and he wrote me letter and he would write, oh the language program is fine but there’s this extracurricular activity and it’s music and so we get to learn Korean drumming and he… he drew all the pictures of the different drums and this is for this style of music that is often called Somo-nadi (SP?) and it’s… it evolves from a folk kind of farming tradition and it’s, uh, it has a lot of percussion instruments and I thought, oh that’s neat, and that I tucked away in my head and then when I got to Oberlin College which I chose because it had an incredibly strong music program and conservatory I figured out very quickly that I was not going to be a professional musician. It just was… it was a whole other level and I just didn’t want to practice eight hours a day, I wanted to do other things. I saw that there were so many other things I could study and explore but I kept playing music and thought it would still be a part of my life. By my second year I had declared an art major and in one of my art history classes which was about Chinese landscape painting we went to the Allen Art Museum at Oberlin so there was a curator who was showing us scrolls and he was unrolling these scrolls of Chinese landscape paintings and I was mostly falling asleep in that class, I really was not a good student in that class but during this visit he opened a scroll and he said, oh, this paper was actually made in Korea because the Chinese painters preferred Korean paper and it was this creamy paper that had gold flecks in it and it was like the biggest ah ha moment of my life. It was… I felt like my head just flooded with light and I thought, what am I doing here studying Chinese art history when I don’t know anything about Korean art? And, actually I don’t know that much about Korean culture and maybe if I had studied a little harder with Korean language this would be a little easier for me. And, because by then I knew that I wasn’t going to be a musician I didn’t need to go to music camp in the summers so I called my parents and I said, can you send me to this Korean language program because I knew that you could do Korean drumming on the side so that there was still a music element and they were very shocked and they thought, okay, this is very unlike you but we’ll call your grandparents and see if they’re okay with it and my grandfather was actually so happy that he agreed to pay the entire tuition and so I went and I loved the drumming class, I did not enjoy the language class but that’s here… that’s just a whole other story because language learning is… um, so I went to Korea and I stayed with my aunt and uncle and my cousins and my one cousin essentially was the one who taught me Korean just by being a great friend. She always talks a lot and so she just talked to me all the time and she would tell me about her life and, and the man that she wanted to marry and, and she would take me shopping and we would go out all the time and that was essentially how I learned Korean or re-learned Korean kind of re-discovered the language and I decided at that point, if I really want to keep it up I have to keep speaking Korean on a regular basis. I have to start speaking Korean again to my parents because I had reverted to English when I was older and so I called my parents when I was in Korea, I said, in Korean I said, okay from now on I’m only gonna speak to you in Korean. But, my Korean wasn’t great and it was very awkward for them and they weren’t used to hearing me speak it so much that they said, you know, it’s fine, it’s fine, you could just keep speaking English and I said, no, I’m gonna do this. And, and I did and it was really awkward at first and sometimes it still is but to me it’s, it’s a way of having a different kind of relationship with my family and also it’s just a way… it’s a way to practice and to keep that alive and so that moment in that museum was when I reconnected not just to Korean but first heard about Korean paper.

Q:

AIMEE: When I was looking at the Korean paper in the museum, I didn’t even know what it was called, I just knew it was from Korea and I thought, I need to get back to Korea. When I was in Korea that summer I didn’t care about Korean paper I just wanted to learn the language and again, that was just a way of tucking away the information and then it wasn’t until I got into graduate school that I stated thinking more about Korean paper. So, when I was at Oberlin at the very last semester, I started making artist books and I had this class, um, that just exploded the entire idea of what a book could be. I was already obsessed with reading, but this was a medium that was pretty young and fairly, fairly new in terms of when you think of traditional painting or print making or drawing or sculpture, artist books started in the 20th Century. And, it’s, um, a form where artists can create books that can look exactly like a book and read like a book or it could look like a sculpture and not like a book but still be a book or, um, it could have no words or it could have no images. There’s so many possibilities and it became a way for me to be able to write, incorporate my visual, uh, art and even do installations and think about performances just in this whole way of a book being a time-based medium that’s interactive. So, the book only really works when there’s a reader. So, I just loved this idea and I really got into creating these books and then when I graduated I kept making them so that about four years after I was done with undergrad and I started graduate school I ended up in a program that was in interdisciplinary book and paper arts. So, the core of the… the program was paper making, letter press printing and fine book binding. And, then beyond that you kind of create your own curriculum and they have courses in sound and movement and different kinds of performance, even puppetry and, um, installation writing and I chose the program because I still was really connected to my violin and I thought, I could still figure out a way to connect performing with book arts. And, then the first semester in graduate school I took a paper making class and I just totally fell in love. And, not that I didn’t care about making books anymore but I delayed that so that I could keep exploring this paper making and it’s… it’s intersection with performance and, and then once I got more into paper making and learned about the history, how it starts in China, goes to Korea, goes to Japan and then everyone just goes crazy over Japanese paper and I thought well, what happened in Korea? Because I grew up in a time even though it was very close to New York City and you’d think the people would be pretty progressive, I still grew up at a time when people would say, oh, are you Chinese? Are you Japanese? And, then they’d say, well, if you’re neither of those then there’s nothing else you could be. And, and this feeling of always being left out and, um, people not knowing about Korea beyond the Korean War which was a really bad thing for most Americans who served there and then North Korea and people would talk to me as if I knew what was going on there. So, it was always a kind of negative connotation and that’s just because of the history of Korea, it always being overshadowed by these two, uh, very strong powers fighting over this very valuable land, actually. So, I, I read about Korean paper making but there was very little information in English. And, that’s when I thought, well, I guess I’ll have to go to Korea to figure out more and so I applied for a Fulbright Grant and I was able to spend a year in Korea to learn how to make Korean paper which is called Hanji (SP?) and then everything that you could do with it that I could figure out in a year. And, it’s probably one of the only grants that I’ve written where I can read the proposal now and say, I did every single thing I said I was gonna do. I was so focused, I spent a year writing that grant and, um, I probably would have gotten it if I had spent less time but I spent a year writing that grant and I did exactly what I said I was gonna do even though it was in a different form than I thought it would look like because there are so many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you could weave paper, I didn’t know you could do, um, all of these different things and so, um, that was the beginning pretty much of my life’s work.

Q:

AIMEE: Korea is still very patriarchal and so the paper industry is no different. And, the tradition is usually that the men and women have different jobs and the paper making part where you’re actually forming the sheets is usually done by men while the drying of the paper is done by women and also the really difficult picking of all the little bits of waste out are done by women. Um, and so when I went, I wanted to learn how to make sheets. I knew how to do a lot of the other steps and when I went to different paper makers, they would just look at me and say, no. I mean, first of all you’re a woman, second of all, you’re not a very strong looking woman. Um, and also you’re 30 years old which is really old in Korea to not be married and so this is a really strange way for you to be spending your time because you’re probably not gonna find a husband this way which is your job as a woman in Korea. So, there was a lot of resistance and I understand because these are men who are making a living doing it and it’s not an easy living and they don’t make a lot of money, why would they want some random American… Korean American woman running under foot who’s not married, who doesn’t look like she is capable of lifting very heavy things to do something that they… they think is important but they don’t understand why other people would think is important. So, I would just go from mill to mill and ask, and they’d say, no we won’t teach you or, um, or why… why would you even ask? And, my family… my family in Korea was also very… they thought it was very strange. And, they also thought… my family in Korea was very sad that they couldn’t help me with connections because paper making is actually something that’s usually done by people in lower classes and my family comes from a… well, they come from more of, of the literati class and, and they did not know anyone who was a paper maker. They would not… they would not know anyone who was a farmer. This is not the world they live in and so in Korea you, you have to meet people based on introductions. You can’t cold call them; you can’t cold email them. They don’t appreciate that whatsoever and so I didn’t have a lot of in roads, um, I had a few letters of invitation from actually Americans who had once met these Korean paper makers, but I didn’t have a lot of, um, introductions with live people. And, so that was another thing that was difficult. But my teacher when he eventually accepted me, he, he even said, what am I doing? I… how am I gonna eat and live if I teach you everything and you go away and do it? I think he’s come around by now but…because my intention was never to take away anyone’s business but to actually shine a light on what they were doing so that they could actually make more business or make more paper and sell more paper. But, um, yeah. It’s, it’s very hard to do physical labor in Korea as a woman in a field that, that men control. But I was… I was very fortunate that I met the right teacher who was willing to teach me.

Q:

AIMEE: Korean paper was one of the first traditions after China where it was invented that paper making began and it, it came from China so a lot of the reason that paper making spread is because of religion. So, Buddhism from China was coming into Korea via printed or, or, um, written manuscripts on paper. And, then it was a lot of the monks that would, um, make the paper because it was a devotional act. So, let’s say in the early, I want to say somewhere in between three and 700 was when Korean paper making had definitely started and, um, and then it developed as it’s own type of, uh, technique that was different from the Chinese technique and in, let’s see… in 7… I don’t remember the date now. In the 700… in the 8th Century we have an actual scroll that exists on Korean paper and so that’s one of the oldest pieces of paper that has wood block printing on it that exists in the world. And, then from there Koreans were able to also develop an ink that was sticky enough to put onto metal type and then print onto paper. So, they actually were the first one’s in the 14th Century, so almost 100 years before Guttenberg to invent and use movable type. And, um, the Chinese when they were asking for tributes cause Korea for a long time was a vassal state of China, they would very often say, we want lots and lots of paper and this type of paper and so there was a huge demand for that. And, then, um, even later when… so let’s say in 610 a Korean monk had gone to Japan to teach them the paper making methods and other kinds of methods and so the Japanese also really coveted Korean paper. So, there was a really high demand for Korean paper for a long time until we start to get into probably after, like, around… so, the Joseon which was the last dynasty in Korea, uh, ran from 1392 to 1910 about and that’s when the paper was… it was… there was still a lot of paper being made but it wasn’t as good as it had been in the past. And, then once 1910 comes we have the Japanese come in and pretty much take over Korea. And, then take over Korean paper production and essentially take the best paper to Japan and train the Korean paper makers to do more Japanese style paper making because they found it more efficient. And, so you see a real decimation in kind of very traditional Korean paper making by hand and then of course, when we get into at that point already we have industrial paper and machine made paper and paper coming from the west and so it’s, um, really difficult competition and then once China opens it’s markets then it’s kind of all over because Korean paper makers, some people actually open up in China cause the labor costs are so low and then they ship that paper back to Korea and it undercuts the costs of all the paper made in Korea. So, at this point we go from I believe in 1910 they had over a 1,000 paper mills in Korea which is all of unified Korea because that was before it was split and then by 2008 there were only 26 and I’m gonna guess that by now there’s less. So, there are very few people even within that number of 20 something who do the very traditional Korean style sheet formation which is what I was trying to learn and which I practice here.

Q:

AIMEE: People really coveted the Korean paper at that time because it was so strong, it was very durable and it was, it was white because they had picked out all of the impurities and then it was made in two layers, so it looked pretty thin but it was actually made up of two layers so it was even stronger. And, then there was a special way of hammering the paper by hand that would… it was almost like a burnishing but it compacts the fibers and it reduces ink bleed and it, it gives the paper a nice sheen and it’s really wonderful to paint and write on. And, so artists wanted it, it was important for the government, the government with all their official documents they needed paper for, so they had their own paper mill essentially. Um, but they were also using great raw materials. So, they often made paper from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree which grows wild in the mountain sides and it’s just an ideal paper making plant because over 90 percent of it is cellulose and cellulose is what makes paper. And, and it grows back every year, so, um, it’s always there, it’s very sustainable and then there was the way that they processed the plant and then, um, cooked it an everything was all using natural materials, so it was, um, preserving essentially the strength and the length of the fibers. Um, and then making… creating a new form for this plant that’s already very strong. So, it was something that other countries didn’t… they just didn’t have at the time.

Q:

AIMEE: My big takeaway from being in Korea to learn how to make paper was that I will always have so much to learn. That it was really just scratching the surface. But I think mostly I learned that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If I’m able, I mean, there are physical limitations at a certain point but I, I finally found the thing that I had been, I think looking for my whole life. I think as a child I saw the way that people had jobs and I wasn’t really interested in any of those jobs and I always thought, I don’t know what I’m gonna do but whatever I do I think I’m gonna have to make it up. And, and it’s come true. The work that I do is… I just piece it together. It’s, it’s not a job that I could go into a career day and say, this is, uh, uh, a job that could apply for. Um, I’ve just created this, this life and this, um, that’s based on this paper and I was really just amazed by how strong it is and how beautiful it is and how many different things you can do with it. And, and there are some artists… there… who… there are artists who really love material and that’s when I learned that I probably found the material that would engage me for the rest of my life because it is so difficult to make, it’s so difficult to manipulate and yet also so easy to make and easy to manipulate if you understand how to speak to it. So, I just became very intimate with this material and, and even over 10 years later I know that there are so many things that I have yet to do with it. So, I know that it’s just a very, very deep well.

Q:

AIMEE: When I peel the paper off the board and I have it in my hands and I look at it it’s almost always the same, it’s the same feeling, this amazement, like, look at what, what people can do with nature. And I just… I just see these plants that have given themselves up to become this amazing beautiful substrate and I just see… I see this future that I don’t… I can’t envision it, but I know this sheet will have some kind of amazing future in my hands even though the form it will take is, is not yet determined.

Q:

AIMEE: When I came back from Korea, all I wanted to do was share the information that I had found and I just called around to every place that I could think of who might want to hear about it or learn about it and I slowly was starting to book workshops and talks and things like that. And, I always knew and that was another thing that I had that was something I had written in my application for my Fulbright, I will build a studio in the U.S. to make Korean paper. And, I assumed it would happen 10 years down the line at the earliest and within a year I had found a partner at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland and they had invited me to teach a workshop and asked, what do you need to teach? And, I said, well, I need a really big vat and they said, okay, we’ll build one, which is very unusual for a place asking you to teach a two-day workshop saying that they would build a vat that was bigger than a hot tub. So, I thought oh, well, it’s not actually just a vat there are other things and we both fundraise so that we could spend one summer building out an entire studio at a non-profit art center that already was devoted to book and paper arts but was pretty early in it’s stages and it was a gamble, um, but I, I just thought, well, they’ve already started this garden and they’re… they’ve planted the plants that you need, the paper mulberry plants to make Korean paper but they don’t actually have anyone on staff who knows how to make Korean paper or Asian style paper and they have this huge facility and they are open to it. And, so I built the studio and it was a way essentially for me to keep making Korean paper in the U.S. and it started as just a kind of, oh, I need to teach a workshop so let’s build and then once I realized what we had done it just was really… it just was so exciting because I thought, I’ve only been back from Korea for a year and now there’s a studio and it’s coupled with the garden and I was able, um, a few years later I decided to take the plunge which is kind of the reverse plunge for an artist to move from New York to Cleveland and again, no job in hand or anything. I just had a lot of connections with people who were willing to let me stay at their home for free and feed me and do things like that and, and I helped the Morgan write a grant and we got a huge amount of money to essentially expand the Korean paper making studio to integrate it into its… all the programming so exhibits, workshops, um, public programming and really make it a part of this center so that it wasn’t only looking at Western or European style paper making because I think that even now in this country even in paper making circles people are really focused on Western and Europe (STUMBLE) European styles and that makes sense, this is a Western country that, um, that has a lot of connections to Europe and the paper that came from there but for me it was really important to be able to have a place for me to practice the things that I had learned and then teach it to other people. And, I was actually amazed, I had… what I expected was maybe more people like myself, a Korean American or people in the Asian diaspora who are interested in it. And, I did have those people, but I had tons of students who didn’t know anything about Korea or Korean paper or paper making, and they just thought, oh, this looks really interesting and they would take my classes. I had people come from… I had a person come from the Czech Republic who said, oh I do photography and I want to learn how to make the paper to, to print my photographs onto and this seems like a great way to make large sheets of paper and it seems pretty easy, a lot easier than dark room photography and he came and took the workshop and he said, this is very hard and I think I will look for a good dealer who will sell me good handmade paper but he actually did end up setting up, um, at least Japanese paper making at his studio back in Prague. But I just saw that this was not necessarily a way… I’m not trying to evangelizing, everyone should learn Korean paper making in the kind of depth that I’ve done it but just that you can see that all of these… this is one tiny country in the world that has this fascinating material and culture around it which means that there must be so many other places with so many other stories and it’s a way just for people to stay open to all of the things that are available in the world and that really enrich our lives here because so many of those traditions actually exist in the U.S.

Q:

AIMEE: When I was studying paper making and paper making history there was a book that Timothy Barrett wrote on Japanese paper making that had an appendix by Winifred Lutz who’s an amazing sculptor and paper artist and she said that she met a Japanese paper maker who thought it was really weird that Americans wanted to learn how to make Japanese paper and also use the plants from Japan. He said, you live in America, don’t you have a lot of plants over there? And maybe you could find plants that would be good for Japanese style paper making and then you wouldn’t have to get them from Japan and also it would be a very uniquely then American kind of paper. And, I just tuck that away again and when I came back from Korea and I had access to this garden, we were growing all the plants and that was great, but I also saw… I would see milkweed growing along the edges of this urban garden and the person who was in charge of mowing was about to mow it all down and I ran out screaming, I was like, don’t, don’t do it, please leave it, please leave it so I can harvest it later because I had luckily in graduate school learned a little bit about milkweed paper making and then once I was out of school and I didn’t have access to fac… facilities, um, I realized, oh, the cheapest way to get material, um, is to scavenge and basically the cheapest way to get material is to forage yourself and to forage plants that are abundant and plants that abundant are usually either native to the place or they’re invasive. And, I just became really interested in working with milkweed. It was one of my first residency’s. When I finished grad school the first residency I had was in Nebraska on a farm. And, I just saw these huge milkweed plants and the director said, you can use ‘em and I did it all wrong the first time, I used the wrong part of the plant and everything and it was a great learning experience. And, then after that I just… every time I could find it I would use it and I travelled a lot on different residencies and it makes you feel a little bit crazy when you don’t have a home studio and you just go from state to state or country to country and you try to set up for a month or a few weeks or a few months at a time and the best way I found to get grounded was to get to know the plants in the area and harvest them and make paper and then make art out of it. And, I learned more and more about which plants are good for the eco system, which plants have kind of taken over the eco system and which ones are good for paper making. So, I thought why not use what’s good for Asian paper making and someone had already done the research so I could look at the list and say, at the top of the list is milkweed. So, I’ve already used that why don’t I know instead of doing European style formation use it in Korean style formation. And, it worked really beautifully. And, for me the reason that I want to use native plants is because it is so important especially these days to be responsible about our stewardship of this world that we live in and so if I can go outside and cut plants down by hand instead of older plants being cut down. In Thailand being flown back or, you know, on a boat, um, then wouldn’t that be a better use of resources and less of a, of an ecological footprint. So, that’s part of it, the other part of it is again to be (PAUSE) the other part of me wanting to use these plants that are local are to stay rooted in a community, to stay grounded in a place, to pay attention to my surroundings and, um, it’s also a great way to meet other people and do interdisciplinary work. So, I’ve met horticulturalists and environmental scientists and farmers and, um, biologists and people who are concerned about what’s going on and, and what we can do and, and the magic with milkweed is that it creates amazing butterfly habitats and attracts pollinators and we know that those are all decreasing in really scary numbers right now and so that act of using milkweed means waiting for the end of the season so all the Monarchs have all grown up and flown away and the pollinators have gotten what they need because the flowers are long gone and, and then, then it’s time for it to essentially to go into the ground. And, that’s when I come in and again, it’s great, like, other paper making plants, like other good paper making plants you cut it back and it comes back the next year because I haven’t killed it.

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