Shared lives, or collaboration is key in building a boat

Interview with Sheer Craft | Community and resilience

Hello, thought I’d start with a quote:

Change, personal and political, does not come about in a day, nor a year. But it is our day-to-day decisions, the way in which we testify with our lives to those things in which we say we believe, that empower us.

Your power is relative, but it is real. And if you do not learn to use it, it will be used,
against you, and me, and our children. Change did not begin with you, and it will
not end with you, but what you do with your life is an absolutely vital piece of that chain.

- Audre Lorde, from a 1989 speech

Essay is below. I hope the next two weeks find you safe and connected to your neighbors, friends, and loved ones. ❤️

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A boat demands collaboration

A few weeks ago, I met with this brilliant couple who started a boat building and woodworking school here in Saint Paul. Their brilliance, at least to me, is their communal, inviting approach to teaching woodworking, to bringing new people into the craft in a way that gets them hooked on the enjoyment of the work.

Maria Petrova and Phil Winger started Sheer Craft a couple of years ago, teaching woodworking out of their garage as they built their business. They bought a building and fixed it up, opening their shop to the public in March 2025.

Big windows bring light and the chance for passersby to look in and see what the couple is up to—from the large, upturned boat currently being constructed, to perhaps a workshop on building Shaker-style oval boxes.

The shop is eye candy for woodworkers, with its organized bevy of hand tools on the walls to the offcuts and lighting and workbenches.

When I think of woodworking, the solo-ness of it comes first to mind. The lone woodworker in a basement or garage (or converted barn) building furniture.

The social aspect of the work only comes into play at the very end, when the finished product passes from maker to customer. When, if you’ve done a good job, you can make them cry tears of joy and appreciation, my dad’s favorite form of payment. (He gets another kind renumeration when I cry tears of exasperation at his terrible jokes.)

A lot of woodworkers I’ve talked with will tell me in great detail about the hardest projects they’ve worked on, the most wily problems they’ve solved, the mistakes that they found clever ways of hiding. Rarely do they talk about relationships or any kind of social aspect to their work.

Maria and Phil are different. From the moment I met them, at a lunch with a group of other woodworkers, they both told me about how social woodworking can be. You’ve just got to set the stage right.

At Sheer Craft, you can take a workshop to learn how to make something small, like an oval box, a bench, or a canoe paddle (fine, a paddle isn’t exactly small, but it’s within the realm of an item that can be made by an individual and easily taken home in a car) in a one or two day workshop. Or you can learn to make something big, like a lapstrake skiff, over several months.

Oh, a lapstrake skiff, you say. Why yes. This is a wooden boat that people have been making since the 300s. The hull is made from overlapping boards, known as lapstrakes, a word I’d never heard before (which will surprise my loving and sardonic partner, Josiah, who thinks I use entirely too many SAT words—well, joke’s on him: I’ve never taken the SATs and haven’t the foggiest what kind of words it includes).

Most of Phil and Maria’s classes involve hand tools, which makes for a quieter environment, conducive to conversation with your fellow students and the instructors, as well as the sheer pleasure of watching a piece of wood come alive into a shape you desire through the efforts of your own hands.

In every class, their focus is on developing fun, interactive woodworking experiences so that people can dive into the best aspects of the work right away. Those parts that satisfy a deeply human itch to use your hands to shape something that heretofore only ever existed in your mind.

“I think what people are really taking away from our classes is an addiction,” Maria says. “If you successfully create these experiences for people, they come away with that desire to engage more with the process.”

Because they teach people how to build with hand tools—bench planes, spokeshaves, block planes, and others—participants get to actually talk with one another. They don’t have to be on this solo journey, creating in a silo.

“We don’t focus on theory,” Phil says. “We teach people how to figure out what is happening with their tools, with the wood, and how to fix problems as they come up.”

Building a boat, in particular, they told me, is a fun social experience because it takes, by necessity, more than one person to build it. You know you’re needed. A boat, they said, demands collaboration.

Maria and Phil teach people how to build boats, but I came away from talking with them convinced that they’re actually helping people build community, stay connected with one another throughout the inevitable ups and downs of a project, and appreciate the companionship of our fellow humans.

God knows we all need more of that.

My youngest child and I have been reading Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, adapted by Monique Gray Smith from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book.

Like Kimmerer, my children and I are enrolled members of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, so her writing is particularly resonant and it’s important to me to include her teachings in my children’s lives. (Note: they are also Josiah’s children. I have the tendency to use the singular possessive when I talk about our kids. And our garage.)

One quote from the book, short and sweet, is: “All flourishing is mutual.”

That came to mind when I was talking with Phil and Maria. In their approach to woodworking as a method to get people together doing something novel with those they love or those they’ve just met.

And it came to mind in the weeks after, the weeks we’ve been living through of violence, instability, fear, and resilience. All flourishing is mutual. Neighbors helping each other. Families supporting one another. Artists and organizations and the rest of us ordinary people doing what we can to provide food, basic needs, transportation, communication, witnessing.

When we support and care for one another, we are supporting and caring for ourselves.

We need our connections with others more than ever. I’m so grateful to people like Maria and Phil, who bring collaboration into the marrow of their craft.

Resources

I wanted to share a few ideas from a recent workshop, What Can Artists Do?, led by local writers and activists. These are useful to readers in the area, as well as those who are living in places that might go through the same thing we currently are in the cities.

• Attend an “upstander” training, legal observer training, and/or “know your
  rights” training: MONARCA, MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), The Immigrant Defense Network, Immigrant Law Center of MN

• Connect to a local rapid response network. Every neighborhood, and many
  suburbs, have them.

• Always have your whistle. Especially after connecting with either of the
  previous points. More info on whistles as a tactic: linktr.ee/mspwhistles

• Support each other. Plug into local mutual aid networks (these are often
  neighborhood-specific or even based out of schools, churches, etc.) to share
  resources with impacted families, support immigrant-owned businesses,
  raise money for legal defense, buy groceries for your neighbors, offer rides,
  etc. We don’t all have to do everything, but we can all plug in somewhere.