Prologue

A Carpenter's Songs is the story of 20 years in the life of one carpenter. The book begins in his first weeks as an apprentice, moves on through the war with his father, on to his first love, and to his understanding of the loss of his father, and his first love, and more. As you turn each page you are walking along with him through the moments of his life.

Each poem is a snapshot in time along his path as he grows older, and the poetry and the photography tie in and reflect each other, augment each other. The two together become a third thing that is more expressive and concise than either could be alone.

Poetry didn't seem like enough by itself. Our lives are rarely expressed by writing alone, we remember scenes, words, the texture of how that moment felt. Our lives are a mosaic of feelings and memories and experiences which join together to form what we become, so telling the story in this way seemed more real, more intimate, more like the way things really are.

I also wanted to bring you into our world, the wonderful place where houses happen, I wanted to show you how high three stories really is, how beautiful the sun looks on trusses, how pine smells mixing into the thick dawn light of fall. And I also wanted to show the years, the choices, the poetry, the ironic and wonderful worlds of being and becoming a carpenter and a man.

In carpentry and manhood there is a handed-down legacy of contradictions. There is violence and punishment, and sudden tenderness. There is destruction, then innocence and creation. There is combustability and conflict, and kindness. A Carpenter's Song is about carpentry, but also about manhood. It is about war that each son has with his father, and how our fathers change us in that archetypal war -- change us both for better and worse. This book is a commentary and a story, and also a prayer that we as men will grow to honor our father's legacy, without repeating the worst parts of it...

I've taken pieces of me and men I've worked with and my father, scenes from my work and my life, and I've written them down in this mosaic format to tell you the story. In this way I thought the work resembled all of our lives, pieces which seem unrelated joining together to form what we become. I thought telling the story this way would bring you further inside the building...