Earlywood: My Willow Phase

Publisher’s note: Good morning, and welcome to Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2018. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

The unpleasant funny about visiting your family during the holidays is encountering your former woodworking self.

Seven years ago, I was in Charleston, South Carolina, with my dad and encountered my Late Willow Phase, a time during the 1990s when I was obsessed with rustic furniture. I had honestly forgotten about this phase (unlike my leather trousers phase).

For a couple of years, I drove around in my Volvo 240DL station wagon cutting willow switches out of ditches on the Westside of Cincinnati. I stored all these sticks in buckets in my shop, giving it an arboreal look. Using a drill and a tenon cutter, I made dozens of chairs, trellises, frames, anything you could fashion with sticks and tenons. It was my first pleasant encounter with bending green wood.

One Christmas, we planned to visit my father in Arkansas. Lucy and I were broke, and my dad already owned everything he needed. So I took an afternoon to make this little footstool for him from a scrap of white pine and discarded willow switches from a chair project.

And it remained in my dad’s house until he died. For something that I threw together in a day, it wasn’t half-bad.

Phases can fade away or end abruptly. This one had its throat slit. One day I got a letter from a family that made willow furniture with a bunch of photos of their beautiful pieces. The letter said: “We’ve seen your stuff. It sucks. This is what willow stuff should look like. Please quit.”

I did.

A 2025 footnote: I still love willow furniture, even though I don’t make it these days. Willow furniture launched my love affair with Veritas’ tenon cutters. And those tools have become the backbone of my stick chair business. So that’s a win. After my father died, I inherited the stool shown above. It ended up in Megan’s hands. I suspect she is working on an exhibit of my questionable works.