Bernie Herman (BH): This is Bernie Herman for the Quilters’ S.O.S. – [Save Our Stories.] project at the American Craft Council, Baltimore Craft Show with Ellen Kochansky. The day is the twenty third of February 2003. And Ellen we always begin in the same point which is to tell us a bit about the object that you brought with you today.
Ellen Kochansky (EK): My issue has been the things we throw away. Quilters are the savers, the conservers. And this string of beads is a very physical representation of the issue of loss and recovery. It is made from the shreds of my mother’s letters to my father during World War II. I want to honor the things of value that we might not recognize, what we have discarded and what we need to think twice about. To use my quilts in a much more symbolic way than I have for the good twenty years that I made quilts to sleep under.
BH: Could you talk a bit about the process of the object and before we move on to talk about its broader connections to your work?
EK: I’m often using three dimensions, packing things into bundles, and I’m often using paper in my quilts. I’ve embroidered them onto screens, and layered boxes. These strips of paper are made into beads, and it feels very meditative to do them, just to wrap them around a quill. And lately I’ve quilted them between layers of silk organza, too. That paper is a way of telling stories is intriguing to me. And now the way I’m expressing myself is through a single fabric – with contents. I came to quilts that are more about the content than the surface. So a material that you can see through allows me to express what’s in the stuffing. And I’m able to use the content visually and symbolically to create the message. It’s just such a pleasure to me to watch my work changing in a way that adds something to what I can say.
BH: I’d like to come back to the content part of this, but before we go there could you talk a bit about that. You said about ‘started’ into the world of quilt making and if we could get a sense of how you got started.
EK: Oh, that’s a long story. But basically I trained in art. I have been a textile fan all my life. I worked in fashion. I made doll clothes. I have done theatre. Probably the theatre part of it was the most growth producing. They didn’t tell us that we couldn’t do it, so we started a youth theatre group, and produced musicals every summer for about ten years or so. I loved fabric. It was my best medium. I knew how to do that. So I got good at clothing, but the fashion business did not appeal to me though I danced around with it for a while. My real voice started coming to me in the seventies when Jean Ray Laury wrote a book that gave us all permission to do things wrong. We didn’t have to make quilts in the old-fashioned way. We could really blow away the assumptions. And that lesson became my art form at a moment in my life when I really could engage in whatever art form I wanted. The lesson also contained the corollary.You can break whatever rules you want, but you have to make it work! For the last fifteen or twenty years, I’ve done a business called EKO which was–revolutionary concept–quilts for people to sleep under. These were limited edition pieces with very much my own stamp on them. Probably two or three hundred a year – we made as many as two thousand quilts through my studio. At the same time all these years I’ve done huge corporate commission projects, a kind of collage work – an example is in the White House collection. These had more to do with layers and painting, stretched like canvas – quilts for the walls. So there are a lot of kinds of imagery and metaphor that I’ve explored, color, no color, texture, less texture; with layers of things that always involve my own history. I still have fabrics I acquired thirty and forty years ago, and the work became more stacked, more three-dimensional when I realized I’d have to hurry if I were going to use all the fabric I had left. Each stage of my work somehow grew from the leftovers of the previous stages! The journey, Darwin-like, leads you to an unoccupied niche every time you put your foot in front of the previous foot. Recently I’ve felt the opportunity to say something more social, and my work has had more to do with honoring other people’s debris as well as my own. Recycling issues, sustainable design issues, what we are doing to the planet. And interestingly my bed quilts that I had always just made with a little tag that said, ‘Dry Clean Only,’ got into trouble when it turned out that OSHA changed the rules on dry cleaning. So, I had been making things out of all sorts of different fabrics and they had been doing fine in the previous dry cleaning fluids–which were toxic. Quilters are the world’s packrats, but also the world’s caretakers–it was irresponsible for me to make something whose future was not safe for its practitioners. I started guiding all my customers toward a dry cleaning process which was CO2 based and non-toxic, but I also chose to simplify my life by making only things that would not need to be washed or which were washable.
BH: Did you make quilts before you read Jean Ray Laury and if so how did you get started?
EK: My first job was as an editor at the “Vogue Sewing Book,” published in 1971 in New York. It’s still a text that people use. It’s a wonderful book, which contains my first visual quilts. Because I hung out with my nose pressed against the glass at the Vogue Fabric Library–Herman Phynes was this wonderful man who ran it. And we ran around New York together exploring the stores where the couture houses left their leftovers. We built a stockpile of swatches that I just loved. My college degree included a textile minor. So, one of my jobs was to write the fabric dictionary that went into the book and then make collages of the things that Herman and I had collected that became visual quilts. They were cut and paste version of simple block quilts that were used to introduce and illustrate the dictionary. There is every sort of fabric. I wrote about wool. I wrote the description from my microscope of how wool behaves, what does silk look like, how is each fiber different from other fibers, what makes it felt. So, this scientific and linguistic fascination with all of the magic that is textiles was distilled into my first quilts.
BH: So the quilts are published in there.
EK: Yes. I also did a very interesting color wheel. So the relation of color to value was part of my earliest professional memory. Those were quilts in a technical way. They were layered and assembled and glued together, because Photoshop didn’t exist at the time. We also physically made quilts of our editorial pages–pre-computer, we cut them apart with scissors and glued them together with scotch tape and gave them to Doreen, who gave us back our copy in typed form. The physical cutting and pasting and the contribution of that to the editorial process later on inspired one of my first community quilts -a lesson for the students in a high school. We took a class full of honors English students, and asked them to hand in both the first and final draft of an article on the act of writing. There were two sessions, I think 45 students. I had been inspired by Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. Using a folded origami bird–the folds became the quilt lines. We processed their papers through a copy machine so that the coded number of each of the parts was on the back. And then we cut up the drafts and mixed up the pieces. The kids reassembled these in patch squares, and then put the squares together. The lesson was that the first draft is not sacred. You must break what you expected in order to achieve progress.
BH: And does that work in your own work in terms of being a quiltmaker?
EK: Absolutely. Quilters and artists and I think that I’m moving from the one to the other constantly, must always question assumptions. It’s our job to question assumptions. It’s a daily mantra for me to look at what I thought I knew especially if it didn’t work [waits for announcement to end.] and question my own assumptions about it. Did I start with a small wrong thought, is this color better over here, who says you have to do it that way–But then the squinting process is also the quilters’ specialty. When we back away from things we find that our best decisions are about value rather than color. So the relationship of values to each other is a very great lesson. I ended up doing a lot of pieces for religious groups, for churches, they would all give me their meaningful fabrics and I would make something of them. The sermon that comes out of that process turned out to be, ‘Look for the basic value–filter out the distraction in your basic choices. Look for what you get by squinting. Literally your eyes relieve you of color, and distinguish value only. That’s what makes a good quilt. It’s what makes a good decision.’
BH: Let me shift here. I have several questions but one that you began with was the idea of narrative and the relationship of words to objects, in particular words and quilts. The narrative capacity of those things if I understood this correctly.
EK: Yes.
BH: And I’d like you to sort of expand on that please.
EK: The piece that I’ve just finished is a sculptural quilt. It is for a group called the Hub City Writer’s Project, to honor the people in the textile industry, and to coincide with the publication of their book “Textile Town.” My proudest moment was the editor’s awareness that this work could express things in a form that was not words. The mills have been declining, collapsing, moving off shore. They were for many years the economic engine for my part of the world, the southeast. They are bulldozing these fabulous buildings which were the home of enormous machines and life stories. And the people whose stories they were are vanishing. But these people were not always verbal. So they commissioned a quilt-like sculpture, twenty-four panels literally framed in the floorboards of the demolished mills. It was made of their contributions. I got blueprints from the mill houses. I got precious gifts like the check that was written for the mill house that someone’s father bought. Tools that were handmade in the 1800s that had been handed down to generations. Those tools were so symbolic because that’s what they honored, that’s what they used that was their effort. The reed hooks for the looms. We got scrip that was used instead of money for the mill stores. People’s toys. People’s baseball uniforms. The descriptions that came with these things we put in a book. So one of my quilt forms now is making the books that chronicle who gave us what. But they are more about pictures than words. Betsy Teter, who is honored by the state of South Carolina for her vision, has published some twenty books, and she commissioned this piece as an extension of the story telling process, because she thought that it tells some of the story better than words.
BH: How has the response been?
EK: Inspiring! I love these community pieces–watching the people find their stuff is the best part of it. We invited people to participate through the local newspapers, and then to come to the unveiling at the local museum. During a snowstorm we had the best turnout ever for an opening at the Spartanburg Arts Center–they don’t do snowstorms well in South Carolina. The magic of it always is watching people light up when they see what they contributed and how it is part of the big picture.
BH: One of the themes in your quilt work and the one that certainly engaged my attention was that of transparency. Could you explore that a little bit?
EK: We come to everything the hard way. It takes us so long to see the obvious. What I tell students is you just keep trucking until the stuff tells you what you need to know. And what it told me finally after hitting my head against the dry cleaning wall and all those issues was that I need a single fabric. I started out quilting with every fabric in the known world, and I’ve come to a single fabric- silk organza. Diane Itter a million years ago was a magical textile artist. She made knotted work with just one type of linen thread, on the theme that a single material helped you focus. So I listened, and chose to ignore her for twenty-five years. I have finally come around. It took me all those years of doing it another way, very deliberately. Now I am simplifying my life as an artist, and finding that the forms that tell the most use the least material. So this is my own exercise, my own kind of academic challenge to myself. What every good teacher does for his students – you do it to yourself and then come up with an answer that’s been in there all along. Like the sculpture in the stone. Silk organza. It’s a magical fabric, It has always spoken to me. It has some tooth. It has what they call [announcement over loudspeaker.]. In the fabric dictionary there is a word called ‘scroop.’ What it means is the sound cloth makes when it rubs against itself. Victorian petticoats. There is “scroop” and it has a kind of a life of its own. So, I started playing with it. If I know I’m changing I need to guide the change by my own intuition. I was using this material just because I loved it and what I discovered was that you can see right through it. So all the things I started making were about what you could see through the surface instead of what the surface is. And just playing with that single issue allowed this new collection of information to come through. But it turns out they go on windows instead of beds! I’d put weeds in between the layers of this silk. Washed stockings. Feathers. Slices of dryer lint. I’m very focused on the issue of recycling. Unloved materials embedded in two layers of this silk organza became so powerful, so much more compelling when quilted than they had been floating around. It kept me in the quilt vocabulary because I am making a sandwich, but the sandwich has the stuffing as the point, the object of the game. And this got to be so much fun I could hardly wait to get out of bed in the morning. Just what you hope to find in your art life.
BH: Let me put a concrete example to this and I believe it’s “Ghost Quilt.” Could you talk a bit about that as how this brings together narrative, word, recycling, transparency, memory, all these themes that are there?
EK: I hope the guy who owns this piece really knows what a “ghost” he has. He seemed to respond in a way that I love when people see what you’re saying and get it. It’s so cool. The piece is made of the batting of a quilt that was sent to me by a wonderful woman who has since become a very dear friend, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her, but she is great. She owns a quilt of mine she got many years ago. She found me again and she said, ‘My father died recently. There’s this quilt that he had in his history that all of us remember in our childhood that was said to have been made by slaves. I would like you to just look at it. I know you don’t like to repair other people’s quilts but this one’s really interesting. Tell me what we need to do with it.’ Normally I would have said to take it to a quilt conservator. It’s not in my field. But I liked this lady, and in this transition I’m trying to be open to the surprise moment when you get what you need, so I had her send it to me. It was a magical quilt. I could see the hand stitching in it. It was very ineptly repaired and it was quite old – a hundred years certainly. The batting was coming out, and it was obviously in bad shape. I honor what happens when quilts disintegrate–that’s more interesting to me than when they’re intact and brand new, because textiles age and so do we all. I was fascinated with the deterioration of this piece–some of that is what my recycling issues are about. The wear and tear, the wrinkles, the history is shown in textiles in such graceful ways. So the history of this quilt was already in the surface but the stitches–big funky hand stitches… might easily have been made for practical reasons. The backing was as interesting as the front. What we did in consultation with this woman was to take this whole quilt apart, sacrificing the hand stitches because it was going to fall apart anyway. We reconstructed the surface in a way that actually could be slept under. We rebuilt some of the parts and assembled the borders out of the backing to enlarge it to full size. But the most fascinating part of the quilt was the stuffing. It was raw cotton. It had adopted threads from all of these upholstery materials that were part of the original surface. It had migrated and welded itself together in a way that was very like felt. I was floored with it and she said, ‘Play with it. Do whatever you want.’ So I started playing with that in between the layers of organza. And in honor of the original quilt we photographed and printed on organza the surface of the quilt that it had come from, and created squares in that form. We hand stitched the squares onto the layers with the stuffing in them. In looking through this you are seeing both the history of quilt and a very contemporary version of the quilt as it has been rebuilt and then the homage to the quilt we had to sacrifice. So there are all the layers of this history and you can see through one layer to the next.
BH: And it has one other quality that you comment on there, which is that of ‘scroop.’ It has the capacity for noise. And how does that add to that quilt?
EK: Ah, actually, I hadn’t thought of that. Language is ‘scroop!’ The storytelling process in getting to what this object was meant to be. And it’s been informing me since. I think the scroop is not so much that the piece will abrade itself and make a sound, but the sound I’m making talking to the microphone. The sound that people create by observing and recognizing the layers of each other’s history. The transactions that took place between Audrey and me in resolving the process. It’s a kind of storytelling. And that’s the sound that quilts make in their growth. In their development.
BH: I love this metaphor of ‘scroop’ is the sound of storytelling. I think that this is a really powerful image.
EK: I thought that would get to you. [laughs.]
BH: I want come back to the beads and the fact that you see these as connected to these issues of memories and transparency and narration and ask you to talk about these in the context of a quilt
EK: The most recent screens I’ve done have been very emotional. These are emotional times. A war is hugely wasteful of human health, life, resources. These shreds of the letters my mother wrote to my father in World War II…she didn’t discuss it with me that she was doing away with them. Of course, she didn’t need to they were hers. Her handwriting has been compelling to me all my life. She’s a calligrapher and her writing was tiny and magical. There are stamps. Three-cent stamps from the war years. He got a letter every day, many of [loudspeaker interruption.] the letters were in photographic form. Their scale was reduced in order to send them overseas. My father was in France for a lot of the war, and he missed my brother’s childhood. My brother was born in 1944. My father left in 1941 and came back in 1946. So a lot of the letters were apparently about my brother’s childhood. She thought we wouldn’t need them. So she let go of her grief over my father’s death and did this emotional housekeeping, and I let go of the stories that I would miss. I re-learned that we don’t get to know all the stories. We get to imagine what they might have been. But, the best thing about a story is what’s between the lines. So I was given a basket full of shreds, with permission to make my own stories out of them. I find myself doing things that are in effect my own grief processing for my father. He was a publisher, who worked for Scholastic Magazines. He handed me printer’s ink in the blood. The grace of words on a page, the love of letter forms, how verbal communication is not everything but it’s some of the best stuff we’ve got. Words on a page have become a legacy for me.
BH: Can you expand on this idea of the aesthetics of communication in relation to your work and in particular to quilts?
EK: A quilt is a wonderful rectangle, amazingly similar to the shape of a page. I’ve made dozens of quilts with that theme in mind. I’ve reduced them to 8 x 10 [inches.] and they are exactly queen sized. And so in a way the design organization that was required of me in reproducing limited edition quilts for 20 years was the shape of a page. Yards of files show all the quilt designs to scale on graph paper, with coded swatches so we could make them again. And now in working on my father’s letters and his handwriting and the issue of text, I’m finding myself floored by handwriting. I’m making things for other people who are blindsided by a letter that was written by a lost relative and finding the handwriting to be [interruption of loudspeaker] the most intimate footprint. So that is both a personal and a collective issue. I’m enlarging text. I’m exploding individual letter forms. There is a graininess to an enlarged letter that has great character. Typefaces. I’m finding magical newspaper clippings that didn’t get shredded, that are about the typeface – Garamond, Goudy. There’s one that I’ve used ever since the beginning of my quilt business called Raleigh Light. It’s a magical typeface. The ‘Q’ which of course as a quilter I use a lot is the most glorious form. So just finding the thing that you delight in and making it your own personal message is something that we all do. And each of us has a thumbprint that has a different collection of things about it.
BH: Would you and how would you draw connections between quiltmaking and the book arts?
EK: Different ways of telling stories! I’m doing it in very physical ways just lately. Because in the collective work, the pieces I’m doing for groups, the book turns into the chronicle of the quilt, and the quilt is a kind of book. It may be a physical quilt with twenty-four panels, like pages, with huge potential to move around. The book itself as the footnote, becomes it’s own object. I’m literally making books – that’s how we describe who gave us what, and what they wanted to say about it. And I’m back to creating books that I want to be beautiful to hold. The pages relate to the quilt in ways that really are the story telling process. We ask the contributors to put a tag on what they are giving us in order for us to recognize them in the book. So, it’s interesting that instead of the object of the game the quilts become the footnote for the collective activity, a bit like Cristo, who describes the activity of engaging people and governments in the making of his works as more important to him than the works themselves.
BH: You talked a bit about the qualities of visual paradox that arise in your quilts. For example, I’m thinking of the transparent quilt that was done as a folding screen, which is meant to conceal in it’s most literal sense, but once you render it transparent it becomes a paradox about what a dressing room or a dressing screen is all about.
EK: Yes, that’s really interesting. The thing I love about the transparent pieces is that light comes through them. I care about being honest. So, concealing allows things to be hidden–transparency which is not always exposure but hinting gets to be a way of reaching out to people and luring them through the screen. If what I’m doing with this screen which is made of the fragments of words is hiding, I am missing my own best point. If what I am doing is allowing light to come through– [loudspeaker interruption.]
BH: It’s a shame all these lost people–
EK: I’m revealing the message behind–not exposing but encouraging exploration. Someone has to look more carefully to see something that is suggested. And in organza there’s a sort of mistiness. It’s not all really apparent, it’s not clear like plastic, it’s kind of drifty. Like scrim in theater, I’m using the screen to conceal and reveal at the same time. And with light coming through behind it which is the way this works–it’s also great as curtains–you get a kind of change from day to night which is very organic and honest. And you get the possibility of looking at something from both sides. There is also–for all of us of increasing age–a mistiness to memory which is very expressive.
BH: You use the word hinting which is a very powerful word in the idea that the material that is not truly transparent but almost translucent in a sense. It doesn’t reveal but hints. I wonder if you could talk more about hinting?
EK: I think we can only really express, ‘through a glass darkly,’ to another person from our own frame of reference. We can’t be clear except to the extent that they are willing to accept our message, whether we are talking personally or internationally. We can only be clear if there is receiving and expressing going on. And both of those are always intermittent and flawed. Assuming that, we can only guide the person or country or character that we’re hoping to communicate to–we can’t understand or express from someone else’s point of view. And so the process of communicating is always that of ‘here’s what I have to say, I am filtering for those who may hear it carefully and I am understanding that they will hear it with their own background and language and willingness to open up to my voice.’
BH: Given the fact that quiltmaking in the U.S. alone is so enormous in scale in terms of numbers of people that are involved in some aspect of this and so diverse. Where would you situate your own work within this broad and very diverse world of quiltmaking?
EK: Certainly the philosophical end. I love that recently it’s about our culture. It’s not about what I want to say, it’s about what can I do to bring a group together to say what they want to say. I believe that community and collective process is an important change. It is not a new concept–friendship quilts have been made in honor of the bride, the transformation or transition, for centuries. I feel like that’s the piece that I’m linking to and hoping to expand the field in a way that is both two and three dimensional and in a way that is very contemporary and formed by my own art, history and background. I hope to guide groups to get together, to understand each other better than they might otherwise have done. And, to feel that they are part of a continuing process. I am a catalyst, a conduit for these groups, who I hope to find in increasing numbers that is a commitment I have just recently made. I want to help people to recognize themselves in each other.
BH: I have one other question. It actually fuses two things that you’ve brought up. One of the ideas of the quilt work–narratives on one hand, but ’emotional housekeeping’ on the other. And I was interested in your thoughts on how closely aligned is this idea of emotional housekeeping.
EK: Emotional housekeeping is dealing with the grief of something worn, letting go. It’s the pants with the hole in the knee. I love it. I call it cultural compost. I’ve written some articles about what we’re doing with the quilt– that is, a historical image of the quilt– taking worn fabric and old clothes or something that’s had a life and revitalizing it into another life. There is no new atom. It’s all been here. We are recycling and reassembling existing parts all the time, all our lives. We give birth. We turn into compost. We don’t assume our lives are anything but a continuum. If we do we’re wrong. Part of that in our quilt process is to take apart and to reassemble and to reconfigure. That in a way is a grief/ hope process. It’s a grieving for the thing that was and a faith and hope in the thing that we’re making out of it. That’s why we have children. That’s why we make baby clothes for the grandchildren. It’s part of how we keep the faith. So our letting go of things is a vital and essential part of that process. And I think quilters do it better than most because we’re archivists and we make things out of meaningful stuff. That’s grandma’s housedress. That’s George’s blue jeans. That’s the message. My friend Brooks told me the best thing about textiles is that they are pre-verbal. It was a psychologist speaking. He says we are aware of textiles before we are aware of language. Our association with textiles is clear before we’ve cluttered our brains with the consciousness of words. So we develop an understanding with the first textile that we remember, and it will never leave us. It is lower brain stem stuff. When our consciousness evolves we still have that resource–the power of the closeness to the cloth, and because of that our relationship to textiles is one of the most powerful connections that we make throughout our lives. It allows quilters to speak to the planet in a voice that is very deeply resonant. [loudspeaker interruption.]
BH: We were looking at other works that you brought with you. I wondered if you could speak a bit about the degree to which Orientalism or exoticism informs your work.
EK: I’d love to. I just got back from a trip to Japan with my son. He was on his way back from Australia, studying art. It was the trip of a lifetime both for my mother-ness and my artist-ness. I felt at home. I studied Japanese art in college, and always felt a very strong tie. Several aspects of my work bear directly on that aesthetic. The serenity and minimalism of Japanese art is profoundly influential. Two dimensionally I’m all about big rest spaces, and compositions that are off-center, and grayed, austere colors. What I’ve found myself doing in three dimensions is wrapping. The tying together, the assembling of threads in a way that is compression. It is a tidiness. It’s a rhythm. The little knot becomes a message. There is a relationship to the knots in quilting, the ties that hold the layers together. So the three dimensionality of it, a reflection of a very strong Japanese fascination with wrapping, has become kind of my own expression. Another theme has been the idea that you should not see it all at once. No good art work is worth looking at if you see it at once – you must be drawn into it and each time you see it something else new should reveal itself. And so the fascination with layers and subtlety.
BH: Having discussed scroop and transparency, I wonder to what degree you see your work as having an erotic quality. This is an unusual question for the site, but your transparent quilts invite it.
EK: Interesting. I haven’t thought about this lately, though you’ve picked up on a few suggestive aspects–stockings and all the see-thru stuff. Back in the 70s many of my first quilts were huge graphic nudes. One was for a patron who worked with sexuality as a therapist. She got a silhouette of a pregnant woman with the earth in her belly! Andy and Ginny Lewis have a series of reclining women as mountains. Others have garter-belts and elbow-length opera gloves in them. I hope I’m less blatant, if that’s what I’m still working on. There’s a very intimate thing about quilts in general…all those years I made bed-quilts, I worked with couples making that design decision, and found out lots more about their relationships than I sometimes wanted to know! You can argue that all art is about sex, one way or another, and textiles, especially ones that have been worn or used, are tremendously personal. But I’d like to think my issues are more humanitarian and ecological recently.
BH: Finally, looking at these works and the piece that you did for the Gateway Center for Bank of America, is that I’m struck with the question as to what extent would you characterize these works as quilts or as quilt-like?
EK: They’re repetitive, and modular, and usually involve textiles somehow, and made of layers like a sandwich–What is the rule they use in Quilt National? I’ve been using the quilt image all my life, trying as we all do both to embrace and escape it. I haven’t spent much time on the quilt scene, because in my first few experiences with it, it was full of people who had lots more rules than I was comfortable with. And also because I’ve managed to feed my family through the craft movement. And there aren’t really a bunch of us out here in the American craft field. So, I could sell my stuff and make my living as a unique voice in this corner of the field. But at the same time I’m avoiding being a quilter. I am loving being a quilter because the form is so close to the concerns I have for things of conservation; things of warmth; the things of comfort; the sense of a woman’s work being respected. [loudspeaker announcement.] I am woman artist and I think the voice that we must listen to is what we’re best at. We know how to do this. We multi-task. It’s something that we can put a new twist on. I don’t have to defy my history in order to enhance it. So, I’m a quilter, and want to be more in touch with other quilters. I’m so grateful for this chance.
BH: Well, I really feel we’ve covered a lot of ground here, but, is there an area we didn’t get into or a question that should have been asked that didn’t get asked, or someplace you would like to go in this conversation?
EK: You’ve done a lot. I hope my wandering mind has given you enough insight. As an editor I think, ‘Oh, I just tossed out the first stuff. It needs to be about a third of this and we’ll have a real good story.’ [laughs.]
BH: Well, you’ll have a chance to review the interview. Right now I’d like to thank you very much for taking the time here to do an interview for the Quilters’ S.O.S.- [Save Our Stories.].
EK: My pleasure, it’s a wonderful exercise and a very wonderful purpose, so I’m really excited to be part of it.
BH: Well, thank you very much, it’s been great.
[tape ends.]