Author Description

"A reflection and celebration of the fading crafts, cottage industries, and artisans that defined communities-like the author's-for generations Everywhere communities, habitats, and families are endangered by loss. This book is an act of resistance against such loss, a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making. This book is about the quest for continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change. Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of communities and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent's "Sardine Dress," I turned to the artisanal industries of my ancestors, on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2500 residents, and New York City, a metropolis of millions. It begins with a family cottage in the Canadian Maritimes, a place for two centuries the center of a thriving herring fishery, and travels back into that history and to a second strand of family history in my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother who were artisanal dressmakers. Both strands speak to micro-habitats of human making, both peaked in the late 19th century and have faded away. Both represent ways of knowing and being perfectly suited to their time and place that I lament seeing fade away. I wanted to refuse history's erasure, reweave the fabric of those lives. One way to face loss is to give a presence on the page to those people, places, and practices that we have loved, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament can become a praise song"--