Author: Michael Witthaus

Furniture as art at The Fells

Running through mid-October, “Summer at The Fells” is an exhibition of work from more than a dozen members of New Hampshire Furniture Masters. Held at the John Hay Estate, it’s an event that should be attended more than once, as new pieces will be coming and going in the coming months. Many items will be available for purchase.

The venue befits the display. It was built in 1892 for John and Clara Hay as a place to summer — when that was a verb. The 83.5-acre property includes the 22-room Colonial Revival mansion, along with forest trails, lush gardens and shorelines. It is the only early 20th-century summer estate on Lake Sunapee that’s still intact and open to the public.

Some of the pieces on display were done by Ted Blachly, who’s been a Furniture Masters member since its inception in 1995. Blachly’s past work includes a sensuously curved chest made of curly sugar maple and rosewood, created in 2014 for the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester.

In a recent phone interview, Blachly said the makers at the Fells event range across several disciplines, like Dan Faya, who taught at the traditionally based North Bennet Street School in Boston. “He’s an expert carver, and his work is very clean,” Blachly said. “He has a chair up there that looks like an antique shield-backed chair, the carvings, that’s where his roots are.”

A distinctive room divider from relatively new member Lynn Szymanski blurs the line between form and function. “She has a more sculptural approach to making work,” Blachly said, “It’s a take on a three-panel screen that might be used in an old antique farmhouse; it has that feel about it. There’s a saw blade integrated in the top sections of the frame, and it’s kind of an interesting piece.”

Blachly began his road to furniture making in the early 1970s.

“It was during the back-to-the-land movement,” he said. “I fell into working on old houses with two really fussy carpenters, and I learned a lot. They saw that I had patience [so] they would often give me a fussy job or a pain-in-the-ass job, because they knew I would stick with it or work my way through it…. Having to solve odd problems, I think, really sort of helped me along.”

The following decade, he became part of a guild that included 17 furniture makers who would meet and discuss their work, and through that he met Jere Osgood, one of New Hampshire Furniture Masters’ founders. Osgood died last year.

“He was a world-renowned figure in the studio furniture field, a teacher and a very innovative maker,” Blachly said. “I ended up assisting him in his shop on an as-needed basis in 1993. I would go down there and help him with runs of chairs. Working for him at that level, I learned so much. It was a really wonderful part of my life. I stayed closely connected to him right up until he died. I worked on his stuff. I feel fortunate to have had that experience.”

Blachly’s Currier Chest is a testament to the painstaking discipline at his level of furniture making. From the initial curator outreach to completion, the elaborate piece took well over a year to finish. Made of sugar maple, Bolivian rosewood, white oak, quarter-sawn red maple and Sitka spruce, the piece is part of the Currier’s permanent collection.

“That was quite a woodworking adventure,” he said. “Through my work with Jere Osgood … his pieces are very sculptural with lots of curves — I had learned how to articulate and figure things with full-scale drawings and mock-ups [and] for that Currier chest I took it pretty far [and] a lot of the techniques or ways of figuring out how to do something was learning this stuff from Jere. It’s not something where you just take some wood and start hacking away and sawing away and get that. There’s all this other work that has to go in so you can build it.”

Summer at The Fells – NH Furniture Masters
When: Daily through Friday, Oct. 12, with a House Party on Thursday, Aug. 8, from 4 to 6 p.m.
Where: John Hay Estate at The Fells, 456 Route 103A, Newbury
More: Free, register at eventbrite.com

Featured image: Currier Chest by Ted Blachly. Courtesy photo.

New Hampshire writer reads from new novel

In her new novel Beautiful and Terrible Things, S.M. Stevens follows the friendship of six individuals, from early, nascent stages to close knit, and uses their shared lives to explore a range of hot-button topics in an admirably even-handed manner. The author will read from it and sign copies at Bookery in Manchester on July 19.

The book is set in an unknown city, a bold decision intended to underscore the universality of many social issues in its pages, Stevens said by phone recently. “These conversations and events are taking place in a lot of Western countries today,” she said. “I just think the story means more to people if they can see it happening in what they consider their city.”

Racism, gender, climate change, mental health and immigration are all addressed. When it comes to the latter, Stevens hopes readers will take away one bit of knowledge. “One of my goals in writing this was to remind people that no matter what your view is on an issue, there are always real people behind the statistics,” she said. “We do well to remember that.”

Without being pedantic, Stevens presents social questions as a school teacher might, asking people to fully study and think them through. If readers don’t arrive at a place of compassion for the many struggles the book’s characters face, maybe they’ll come away with some understanding.

“I wanted to show various views on some of the stickier issues,” Stevens said. “Now, there are no two sides to racism — it’s just wrong — but immigration is a really complex issue. On that one, I tried to present varying views.”

The character Jess is a rising professional and the daughter of immigrants who’s sometimes needled about her citizenship status. Jess brushes off such queries, comfortable in knowing she’s U.S.-born to legally naturalized parents. That changes when a woman who works in her childhood home and helped raise her has an immigration problem that’s too complicated to write off as “those folks” coming across the border.

Stevens employs other real-life stories to highlight social questions. Jess dates a Black member of the group; witnessing him encounter systemic racism is an eye-opening experience for her. One character has mental health issues that his friends try to understand and help with; another is nonbinary and helps to explain their experience with delicacy.

The book’s main characters are all millennials; Stevens has two daughters in that age group. “They are more passionate about equality and the planet and social justice than most people I know,” she said. “I think characters on the cusp of age 30 are asking all those really cool questions about their lives. Am I in the right career? Should I be married by now? Do I want to have kids? That’s a really important stage of life for most adults. That was why I chose it.”

More than anything, the novel is a fun read about people from different backgrounds getting to know each other, doing things like enjoying weekend trips or going to a demonstration.

“I hope it entertains people,” Stevens said. “I think reading is a pastime unless you’re doing it for school and education. It should be fun, it should be entertaining, and you should love the characters and not want to leave them behind at the end.”

Much of the novel’s action happens at an independent bookstore one of the characters manages that becomes a flashpoint for looking at gentrification and who it affects. In the book’s acknowledgements, Stevens notes that the store is inspired in part by Gibson’s in Concord, where she once did a reading.

Stevens lives north of Hillsborough, having moved to New Hampshire with her husband in 2020 to live in a house on a pond that he’d built there 35 years earlier. Beautiful and Terrible Things is her second adult novel, following Horseshoes and Hand Grenades and two books written for younger readers.

S.M. Stevens
Author reads from her new novel Beautiful and Terrible Things, followed by Q&A and book signings.
When: Friday, July 19, 5 p.m.
Where: Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: free, register at eventbrite.com

Featured image: S.M. Stevens. Courtesy photo.