Category: Q&A

Jewelry maker and owner of CCMDesigns in Nashua (@ccmdesignsforyou)

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

How expensive beads are. It’s pretty expensive. When I did my taxes this year I was very surprised at what I’d spent on tools and supplies. It’s expensive.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

I wish people that are creative and have an idea just go for it. I remember one day I had a friend who wanted to make earrings and she goes, ‘What do I do first?’ and I said, ‘You just have to start,’ so I wish people would just start.

What was your first job?

Working for the Telegraph [The Nashua Telegraph] delivering papers.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

Probably from my dad, who was in the military, and it was, just be the hardest worker I can be. If it’s slow, you should be doing something. Always be working.

– Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Favorite movie: Avengers: Endgame
Favorite music: My favorite band is Paramore
Favorite food: Cheeseburgers
Favorite thing about NH: That it’s so close to Maine where my family lives.

Featured photo: Chantelle Morin. Courtesy Photo.

Conditions on the trail are not like in your yard

Lt. Jim Kneeland is the Search and Rescue Team Leader and Coordinator at New Hampshire Fish and Game, and the Hike Safe Representative/Partner with the U.S. Forest Service. Visit hikesafe.com.

What is your advice for inexperienced hikers?

Depending on experience levels I always think that hiking in a group is obviously a good idea. Then you can bounce ideas off of one another when you’re out on your excursion, like when to turn back or if you don’t feel comfortable with the conditions. Or better yet if you’re really inexperienced there are a list of guides that you can find online and going with an experienced guide, maybe taking your first time or two to kind of go through a safe way to go hiking … in adverse conditions or basic conditions that you’re not familiar with. That’s another good way to gain some experience is to go with a guide.

What should hikers know about springtime in New Hampshire?

Hiking enthusiasts [who] come from the south where their lawns might be green and the daffodils are coming out … there are still a lot of times late into the spring [with] winter-like conditions and that means you should be prepared … with clothing, footwear, traction devices, even after today you probably need snowshoes again here, even in April. That’s the kind of thing we see people usually screw up here and that’s the change of the seasons, being prepared for where … different weather conditions that are still going on here in elevation.

What is a Hike Safe card?

A Hike Safe card is a way that we help fund search and rescue here in New Hampshire. Traditionally, prior to the advent of the Hike Safe card, the only way that Search and Rescue was financed was through this $1 surcharge on OHRV [Off-Highway Recreational Vehicle] registrations and boat registrations, and that wasn’t eating the cost of search and rescue here in New Hampshire, so they came up with the voluntary Hike Safe card, which is a $25 per person or $35 per family Hike Safe Card which lets you support Search and Rescue in New Hampshire and actually has helped defray the cost of Search and Rescue placed upon the agency.

What should you do if you encounter a bear, bobcat, etc.?

We do have, obviously, bears, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, those kinds of things here in New Hampshire. It’s very rare, you might see one, but it’s very rare that you have an adverse interaction with one. Making noise, making yourself appear large, usually gets the animal to go the other way. I can’t think of a time, there’s only been a few occasions where … not myself, but I have heard of bad interactions with people outdoors and that’s typically because they surprised the animal or maybe even, in the instance of a bear, maybe got between a sow and its cub, but typically most wildlife doesn’t hang around long enough…. Noise is my best advice.

What should Granite Staters do to help preserve wilderness areas they frequent?

They can visit websites through the Forest Service, Appalachian Mountain Club and whatnot to see the best ways to protect those fragile environments above treeline and that’s basically staying on the trail, not trampling vegetation…. A lot of our trails are marked by rock cairns, which are piles of rock that mark the trails, and then in the summer months when you can see the granite that you’re hiking on there’s usually a painted blaze on the rock or a tree that depicts where the trail goes, so staying on marked trails…. Then obviously, no one likes to see garbage and stuff up on the trail. Take what you bring. It baffles me to go hiking and you see people putting dog poop in the green bags and leaving the bags on the side of the trail. If you’re going to pack it in, you can pack it out, so that’s my advice on trash….

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Lt. Jim Kneeland. Courtesy photo.

Owner and tattoo artist at Neon Lady Tattoo

Explain your job and what it entails.

I am a tattoo artist and that entails drawing custom pieces for clients and bringing their ideas to fruition.

How long have you had this job?

I’ve been tattooing for 11 years. Started apprenticing in 2013 and opened my own business four years ago in February 2020.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

I wanted to be able to create artwork for my clients and wanted to do something I enjoyed as my career. Creating custom work and being able to do custom art pieces has always been a passion of mine and being able to support myself doing that has been one of the greatest things.

What kind of education or training did you need?

I did go to art school for a little while, for a couple years, but you do need an apprenticeship, so finding a mentor and another tattooer that has experience and is willing to take on a student or an apprentice, in order to be licensed to be able to tattoo legally.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

I wear whatever I please that is comfortable and black usually. It’s my favorite color. It hides the ink and the blood — you can include that or not; it’s the truth, though. It’s professional, looks artsy.

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

Time management. Especially as a business owner, beyond just being a tattooer, owning the business. Just trying to balance personal life and work life is very challenging but it comes with its own rewards.

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

How much of my time would be dedicated to being involved in it. Like the emails and customer service aspect of it, again, the work-life balance.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

It can be physically taxing, mentally taxing. But a positive aspect of that, though, is you get to meet so many different people and I feel like you definitely grow as a person with all the folks that you meet and how close you end up becoming with some of your clients and the importance of some of the art pieces that come in. Whether it’s a memorial piece or you’re doing a cover-up or scar cover, how important that can be with some clients and that comes with some responsibility too, being able to give someone a sense of themselves back.

What was your first job?

My father owned a pizza restaurant for several years…. So I pretty much folded pizza boxes for a dollar to help the family, swept floors, cleaned tables, that was my first job.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

Stay humble and keep growing. There’s always an opportunity to learn.
—Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Favorite movie: An American Werewolf in London
Favorite music: I like a mixture of punk and rock ’n’ roll, in general. Some rap, some hip-hop, some oldies.
Favorite food: Sushi!
Favorite thing about NH: There’s so much to do, especially with nature. I love to hike, I like to garden, I like the seasons.

Featured photo: Neon. Courtesy Photo.

A discussion with Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello, award-winning Goffstown poet and MFA Director at New England College, on being named New Hampshire Poet Laureate, to begin her five-year term in April.

What do you believe led to your nomination?

There is a process. There is a selection committee that goes through the applications, or nominations, and it’s made up of members of the different art communities around the state: New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, New Hampshire Writers Project, Poetry Society of New Hampshire. It is a pretty long, extensive process. Then they bring the name that they choose to the governor and he nominates that person and then the Executive Council finally approves it. I think I’ve just been doing a lot of work to increase the visibility of poetry throughout the state for a long time. I’ve been advocating for poets…. There are many excellent poets in the state and many people who could do an excellent job in this role, but hopefully people saw that I had started a festival, run an MFA program, invite visiting poets, and I am in schools a lot. Hopefully, it was a natural next step for some of the work that I’ve been doing.

What does the Poet Laureate do?

There’s no real definition or expectation or role. I think each Poet Laureate chooses the way they want to grow and support the poetry community individually. I think ideally it is someone who is really active in connecting with other members of the poetry community. Someone who is thinking about young people, who is thinking about schools, who’s thinking about libraries, who’s thinking about event organizing, and also who’s just increasing the visibility of poetry. I know there have been poet laureates who have started websites or put together anthologies with New Hampshire poets’ poems featured, there are people who have worked to support poetry in schools. One poet laureate I know created a conference and got together all the poet laureates from across … the different states and then had them do readings in different parts of New Hampshire for a weekend, which was really cool…. I think really it’s just the person who is like ‘poetry is here,’ and it’s amazing, kind of the poster child for New Hampshire poetry for five years. If people are interested in poetry or have questions about poetry they can go and shoot me an email and let me know and I’m here.

What is your take on the state of poetry in New Hampshire?

New Hampshire is in a really exciting place at the moment. One of the things that I always think about when I think about New Hampshire is the incredibly rich literary history of the state. There’s a foundation here. It’s a state full of poetry history. Robert Frost is, of course, the first person we all think of and then, more recently, we have Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, who were all living here. I think now the poetry community in New Hampshire is … writing poems that are rooted in the poems of their foremothers and fathers, but … also looking to contemporary poetry to find out what a poem wants to be in the current moment…. It’s a really rich place, it’s pretty exciting.

What led you to the state of New Hampshire?

I was born in New York City and grew up in Rhode Island but I wanted to live in New Hampshire from the time that I knew that you could choose where you wanted to live. We used to come up to go camping when I was a kid, and sometimes skiing. I wanted to be a poet since I was really young and I always saw those two things hand in hand. I always wanted to live in the woods and write some poems and be in a place that felt like a place poets would live in my very young, naive mind, and Robert Frost wrote some of the first poems I was familiar with and loved… When I turned 17 I came up to UNH to study with Charles Simic. I have spent a few short stints away in other places but for the majority of my adult life I’ve lived in different parts of New Hampshire. … It’s an adopted role, my New Hampshirite-ness, but it is something that has always been a dream of mine to live here.

Do you have a favorite poem about New Hampshire?

This is so cliche but I really love ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost…. One of the great things about literature is that it can permanently change the way you see things. When I am here and I see birch trees, there are always moments from that poem. There’s one moment where Frost talks about the birch trees bent over by an ice storm as women who have kind of thrown, bent over throwing their hair over their heads, and I see that image in my head every time I drive through New Hampshire after a snow or ice storm and I have read it so frequently to my daughter that she has it memorized; it’s a really long poem. So yeah, it’s an oldie but goodie and I would say, just off the top of my head, it’s the one I think of.

What’s more important, the sound of the poem or the meaning of the poem?

I actually think a lot of times the meaning grows out of the sound, ideally. I always tell my students to think about songs on the radio that they love. The lyrics are important but the music is important and poems only have the language to accomplish both of those things. You are responding with your intellect but you are also responding with your instinct or emotions. For me, I really like it when a poem is an experience that hits me emotionally and then the intellectual aspects of it follow. So, I am a sound person.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Jennifer Militello. Courtesy Photo.

Bartender at Stark Brewing

Explain your job and what it entails.

I’ve been bartending for 34 years. Bartending instructor for 10. Basically, knowing bartender duties, making drinks, waiting the tables, waiting on the people, keeping your bar clean and stocked, and customer relations, is basically what I do.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

I was a carpenter in the ’80s…. I needed a secondary job to get me through the off season, so I picked this up. My father sent me to bartender school in 1990. I picked it up as a second job and as the years have gone on it’s morphed into my full-time work. I got trained as a bartender but then I got into restaurant work so I can wait tables, I can manage, I can host, I can do basically all aspects of the front of the house of the restaurant.

What kind of education or training did you need?

My only formal education was the bartending class that I took about 30 years ago. It was a 40-hour course. The rest of the training I’ve gotten is through companies and corporations training you to do stuff their way.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

Generally, black and whites, or here, it is basically whatever I want as long as it isn’t offensive. Jeans and a Stark shirt is what they want me to wear. But generally I wear jeans, and if I don’t have a Stark shirt I’ll just wear black.

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

Just dealing with the guests, dealing with the people can be the hardest part depending on the guest’s personality and their level of intoxication.

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

Well, I kind of walked into it with eyes open. I mean, I know what a bartender does, I got the job. Maybe started a little earlier — I was in my mid to late twenties when I started. That’s about the only thing, really.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

A personal pet peeve of mine is when people yell drinks at me while I’m in the middle of doing something else. A good bartender has his next three or four steps planned out. But if I’m in the middle of Step 2 and you yell something at me, it’s going to throw me off of step 3 and 4 and then you’re going to get mad at me because I’m going to need to take care of 3 and 4 before I can take care of you….

What was your first job?

Not including paper routes, washing dishes in an Italian restaurant in the early ’80s … a family-owned pizza joint called the Capri. I washed dishes and did prep work there when I was like 15, 16.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

… I use this all the time, especially in my bartending classes. It’s all about the dollars and cents. If you’re not making the dollars, it doesn’t make any sense.

—Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: Dean Koontz is the author.
Favorite movie: I like old ’70s car movies, to tell you the truth. Stuff like Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.
Favorite music: Classic rock. I have a vintage stereo system … over 600 records….
Favorite food: Probably more of a seafood person.
Favorite thing about NH: The location. Within an hour of Boston, within an hour of home, within an hour of where I grew up, within an hour of the beach, within an hour of the mountains.

Featured photo: Phil DiLorenzo. Courtesy Photo.