Folk School Confidential

What's in a Name

1.

I named this substack Spencer Street Folk School in a fit of whimsy, yet ever since we started our little collective this past March, I’ve been looking out at my detached garage and thinking, ‘That could be a school.’ And it could be, though it would take some doing (at the very least, we’d have to find a new home for the ping pong table).

While it might take a while to get the garage up to snuff, institutionally speaking, I can think of all sorts of ways my neighbors and I could educate ourselves in the meantime on our front porches and around kitchen tables. For instance, we could investigate ways to cool our houses when the power goes out in the summer, which I suspect is going to happen with greater frequency in the not too distant future, due to weird weather and the hotter temperatures.¹ ²

Another thing that my neighbors and I could brush up on is how to garden in the hot, dry summers that are on their way to becoming the new normal here in our southern home. It’s always been hot here in the summer, but we’ve had ample rain to keep things green. That may change. The winters are going to be warmer and wetter. Advantages? Disadvantages? Will our growing season be extended? Foreshortened? Let’s start a folk school study group and figure it out!

Other fields of study: Cooking in a Dutch oven in your driveway when you can’t turn on your oven because the power’s out or it’s just too dang hot. Preparing herbal remedies for life’s simpler aches and pains when the road to the pharmacy is flooded. How to scare the bejeebers out of the bunnies (and other critters) who eat your veg even though no one invited them to dinner. Maybe we could have a “Channel Your Granny” class, where everyone shares useful tips given to them by their grandmothers and their grandmothers’ grandmothers.

It wouldn’t all have to be practical stuff. It would be nice to sit around with some guitars and an old copy of American Ballads and Folksongs by Alan and John Lomax. It would be lovely to learn how to sing together. I suspect beer and other libations may be required for the adults. The kids, on the other hand, especially the little ones, are still in their prime singing years. They can be the teachers when it comes to belting out “John Henry” and “The Crawdad Song.”

2.

I made a study of folk schools a few years back when I was writing a children’s novel set in the southern Appalachians.³ There are still folk schools in these parts, but you have to pay to attend, and the classes on offer tend to be artisanal craft making. The early folk schools mostly taught skills and practices intended to improve the lives of local people. When established by people from within these communities, these schools often did make life better for people. The Highlander School in East Tennessee is one such example. Other schools, run by missionaries from the northeast U.S., were places were people were taught that their customs and foodways were substandard or backward and needed changing.⁴

The earliest folk schools were established in Denmark in the mid-1850s. Ikolai Frederik Severin (NFS) Grundtvig believed folk schools were needed if the Danish people were to transition into a successful democracy. From the Folk Education Alliance of America:

“Schools for Life” as Grundtvig called them were to assist people in understanding their own identity and to strengthen and empower communities. The folk schools were part of a decentralized grassroots movement that gave farmers a means for personal and social transformation (Borish, 1991).

Today’s folk schools are good for learning arts and crafts, and there are some that offer courses on homesteading and small scale farming. It would be nice if they could also teach us how to be folk again. We need to figure out how to be connected to each other through custom and ritual and culture. We’re going to need to be rooted in some sort of common life.

So, how do you create a local culture, a living culture, one that’s rich enough to sustain people through the hard times ahead? I’m not sure, but the idea that I’ve been playing with is that maybe you start by making something together. ⁵

So far, the most successful part of our little collective here on Spencer Street has been the composting. We’re taking our leftovers (at least the leftovers that don’t contain meat or dairy) and mixing them together to make dirt. As you may know, the word “culture” migrated from the Latin cultura into the Middle English lexicon, where it referred to the cultivation of the soil. Dirt and culture go hand in hand.

Which is to say, we’re literally creating a culture over in our little composter that sits at the end of Ryan’s driveway. In time, the compost will be incorporated into our gardens, where it will re-energize the soil and transfer its nutrients to our tomatoes and butternut squash. The dirt will be the beginning of our shared culture. Who knows, if things really get going, maybe we’ll have annual harvest festivals and special feast days. Maybe someone will write a song called “Gather ‘Round the Compost Pile, Boys!” I for one would be happy to sing it.

We’ll make something together, and then we’ll celebrate the act of making. That’s got to be part of it, right? A path to take?

Spencer Street Updates:

• Ryan is hosting three grow-bags in his front yard, near his mailbox. Last week, a few of us got together to fill the bags with dirt. We had planned on planting as well but realized everyone was going out of town at the same time, including Ryan, so we’re going to plant this week. This is a test, since we’re not sure that the site gets enough light to sustain any flowering veg (cucumbers, tomatoes and the like). But I have an extra sun gold tomato plant and Christy has a cucumber plant, so we’re going to make them guinea pigs in this grand experiment of ours. I suspect that when the weather cools, greens will be successful in that spot, since they can tolerate some shade. Stay tuned!

• Christy, who lives across the street from Ryan, is planning her own grow-bag garden out front. I’ve got grow bags in the back yard, but I could see getting some more in the fall and putting them near the mailbox. It would be super cool to have edible gardens up and down the street. My dream is that once other people see the grow-bags lining the road, they’ll want their own.

  

  My grow bags, about six weeks ago. The whole garden looks so different now! The garage that might one day be a folk school is to the right of the frame.

  The deer could still be a problem when it comes to critters, but the bags are tall enough that the bunnies will have to look elsewhere for lunch. No one will miss them, believe you me.

• Chicken news: Plans have been made for Anthony to help Christy reinforce her chicken coop against predators in August, before he and Amy leave on a fall sabbatical. Christy and the other chicken tenders (including me) will be taking care of their flock while they’re away. It’s a test run to see if we’re up to running a coop co-op. We’ve got other chicken keepers in the neighborhood who I’m sure will show us the ropes.

1. People will be running their air conditioners more frequently, which will make more demands on the power grid, and may result in planned and unplanned blackouts.

2. Also, if we could find ways to keep our houses cooler without AC, we can reduce our need for AC when the power is on.

3. Anybody Shining, published in 2014 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

4. Good books on this subject: All Things Native and Fine: Politics of Culture in an American Region by David Whisnant and The Long Haul by Myles Horton.

5. I’ve mentioned before in this space that I’m on my second “Regrowing a Living Culture” session with A School Called Home, led by Dougald Hine. It’s gotten to the point that I can’t remember if my ideas are original to me or if I’ve picked them up like a magpie from Dougald & Co. A little bit of both, I imagine.