This & me.

Hello, I’m Jeff. I’m a storyteller in words and wood.

There’s not a soul on this planet who is just the one thing. Snoop Dog is a licensed football coach, Rosario Dawson speaks Klingon, and Charles Dickens was a creepy prankster in his spare time.

While I can’t claim any of the above - although I would very much like to speak fluent R2D2 - I can say that I am product of many things.

Carving, writing, teaching, doodling, running in wild places; they each shape who I am and how well I function - or disfunction - as a human being, husband and father.

Boiled down, I’m a story teller and I mostly choose the mediums of words and wood to escape into worlds of the fantastical, whimsy, and scary.

Often, my wooden creations - puppets in particular - become my whimsical outlet, and my fictional ramblings tend to venture out as things to make you shiver at night.

I’m an 80s child - oh lucky me - and I lived those halcyon days absorbed in a blissful world of leg warmers, hair gel, horror books and scary movies. This heady cocktail of style and frights gave me power in those formative years because, while I wouldn’t say that Freddy Krueger and Pennywise the clown were my teenage homeboys, the eventual triumphs of the Dream Warriors and other against-the-odds misfits filled me with hope in a scary world full of things I didn’t understand.

And that is why now, as a 47 year old wearing hand-knitted socks that more than remind me of my leg warmers, I still love and write these stories for a new age of misfits and young adults: because now, more than ever, we need all the hope we can get, and yup, I still live in a world that confuses the shit out of me.

My stories in words and wood are my imagination engines; they poke each other along like kids on a dare. Imagination to me is beyond precious, it’s the golden gateway to what can be, instead of a well-trodden road to what should be. It’s why my work is forever prone to shifting directions at any moment, because to imagine is to be free to travel by magical feathered moon rockets in any direction at any given time.

From chair maker to spoon carver, puppet maker, writer, teacher and whatever lies ahead.

How I ended up treading this peculiar path is probably a story worth telling; it starts with an adverse reaction to boredom and quickly moves onto the jungles of East Africa via a brief spell in an English woodland with a friendly master craftsman.

Having absolutely nothing to do can sometimes be the best way to wear yourself out. In my case it was 1997, I was in the small English village of Claverham; I was jobless, cold and bored. On that particular day I went exploring the best way any penniless person can do, and that is to wander through the well-stocked shelves at the nearest bookstore with half decent heating.

I liked to play around with wood so I came to a halt at the craft section. I remember it as clear as day, standing there with messed-up hair and a coat that looked like a grizzly bear skin. My eyes fell upon a book that stood out from the usual build-something-horrible-and-dangerous-in-a-weekend titles; it was called Green Woodwork: working with wood the natural way by a fine bearded chap, Mike Abbott, featured on the cover treadling what appeared to be a homemade, foot-powered woodturning lathe. I was interested, and after a few pages I was hooked. I even bought the thing.

Fast forward six months and I’m in Mike Abbott’s blissful woodland workshop, left leg going like the clappers on one of his lathes and learning a craft that I knew would consume me. I was half way through a ten-day chair making course, learning how to craft a ladderback chair from a single log of straight grained English Ash. Power tools in this workshop were nowhere to be seen or heard, leaving the senses to feel and work with the grain and appreciate the sounds of Clissett Wood from where the ash tree came.

Evenings were spent in Mike’s outdoor kitchen where much stout was consumed to keep our toes warm and basketball-sized puffball mushrooms were sliced into ‘steaks’ and fried in a pan over a wood shavings fire. Clissett Wood was invisible in the dark, but occasional reminders from owls or scurrying animals kept it in my thoughts. I was starting to see that working with wood the natural way meant more than just working with unseasoned, soft hearted timbers, it was a nod to the forest, an appreciation of using your hands to craft living trees into functional forms that still have an essence of life in their design.

I went home with a chair and a mind awash with inspiration and before long I had opened Goblin Combe Rustics, a little one-man-band of furniture making and foot powered lathe demonstrations that I took with me across Southwest England.

The joy of working wood this way hung around like a good friend, even when it soon became apparent that public fascination in the craft wasn’t strong enough for people to turn their backs on the prolific moulded white plastic patio chairs of the 90s. I needed to find a paying job before I started wandering aimlessly around bookstores again, so naturally I ploughed myself into possibly the lowest form of pay I could train for. And so started the animal years.

It was the year 2000, and winter. I was still in Claverham and a student of animal welfare paying my way with a job at the local pizza shop. I was motionless in front of the TV when the phone interrupted my viewing. It was for me. A long forgotten application to work with apes somewhere warmer than Claverham had fruited into a job offer counting wild chimp populations in Uganda for eight months! Say that again?

Advance a month and I’m stood once again in beautiful forest, my thoughts being drawn, as they were in Clissett Wood, into this tangled mess of wonder. This was Budongo. Over the next eight months I would live in this enormous forest, and with a merry band of locals we would cover every square kilometre on foot, searching for wild chimps, monkey species and illegal logging. For the second time in my life a forest would enter my soul, consume my thoughts and stay with me indefinitely.

And while alone in that sprawling forest, at night, something else happened.

“I started to write. Letters at first to family and friends, and then I turned attention to writing about the things I saw every day in the forest: the wild things, the solitude, the fragility of life in and out of balance, and the feeling of standing possibly where no person had ever stood before.”

I scrawled upon every sheet of paper I could find, and when next in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala, I pitched my story to the Editor-in-Chief of the nation’s daily tabloid, The New Vision.

I remember the feeling of anticipation while sitting in David Sseppuuya’s office, waiting in silence while he read my article. And then he looked up, asked me if I was related to English metaphysical poet, John Donne (I am, somewhere down the line) and then he said he liked my story and would like to publish it in the New Vision. I was blown away. I even got paid. And from there, my love of writing grew wings. Thank you, David.

Back in Budongo, where I would wait and wait to read my story in print, I fell in love with an Australian primatologist researching chimp behaviour in a secluded forest field station. I followed her home, and we nested on the beautiful Sapphire Coast of New South Wales where, surrounded again by a massive forest (minus chimps, lions and hyraxes), I would rekindle my desire for working with wood. 

Before long, foot powered lathes were set up, spoon carving commenced and people started signing up for my forgotten crafts workshops. This was a lot of fun, the kind of fun that spreads easily to others, and so without much thought, Spoonsmith was born, a kind of paddock-to-plate woodsmithery that gives your home-grown tucker a handmade place on the table.

I was teaching people this old craft and sending them off with a new skill that literally changes lives. I travelled many places, expanding the hand carved spooniverse by demonstrating and teaching across much of Australia from the cities to the desert. It felt great.

And then 2020 came, and everything changed. First, our beautiful country burned in the most horrific of bushfire seasons. An area larger than the entire landmass of England was gone. People died. Millions of animals died. Our property escaped unscathed, but many didn’t, including the hand-built home of a dear friend who was instrumental in helping Spoonsmith to grow.

They were hard times, but before we could take a moment to breathe, the world headed into a pandemic. I’ll make this part brief as we have all heard so much already, but COVID-19 changed things indefinitely. Wood was getting harder to find thanks to the fires, and I could no longer travel to teach thanks to the virus. The road I had been travelling for the past seven years had ended. And that was that.

I struggled with this. A lot. But I felt a certain kind of kinship with just about every other person I knew who was trying to reinvent themselves in the wake of the fires and virus. This somehow gave me a chink of light and rekindled just enough of my imagination to sit down and think, ok, where to now?

And so, some weeks later, after much thought and a growing feeling of hope, Under the Bloodwood Tree was born. My two creative releases that have proven so essential to my wellbeing over the years were combined under one slightly ambitious project. It would be a showcase of my carved works, my written fiction, and something I am enthralled to be working on: The Library of Modern Slöjd, a growing collection of written works distilling more than 20 years of carving and teaching into easy-to-follow guides and ruminations for the modern maker. I’m really excited to present this, and I hope you’ll enjoy being part of this slow-fruiting journey.

So that’s me, the many different parts of me, that I hope explains why a single website should house hand carved spoons and zombie stories behind one uniquely crafted wooden door.

Read, write, carve, MAKE!

Do it all.

Peace & whittles,
JD.