What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1328956
JANUARY 17-23, 2021 WHAT'S UP! 9 FEATURE But we came home and went directly into quarantine. Then jobs started rescheduling. And we let a few go on purpose — we didn't want to catch it, and we didn't want to be responsible for bringing people together to catch it!" "That was March 7, our last live show," adds Grimwood. "I look at the calendar of what we have missed since then — for one, we released an album with Wheatfield; the entire release tour was canceled. We released an album with Michael Cockram and Susan Shore; the entire release tour was canceled. We had festivals lined up all over the country. But that is all on the business side. I'm enjoying being home — I've been on the road for 40-something years. The deal is not just waiting for it to pass. It's embracing life as we know it right now." "It's like when a lizard loses its tail; it's growing back different," says Idlet. "I love live shows, but finding that satisfaction in the writing and the recording has been really wonderful. While we are touring, the time to develop ideas is severely truncated. Now we come together, we write, we listen, we edit. We have time to go out on creative limbs and to make those limbs stronger by examining and reexamining them." They've also found a unique niche for releasing their music, something they're calling "Tackle Boxes." With each release, fans get a download of three songs, a video of Trout playing those songs, a little bit of background on each song and artwork by Susan Idlet, Ezra's sister and a well-known Northwest Arkansas artist. With that, and the occasional livestream, life for Trout Fishing in America is going swimmingly as they prove lifetime achievement doesn't equal retirement — at least, not this time! Joe Doster Huntsville Folklife Award In a video created by the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, Joe Doster is working in his blacksmith shop. He's dressed in a blue denim shirt, jeans and suspenders, and he sounds a lot like folk music icon Arlo Guthrie, describing not the Thanksgiving tale of "Alice's Restaurant" but instead how he starts his fires with wood chips from his wood shop and prefers to "make do" with recycled materials because "I think it's in the spirit of the Ozarks." However, Doster received the Folklife Award for his wooden creations, which range from cutting boards to intricate period furniture. He has long been a member of the Arkansas Craft Guild, is founding president of the board of the Arkansas Craft School, taught for many years in the public schools and is now mentoring his son to take over the family business. He credits his father as where he got "most of my figure-out- how-to-do-it-ness." "Many of our parents that didn't have a lot knew how to do stuff," he says. "That was back in a time that when things broke, you could fix them." Both Doster's parents were from rural Arkansas, so they returned to Arkansas upon his dad's retirement. Doster graduated from Little Rock Central High School in 1972 and went off to study history and political science at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Disenchanted by the politics of the day, he was going to drop out of school, but his roommate encouraged him to stay one more semester and take a woodshop class. "I absolutely loved it," he remembers, and transferred the next semester to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, which had a "wonderful" industrial arts program. Doster learned it all — hand and power tools, old-fashioned print making, drafting. Then he did drop out and went to live in a cabin in the woods for a year with his dog, lacking just four hours for his bachelor's degree. "It was a great thing to build your inner confidence," he says now. And he met his future wife, who was living in a tent on the property at the same time. Doster turned his knowledge into a paycheck by joining a friend's woodworking business, making cutting boards and butcher blocks. They traveled the juried art show circuit for more than a decade — "not an ideal lifestyle unless you love the road," he says. Ready to stay home, he landed a job with the park service at the Buffalo National River, where he made pioneer woodworking part of his interpretive programming. "It was the greatest way to attract kids," he says, recalling them "piling out of the station wagons." "And I fell in love with teaching again. "I did that for three summer seasons," he recounts. "It was probably the first experience I'd had working with a majority of folks that had advanced degrees — very, very intelligent people doing pretty hard work. That was inspiring, to be around folks that were pretty sharp." Over the years that he taught in public schools, Doster always kept his creations on the market through the Arkansas Craft Guild shops and got involved with the Arkansas Craft School in Mountain View "trying to keep what we do alive." "It's important — my friend Doug Stowe [from Eureka Springs] refers to it as the wisdom of the hand — and I like that phrase," he says. "There's something inherent about the connection when we create with our hands in concert with our heart and our mind and our eye, that is innately human. And keeping that going is really important for humanity." That's Doster's hope for any publicity surrounding the Governor's Arts Award. "I hope it triggers a 'want to know,'" he says. "I want to get people involved in it. The other thing is to at least have a full appreciation for it or begin to, so when they see a product for sale, they don't look at the price and set it down. "The award is a great honor. But it's also a representative award. I'm one of a great many creative people I know." Joe Doster of Huntsville, recipient of the 2021 Governor's Arts Awards Folklife Award, demonstrates how to carve a wooden spoon with hand tools at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. Doster is also a blacksmith and was recently featured in a Shiloh Museum video available on the museum's YouTube channel. (NWA Democrat-Gazette File Photo/Ben Goff) See Awards Page 10