Jensen Beach likes to start with a sentence, listen to how it sounds. Then, he writes another one.

The Vermont fiction writer never approaches a story with a big theme, he says, or even a plot. He starts with an image, a character, a place. In his book of short stories, Swallowed by the Cold, each stand on their own, sometimes bright and a bit funny, other times bleak, often reflecting the features of the Swedish landscape where they take place.

Ultimately, the book connects characters who reappear throughout the stories around the recurrence of life’s difficult events—death, car accidents, violence, war and torn relationships—and the ways that people respond and adjust to them. Last month, Beach received the 2017 Vermont Book Award, bestowed by the Vermont College of Fine Arts to an author of an outstanding work of literature, for Swallowed by the Cold.

“It features things that I love,” Beach says of the book, published in 2016 by Graywolf Press. That includes Sweden itself, where he lived for six years, as well as sailboats and the water.

When he’s not writing or teaching writing and literature at Johnson State College, where he is also fiction editor for Green Mountains Review, Beach is skiing or hiking or swimming. In the water, he composes some of his best stuff, he says. “Physical activity is a really important part of my practice,” he says. Beach is not a wake-up-at-6-and-write-for-hours kind of author. Even amid the ruckus of his three kids—ages 12, 9 and 7—he prefers to work at his kitchen table or in his office at the college, where he can read out loud and hear the rhythm of the prose.

Beach, who grew up in northern California, has wanted to write since childhood. He started as an English major at a California community college before heading to Europe, living in Hungary for a time, then landing at Stockholm University. With a plan to become a professor, he started publishing stories in various online literary magazines and anthologies.

Short fiction always was Beach’s favored form. He reveled in “that feeling of breathlessness of just being totally wrecked by a Flannery O’Connor story,” he says of one of his favorites.

Returning to the States for graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he felt a bit disconnected, he says. He left Europe and became a Californian living in New England. “I think I was a little homesick,” he says. Stories about Stockholm started pouring out of him and ended up as the manuscript for his thesis.

Beach joined the University of Illinois faculty as a lecturer before moving to Johnson State. In 2011, a friend he met at a summer conference introduced Beach to her literary agent. They reworked the stories and shopped them to publishers, placing some in Paris Review, A Public Space and The New Yorker before selling the whole collection to Graywolf.

Beach writes about places after he leaves them, partly out of nostalgia and partly because the distance gives him perspective and inspiration. He’s now tackling his first novel, set in California and Florida, where he has spent some time in Miami. He finds it fascinating to see the contrasts from neighborhood to neighborhood. “It’s a novel about transitions and change and those kinds of personal experiences that we go through,” he says.

Ensconced in the picturesque town of Jericho, close to hiking trails and ski slopes, Beach has no plans now for a Vermont-based story or collection. Maybe at some point, he says, if it shows up in that first sentence.

Jensen Beach–author
Jericho, Vermont
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The post Word by Word appeared first on Take Magazine.

Robin Mix had romantic notions about studying glassblowing from the masters of Murano in Venice, Italy, but they didn’t welcome many American artists back in the 1970s. So he went to Sweden instead, where its own well-entrenched glass craft—less revered and tradition-steeped than in Murano—allowed him to develop his skills. He started shaping molten glass about eight hours a day for a tradesman and then moved to the Orrefors factory.

In his free time, Mix escaped to classes and collaborations with other glassmakers in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He taught some classes, too, and sold some of his first work. Back the States, he continued his education in Seattle, a U.S. hub of glassblowing. “I was very drawn to the people who were trying to master it,” whose goals were to “try to be the determinant of what happens with glass,” Mix says.

The Murano style inspires Mix, but he has made it his own. It took him years to command the complicated murrini method, he says. Dating back centuries, murrini involves the melding of glass canes in an oven into masses that are cut by cross-section into a sheet. The sheet is rolled up and closed before Mix blows it into shape. The combined canes create an intricate tapestry of colorful squares or bubbles, sculpted into a vase.

Mix’s murrini grew more and more detailed, requiring him to craft his colors from scratch. He needed lighter hues that didn’t end up looking like dark blobs when combined, and the colors changed the metal content in the glass, so he had to continually adjust the heating and cooling. “It’s a very obvious manifestation of physical labor,” he says. “I took it about as far as I could go.”

Mix’s other glass vessels use techniques that turn them striped or plain or into abstract patterns. For years, he sold his work through luxury department store Barneys New York and in galleries around the country.

Ben Fleishman Photography

Mix grew up in Minnesota and stayed in school in the States while his parents and younger siblings moved to West Africa for his father’s work in the foreign service. They returned to settle in central Vermont, near where Mix lives and works in Tunbridge. In 1973, he went to Hampshire College to study architecture and, at nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst, took some glass-blowing classes, which simply looked like fun. “It turns out to be much harder than it looks,” he chuckles.

But compared to architecture, “it was instant gratification,” Mix says. “In glass blowing, you either got something or you don’t.” So he left school early and headed to Sweden.

Recently, Mix created a collection of heavy mixing glasses, wrapped in threads of color, made originally for his daughter, a mixologist who co-owns a cocktail bar in Brooklyn. So many of her friends asked for their own sets that Mix set up an Etsy store to sell them.

Some of his longtime customers have come into his studio to refresh their collections, noticed the new glasses and say, “I gotta have one of those,” he says. That helps this 63-year-old master keep a “youthful enthusiasm” for his old-world work.

Robin Mix–glassblower
Tunbridge, Vermont
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Top image by Ben Fleishman Photography

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