Upstate Woman Nº 2 | Winter 2024

UPSTATE WOMAN I S S U E T WO W I N T E R 2 0 2 4 $ i 5

M A RC I A GAY H A R DEN

Photography by Harold Julian

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ELEVEN SIX

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A Place To Rest Your Eyes.

The task of defining a theme for this issue proved challenging. There is no simple explanation; life just got in the way, with its incessant interruptions of pings, nags, and whatnot. Let’s not ignore the fact that it took me two years to summon the stamina and courage to relaunch this edition. During my hiatus, I kept insanely busy, which seems to be a running theme in everyone’s life. One other major occurrence during the past eight seasons: My dearest sister passed away. It was a very abrupt departure from a swift bout with a wholly unexpected cancer. Her passing spurred a realization: There’s a pressing need for goodness and positive endeavors in this world, and it became a driving force behind seeing this issue through.

Throughout its creation, I found myself in a perpetual haze, which could be attributed to taking on too much simultaneously, or the lingering effects of mourning. Although it may not solely be either­— the current state of our collective conscience seems to have been hijacked. Too much information is floating around with not enough space in our brains to process it completely. Compound this with the ongoing world-altering events that dominate the news, leaving one feeling overwhelmed and helpless. Even as I pen these words in the comfort of my upstate home, recognizing my limited ability to effect change, they seem somehow inadequate. Technology and media are advancing too quickly to be ignored, and global shifts are too distant for me to extend much of a helping hand — though I do pray daily, in my heart, for peace.

In contemplating all of the chaotic themes and instances that surround our intricate lives, I wonder if there is at least one thing that I can do, a thing that I am good at. Upon finishing this issue, I realize that my ultimate objective remains clear despite there being no apparent through-line to make a coherent theme. I can aspire to contribute beauty and healing. I wish for these stories to serve as a source of comfort; perhaps they distill a measure of joy in readers; perhaps they can be a space for inspiration, self-reflection, or simply a moment of repose for weary eyes. If any of these outcomes are realized, I can take solace in knowing that, at the very least, I’ve put some form of goodness back into this world.

All rights reserved. Upstate Woman Issue No. 2 © 2023 Delaware Valley Eight LLC. See the magazine online at upstatewoman.com. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not reflect the opinions or views of Delaware Valley Eight LLC d.b.a. Upstate Woman or its members. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited.

For subscriptions, submissions or advertising and press inquiries, please email info@upstatewoman.com

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Discover the creatives behind our second issue, ranging from skilled writers, artists, to photographers, all of whom generously dedicated their time from various corners of the region.

Editor in Chief Nhi Mundy Senior Editor Janet Mercel Associate Editor Mandy Coon Art Director

Iris Cushing Writer Iris Cushing is a poet and writer living in the Catskill mountains. She is the co-editor of Mary Norbert Korte’s Jumping into the American River: New and Selected Poems and the author of The First Books of David Henderson and Mary Korte: A Research and Wyoming. Her poems and critical writings have appeared in Granta, Fence, Frieze and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series.

For Upstate Woman, She wrote about the artist Emily Johnston.

Kate Best Artist British transplant Kate Best has called the US home for 30 years, making her mark as a makeup artist alongside industry giants like Albert Watson, Richard Avedon, Steven Klein, and Annie Leibovitz. Over the past eight years, she has been Jennifer Lopez’s dedicated personal makeup artist, contributing to all of the star’s films. Beyond the makeup world, Best dedicates her time to her home and horse sanctuary in the Poconos.

Emily Winiker Photographer A multi-disciplinary artist since she was a young child, Emily Winiker is an acclaimed photographer who brings stories to life through her rich, vivid imagery. With a focus on the human experience and a painterly sensibility, she is able to capture beauty in everyday moments – from the vibrant hues of summer to the intimate details of familial relationships. Her biggest strength is her ability to connect with the subjects in front of her camera, giving images a sense of aliveness.

Bridget Jacobs

Stacy Adimando Writer Stacy Adimando is the owner and chef of Little North, a farm-focused kitchen and catering company in the Catskills.

She was the former Editor in Chief of SAVEUR magazine and won a James Beard Award for her cookbook writing.

Design Assistant Jinny Chiang Marketing Assistant Briana Pinales Contributing Writers Alison Green

Mariana Barrera Pieck Writer Mariana Barrera Pieck is a writer, editor, and translator from Mexico City. She is the senior editor of Litt Magazine, a biannual literary publication highlighting authors and artists who are based upstate New York. After spending 15 years in New York, Mariana is used to living and working in between languages and cultures and has turned that ability into both a career and a source for her creative work.

Barbara de Vries Faith Cummings Iris Cushing Jillian Scheinfeld Lisa Przystup Mariana Barrera Pieck Sara Mae Zandi Stacy Adimando Contributing Photographers Adrianna Newell Ami Sioux Barbara de Vries Emily Winiker

Barbara de Vries Writer and Photographer Barbara de Vries, an Amsterdam-born creative director, made her mark creating CK collections at Calvin Klein.

She then launched her own fashion company and won the WWD Fresh Face Award in 1997. In 2008, she co-founded Gordon de Vries Studio, focusing on design, architecture, fashion, and lifestyle books. De Vries is an active anti-plastic pollution advocate, and has spoken at TEDx Miami and received the Dutch American Heritage Day award in 2014. DeVries has authored Coming Home: Modern Rustic, Creative Living in Dutch Interiors in 2021 and Upriver Home, in 2023.

Harold Julian Lawrence Braun Lisa Przystup Michael Mundy Mikala Gallo Moriah Aslan Noah Kalina Peter Crosby Randazzo Blau Stephan Schacher Contributing Artists Ise White Kate Best Kazunori Ueda Rebecca Alexander Stacey Cunningham Special Thanks John Paul Tran Tivoli Hotel

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Leading the Composting Revolution, One Countertop at a Time In the face of growing global concern over the mounting waste crisis, our focus shifts to an up-and-coming brand, Lomi. Cofounded by Jeremy Lang, this innovative company advocates for a simple solution – distributing their compact composting machines to every household. As we delve into conversation with Lang, it becomes clear that his company holds the potential to make a significant impact. If successful, Lang’s mission could be pivotal in transforming our connection with the environment and our approach to waste.

By Mandy Coon I read somewhere that you initially made sustainable phone cases before jumping into the home composting market. That’s quite a leap.

It is. We’re on a mission to create a waste-free future, and we started by focusing on keeping plastic waste out of landfills and looking for better alternatives. We developed a material called Flaxstic and created the world’s first compostable phone case. Over time, we realized there wasn’t an infrastructure to take these new materials. Material sciences are advancing rapidly, but compost facilities don’t always have the resources or know what to do with these newer materials. So we thought, what if we decentralized and democratized waste management and created a device that could compost phone cases and other materials.

10% of households have access to some form of composting. The infrastructure would need to be greatly increased to have the capacity to be able to take all of our food waste. Our goal became to decrease food waste and turn it into a valuable resource.

Most people in the woods might argue that Lomis aren’t necessary since they have access to their own compost piles. But I beg to differ. The sheer convenience offered by Lomi seems to be quite compelling.

Yes, I agree. 70% of Americans would love to compost or recycle their organics, but it’s a pain. It’s smelly, and some people don’t have the space. We’ve found that in areas that already have a compost collection — we’re actually selling more because it’s less messy and so easy.

So Lomi could actually compost a phone case?

We were solving our own problem. Over a couple of years, after several prototypes, we finally got it. It’s a funny story: The first time we got it to work, we put our phone case in, ran it overnight, and the next morning, there was no evidence that a phone case had been in it.

I’ve read detractors say this isn’t true composting. What is the difference between your compost [Lomi Earth] and natural compost?

The difference is that Lomi Earth is about 80% finished off, meaning that plants can use it. The microbes in your soil do the other 20%. Compost is already completely finished off.

And that was your “aha” moment.

Would you say that the nutrient profile in Lomi Earth is similar to compost?

Yes. While developing this device, we discovered how unnecessary food waste was. Food waste is not waste. It’s a very valuable natural resource. It’s nature’s fertilizer. Anything we can do to keep food waste out of a landfill and get it into a form that can go back into the soil is a win. Compost facilities are great, but less than

Yes, we’ve done testing where we’ve compared our end product to compost in soil on farms, and it’s been more nutrient-dense, and it’s better than organic fertilizer because it’s made from a variety of plants and materials. So it’s very biodiverse. It has organic matter, microorganisms, macronutrients, and micronutrients; it’s more like

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a slow-release fertilizer. The results are amazing but not surprising if you think about it this way: If you put an apple in your compost pile, it’s going to dry out and break into pieces by turning it and mixing it. The heat generated from the pile and microorganisms can take months to get into a form that can go back into the soil.

With Lomi, we’re accelerating that process.

What went into making your prototype?

From the beginning, we wanted to make something look good on your countertop. That was a top priority, along with functionality.

We see these devices as becoming ubiquitous. Just like there was a time before dishwashers; now they’re pretty standard.

How do you see the influence of Lomi on a global scale?

In the United States, roughly 100 billion pounds of food waste goes into landfills every year. So we’re taking all this out of the soil and then into landfills instead of back into the earth. And we’re putting around 40 million pounds of synthetic fertilizer to replace all the stuff we’ve stripped out of it. We need to be doing anything we can

Covet: Things we love

to get this valuable resource back into the soil.

I see the price as a barrier for a lot of people. Do you think you’ll offer a more affordable product at some point?

Absolutely, that is the goal. As we scale up, we can bring the price down and make it more accessible. Usually, the first stages of anything are more expensive to make and get it out there. Then, you can work to bring the price down to reach more people.

Brilliant. Any last thoughts?

Our goal is to eliminate 10 billion pounds of waste per year. Each Lomi can process about 1,000 pounds of waste per year, which the average household produces. The average person in the US produces one pound of food waste a day. If there are 10 million devices out there, each doing 1,000 pounds a year, that’s 10 billion pounds of waste. That 10 billion pounds of waste turns into 2 billion pounds of Lomi Earth to replace synthetic fertilizer. That equates to about a million metric tons of CO2 emissions saved a year. At that scale, we can really make a difference.

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Covet: Things we love.

Associate Editor Mandy Coon uses her discerning sensibilities to curate an assortment of unique offerings. Each item in this artful selection is meant to complement the impending cold front and summon the natural beauties of Upstate.

By Mandy Coon Copy Editor Alison Green

Jolie: Filtered Shower Head $165 Beauty may come from within, but those who have witnessed their best hair and skin understand the importance of a reliable shower head. Chlorine, while a necessary guardian against bacteria, can be harsh, and rusty sediments captured from well water leave an invisible and unhealthy residue that collects on skin and walls over time. Jolie seeks to solve this dilemma with a shower head that promises to remove chlorine and other pollutants. The company touts an easy install with results that will nurture healthier hair, clearer skin, and, yes, improve water pressure even in the highest altitudes. It’s all in the little things. jolieskinco.com

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Monastery Made: Attar Floral Repair Concentrate $168 Athena Hewett came to her calling organically, via childhood visits to her grandmother in Greece. There, she learned about herbs and remedies, pressing oils from her grandmother’s grove.

She called on that familial knowledge and her two decades as an esthetician to create a line of skincare that uses the finest and most concentrated form of plant extracts. Of all her products, the Attar Floral Repair Concentrate is a staff favorite. Forgoing traditional balm ingredients, like shea butter and beeswax, Hewitt opts instead for flower waxes, which instantly melt into the skin. The delicious scent is a bonus, transporting users to the luscious fields of the Mediterranean — far away from that driveway waiting to be shoveled. monasterymade.com

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Glissant: Hydratant D’Amour Water Based Lubricant $55 Founded by beauty entrepreneur Renée Garacochea, in collaboration with a urologist specializing in female pelvic medicine, Glissant, meaning “slippery” in French, combines herbology and medical science to enhance women’s sexual wellness. Their debut product, Hydratant D’Amour, is a luxurious lubricant containing hyaluronic acid, L-arginine, lactic acid, and botanical extracts. It’s chemical and hormone-free, while the packaging resembles a tiny bottle of Chanel No5 and ensures the chicest discretion. glissantlove.com

Covet: Things we love

Koala Eco: Starter Cleaning Set $31 Cleaning is not usually linked with words like “luxurious” and “uplifting,” but in this context, that’s precisely the case. Koala Eco’s products are the epitome of eco-friendly cleaning, housed in recycled and recyclable bottles. They don’t compromise on effectiveness, having undergone rigorous lab testing to eliminate 99.99% of germs, bacteria, and viruses.

Additionally, each bottle infuses spaces with the delightful scents of pure Australian essential oils like eucalyptus and mandarin.

The starter set is $10 a bottle, transforming any cleaning routine into something a little more glamorous, or at the very least, less arduous. koalaeco.com

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Jessie Lazar: Pit-fired Vases $65+ Ceramicist Jessie Lazer’s pit-fired vases strike a balance between nature and art. She produces distinctive patterns and vibrant metallic colors on raw clay using a wood-fueled pit fire infused with organic elements like coffee grounds and banana peels. After an eight-hour firing process, each vessel reveals an otherworldly palette influenced by the earth’s elements. Indeed, her designs are a special addition to any home and a testament to allowing the power and unpredictability of nature to inform a work of art. jessielazar.com

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Overland Hudson: Shearling Lined Boots $295 As the chill deepens and schedules become increasingly packed, the allure of shedding rigid footwear in favor of fur moccasins becomes an irresistible daydream. Enter Overland. Crafted in Portugal with a focus on durability and comfort, these expertly made boots feature a generous 12-inch suede shaft, fully enveloped in plush shearling and insulating wool. With a look that marries the elegance of a classic riding boot and the sumptuousness of a cherished slipper, it is a heavenly union indeed. overland.com

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Asceno London: Oat Wool Cashmere Set $860 Asceno’s Oat Set, thoughtfully crafted from sustainable wool and cashmere, strikes a thoughtful balance between style and comfort. Its relaxed silhouette blurs the lines between loungewear and fashion, presenting a winter essential for those who value versatility. With sustainability at its core, this ensemble is a conscious choice that fosters a warm and environmentally responsible approach to winter fashion. asceno.com

Melissa Easton: 10k Gold Friendship Bracelet $525 Designer Melissa Easton revisits the beloved tradition of friendship bracelets, imbued with a sophisticated twist. Each piece is painstakingly handcarved, cast from solid 10K yellow gold, and custom-crafted in the heart of the Catskills. The result is a beautifully unassuming yet exquisite creation, boasting a soft, aged patina. Personalized engraving transforms into a timeless emblem, representing not only friendship or love but also the pride of ownership. melissaeastonjewelry.com

Covet: Things we love

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Quiet Pursuit: What we’re reading In considering the importance of giving our eyes a rest, a swift solution emerges—finding a tranquil space and delving into a book that truly merits our time. Here, we share a selection of our writers’ current favorite reads.

I Love Dick Chris Kraus Hear me out: this book is a delirious, delicious smorgasbord — part heady theory, part juicy memoir. I read it in my early 20s and felt scorched by it. I reread it recently, marked up the margins of almost every page, and was shocked by how much my response to it had changed (or perhaps how much I have changed).

A lightly fictionalized account of a crush turned muse turned obsession that ignites a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker’s desire and encroaches fully upon her work, marriage, and life told through a series of epistolary letters to the titular Dick, the book is honest and incisively raw — about the art world, about sex, about womanhood — to the point of being radical.

It grows to be about something much larger and complicated: the transformative catharsis of female desire, the way it tiptoes between hysteria and ecstasy, and vulnerability, forging self-discovery and creativity. Alison Green

Nutshell Ian McEwan A contemporary Hamlet twist, Nutshell stands apart from McEwan’s usual, like Atonement, with its deliciously deranged tone. The narrator?

An erudite, cynical, droll fetus — Hamlet in the womb, so to speak. It may sound bizarre, even implausible, but McEwan’s mastery of wordplay and wit turns this farcical premise almost ordinary in a hallucinatory sort of way.

The result? A darkly delightful, tongue-in-cheek tale of murder and deceit spun by a modern-day maestro. Mandy Coon

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Participation Anna Moschovakis This gorgeously experimental novel gave me a whole new take on what it means to be in community with other artists. How do relationships based on intellectual affinity and fearless philosophical questing blur into love, or its opposite? How do those affinities shift under the pressures of collective disaster? This was an incredible book to read, having lived through the pandemic and witnessed how it changed our communities. As someone who loves nothing more than to be together with others talking about ideas, I devoured it. Iris Cushing

What If This Were Enough Heather Havrilesky Self-help meets cultural critique. What If This Were Enough? is a brilliant collection of essays

by New York Mag’s “Ask Polly” Columnist Heather Havrilesky. In a time of relentless self-improvement and insatiable consumerism, Havrilesky challenges the notion that happiness lies just beyond our reach, hidden in the next elusive high. Thought-provoking and highly relatable, this is a great read for anyone horrified and intrigued by the complexities of living in the digital age. Jillian Scheinfeld

Lunar Park Bret Easton Ellis I am not currently so much of an Ellis-head that I can locate all of his plot Easter eggs, the ones he drops to link one novel to another years apart, but this is a masterful example of an author pulling together the threads of an entire body of work into one book. No one like Ellis taps as deeply into spiraling mental illness, family baggage, loss, selfforgiveness, and acceptance (whichever comes first). Inside his signature gore, Lunar Park perfectly demonstrates how quickly things can unravel when we ignore the darker parts of our lives, and our family’s lives, in the pursuit of normalcy; and like all his books, you come out of it wondering if anything you ever felt, thought or saw is real. Janet Mercel Quiet Pursuit: What we’re reading

Devotions Mary Oliver The last month has been nothing short of devastating — the world feels as if it is crumbling. I’m not religious, but I needed something of a bible to lean on in these dark hours. Oliver’s very worn, familiar collection of naturalist poems reminds me of the eventual sunrise and the magic of snow, the ebbing seasons, and migratory birds, making me feel more whole and more myself these days.

I often land on page 61. Don’t hesitate: my prayer to the heavens and the soft whisper from on high, always when I need it the most.

Sara Mae Elbert

Lost Children Archive Valeria Luiselli A rumination on love, family, childhood, and belonging, Luiselli is a preeminent voice in contemporary Mexican literature, who tells the story of a couple of sound archivists embarking on a road trip along with their two children from New York to Appalachia during which an immigration crisis of unaccompanied children arises. Combining alternative narratives, photos, maps, poems, and music, the novel explores how we document our experiences and what we choose to remember or forget.

Mariana Barrera Pieck

The Future Naomi Alderman Modern life’s ever-increasing speed seems largely due to technology’s incessant advances, and Alderman takes tech head-on in her newest novel. Driven by self-absorbed billionaires and the powerful people in their orbit trying to navigate a forthcoming apocalypse along with social media’s gift of connection and curse of cruelty, this book shows us what our outlook could be should we stay on this current path.

It’s frightening, thrilling, sad, and optimistic simultaneously. Alderman is a master world builder, and this is no exception. It will give you much food for thought as we rapidly sprint into the future. Faith Cummings

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Lisa Przystup: How to make a home Words and Photography

by Lisa Przystup

The Delhi Farmer’s Market happens every Wednesday.

There’s a booth that strictly sells mushrooms, one that hawks local honey, another with San Marzano tomatoes so red and beautiful and fragrant that their magnetic pull draws you to them before you even know they’re there. If you find yourself holding one in your hand, it’s already too late. You’ll be powerless to do anything less than take it home, slice it up on a cutting board, and drizzle it with olive oil and a pinch of salt before popping its rubied glory into your mouth and muttering exaltations to the outrageous and simple flavors pinging around. There are booths with peaches and strawberries and blueberries and trout and corn in the summer. In the fall, there are squashes — delicata, honeynut, butternut, kabocha — in bins next to apples and constellations of fat, juicy, sticky-sweet concord grapes.

First Person: Lisa Przystup

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“Still, the truth of things, the ventricular muscle that beats at the heart of it all, are the people...”

IN ADDITION to all the bounty, as mentioned earlier, there is also an abundance of conversation to be found circulating around the grassy square in front of town hall. Every Wednesday, as my husband and I head out on the seven-minute walk into town (ten to fifteen minutes if we run into someone we know, like Eddie, who mows lawns and is always up for a chat about music or the weather or any other thing that might be on your mind) we say out loud, “Okay, we’ll be super quick — like, twenty minutes.”

We have yet to meet that mark. Instead, we run into familiar faces, strike up conversations with the farmers who run the booths, and find a patch of sun to eat a taco from the turquoise truck that’s always pulled up alongside the market.

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Where we live is punctuated by rolling hills and ponds and cows and so many other things that, just by mentioning, feel trite and expected, and reduce our universe here to a stereotypical narrative of country life. Still, the truth of things, the ventricular muscle that beats at the heart of it all, are the people and community we’ve found in a town in the Western Catskills, three hours outside of the city, one hour and 45 minutes away from the closest train station (which is folly, really; at that point, you might as well finish the drive you started), and a ten minute drive away from the first farm to pasteurize milk in the United States (or at least that’s what the rusted out historical marker that sits outside the now rundown farm says).

If the people are the beating heart that drives

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connection, these dinners are the proverbial arteries that allow it all to happen. I was talking to a friend about community (how we built one, etcetera). My very first thought was that there wasn’t much about it to wax poetic about. It was simple: we were lucky enough to walk into one that had already been established, one that was supportive, warm, and accessible. One that perhaps doesn’t merit 1,000 words.

She told me about a conversation she recently had with a mutual acquaintance: They were talking about what sets this place apart from, say, the city, and they said something about the fact that they hadn’t opened their wallet to eat dinner in over a week. Which is to say that they had supped at various friend’s homes for seven days and counting. “In the city, you have to spend money to spend time with friends,” they remarked. “Here, you end up going on walks with the dogs or helping them install sump pumps or leaning in on some other random home project. Being upstate is a study in contradiction: being alone but not lonely, having to be fiercely independent while also allowing yourself to rely on your friends.” Part of that means hosting dinner one night and being hosted the next. It means that we’ve all had the good fortune to pull up a seat at a table in someone’s home, pass plates around, and ask for seconds and sometimes thirds while each of us talks about our day or the past week, all while the soft glow of warm light spills out the windows and into the night. It means cleaning up and doing dishes together, stacking and laughing about one thing or another. It means that before you know it, you’ve built a home and a community.

First Person: Lisa Przystup

Our home is an 1893 farmhouse that we found after much searching about seven years ago. While I sat at my office job back in the city, my husband would pepper my inbox with an army of links to houses upstate. Some were dreams come true; others had wall-to-floor-to-ceiling royal blue carpeting that required me to look beyond and utilize my overly active imagination to “look at the bones.” Which, as it turns out, is harder than you might think. In the end, we looked at 19 houses before meeting our house on one of the last weekends of summer. It wasn’t an “aha” moment; there was no magical beam of light that opened up in the skies over the house, but it was a lovely thing perched atop a winding hill — musty smelling and full of potential.

Since then, we’ve planted garlic and dahlias, tended to blueberry bushes, shoveled our steep, windy 600foot driveway umpteenth times, dug friend’s cars out the ditch at the end of the very same driveway, strung Christmas lights, stacked wood, fed fires, sat under the vast quiet of the stars, watched the fireflies, listened to the faraway yips and howls of the coyotes, woken up to 28 inches of the sparkliest snow you ever did see, argued about paint colors, and hosted family and friends.

Part of this ever-continuing home-making cycle includes the turning in that fall asks of us: the pile of wood we stacked in July gets loaded into the basement, the frost-browned plants in the garden get pulled out and composted as we prep the beds for next season, bulbs get dropped into the ground, clocks get turned back, and we start making a list of things we want to do in the spring. This is how our home was made, and this is how it continues to be made.

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“Being upstate is a study in contradiction: being alone but not lonely, having to be fiercely independent while also allowing yourself to rely on your friends.”

Nature Becomes Her. Jodie Patterson

By Faith Cummings Photography by Michael Mundy

Jodie Patterson is proof of how full a life can be. In her fifty-three expansive years, she’s mothered five children, been an acrobat in the Big Apple Circus, directed public relations for a major fashion brand, got married twice, owned a beauty business, wrote a memoir, and the list can quite literally go on and on.

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SHE’S ALWAYS CREATING and forever ideating, but when we finally connect, she’s in both a mellow zone because of the incessant rain New York City is getting, and, concerned about the state of the world in this current moment. “I feel really sad and frustrated about what’s happening because the conversation is so charged and layered that it’s hard to speak freely without upsetting people,” Patterson says. “Many of us are so angry because we’re intersectional with so many identities. It all screams a lack of humanity. Processing war and all the death is really hard.”

But more than virtually anyone, Patterson is equipped to help her community and the world at large navigate this devastating and overwhelming time. She is a master of having crucial conversations — a skill born from the confidence her mother instilled in her and her sister growing up and her journey of self-examination throughout her son’s transition.

These conversations are not just ones she’s having around the globe as she lectures in different board rooms, communities, and hospitals, but discussions she’s also having at home with her children. For Patterson, it’s all about the dose and environment when approaching challenging subjects. “When I give hard-hitting facts or open up a conversation that’s really difficult, I make sure the environment is right.

The dinner table is always good because it’s loving, inclusive — we’re getting fed, and we’re close to each other,” she says.

Family and community are lifelines for Patterson, so she’s steadfastly built hers out of curiosity and a need for an even deeper and more all-embracing understanding of humanity. She’s unabashedly in love with people and says as such because they’ve been her gateways to new worlds. “I always ask them what they know that I don’t know and for them to take me there,” she says. “My curiosity gets the best of me.

Once I found out my daughter was actually my son, I thought, what else in the world don’t I know?”

Patterson used that unknowing in taking on writing her memoir, The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation. At first, it seemed like a self-indulgent journey that she wasn’t compelled to go on. But after realizing she had come to some clarity in her life around unlearning and relearning gender with the help and support of her son, she felt it was important for her to write that down and share it.

Aside from the actual living and learning required to gather the contents of such an endeavor over decades, Patterson also wanted consent from

Groundbreaker: Jodie Patterson

her family before talking in-depth about her life and their roles. “For many years, they said no,” she says.

“So when they started saying yes, I began to share in a very conscious way, only sharing the things we were all okay with. The anonymity that my family needs, I give them. There’s so much to talk about in this world of pro-equality, and I can use the experience from my family and share it as universal truths.”

Upstate New York is just the latest location where Patterson’s community is expanding, after growing up on the Upper West Side and living for years in NYC’s coveted neighborhoods and now Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. After a period away from the region, she was called back to Sullivan County during the pandemic, when she realized congested cities away from nature weren’t where she wanted to spend most of her time. So, she started to dream about the ideal environment for herself and her kids and how she could be there more often. And like everything she set her mind to, she brought it to fruition.

“When you start looking for things, you’ll find them,” Patterson says. “I’m in Forestburgh, and the actual land is perfect. I’ve got a body of water, blueberry bushes, and five acres. I’ve now developed and somewhat created an environment of queer, Black people in a neighborhood that wasn’t that. It was a little bit of timing with the pandemic and a little bit of nature and the universe doing its thing to support me.”

The importance of Patterson owning land as a Black woman and carving out her own space in the world is not lost on her, as it’s an unattainable goal for many. “I had never owned anything until now, and it took a lot to get there,” she says. “I used my last bit of book money, which took a lot of creativity — and that to me was important, that I could do it on my own.”

Patterson started with the basic structure of a barn, which made sense both economically and visually. She had already decided she wanted to spend money bringing nature inside, so she created a double-height wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Her kitchen is full-on industrial, akin to those used in restaurants since she cooks a lot for her family.

“A lot of the design is based on how I operate in life, and what I want and need as a woman is nature,” she says. “I’m never going to overspend just because I like something, so a lot of the decisions were based on economics and where my values are.”

As a creative, upstate is also a refuge where

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“I used my last bit of book money, which took a lot of creativity — and that to me was important, that I could do it on my own”

Patterson can think quietly without music, the pings of social media alerts, and traffic outside her door.

“It’s a huge haven for me to do nothing, and in that nothingness, I could end up writing another book or coming up with a concept as a thinker,” she says of her Forestburgh home. “The time I do nothing up there is the pre-work and quiet work for all the heavy lifting I do as a mom, activist, and writer. It’s a good reminder every day to behave in sync with nature. We have to be immersed in it, or else we create an artificial existence.”

No matter where she is, though, Patterson is committed to taking care of herself so she can continue to fight and show up as her best self. She runs two miles almost every day outside in the streets of whatever place she’s in, followed by an equal period of stretching.

Style is also a powerful practice Patterson spends a reasonable amount of time on, which is dictated by her mindset and mood. Her hairstyle may drastically change from a pixie haircut to a straight bob to long, bohemian box braids. And her fashion choices may range from a menswear-inspired plaid shirt and corduroys to a glamorous gown for a gala. “How I want to perform and present to the world needs something to get it going,” Patterson says. “I use my style to get me ready for the fight I’m a part of.”

Then, Patterson leans into her care rituals that involve others, including how much alone time she has and how that harmonizes with caring for her children. She and her ex-husband share that caretaking in thirty-day increments, which allows Patterson to think, travel, write, and take meetings at different times. “I used to think I had to be with my kids all the time as a mom,” she says. “And now I know that untethering from my kids and social norms around what women are supposed to do is one of the biggest forms of self-care and drivers of my success.”

And the future is bright for Patterson as she gears up for one of her biggest and most visible projects yet—developing her memoir into a television series with HBO called Starfish. Nicole Ari Parker has already signed on to play Patterson in a story centered around a devoted mother and wife who realizes so many needs to change in her world after one of her children tells her, ‘I’m not a girl. I’m

a boy.’ “It’s in line with all the classic family stories, but it’s not nice,” Patterson says. “It’s combustible and complicated with a Black single woman at the head of this queer family and the journey she takes her family on. It’s set in New York City and goes into gender, race, and identity. I’m telling it only from the perspective I know.”

Patterson believes there’s so much space on both the big and small screen to tell new and unique stories about single women and those about queer families that aren’t steeped in sadness. She wants to create art showing adults listening to the younger generation and genuinely believing collaboration is the way forward. Patterson sees many women tapping into the power of sharing their journey, and she considers this feminine approach to creativity, imagination, and leadership as the new form of influence.

She calls it “genderless mothering,” and she’s already teaching in her keynotes around the country and abroad to different communities and organizations. Patterson is seeing just how much her perspective as a mother adds value to every room she’s in, and she knows hers is part of a long and compassionate lineage of mothering in the Black and queer communities and all their intersections.

“Mothering is the way forward, and I’ve seen some of the best mothering done in the queer community by brothers, by non-biological mothers, and even in the boardroom at the Human Rights Campaign,” she says. “Anyone can learn the skill sets of Black women and the queer community, and they can bring it into their communities. Anyone can raise a community and raise a person against the odds, even with the current state of affairs of the world.”

Patterson is using her energy in this next stage to mother others, mother concepts, and mother her communities, whether in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Forestburgh, or worldwide. She isn’t exactly sure where this path will take her, but with all the other roads she’s traversed, she’s unafraid to take the challenge head-on. With the people she loves around her and nature close by so she can recharge, think, and create, Patterson is sure to unearth something new and unknown and share it with all of us for our betterment once she’s grasped it.

“... It’s a good reminder every day to behave in sync with nature.

We have to be immersed in it, or else we create an artificial existence.”

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Patterson opted for a barn-inspired structure that was economically and visually sensible.

Incorporating nature with a double-height wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, she designed her home with her family’s needs in mind.

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In Harvesting Dreams: Mary Kate Chillemi

By Mariana Barrera Pieck Photography by Moriah Aslan

There’s a saying: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But for Mary Kate Chillemi, who established Thousand Leaf Gardens, along with her partner Chris Hausman, back in 2017, it was not so much the tree but the roots that she fell close to. A native of Tarrytown, New York, Chillemi is the oldest of seven children. She was born into a large family of Irish and Sicilian descent, who had a substantial dairy farm that was started in 1900 in Hudson Falls, New York, called Hogan Family Dairy.

Of The Soil: Mary Kate Chillemi

A B OV E : The Hogan Family Dairy Farm once had over 800 head of cattle.

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THE FARMING SEED was planted in the old world, four generations before hers. Her greatgrandmother, of Scottish descent, was working in her family’s bakery in Glasgow when she met Chillemi’s great-grandfather from Ireland, a dairy farmer who supplied the milk to the bakery. After falling in love, they immigrated to the United States and established the family business that would shape Chillemi’s destiny a century later. They had 14 children, one of whom was Chillemi’s mother, Ann Delaney Chillemi.

At its peak, the dairy farm had over 800 head of cattle, and her mom grew up driving tractors, inseminating cows, and breaking horses. Despite growing up as a farm girl, Chillemi’s mother was of a generation brought up to seek a more comfortable life. Consequently, she went on to study education, working as the Associate Vice President of Fordham University Lincoln Center for 25 years.

The farm would eventually shut down in 1994 (but the family kept the land, and they — the 14 siblings with their 86 offspring — still get together every four years). Stories about the farming days were often shared over meals with Chellemi, but it was never suggested that she, or any of her siblings or cousins, follow that path.

Quite the contrary. Perhaps, Chillemi considers, it was because the dairy industry has been very demanding, forcing farmers to schedule and prioritize weddings (and even funerals) around the milking of the cows.

In a path mirroring her mother’s, Chillemi attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn shortly after high school, studying creative writing.

When she graduated in 2009, the recession hit; jobs became scarce, while grad school presented itself as an option to tinker around.

Once enrolled, she realized that it wasn’t for her. When her then-boyfriend had been accepted to St. Andrews University in Scotland, Chillemi jumped at the opportunity to join him and immerse herself in a new environment.

What she didn’t anticipate was that it would completely alter the course of her life.

They moved into a quaint 1800s cottage by the North Sea in the fall of 2011, where they had to heat the water on a wood-burning stove just to shower. It was so remote, Chillemi recounts, that it literally felt like the edge of the earth. But the room was very cheap, and it happened to be on a beautiful farm owned by an old man who grew barley and grains for whiskey. While her former boyfriend attended school, Chillemi searched Merlette dress and skirt (worn as poncho)

Cultivated: Mary Kate Chillemi

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“Stories about the farming days were often shared over meals with Chellemi, but it was never suggested that she, or any of her siblings or cousins, follow that path.”

ABOVE: Chillemi at a farmers market in New York City.

P R E V I O U S PAG E : Merlette dress and skirt worn as poncho. T H I S PAG E : Merlette dress, model’s own shirt and cardigan.

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for jobs at the University. As it turned out, St. Andrews had a great sustainability program, and through friends she met there, she began to take an interest and immersed herself in the field.

Amidst the lush landscape of her newfound life, and tending to her modest garden, Chillemi grappled with the profound question of what she wanted her future to look like. She continued to learn about sustainability and slow food and began playing with the policy side of agriculture.

Through St. Andrews University, she met with more individuals who helped nurture her interests and opened up a new world of possibilities with conversations extending over long walks in the forest, foraging, hiking, and pontificating the source of food. Inspired, by the summer of 2013, Chillemi moved to Italy alone to work on the farms there with nothing more than a backpack.

The weather in Piedmont, Italy, upon arrival, was warm and the air sweet. It was the beginning of the farming season, in June, and Chillemi had taken an interest in livestock. Through the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms Association (WWOOF), she connected with Mario and Isa, a couple on the board of Slow Food Italy who owned Finocchio Verde, a farm specializing in traditional cheese from the region, with a closed ecosystem where everything was grown on-site.

On Chillemi’s first morning there, she was given a shepherd staff and introduced to her working partner, a young man named Lorenzo, who did not speak an ounce of English. Chillemi, far from fluent in Italian herself, made it work.

Together, every morning, they herded 90 sheep and 30 goats for two hours to a field without any fencing and then, somehow, miraculously brought them back to the farm to milk them by hand. Despite her inexperience (and the calluses and blisters), she took to it very naturally.

Chillemi learned how to make cheese at Finocchio Verde, but since she didn’t really enjoy it, she began using her “free time” working with Tizziano, the farmhand. Between pasturing and milking in the mornings and evenings, she learned how to weed the garden and prune tomato plants. She liked it so much that she ventured out to Bologna to a vegetable co-op run by a group of young people, where she lived in a tent for weeks and made like-minded friends.

She spent a few weeks in Sicily, where her

family had come from. During a short break, she stumbled upon a book by Mary Taylor Simeti, an American writer and historian who has written extensively about the Italian island.

As fate would have it, while researching on the WWOOF website, the author’s name came up again. Chillemi decided that she had to reach out. A few days later, she found herself living on Simeti’s farm run by her daughter, Natalia.

Chillemi observed and became impressed to see a woman running the entire farming business, from winemaking to growing olives and producing a variety of vegetables. After working on a wine harvest with Natalia, Chillemi’s own path was sealed.

She flew back to Scotland, packed up her things, convinced that farming was her calling.

Shortly after arriving home in New York, she took on a job at Fishkill Farms, where she absorbed everything, from driving tractors to building crop plans to understanding the farming business. It was there that she met her soon-to-be husband, who had come from Colorado and had extensive farming experience, starting as a teenager on farms in Panama to Peru, Greece, Ecuador, Colorado, and California.

In less than a year, Chillemi and Hausman left Fishkill Farm to lease their own land.

Recently, the couple purchased a 20-acre property in Gardiner, New York, where they live in a multi-generational home with her parents and are expecting their first daughter. They plan to extend the farm operations, following Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy on biodynamic agriculture that Chillemi was introduced to in 2014 by her farming peers and her partner, which they have applied to their practices since they started Thousand Leaf Gardens. This approach puts a lot of thoughtfulness into farming, and there is not one way to do it.

According to Chillemi, there is an interconnectedness and a spiritual side in biodynamic agriculture, too, which is that the practice considers the greater cosmic cycles of the whole earth. There are moon cycles, planetary cycles, and seasonal cycles, all of which play a part in how this living creature, the entire ecosystem, changes and operates and how they work with the land to make it the healthiest it can be. Everything has a purpose and a place, and for Chillemi and Hausman, the goal is to create the best environment for all to thrive.

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Who knows where the time goes: Returning to Tivoli Marianne Rendón

By Alison Green Photography by Emily Winiker

It’s a damp and rainy day in late October. The tree branches are spindly and bare; the gray sky is mottled with birdsong. The season is changing, as it always does. Marianne Rendón walks down the main road of the tiny Hudson Valley village that, a little over a decade ago, felt like the center of her world. They say you can’t go home again, but there are some places you outgrow and some places that grow with you, claiming a corner of your internal landscape and imprinting on who you are by reminding you of who you were. For Rendón, a seasoned and successful actor who splits her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, this place is Tivoli.

Daytripper: Marianne Rendón

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“I’m on a path right now of learning how to find the surrender in everything.

Letting go of control, being more open to not knowing.”

“ I LOVE THE HUDSON VALLEY so much. When I do guided meditations that ask you to imagine a beautiful, idyllic place, it’s here that I think about,” she says dreamily. She speaks with the warm and easy intensity of someone to whom thoughtfulness comes naturally. You get the feeling that she has lived many lives, and is grateful for each one.

With a steady career in film (such as Mapplethorpe and Charlie Says) and television (such as Imposters and In the Dark) under her belt, and roles in four films slated to release this year, Rendón recently found herself on an unintentional pilgrimage back to where it all began. Last summer, she shot a film in Tivoli, the quaint and artsy town she lived in during her formative years studying theater at nearby Bard College. Ironically, the film – titled Summer Solstice – follows two best friends from college as they reunite and attempt to reconcile their old friendship against their new and changing lives. I can’t even visit my old college campus without becoming a moony mess of nostalgia - returning to your collegiate stomping grounds for the first time in ten years to shoot a movie about college best friends feels almost too serendipitous and surreal to bear, like a recoccuring fever dream come to life. “Oh my god, it was so

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emotional when I first came up here – it’s amazing what instantly came back to me,” she says. “Just the way the light falls in the trees. There’s this one clearing on [Route] 9G between Bard and Tivoli that opens up and you see the Catskills and there’s just something about it – I’ve never seen light like that anywhere else in my life.”

Seasons change, and people do, too, but no matter how much we grow and evolve and how many past selves we shed, there will always be things that transport us right back to the wide-eyed person we used to be: a house, a meal, a scent, a song, a soft bend of fading light. In Tivoli, Rendón saw her old self everywhere, and found it beautiful but bittersweet, that vivid double-edged sword of memory. “When I’m here I feel like I’m investigating who that person was, how far away I am from that person, and how moved I am by that person still.

I had so much time to dream and romanticize.

This place does that to you. There’s this beautiful walk between here and campus called Tivoli Bays.

In college, I had an acid trip through there with my best friend – these are things that change you.

There’s a memory on every corner here. I mean, it’s just one street, but there’s a lot to remember. I’m unraveling all that now.”

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Rendón was raised in New Rochelle, NY (“City kids would never say I was a city kid because I took the Metro North. But I would go to punk shows at ABC No Rio on the LES. I was really into the hardcore scene in the early aughts.”) by parents who molded their lives around making and loving music. Her mother was a vocalist in the concert performances of the composer and “icon of musical theater” Marvin Hamlisch, and her father was a sound engineer for live performances.

Rendón grew up playing the piano and guitar and dancing, two creative outlets that she still practices to this day and feed into her film and theater work. “I’m so grateful my parents exposed me to all that stuff.

When I’m dancing, I think so much about acting, and when I’m acting, I think so much about music. There’s a rhythm in language. And each shot has its own rhythm.”

At Bard, she danced flamenco under experimental dance legend Aileen Passloff, played in an all female feminist country band, and grounded herself by playing music before every theater performance. “I’ve done that since a young age. Even my first plays, I would always play piano before going onstage because it was a kind of meditation. I always bring my guitar when I go on location.” To this day, music looms large in her life and her work – though the music she makes now is purely for herself. “I need something that’s just mine.

Something that is my soul. No one can buy it.” She tells me about an impressionistic film she shot in Costa Rica last year, with a script as sparse as a poem, and how her main way of preparing to embody her character was through a score she created for herself. And what score would bring her right back to her halcyon days in Tivoli ten years ago? “Who Knows Where the Time Goes by Fairport Convention. Or the entirety of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Music is our greatest time machine.”

After college, she left idyllic, Hudson-hugging Tivoli and landed in New York City, where she got her MFA at Julliard and threw herself into her career, garnering praise for playing a handful of characters who embodied a certain intensity. I ask what draws her to a role: “Ideally, something I’ve never done before. The ideal for me is to have a new challenge. I love rigor, and I love a kind of muscularity in crafting something so I’m drawn to more psycologically intense circumstances because it’s just a kind of heightenedness. I also do a lot of comedy and that’s rigorous too, in that it’s incredibly technical.” There is a seriousness to her tone when she speaks about her craft, that Julliard-trained razor focus

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that has kept her working steadily for the past eight years peeking through. But then she lights up as she begins talking about a creative dance project she is working on with a former classmate from Bard, choreographer Lisa Fagan. “I did a lot of her choreography pieces at Bard and we just did a piece we’re working on at Prelude Festival, which is a really great work-in-progress experimental dance and art festival. She has these scores that are somewhat improvisatory and you rely so much on your physical goofiness - I find it only works when you dive face first and don’t know what’s going to happen.”

There is a thread I pick up on as Rendón and I get deeper into the story of past and present selves, a thread that she herself seems to be unraveling as well. She is working on her health, letting go of the trajectory she expected her career to have, and prioritzing building community and making art with the people she loves. “I’m on a path right now of learning how to find the surrender in everything,” she explains. “Letting go of control, being more open to not knowing. Which is interesting because it’s such an essential part of acting. When acting is really alive is when you’re at your most unsure of what will happen next. But it’s hard for me to be in that place.”

As for what will happen next, it seems like she has some strong leads. She is recently engaged, and she’d like to be a mother. She wants to become a death doula. She wants to rest and regulate her nervous system. She is excited about her current theater project, which is starring in Sarah Gancher’s musical adaptation of Pushkin’s novel, Eugene Onegin, which she describes as a bluegrass “beer chamber musical” they hope to perform at bars or around a campfire or upstate on a farm. Talking to Rendón, you feel like you’re witnessing someone on the precipice, or at the center of, an evolution of self, a creative restrucuring. It’s a telling time to be

pulled back upstate to bucolic Tivoli, to remember the influence it had on the building blocks of her artistic life. Many of her classmates put down roots after graduating; she runs into people every time she returns. Maybe someday she’ll buy a place up here. “I would treat the community really well,” she says, almost as if to herself. I believe her.

I ask her if there’s anything she would tell that younger self today, basically whispering the question because it feels too personal, too complicated. I’m not sure I would have known how to answer, but she responds immediately with a laugh and her usual openness. “I can see myself just walking down the street with my horrible boots with eight holes in them. I would love to tell her that I’m doing the thing I always wanted to do. I feel like I have to learn from her at this moment because she was so free in her art. I didn’t have a ton of voices in my head back then. I just had a quality of courage and I would throw myself into things. She has a lot to teach me right now.”

Rendón is in town for a whirlwind twenty four hour roadtrip, visiting friends and waiting out the rain at the cozy Hotel Tivoli. Tonight, she has a reservation at Stissing House in nearby Pine Plains, a colonial tavern serving rustic seasonal fare by candlelight – she’s been dying to go. Eventually she’ll leave this place that holds so many of the memories that shaped her past self, and head back to Brooklyn, towards her present life and future self. After all, she and I agree that we carry all our past lives and loves inside us – they’re always there to remind us, to ground us, to teach us. Look no further than the last lines of the song that sums it all up for her: So come the storms of winter/and then the birds in spring again/I have no fear of time/For who knows how my love grows?/And who knows where the time goes?

“…you see the Catskills and there’s just something about it; I’ve never seen light like that anywhere else in my life.”

Daytripper: Marianne Rendón

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The Colorful World of Christi Johnson

By Jillian Scheinfeld Photography by Stephan Schacher

Christi Johnson has visions.

Last week, she conjured an eight-armed deity with the flowing locks of a goddess. Yesterday, it was a boy emerging from a lotus flower. “A lot of the time, I see these images in my head, and then I go look them up. The process is sort of backward,” she tells me one late Autumn day at her house in Swan Lake, New York.

Mother Nature: Christi Johnson

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A DESIGNER , embroidery artist, author, and

educator, Johnson is a self-described figure-it-out

things out of landfills that are perfectly fine.”

kind of person. Be it repurposing an old scrap of

That “we” refers to Johnson’s other half,

fabric, fixing up a foreclosed house, or bringing a

Nicholas, a carpenter and musician she met at a

warped chair back to life, Johnson is perpetually

yoga, African drumming, and belly dancing fusion

engrossed in the act of creation.

class 8 years ago. Quickly after, they realized their

She greets me at the entrance of her home

shared desire to be together and live in a way

with her ridiculously adorable 8-month-old

that was closer to the earth. They wanted to have

daughter, Juno, who is comfortably nestled on the

more space, time to make art and garden and be

makeshift edge of her fanny pack. Her house is

able to build their lives from rescued materials. It

drenched in a kaleidoscope of color, with various

became unmistakably clear that their desires were

tapestries adorning the walls and plants bathing

intrinsically aligned with life in the Catskills.

in the early evening sun. The house radiates an

“I just love that there is so much physical space

unmistakable warmth reminiscent of Johnson’s

up here that leads to having more mental space. In

Mother Gaia-like energy.

the summer, there’s so much going on, but come

“We joke around and say we’re saving the world one piece of paper at a time,” she says after Jonhson’s life upstate is a masterclass in the art of unhurried living.

or make it into something better. We try to keep

winter, I really enjoy having that time to just kind of dawdle,” she says.

I ask if she knitted a seat cover to mask an old

While Johnson happily leans into the empty

stool in her studio. “When people are getting rid

expanses of time during the long Catskill winters,

of something, I can save it from turning into trash

she’s much more of a doer than a dawdler. In 2021,

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“I just love that there is so much physical space up here that leads to having more mental space.”

she published her first book, Magical Stitches,

fabric over to Juno to keep her occupied. “With

a DIY exploration of embroidery as a tool for

embroidery, even if it looks funky or wonky, it

personal empowerment and transformation.

doesn’t feel like it needs to be perfect.”

Presently, she’s teaching online courses through

Knowing that Johnson is a student of

a platform called Mixed Color, a portal into the

slow living, I had to ask her if she ever buys

many layers of her experimental textile studio.

clothes. Punctuated with laughter, she tells me

Her class, “Soft Work,” is a beginners’ course for

she loves supporting independent designers,

learning intuitive garment construction based on

with an honorable mention of MayerWasner

zero-waste concepts. Eschewing the Eurocentric

in Narrowsburg, New York. “Knowing how to

model of clothing design in favor of styles that

make clothes means I understand what goes

move with the body (think kimonos, saris, and

into an article of clothing.” Earlier in her career,

kaftans), Johnson teaches her students how to

she worked for veteran fashion designer Rozae

translate their own measurements into comfy,

Nichols when she first encountered the dark

freely-fitting styles. Subsequently, she’s working

realities of fast fashion. “I would see the amount of

on a second book full of sketch and stitching

fabric that would end up in a bin and bring them

experiments to encourage budding artists to

home. I still have yards and yards of fabric left.

develop their own designs.

The smaller the scrap, the more time it takes to

It is no surprise that Johnson has designed her clothing since elementary school. “My mom

figure out how to repurpose it.”

Quietly playing for an hour straight, it seemed

was always making stuff. Every blanket I have in

that her daughter, Juno, may have set a new

here she’s crocheted, like the one behind you,”

record for the world’s chillest baby. Eventually,

she says and points to a beautiful blanket where

her patience waned, and it was time for a diaper

I’m resting my head. While Juno plays happily

change and a walk in the garden. Johnson gently

with a ribbon on the f loor, my eyes are besieged

guides me through the kitchen, where I spot a

by color. Sitting on a ‘60s-esque f loral couch, I

table lavished with a cornucopia of raw splendor:

mentally download the vibrant clutter of crafts

lemon balm, tomatillos, and strawberries.

and textures abound. There are myriad books,

Naturally, when I inquire about the fate of the

with titles like The Book of Symbols, Witching Hour,

lemon balm, Johnson points to a rotating treasure

and The Fabric of Civilization. There are spools of

chest brimming with botanical remedies. There’s

thread in every color under the sun, shelves upon

apple mint, yarrow, chamomile, homemade

shelves of fabric, and a table showing off some of

passionf lower, and elderberry tinctures.

Johnson’s meticulously crafted works-in-progress, all ensconced by an embroidery hoop.

While creativity may be Johnson’s birthright,

With arms wrapped around Juno, Johnson carefully steps into her clogs with maternal grace.

Her f lowy checkered skirt animates against the

it was during the frenzy of designing for a

breeze as she walks towards her own Eden. I

brand called Coastwide in Los Angeles that she

follow, taking a visual inventory of the bounty

stumbled upon embroidery as her preferred

that surrounds us, as she leads me to a lush and

medium. There, she was tasked to guide

incredibly professional-looking garden with

manufacturers in producing the illusion of

rows of leafy collard greens, cabbages the size of

handcrafted embroidery on denim shirts. “We

bowling balls, asparagus, rose bushes, zinnias,

were making these machine embroideries look

and so much more — a true garden variety.

like they were hand done. So while I was studying

Bending down and snapping off a collard green

how different hand-embroidered stitches were

stem, Johnson hands it to Juno as a teether and

made, I became obsessed with embroidery in such

stashes some greens in her fanny pack for later.

an intimate way,” she says, handing a new piece of

“We’re going to keep this and make bolognese for

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“Living upstate, there are so many things in my daily life that become like a meditation.”

LEFT: Johnson sources the majority of her

food from her garden and additionally tends to a f lock of chickens.

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dinner,” she says declaratively. “Living upstate,

so much invested in ensuring we have enough

there are so many things in my daily life that

food for the year, so it’s nice to have some fun

become like a meditation. You know, cooking

with it. It doesn’t all have to have a purpose. It

three meals a day — I feel like I spend four

makes it more of an art,” she says. Still, I can see

hours of my day cooking.”

the cogs in her brain as she considers what lies

As we stop and sniff some lemon balm,

ahead for the gourds. She pauses for a moment,

I notice the garden’s pièce de résistance, a

mentally sketching the possibilities, and adds,

collection of bottle gourds. “We always have a

“In the end, we’ll probably dry them out, poke

few plants that we grow just for fun. There’s

holes in them, and turn them into birdhouses.”

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Undaeruptat volupta tiusam, aut omni occusam, quam in non res as et quia abore la dolupta quist, utassum nis ium veni dit quam fuga. Ficatiissi dolore perum volent ut utemporis consequi nostect orporuntet magnimolorum sit pliti ulpa cum, conecta culpari tatiaeribus quissiti accuptatint autem re volut maio. Tem rem quodipsuntem doluptatur?

Pedit quiae et oditatet auta sitat acea coresciis aut re lam quiassit labo. Lessim qui repe ped quat millectem in eum ideliti unt etur?

Nis eat eaquunt et, con por simuscidem fugia dolutat ecturep udanduc ilique sam qui quam audaeptatur?

Quiducit que doluptatusam invelia sunt voluptiae voluptae volore eaque laut ut quiandenis acea quia consenestias quae plit recus andigni maximin vellut omnimilit atet dolo mos atis digenis si nosande lloraep eribusam eum doloreperia eleniti atia quid qui odi reris is exeritam, eaquiates est quosandae doluptas entibus aut peles rempor same num quidus et ut dunt audis di int re simus nonsequi auta debit etur aperferovid quaspis id mos eatem et aut accaboribus, nihitis dolesci lluptat.

Cea sinctoratus eum que del mosa cullit quam quid eumquaeped es most labo. Oviderf erumquam ipis di te repudae quasimini con nos re sam quaepro di ipid mo di omnis serchil iquam, que ipsunt quate derchic iusaperepro eum ipienis aboritio temperrorum ipsam eni auta con ped mos ut in nia volumquas et fugit vid que labore maxim dolorem eicianimi, ut aspellab il eum aditiisquam estia perovitatus estotam repeliquias incit laccaecustem veriatur, et quodi doluptat vol Upstate Woman

i nusdae nimporesse sitatiunt volest accae occusda nobiscient id qui berae preste officipsant.

Icilit fuga. U

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Emily Johnston: Integrity of An Artist

By Iris Cushing Photography by Lawrence Braun

Walking up the steps of the old Victorian house in Bovina Center where Emily Johnston’s studio is located, I hear the subtle rush of the Little Delaware River behind me and feel the presence of the old, maple-and-hemlock-covered mountains to the north and south. The vibrance of this place follows me into the studio, where Johnston greets me with a hug and a grin; there’s a wise quietude in her gaze as she moves around her studio, its table laid with marble and granite mortar-and-pestles, handmade naturalpigment pastels, and jars of oak gall ink.

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Upstate Woman

Cultivated: Mary Kate Chillemi

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A BOV E: Johnston creates a direct relationship with the earth to make her pigments, transmuting that relationship into images.

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THE ARTIST has just returned from Rome. There, she spent a week transforming stones, dirt, and minerals into pigments, using methods humans have practiced for thousands of years. On the table, I notice a palette carved from found Italian cypress wood, each of its wells filled with a different delicate tone. Beside that, there’s a series of pens and brushes made from swan and goose feathers. Johnston shows me a notebook filled with daily drawings done with these pigments, some abstract and some depicting landscapes.

I look up from the table and let my eyes rest on the walls, hung with Johnston’s newest body of paintings: shapes that are alive with warmth and strangeness dance over raw canvas and sheets of hemp paper. Then my eyes move to the window, to the mountains and sky, the sound of the river, and the continuity becomes clear.

“When I moved upstate, I wanted to make work with my body and be creating in relationship with natural elements,” says Johnston, who moved to the Western Catskills

from New York City in 2015. “In hindsight, I can see that I was looking for a way to make work with the actual earth, not just about nature or the landscape.”

Johnston’s arrival at pigment-making feels like a homecoming of sorts. Although she’s American, Johnston grew up in Paris, moving to the outskirts of Chicago for college.

Her career as an artist began with largeformat photography; she worked for years in both film and digital mediums, showing her work in New York’s East Village and various artist spaces upstate. She’s traveled through Mexico, Nicaragua, California, and the Pacific Northwest, observing the earth’s patterns along the way. The network of processes and ideas she encountered through photography led her transition into working in collage and, from there, into drawing and mixed media. (I was lucky enough to view Johnston’s inaugural exhibition of drawings, Returning – pieces full of motion, gesture, and organic mystery – last year in Delhi, New York.) On a trip to New

Upstate Woman

“When I moved upstate, I wanted to make work with my body and be creating in relationship with natural elements.”

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Mexico earlier this year, Johnston decided to try out mixing her own pigment from the copper-colored soil and realized she’d found the direct connection between the earth and her art practice that she’d been looking for.

The aura of delicacy and quietness encoded in Johnston’s palettes of earth pigments opens up within the planes of her paintings, expanding into a bright liveliness of gesture that is all her own. While I’m seated at her studio table, she shows me a series of paintings based on the figures of ancient fertility goddesses. These works on paper feature hovering figures painted with pigments made from blue and gray stones found on the bank of the Little Delaware outside Johnston’s studio. Some of the figures are dotted with pigment made from ochre-colored minerals taken from a bauxite mine in Puglia, Italy.

Johnston intentionally layers pigments from various locations in the same painting as a way to acknowledge the convergences and disruptions that happen to the earth itself– the land is mined, extracted from, and the energies of those extractive acts remain with us. These paintings are documents of the artist’s journey but also of the earth’s journey.

She describes her choice to represent ancient fertility goddesses as a meditation on human acts of violence against the feminine. This strikes me as an especially profound way of making art with the body: Johnston creates a direct, intentional relationship with the earth to make her pigments, transmuting that relationship into images that are at once haunting and lifeaffirming.

Johnston catalogs each of her pigments in a notebook, recording the location and date where the material was found, as well as any information on the material itself. The descriptions in Johnston’s notebook become tiny, intimate poems: “Where the earth was open to make/ our driveway. This sliver was exposed. When/ I dripped water on the dry pigment/ it smelled like rain. Like leaves in late fall. May 2023.” A poetic energy pervades Johnston’s work, where color and image operate in tandem with language and bio-

Cultivated: Emily Johnston

regional knowledge. Pigment-making has been an initiation for Johnston into studying the natural history of the Catskills. Becoming pregnant with her son in 2019 and learning that her son’s ancestors were among the first European settlers to come to this part of New York heightened Johnston’s commitment to getting to know this place we call home.

Her eyes light up as she tells me some of the story of the stones she finds for her pigments along the Little Delaware–380 million years ago; the place we’re sitting was an ocean, and some of these stones were on the bottom of the sea bed. Other stones were glacial erratics left by glaciers that formed during the last ice age. As she’s learned this history, Johnston has also cultivated an ability to listen to the land as she’s working with it — she only uses stones that she finds loose, for instance, never digging or prying stones out of place. She mixes her pigments with water from the places where the pigment was found. She tells me that she also occasionally finds herself putting back stones that she senses don’t want to be taken. She describes this sense as “the integrity of intuition” — an integrity that inquires, persistently, into the relationship of care between the artist’s body and the earth.

Seeing how Johnston creates her materials, I perceive a rich, glowing layer beneath the surface of the paintings in her studio, as vivid as a rocky substrate. Within the vessels and tools of her beautiful studio, the depth of Johnston’s conceptual engagement with her work means that her pictures are always enmeshed with history and ritual. Gesture emerges as an essential thread of continuity between the artist and her work: even Johnston’s gaze and mannerisms are suffused with a sense of care, a warm, easygoing intentionality. There’s a direct line between her physical presence and her embodied acts of making in dialogue with the earth. As the earth’s gestures move through millions of years of transformation, this artist creates gestures in her work that reaffirm a central fact: she has so much to learn from this land.

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“...I was looking for a way to make work with the actual earth, not just about nature or the landscape.”

Johnston intentionally layers pigments from various locations in the same painting as a way to acknowledge the convergences and disruptions that happen to the earth.

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Upstate Woman

Upstate Swedish Words and Photography by Barbara de Vries This feature presents an excerpt from the author’s latest book, Upriver Home, now gracing the shelves of bookstores countrywide.

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TOM GREW UP in northern England and Scotland, and Anna [his wife] spent much of her childhood in the countryside near Gothenburg, Sweden, so it isn’t surprising that they felt at home in the foothills of the Catskills, with its rugged farmland and endless forests, waterfalls, and streams. While still working nine-to-five jobs in New York City, Anna and Tom escaped to Upstate whenever they could, renting various cabins, farmhouses, and converted barns. “We would be sitting around the fire, dreaming up plans and looking at real estate online,” Tom says.

“Eventually, we found these two very dilapidated, almost terrifying-looking buildings on the edge of Livingston Manor.” The property also contained six hundred feet of New York’s Willowemoc Creek, the famous fly-fishing river that connects Livingston Manor and Roscoe.

“Over the first six months, a gaggle of friends who were excited at trading a keyboard for a sledgehammer, shovel, or paintbrush helped us out,” Tom says. In addition to restoring the house, Anna and Tom were also constructing dining tables, tents, and a sauna on the river. When they completed the work, they invited their helpers to enjoy the fruits

Home Spun: Upstate Swedish

of their labor. At the celebration, everyone realized that other friends would also love a Livingston Manor fly-fishing experience. “It was always meant as a house for ourselves with a view to creating a space to share with friends,” Anna says. The success of the “Fly-Fishing Club” came as a bit of a surprise and forced them to rethink their lives in the city.

They were creating a year-round destination, a bed and breakfast nature retreat of sorts, with not only fly-fishing but hiking trails, saunas, outdoor cooking, and cozy indoor living spaces.

Once they’d committed to the country full-time, Anna and Tom needed more space for themselves and bought a small Victorian house nearby, which they named the Lady Pomona. In no time, it became a bed and breakfast, too, and they were on the lookout again. “We realized that we needed to create a more sustainable life for ourselves, a home of our own, and not something we capitalized,” Anna says.

Meanwhile, many regular guests bought their own properties and came to Anna and Tom for help with the renovation, design, and decorating of their new homes. This led to Homestedt, Anna and Tom’s studio for their budding interior design business and a store for their favorite home goods.

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“To get the right quality is often a question of precision and patience, and we’ve learned a lot from each other.”

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“It was always meant as a house for ourselves with a view to creating a space to share with friends.”

Upstate Woman

“We realized that we needed to create a more sustainable life for ourselves, a home of our own, and not something we capitalized.”

Upriver Home, Barbara de Vries’s new book published in 2023 by Rizzoli.

Driving home one day, only minutes away from Lady Pomona, Tom spotted a new ‘For Sale by Owner’ sign. “I knew Anna was walking our dog, Biscuit, on the trail behind the property, so I called her and was like, ‘Get in the car. I found our next home,’” he says. A few minutes later, they pulled up to an old ranch house with vinyl siding. “It was ugly and suffocated by trees, but it had this beautiful stream running by it,” Anna says. They ultimately gutted the ranch house up to the roof and down to the foundation, changing its identity entirely.

Whereas their first two historic properties were inspired by the British country homes of Tom’s youth — old beams, wallpaper, antiques, traditional paintings, leather couches, and dark wooden floors — the new house was inspired by Anna’s roots. “Tom always liked the Scandinavian aesthetic, and I really wanted pale wood on the walls,” Anna says. After some searching, they found a local lumberyard that would mill their planks to size using affordable basswood. “We’ve somehow managed to create a Scandinavian Japanese minimalist space inside a North American ranch house,” Tom laughs. The walls of paneled windows, open spaces, and neutral furniture emphasize the seasons as they evolve around the house, from the cool brightness of spring to the deep green of summer, the rich foliage of fall, and the whiteness of winter. “I no longer have the urge to leave in the morning,” Anna says, “It feels like I’m already outside.”

As a result of their seemingly boundless creative energy, Anna and Tom’s business evolved from Airbnb hospitality to a significant design studio that restores and builds homes. Homestedt’s first big design project was the Boarding House at Seminary Hill, a boutique hotel in the former Callicoon General Hospital, which had been derelict for some time. They gutted both buildings, reimagined the rooms with private bathrooms and kitchenettes, and created interiors that feel authentic and homey.

In an ongoing quest to create the perfect place, using the experience of restoring a dozen local homes, Anna and Tom designed the Homestedt House, a partially modular structure that comes in several sizes and layouts and can be constructed within six months. “We built the first one on a mountain, with really great views and access to a lake,” Tom says.

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The two-bedroom house is about 1600 square feet with a high vaulted open-plan living room.

Unlike the traditional design of Seminary Hill, they used a mix of Japanese and Scandinavian minimalism, adding the same warm and unique touches they’re known for. But in contrast to the pale wood of their own house, they used black shou sugi ban burnt wood for the siding as well as interior design touches. They credit their success, not least to their full-time crew of builders and carpenters. “To get the right quality is often a question of precision and patience,” Anna says, “and we’ve learned a lot from each other.”

In a search for a space large enough to consolidate their growing business under one roof, Anna and Tom came across the dormant North Branch Cider Mill, one of the oldest cider mills in the area. After several months of negotiations, they bought the compound. “We plan to fire up the old cider-making equipment and have an AmericanEnglish-Swedish-style café in the mill,” Tom says.

They also plan to create an expanded retail space for the Homestedt collection of homeware, kitchenware, and furniture. Their design studio will go into the three-story barn, and they’ll use a full carpentrymaking space to build custom furniture for the store and design projects. “There might be a couple goats and other livestock as well,” Tom says, “and possibly some saunas and a bathhouse on the river.”

Upstate Woman

Anna and Tom discovered a nearby lumberyard willing to mill budget-friendly basswood planks to size, allowing them to craft a Scandinavian-Japanese minimalist ambiance throughout the entire house.

Home Spun: Upstate Swedish

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Everyone wants to go to Marcia Gay Harden’s house.

By Janet Mercel

The Academy Award winning actor also has a Tony Award and a handful of Primetime Emmys to her name, but you won’t find them prominently displayed in the Catskills. At her longtime home, the lake, the land and her family takes top billing.

Photography Harold Julian Fashion Ise White Hair Kazunori Ueda Makeup Rebecca Alexander 64

Upstate Woman

Sayaka Davis sweater courtesy of Mayer Wasner, model’s own earrings

“I don’t like gender passoffs, and I didn’t want to be dependent on a man of the house in order to keep it. When you just turn it over to someone else, mistakes get made…”

MARCIA GAY HARDEN’S memoir opens with a passage from that quintessential figurehead of upstate folklore, Washington Irving, about Rip Van Winkle’s decades-long nap in the Catskill Mountains. The anecdote is a metaphor for Harden’s relationship with her mother, of time passing and memories lost, but also reminds us that the Oscar-winning actress is intimately familiar with the territory. Her own Catskills home is a supremely private property on Gossamer Lake, where Harden and her family had congregated and escaped to, canoed, gardened, and cooked together since 1997 when she and her former husband acquired the initial 150 acres and continued to snap up surrounding chunks of land to accrue the current 300-plus.

When I visited her there last October, it was arguably the most beautiful day of the whole month, and the houses (plural) were at their preening best.

Enviable stacks of firewood were piled at numerous indoor and outdoor fireplaces, the leaves had begun turning and whisped over the lakewater and our heads as we traipsed around the grounds, and the autumn light was the exact color that makes people wonder this time of year if keeping that city apartment is really necessary after all. The property felt alive and loved in a way that secondary homes often do not, and by the end of the day, its owner will have made me understand exactly why, and I would be sad to leave.

“Have you seen the nasturtiums?” Harden asked us — me, the photographer, and various crew who had gathered for the day’s shoot. She mentions the nasturtiums three times before we end up out in the gardens that she is in the process of winterizing. (On the phone later, she asks my opinion on burlap beds versus tarp sheets, etcetera. I tell her my parents advise running the lawnmower over fallen leaves in the yard to shred them and use them as mulch; her interest is laser-focused.)

Harden is not afraid of physical labor, or if you’re familiar with her award-laden acting career, emotional labor, either. She is proud of her house and all the work that’s gone into it from many hands, although she doesn’t like the expression “house

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proud” because it reminds her of boorish rich people who give boring tours and force you to appreciate their artwork in every room. This is not one of those homes. (Although the late season, pumpkinbright nasturtiums she so wanted us to enjoy were, in fact, perfect.)

“We built the main house, what was going to be our retirement home, first, then the barn and bunkhouse, then the boathouse in 2009,” Harden says, the he in “we” being her ex, the director Thaddaeus Scheel, with whom she has three children. “His stamp is all over it. I thought at one point maybe I should sell it, but then I realized, why obliterate it? Why should I have to find something that doesn’t have that connection? You don’t have to annihilate people. And it’s not like I sat around eating bonbons while he worked on the house.”

She’s not eating bonbons now, either. Harden maneuvers the ATV, understands the plumbing and irrigation systems on a cellular level, and could pull your car out of the mud with her tractor if ever needed. She can hear the heartbeat of her household and has an understanding of its operations and property management that many full-time upstaters will never have, much less people who spend the majority of their working lives on set or onstage, on location, in Los Angeles or in New York. Perhaps it’s those very absences that drive her to run a tight ship.

“I don’t like gender pass-offs, and I didn’t want to be dependent on a man of the house in order to keep it. When you just turn it over to someone else, mistakes get made because someone didn’t know about the spigot for the outdoor shower or that the pipe from the footing drain backs up.” (This is an intentional edit of Harden’s four to five-minute, detail-intensive explanation of what a footing drain is and how it works, but rest assured it was comprehensive.) “My ex has been great about showing me those details. It’s offensive when someone comes in to fix something, and they’re like, ‘Listen, lady, just let me do my job.’ They don’t use logic; they’re using ‘this is the way it’s always been done.’ And because right now I’m not shooting…” Harden pauses weightedly, “a certain show, I’ve had the inverse blessing of being here to train a new person.”

Upstate Woman

Alex Mill jacket, pants, and sweater courtesy of Concrete + Water

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Amente vest and sweats courtesy of Concrete + Water, Theory top, Hermès Scarf , model’s own boots

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The actress is referring to the current state of the entertainment industry, in that October 20th marked the 100th day of the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild) strike, the longest in the union’s history, and that the Hollywood machine has ground to a halt for the last several months. SAG members are forbidden to promote struck work without consequences, and while Harden is not allowed to talk about current projects or her latest television series on CBS, I am allowed to write about it.

So Help Me Todd is the most recent in a long list of TV appearances that have made her as beloved a small-screen performer as a big-screen one.

She has been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, including a turn as the blazingly bigoted Star on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Her string of SVU appearances is legendary for show zealots, not because Harden plays a neo-Nazi, but because of her willingness to be so cringe it’s difficult to believe it’s happening onscreen. Her episodes aired between 2005 and 2013 and were chillingly prescient, rife with eco-terrorists, schoolyard shooters, antisemites, and white supremacists. Harden is not one to shy away from unsavory, unflattering material that a less confident actor would instinctively avoid.

Her singular performance as Celeste Boyle in 2003’s Mystic River (for which she was a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee after winning the same award in 2000 for Pollack) troubled me for years and still does, as she wanders from scene to scene looking haunted and morally bereft as Tim Robbins’ wife. Laura Linney, as her nearly villainous cousin, asks at one point, “What kind of a wife says things like that about her husband?”

It’s Linney’s line, but it always pulls me back to Harden’s character. What is motivating her? In a film where the men go about their important male business in Southie-esque Boston, Celeste is the emotional callback for the entire movie, returning over and over to her struggle as a wife and good person. “Didn’t she just have a major crush on Sean Penn’s character and was trying to suck up to him?”

I asked Harden. (Of course, it was never going to be that simple.) “Oh no, I think it was that Celeste was deeply religious and tormented,” Harden explained.

“If someone you love in your family did something terrible and you’re a good Catholic girl from Boston, you know God will know. How do you hold a secret

In Essence: Marcia Gay Harden

like that? Well, we know she didn’t tell the church or the cops.”

It’s a ridiculous notion to ask an Academy Award-winning actress how they do what they do when so much comes from an intangible place, but I ask, anyway. “HOW do you do that?” As in, how do you keep everyone’s eyes on you to the very last frame? Not alone, Harden says. She is always quick to point out the brilliance of her colleagues in interviews, in podcasts, and in conversation.

“Clint [Eastwood] and Joel Cox, his editor, are two hugely important storytellers. I can’t tell you how important the editing process is — to know when to hold the entire moment a little bit longer to have the audience weeping. Without that, you would have had something completely different. I am enamored of Clint and Joel. It was the same thing with Pollack; the director and editor allowed my character to live and do the storytelling.”

Harden embraces the make-believe of acting, the costumes, the wigs, the accents, the fun of it. (See: The Mist and Miller’s Crossing.) She searches for a humanity point of reference for every character and all the things that make a role stingingly real.

I told her that while reviewing her body of work, I realized she is a longstanding gay icon, which somehow managed to escape me before now, so I asked a friend about it right before our interview.

“Oh my god, yes,” he yelled. “I’m not even sure why.

I think partly because of her performance style. She can be almost campy with her ‘capital T’ Theater voice. She’s not afraid to be silly. And because she always has these biting, cutting one-liners that make her such a queen. Now I’m going to go rewatch The Morning Show.”

“What!” Harden exclaimed when I repeated it. “I feel like I never get to play those roles!” showing that even the most highly regarded actors in the world have blind spots about their work. “I thought it was because of Angels in America. Or The First Wives Club. And, well, because my middle name is Gay, obviously.” (Marcia Gay is preferred, rather than just Marcia.) It is, in fact, all of those reasons, and while those parts alone speak to her scope as an actor, Angels may be where her iconic status began.

Harden starred as Harper in the 1991 Broadway debut of Tony Kushner’s pivotal play about closeted queer life and the AIDS crisis in New York City.

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“All the greatest men I’ve loved in my life were gay.”

OPPOSITE: Brunello Cucinelli

blouse, Mirth linen pants courtesy of Concrete + Water, First Rite cardigan, Andre Assous boots, model’s own hat

O P P O S I T E : Gap cashmere top, Madewell trouser, Lauren Manoogian sweater courtesy of Mayer Wasner, ÉPICE Paris scarf, Andre Assous Boots

She was nominated for a Tony for that role, although she’d go on to win the award for God of Carnage in 2009.

“Angels was a life-changing event for me. By that time, we were in the hindsight Reagan era.

Time had passed a little bit. The play was so epic, and it was making a difference in so many lives.

So many people told me they would come to see the play, then go home and tell their parents, ‘I’m gay…and dying.’ Meaningful for that time is an understatement.” For someone who says, “All the greatest men I’ve loved in my life were gay,” Harden has always been proud to move as an advocate through the LGBTQ community, especially when the going gets rough. “I mean, people are banning books now,” she said. “There’s zero tolerance for anything, even on both sides. There’s a lack of playfulness.” Harden speaks publicly and often about how her children are teaching her the evolutionary mindset of Gen Z and younger Millennials and that the casual speech patterns of yore no longer fly.

“All my kids are queer. My eldest is nonbinary.

My son is gay. His twin is fluid. They educate me, and I love that because the rules have changed.

My gay friends used to call me their best fag hag; that’s not okay anymore.” (I came of age with the same moniker, but asked a few people in my early-30s-and-younger orbit about that onethey’d never even heard the expression.) “When we did Angels, we were still educating people that AIDS medicine should be affordable, that you can’t get it by shaking someone’s hand. But it’s a different conversation right now. The hatred is so violent and righteous. I got so much hate mail when I did the Drag Isn’t Dangerous fundraiser last May. I wasn’t really hurt by it, although as a performer when anyone throws tomatoes at you, it’s shocking

at first. There’s a powerful system of hatred at work out there, but the love and helping people to lift the shame is much more profound.”

It is not surprising that someone who grew up as a Navy man’s daughter, who was born in California but by early adulthood could also call Germany, Japan, Greece, and Texas home, can inhabit so many portrayals of people’s lives and be naturally understanding of many perspectives. “I learned early that America’s not the only game in town,” she said. We agreed, though, that when it’s good, it can be very good, and discussed what it means to be an “upstate woman.” We acknowledged it is a mindset we see anywhere in the world — a self-sufficiency and grit, but one that’s not afraid of a little gloss (or a lot). Our conversation returned to where it began, to her house. She was the one to suggest I call her after I’ve put my 18-month-old daughter to bed (“I know how it is”), and we’ve spent the better part of the evening gabbing about our pull back to the Catskills. I imagine that her house at night, abutting the moon-slicked water, the fireplaces lit under a lot of heavy old wood beams, is just as beautiful as during the day.

The time I spent there, I told her, felt completely authentic, not like a person playing the “country” role. “You know, I’m so glad you said that. Because just this past week at the house, and with you guys being here for the photo shoot, I’ve been really seeing it and feeling it. I’m here taking care of things,” Harden said, sounding very much like someone looking forward to getting up and doing it all again the next day. “I’m making the compost, harvesting the last of the tomatoes and arugula. I just invested in a Gator. And, I thought, this is really you.”

“There’s a powerful system of hatred at work out there, but the love and helping people to lift the shame is much more profound.”

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Remy Holwick: On Being Committed Interview by Sara Mae Zandi Photography by Adrianna Newell

November begs for commitment here in the Catskills. In its breeze, crisp maple leaves fall from quivering branches, and if you’re lucky, the warmth of a noonday sun coaxes out the heady scent of hay and cow manure — the last of summer’s bounty, asking you to let go. As it snakes through the rolling foothills, which are spread thick with fertile farmland and dotted with ponds abuzz with migratory birds, who will soon escape into the sky, colder that air becomes. Soon, rumblings of geese and tractors slow while snow blankets the valley, and newness gives way to stillness. What will grow from a rocky earth and a desire for closeness is our need for each other, to come back to the land, to honor the cycle of things.

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Ivy Kirk dress, Alexander McQueen boots

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THESE MUSINGS played in my mind as I drove from Bovina, where I call home, to Stamford, where Remy Holwick has made hers. A quietly inspiring morning that pulled us closer to winter also brought me into conversation with Holwick, a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, model and mother who has made a home here in the Catskills since 2020. We talked about her nomadic upbringing, the ways in which this town of 2,000 has inspired her career, and what it means to contribute to community in a meaningful way.

I am so glad to be here. I love seeing how and where people have made a home. Can you tell me about how this one came to be yours?

OPPOSITE: Madeline Marie

dress, Rag & Bone boots BELOW: NVLT coat, Merlette

dress

My friends Cay Sophie and Christian, the creators of Osmos (who also have Osmos Station, a gallery here in Stamford), bought this house as their COVID project. (I’ve been coming to their place upstate for almost eight years.) It was funny because, in my head, I kept thinking, ‘Put in a fireplace. My house needs a fireplace,’ and yet it wasn’t mine. When they finished this house [to sell], I was in contract to buy another one and dropped out.

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You spent a lot of time here, visiting, but did you always feel that you’d set roots down permanently?

I never really saw myself as a property owner. We were very nomadic. My family moved a lot growing up, from California to Hawaii, when I was six. Then, all over the world, as a young adult, and nobody owned property. We had a very rich upbringing, but it was not rich in money. I was not thinking in terms of what kind of assets I could compile. It was more about what’s the next adventure? What are we creating? Or how can I finish what I’m doing? This idea of owning something and having roots was so baffling and appealing at the same time. I think that the flip side of being nomadic is we’re always kind of looking for a home.

I first thought Hawaii couldn’t be more different than Stamford. But you’ve hinted at their similarities, especially concerning living and working as a newcomer to your community, it challenges and how to thoughtfully be a part of it.

Upcountry Maui is ranch land, which is where I grew up. Our town was smaller than Stamford, so this setting makes sense. It feels like home.

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“This idea of owning something and having roots was so baffling and appealing at the same time.”

Eleven Six cardigan, Ivy Kirk skirt OPPOSITE: Merlette cardigan and

dress, Hunter boots

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Ivy Kirk dress, Alexander McQueen boots

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When you come to Hawaii as a young kid to a native-centric state, I think it makes you see the world differently. It wasn’t friendly; You learned what Haole meant really fast and it was that you are an outsider, particularly a white outsider, which was confusing because I’m Native American and White, so not White-White, but I’m not the right native.

Because of that experience — having a culture welcome me in, and not wanting anything to do with what I was bringing with me — you learn really fast that what you bring with you is the least interesting thing about the place that you’re entering.

You have a fifteen-year-old son who goes to school in Maui, where your mother still lives. When he returns here next year to possibly finish high school, what will he be most excited about?

He is stoked that we’re in the village because teenagers love autonomy. All you want when you’re a teenager is to try things and not have your parents necessarily have their hands in it. He knows he doesn’t have to be back until sundown, and I don’t know what he’s doing. I want him to be a teenager. His passion is computer hardware, so he builds motherboards out of discarded parts. That room right there, there’s a Tandy in there in the original boxes. Sometimes, I’ll find him at the IT shop just sitting with the IT guy because he takes computers apart too.

It seems you both have found community here. There’s a trust and respect for your neighbors, which is so important and often overlooked as someone moving into an established rural town.

We have our people. I’m friends with the grandmother of the people he hangs out with. I really believe in community. It’s been super central to me forever. A lot of the activism I did in the city is centered around building and protecting community; that’s what keeps coming back to me. The thread always comes back to community. To be able to be in a place where you have a tangible community, where conflict resolution isn’t a concept that certain people talk about. It’s a real thing. It’s a real place. You have one life. This is it.

These are the people you’re with. How are you going to make it meaningful?

You mentioned that you’re working on a clothing line, Baby la Baby, named after your Dalmation, Baby Balthazar, which seems very community-centric, too.

When I first went to school, I was in theater design and costume design specifically because I didn’t really come from a place that had fashion. I thought

Well Worn: Remy Holwick

costumes were so cool. I got dressed at thrift stores, and the idea of the bigger fashion industry felt so disconnected to me; but when I got scouted to model, I learned all of that pretty much off the bat.

That was 20 years ago. I got kind of sucked out of the world of costume design, where I was classically trained, where I had taken pattern drafting, and worked in a costume shop. Then, suddenly, I saw all these skills applied to these impossibly expensive situations, and after thinking about it for a couple of years, I just started collecting textiles and concepts.

I’m looking at this nomadic culture we have both in Stamford and as young people... how we establish home, what we see as generational and important, what we carry with us. I found lots of travel patches and vintage quilts, things that both represent the nomadic ideal and that represent that generational concept of home.

Baby la Baby sounds very much influenced by your living and working upstate. What has it been like creating here?

Stamford is such a creative place. I couldn’t have done this anywhere else. Everything’s going to be done here. Everyone is so like-minded. If I had been trying to do something like this in the city, I would be hauling my ideas over to Midtown for production to Brooklyn for silk screening. Here, I have my sewing machines on my third floor. Sal [Fabbella] is a screen printer — his spot, Catskills Outpost, is around the corner. When I decided to screen print items, I walked over and knocked on the window and was like, ‘Hey, can I send you a file? Do you mind printing this? I’ll trade you some design work.’

And that’s how it went.

“…you learn really fast that what you bring with you is the least interesting thing about the place that you’re entering.”

You find the energy, time, and passion for whatever is thrown your way. Your time here feels like an honest commitment.

All the things that have been given to me are my favorite. We don’t always know what’s best for us. They are the things that unexpectedly find me and fall in my lap. Since when is what I want better than what’s happening? That’s what it comes down to. I wanted Great Danes, but my partner, Matthieu, wanted a Dalmatian. Now, I have a Dalmatian who needs to run every day; I’m getting a second one, so she has a friend to run with. The way I feel is... I can fight every day for the next fifteen years with you, or I can see you for who you are and fall absolutely in love with how perfect you are, and who you’re meant to be. Which is it going to be? So now we have Dalmatians.

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CREATIVE DIRECTION Nhi Mundy HAIR A ND M AK EUP Kate Best ST Y LING Stacey Cunningham

A Culinary Homecoming with Alexis Deboschneck Interview by Stacy Adimando Photography by Randazzo Blau

When everything stopped at the beginning of the pandemic a new way began for Alexis Deboschnek. Like many of us, the cook and culinary school graduate had been preoccupied with her busy job and social life where she lived in Los Angeles, excited about pursuing opportunities as a freelancer since leaving a recent job. She’d gone from being Test Kitchen Director at BuzzFeed’s blog and video channel Tasty, where much of her days were dedicated to making clickable recipe videos, largely trafficked by millennials.

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“I’m prioritizing happiness in a totally different way that feels much more authentic to who I am and what I want out of life..”

ONE SERIES , Cook Out of Water, challenged Alexis to make a three-course meal while using only wacky, and often not culinary, appliances (a clothing iron, a wax warmer). While you could see in her videos, she is a natural on camera, and while she says she knew the exposure was probably a good thing, something about the role just felt unnatural.

“Looking back, I was kind of like, ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do,’ and it didn’t feel genuine or authentic to me,” she says.

It took a Covid-inspired move across the country and a somewhat uncertain decision to move with her boyfriend back into her mother’s 1820’s Greek revival house in upstate New York for her to realize what was missing at the time.

Everything from the landscape to the mediascape looked very different in her tiny, rural hometown of Delhi, New York, but the vast swaths of farmland, the young businesses starting up, and the people — friendly, looking for connection, and quick to jump in and help one another — put her at ease. Something about it felt as if the community there had been waiting for her return all along.

So much began to click, like a new tight-knit community and some new skills she now knows she will have for life. Her mother has long been a proficient gardener and an occasional forager, who would often cook Alexis’ family elaborate meals with local produce and international f lavors, even on weeknights. She has an extensive vegetable garden with fruit trees, grows her own flowers, and tends and boards more than a dozen horses on their farm. The same rolling fields that, Alexis admits, had little luster during her adolescence in comparison to NYC and LA became absolutely magnetic to her.

When you watch Alexis on videos more recently filmed at her home, with its dark wooden countertops and soothing neutral tones, you feel at ease. Everything from the earthy-colored canvas aprons she wears to the way she stirs brownie batter with bare wrists or picks chestnuts from her family’s own trees in the fall has an easy country appeal. “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she laughs in the chestnut video. But you feel as if you are learning alongside her.

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When we talked recently, Alexis detailed with giddiness how fun it’s been to throw continuous dinner parties on the property while working from home on her second cookbook. “We’re hosting at least twice a week, sometimes more,” she says.

Winter is no different: She keeps fires going for guests and friends and lately has been rolling out comforting but special recipes that she’s testing for the book, slated to be called Nights & Weekends.

“Coming back here, I’ve been appreciating the sense of wintering, starting with the garden,” she says.

“You can appreciate that the plants need some time off, as do we.”

There’s a palpable maturity in her approach, and her dishes, which feel comfortable yet inspiring, helpfully use up all parts of the ingredients and lack overly fussy finishes. It’s not effortlessness because you know what effort it must take to, say, grow a potato and then make it into a flaky, gruyerecovered tart. But her food just looks like home, and she feels like herself while serving it.

Here is what Alexis had to say about growing up in the Catskills, her second coming, and her plans to stay a while.

You have been upstate since an early age, right? When and where, and also, what was it like growing up here for you?

My parents moved upstate from Brooklyn, so this place has been what I’ve considered home my whole life. We rented a few different spots around Delhi as they hunted for their ideal home and finally bought a place in 2000. It’s an old Greek revival farmhouse from the 1820s, which they did a major gut renovation. This house specifically — and land — is home to me. As a child, growing up in the Catskills was completely idyllic. I spent most of my time outside, no matter the season. My mom gardened for other people, so I was dragged all around Delaware County to these really impressive gardens and picked up a few things by osmosis. Our life was really guided by the seasons — in the fall, we’d pick apples behind our house and turn them into cider.

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In the winter, we’d go skiing. In the spring, it was time to plant and take advantage of the longer light. In the summer, we’d forage for chanterelles and take long walks.

Of course, as a teenager, things changed, and I couldn’t wait to leave. I’ve found that no matter where you are, most teenagers complain about not having anything to do. That wasn’t really my issue — I just felt like I had different aspirations than most of my peers and didn’t fit in. I ended up graduating a year early and taking a year off before college. I left Delhi and spent five months in NYC interning at Cynthia Rowley and three months in France “trying to learn French” (eating pastries and smoking hash — maybe we’ll leave that out).

After 14 years away exploring NYC and LA, you found your way back to your childhood home and town.

What spurred that on? Did you ever or always think you’d end up back upstate?

If you can believe it, it was my husband’s idea to move back to the Catskills, specifically, that we move in with my mother. I loved living in Los Angeles and had thought that I’d spend the rest of my life in California. As much as I loved coming home to visit, I couldn’t imagine what living in Delhi as an adult would actually be like. Who would I be friends with? What would I do for work? Where would I live? The Covid-19 pandemic completely turned our lives upside down, as it did for so many people. I had left my full-time job nine months before and was still trying to establish myself as a freelance recipe developer and writer. I was starting on my first cookbook but was pretty financially insecure at the time, and when work dried up, I started to panic.

Similarly, my husband is a DP (cinematographer) and was also out of work. After six months of locking down in Los Angeles, he suggested we downsize and go back to Delhi for a few months to ride out the pandemic and save money.

My friends in Los Angeles seemed to know that I wasn’t coming back from the get-go, but it took me much longer to come to terms with that.

Fairly immediately when we moved back, we

Seasoned: Alexis Deboschnek

were greeted with this incredible community of people. Delhi, Delaware County, and upstate New York had changed so much. Suddenly, I found a whole community of like-minded people, a ton of creativity, and so many shops and restaurants (you know, comparatively from when I grew up). Six months into our new life, we made the decision to stay. I love my friends in both New York and Los Angeles, but I’ve never felt such a strong sense of community as I do now. There’s a real thread of people being there for one another and showing up — whether that’s to dig a friend out of a literal ditch, to bring food when someone’s sick, or to support each other at events. There’s a strong feeling that we’re all in making this place better together.

You’ve mentioned in some of your work that your mom is an excellent cook and gardener. What were some of the iconic things she grew and cooked during your youth?

These days, who does most of the daily cooking at home?

My mom made [every meal] when I was growing up. For lunch, there would be prosciutto and Brie on sourdough. Sometimes, she’d roast vegetables the night before and layer them with goat cheese on a sandwich. While weeknight dinners featured a lot of simple pastas and rice and beans, she threw regular dinner parties and pulled out all the stops. There were miniature pumpkins filled with corn soup and topped with crab. Indonesian feasts with too many sides and toppings. One Christmas, we decided on a smoked goose.

Another year, she made everyone a personal quail.

She seemed to do all of this effortlessly, although now I know how much work went into making it happen. These days, my husband probably cooks once a month, and my mom might cook once every three months. Otherwise, I do all the cooking.

Career-wise, how and when did you find your way into food media? Give us a little recap of your career past.

I went to FIT and interned at Eater New York, where I got my first real taste of food media and was completely sold. After college, I landed a job at Tasting Table as an editorial assistant.

Within my first month, I realized there was a real difference between being a home cook and being a professional, and enrolled in the International

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“…I’ve never felt such a strong sense of community as I do now.

There’s a real thread of people being there for one another...”

“Life is long and unpredictable, but I really can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Culinary Center. I was working from 9-6 and going to class from 6:30-11. It was a fairly miserable time, but I think having those credentials really got me to where I am today in my career. After Tasting Table, I moved to Los Angeles and worked at a few different food media jobs there. In 2017, I saw a job open at BuzzFeed’s Tasty and applied. Everywhere I had worked or freelanced up until this point was on a much smaller scale, and I was curious what it would be like to create content on a massive scale. After two years there, I went freelance and landed a book deal shortly thereafter.

What else do you find different or significant about the kinds of resources you have to work with upstate versus elsewhere? How does it affect your work or your daily life?

In my experience, up here, ambition can often look totally different than it does in the city media life — work-wise but also just lifestyle-wise. What does it look like to you right now?

What gave you confidence as a cook when you started out? What gives you confidence as a cook now?

I felt really set on writing a second cookbook, but my career aspirations have overall really shifted. I feel so much more aware of having a balance in my life and doing things that feel fulfilling. To me, that means making sure I have room to spend a lot of time with friends, contribute to my community, and dedicate many hours to our garden. While I still have career ambitions, I’m prioritizing happiness in a totally different way that feels much more authentic to who I am and what I want out of life. My whole career, I’ve been hyper-focused on encouraging people to cook more, and I feel like being here and getting to be more intentional with the type of content I create or the projects I do, I’m making that happen.

What’s typical for you in terms of how you buy, grow, or source your food and groceries?

Grocery shopping is entirely different living in Delhi. We have a fantastic farmers market on Wednesdays. That’s where we get the bulk of our meat and most of our produce. There’s a local food shop in town that gets fish in on Fridays, and we have some great general stores in the area that carry specialty goods, like First Bloom in Bloomville or Hamden General in Hamden. We do have a few conventional grocery stores that I go to regularly, but my week is really structured around the farmers’ market.

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In terms of recipe development, I think it’s actually been a real asset to live here. It’s made me really consider what kind of ingredients most people have access to and changed the way I create recipes. If I can’t find it at Price Chopper, I’m not going to put it in a recipe. It’s made me get more creative in terms of coaxing flavor out of ingredients in different ways.

I admittedly had little confidence when I first started cooking. Over the years, I’ve become more confident as I’ve found my own style of cooking.

This is a bit of a bragging moment, but Kim Severson reviewed my first cookbook, To the Last Bite, for the New York Times and wrote about how the recipes really do work (which not all cookbooks can say!). That felt like a huge feather in my cap and really gave me a boost of confidence that my recipes do work and are delicious.

You’re not tied to any particular brand or company now. How do you satisfy the desire to create or to achieve within the context of a freelance life?

I love not being tied to one brand. It’s given me the f lexibility to work with a lot of brands I admire and create different kinds of content and recipes that I may not have otherwise. I also have a newsletter on Substack called Side Dish, where I share weeknight-friendly recipes.

I think I actually get to be more creative now than when I was tied to one brand.

Do you imagine living upstate for the long term now or even forever?

Life is long and unpredictable, but I really can’t imagine living anywhere else. I feel like I get to be my most authentic self living here, and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been.

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Dreaming of Horses.

Hollie Witchey, and the pursuit of happiness

By Nhi Mundy Photography by Peter Crosby

On a wet October evening in the drowsy town of Kenoza Lake, NY, I found myself at The Old Foundation, a restaurant recently acquired by new hands. The local spot, formerly dubbed the Stone Arch Inn, still maintained its aloof demeanor, yet inside, a contrasting energy emerged; the remnants of the original interior embodied the spirit of a Brooklyn basement party. Flashing strobe lights traversed the wood-paneled walls while a DJ nestled to one side of the reception played a mildly irritating jumble of 90s techno, drawing a crowd of rustic locals and retired hipsters in casual chatter and cheap beer. The down-to-earth setting was fitting for the post-wedding revelry of Hollie Witchey and her new husband, Ru Norbury.

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HAILING FROM the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, Hollie is an ideal of all-American beauty, blonde and blue-eyed, standing at 5 ’10. In her forties now, the seasoned model frequently appears in glossy print ads and billboards — a quiet nod to the fact that she wasn’t initially considered for the runway, as her wholesome look didn’t fit the typical mold. Despite this, Hollie has carved a niche for herself, regularly booked by “money” brands like L’Oreal, Ann Taylor, and La Mer. While ref lecting on her upbringing, she shared how, at sixteen, she jump-started her career with saved earnings from a job at a local hardware store to finance a modeling convention called ProScout.

“My mom didn’t want to pay because she thought it was a scam — but it wasn’t. It had Ford, Elite, Wilhelmina,” Hollie said. “I got called back by every single agency.”

I watched Hollie, clad in a white country-style ensemble with fringe pocket details, dancing with her new partner in his black cowboy hat and grey f lannel Westernstyle suit at her wedding reception. Having known her for a decade, it seems natural she emerged into this current iteration of upstate cowgirl. When recalling childhood visits with her grandfather to see her great-grandfather’s horses, her strongest memory is how mesmerizing she found these remarkable creatures. Her parents recognized her passion and arranged for riding lessons, with Hollie soon working at a horse barn mucking stables to earn more instruction. When questioned about her willingness at such a young age to engage in ostensibly disagreeable work, she explained, “When I’m riding, it feels like I’m connecting to a source, like to God.” By the time she relocated to New York, her attention shifted to more lucrative opportunities in fashion. At age seventeen, Hollie secured a modeling campaign with Abercrombie & Fitch, a pivotal moment that would catapult her career. “If you got picked by Bruce Weber, it was like a nod of approval from the industry,” she said, “but I was super shy and froze in front of the camera like a deer in headlights, and during that time, there was so much emphasis on being sexy.” And so, her agency sent her to Australia to broaden her modeling book and evolve, aka

Connections: Hollie Witchey

“party and meet new people.” By and large, everything proceeded as planned. Down under, Hollie swiftly found acceptance in the industry, gracing the pages of Marie Claire, Vogue, and other prominent fashion publications. Candidly, Hollie acknowledges that the price of her success meant numerous #MeToo moments, specifically when she became engaged and then married to a local photographer. “I met this guy, like a poor man’s Terry Richardson. I wouldn’t want any young girl to go through what I went through with that guy.

It was an education for sure.”

Marrying the wrong person was a pivotal moment of enlightenment, as well as perhaps a cautionary tale for impressionable young women everywhere, especially after she discovered their union was founded less on true love than her new husband’s desire for a green card, on top of a proclivity for abuse. “I went to the hospital and couldn’t walk for six weeks,” she said. “He got deported, and I never spoke to or saw him again.” This period of personal upheaval marked a significant turning point in Hollie’s life, shaping her journey toward self-discovery.

She sought solace in the company of friends in upstate New York. After visiting the region for years, she began house hunting. She knew she wanted a home that mirrored her unique style and land where she could build a garden and explore a burgeoning interest in permaculture.

In 2010, Hollie happened upon a charming “gingerbread” house in Jeffersonville, NY. “No one wanted it,” she recalled. “It was dark and infested with animals. But I knew that it was for me. There was a big barn in the middle of twenty acres and a pond.” Within a few years, leaving behind her city apartment to become a full-time upstate resident, Hollie fully embraced her life in the Catskills. Positioned for her next venture as a certified health coach and herbalist, she temporarily assumed the role of a shopkeeper in Mountaindale, NY, for her skincare brand, Witchey Handmade, a line she developed with ingredients from her garden.

The shift from modeling to crafting healing potions and working closely with customers felt logical, given the inf luence of nature and the community surrounding

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“When I’m riding, it feels like I’m connecting to a source, like to God.”

Inspired by childhood visits to her great-grandfather’s horse stable, Hollie’s passion for riding horses became a lifelong dream.

O P P O S I T E : Rediscovering her love

for horseback riding, she took lessons and acquired a golden thoroughbred named Dune.

B E L OW: In 2010, Hollie happened

upon this “gingerbread” house that no one wanted, which she deemed perfect for her.

her. But like many, the pandemic altered her perspective on her future. She was compelled to rekindle her childhood passion for horseback riding, taking lessons at a nearby farm and acquiring a golden thoroughbred she named Dune. Alongside realizing her childhood dream, she began scrutinizing her romantic life. “I had been praying; I was so confused about my thenrelationship, if it was enough or if I deserved more. I started asking God, ‘If I’m supposed to have more, can you make it clear to me?’ Literally, a month later, Ru came into my life.”

Her union with Ru is a study in serendipity, punctuated by a series of remarkable coincidences. His appearance in her life traces back nearly a decade to a f leeting encounter: While on tour with her best friend, Matt, the founder of a band humorously called Psychedelic

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Horse Shit, she was invited to play the keyboard and sing with him onstage, despite her lack of experience. “We toured the UK and played a show in Brighton and then partied together at a friend’s house,” she said. “In the morning, Ru, who was friends with a friend, went out and got me something to eat, and I distinctly remember thinking, ‘This guy is so cute.’”

A decade later, that connection would evolve into a romantic love story akin to a slow dance in the digital age. Ru, who had been cattle herding in the outback of Australia, mustered the courage to DM her on Instagram after noticing pictures of Dune on Hollie’s feed. He proposed a conversation over the phone, expressing his desire to talk whenever she was interested. “I thought, ‘This guy is coming on strong, but he’s a real-life cowboy in the middle of nowhere, so

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Ru, a former cattle herder in Australia, sparked their modern love story by messaging Hollie on Instagram, drawn in by photos of her horse, Dune.

why not?’” For months, their conversations grew progressively longer, prompting the initiation of plans for his visit to New York, but strict COVID-19 restrictions proved an effective delay. “Australia wasn’t letting anyone leave the country,” Hollie explained. “If you wanted to go, you had to get clearance from the government. So Ru hired a lawyer, and we collected letters from friends and family stating that we needed to be together.”

Flashing forward to the wedding reception, Hollie spots me and excitedly introduces her new husband. In a gesture straight out of a Western, Ru tips his hat, exuding the aura of someone well-acquainted with the land.

As I congratulated the newlyweds, I noticed

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a familiarity in Hollie’s eyes I had grown accustomed to since our acquaintance, but there was also an unfamiliarity; this duality intrigued me. Ref lecting on Hollie’s evolution through the years, it’s evident that her draw to a life with horses isn’t just a childhood passion; it’s a consistent motif symbolizing her constant pursuit of authenticity. Like her upstate home, her affinity for the equine life represents a noble search for a sanctuary built on trust and genuine connection. Hollie admits to me that their relationship is far from perfect, yet she quickly affirms that there’s one thing she is always sure of.

“With Ru, I never feel anxious in my stomach like I have with every other man. I always feel calm.”

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Connections: Hollie Witchey

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Journey to the West, Ami Sioux in Big Sur Interview by Mandy Coon Photography by Ami Sioux

Ami Sioux has always been a wanderer. Growing up in a family ensconced in fundamentalist religion, she moved constantly, never able to take root. Yet, as a photographer, her nomadic nature served her well: She traveled the world and lived in the great fashion capitals of New York, Tokyo, and Paris. In 2020, during the pandemic, Sioux began reevaluating her frenetic lifestyle and her motivations as an artist. She would find her way to California, where she had spent most of her childhood and formative years.

Out of Range: Ami Sioux

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O P P O S I T E : Southern view of the Pacific Ocean from Highway 1.

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : Esalen’s spring-

fed thermal mineral baths overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the sign at the entrance to the Esalen Institute; a key hub of the 60s New Age movement, Highway 1; the sole road in and out of Big Sur, winds along the coast; a Big Sur local displays their personalized license plate.

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ESTABLISHING A BASE in Big Sur, Sioux became drawn to the idea of having both space and solitude — something she admits she had never had before — along with a nearby community of like-minded artists, who, much like her, had settled upon this quiet oasis for its expansive rural landscapes and close proximity to the sea. Our editor, Mandy Coon, engaged in conversation with Sioux, who reflected upon her departure from New York in the wake of 9/11, the courage it took in shedding her persona, and the never-ending process of mastering the art of staying still.

Mandy Coon: You used to live in New York. That’s where we met. How did you end up in Big Sur? Ami Sioux: I lived in New York through the 90s and volunteered after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. I was feeding firefighters at the Ground Zero Cafe and setting up a makeshift medical station. The trauma from that experience was the impetus for my departure to Europe.

I built my career living in Paris for over a decade. At the time, I felt disenchanted with the industry and my life, so again, I packed up and ventured West. I wanted to return to where I was born. I didn’t know it yet, but felt a tug to revisit my past.

L E F T: Esalen Institute’s greenhouse pioneers sustainable, farm-to-table methods for over half a century, supplying much of the kitchen’s produce from its own farm and garden.

B E L OW: One of the stunning views from turnouts along Highway 1.

How did it go?

Living in Los Angeles didn’t feel quite right. I longed to be near nature. I had taken solo trips up to Big Sur and felt a strong connection to the area when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had also met many artists in Big Sur and found how they worked and lived inspiring. It reminded me of my initial intentions as an artist. Although I learned how to be a photographer in big cities, I knew I needed to return to what motivated me. When COVID-19 hit, Dai [my partner] and I lived in a small Los Angeles space. Everything was locked down, and you couldn’t even go to the beach. It seemed like the right time for a change.

What has changed most since your move to Big Sur? We were initially surprised by the silence. My childhood years were spent in California and Montana. I lived near snow-covered mountains, which have their own stillness.

It’s a unique silence here, however. It’s all-encompassing.

My house has a studio, which was a big change for me.

Spreading out has been an enormous evolution, mentally.

Out of Range: Ami Sioux

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“Living in such a stunning place shifts your perspective. I see all the stars at night; feeling so small evokes your humility.”

Pfeiffer Beach ’s Keyhole Arch features purple sand derived from garnet in nearby cliffs.

OPP OSI T E ,C L O C K W ISE : A verdant field on Partington Ridge. a view from Esalen Institute, McWay Falls: an 80 -foot waterfall on Big Sur’s southern tip.

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Living in such a stunning place shifts your perspective. I see all the stars at night; feeling so small evokes your humility.

Has this new environment influenced your personal evolution?

When I was fifteen, I left my family and had to survive on my own, so I’ve developed a persona. But out here, I’ve become humbled and been able to drop that mask.

That persona seems to have protected you. From what I’ve observed, you’ve done amazing things and have earned so much respect in the industry.

I had to develop the courage to let go of the facade and show myself. It’s important that I let some people see me and that I feel seen. That is perhaps the main part of my work as a portraitist: to show the image of a person but to also remove the layers and see the real person underneath.

How has living in Big Sur affected your work?

Out of Range: Ami Sioux

My work has gotten much more personal. When I left Paris, I shipped over 75 kilos of negatives of my fashion work to the U.S. I needed to reexamine it and understand what I had done all those years. I sifted through and pulled images that spoke to me instead of photos chosen for a cover or billboard, and those became my book, From The Road. It felt like I had left little pieces along the way to find later, to come back to myself.

How do you make your work “work” in a rural environment?

When I first moved here, I thought I needed absolute silence to focus, but it’s sometimes the opposite. I liked walking to the Pompidou or going to an exhibition. Much of my work has been about movement through urban spaces, and I’ve realized I sometimes need that inspiration. Conversely, at a base level, I need nature and space to nurture myself. I’ve learned that it’s important for me to have both: to be able to live in this incredible place and go away occasionally for jobs to keep my balance.

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The road into Big Sur.

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going down across our road, mud and rockslides down the mountain. It can be a calm utopia, but it can also suddenly change quickly into chaos.

We are always prepared and stock food in case the highway closes. When we lose the internet, it becomes my dedicated writing time. We’re often off the grid, so we make the best of it.

Do you find the isolation challenging?

On social isolation, I’ve been a freelancer for 23 years, so I’m used to working from home alone.

Otherwise, I’m out photographing. It’s not really that different. I get to live in this beautiful place and take walks daily. I can go down the mountain to the bakery. I can visit the Henry Miller Library and browse for books or go to Esalen [holistic retreat] when I need to decompress. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel so secluded to me.

Years ago, people might have interpreted your move to the country as giving up.

People who visit and see how I live have shown deep respect — industry friends from London, Paris, or Tokyo — and I get to see everything anew through their eyes. They take in the beauty, but I also notice confusion in the beginning: they don’t know how to start a fire, they’re fearful of night noises, and they’re in the middle of nowhere. But after a few days, they calm down and physically relax, and they begin to understand that my choice comes from the need for a fuller life.

It takes a certain fortitude to live this life. There are mudslides, floods, forest fires, and sections of the highway falling into the sea with shocking regularity.

What do you find the hardest about living there?

Within two weeks of arriving here, a raging forest fire ignited near us, and we had to evacuate for a week. The sky was blazing red. We couldn’t breathe without air purifiers and gas masks inside. It felt almost apocalyptic. I had never experienced anything that destructive. We’ve also been through devastating storms here: the entire house shaking, the power out for a week, trees

Out of Range: Ami Sioux

I read on the news that the bridge in Big Sur collapsed a few years ago, and everyone on the other side was stranded for almost a year while it was being replaced.

The whole community pitched in and made it work.

I heard that they hiked for 45 minutes to deliver things to their stranded neighbors. It sounded pretty incredible. Have you developed a strong sense of community since things there can be challenging?

“I sometimes wonder if I really can put down roots. I always have half my stuff packed up in boxes.”

Yeah, it’s a very close community. Although it can be quite insular — the old-school Big Sur people are pretty wary of newcomers, and it can take a while to make your way in. But once you have [their trust], they really come together. I have a lot of respect for this community, and I’m so grateful for the support they provide.

Now that you’ve put down roots, have you learned things about yourself?

I sometimes wonder if I really can put down roots.

I always have half my stuff packed up in boxes.

As a kid, my family and I moved every 6 months.

We built a church, then moved to the next town to build another. Now that I am an adult, I can choose to stay in one place. I think that’s what this place is trying to teach me.

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A BOV E: Tenting at Ventana Campground TOP R IGHT: Airstream camping at Ventana Campgrounds, surrounded by Redwoods.

Field Guide: Places to go and things to do.

Embark on an exploration with us as we present a thoughtfully curated selection for the winter season, capturing the essence of excellence in Upstate New York. Crafted by our editors, our guide spans distinguished hotels, restaurants, lively markets and stores, art galleries, and fitness studios. Each recommendation promises a worthwhile experience, designed to enhance and simplify your enjoyment of the region.

Stay

H A S B RO U C K H O U S E

HOTEL LILIEN

N I N E R I V E R ROA D

9 River Rd, Callicoon, NY (845) 887-0042 nineriverroad.com

A N TR IM STR E A MSIDE

408 DeBruce Rd, Livingston Manor, NY (846) 747-0704 antrimstreamside.com

OL D DU TCH IN N

D E E R M O U N TA I N I N N

3805 Main St, Stone Ridge, NY (845) 687-0736 hasbrouckhouseny.com

6629 NY-23A, Tannersville, NY (647) 633-3995 hotellilien.com

HEM LOCK NEV ERSIN K

H O T E L T I VO L I

790 Co Rd 25, Tannersville, NY (518) 589-6268 deermountaininn.com

8 Broad St, Kinderhook, NY (518) 203-3347 theolddutchinn.com OL D M I L L BY AU D R E Y ’ S FA R M H O U S E

G AT H E RW I L D R A N C H

7491 State Rte 55, Neversink, NY (845) 985-1183 hemlockneversink.com

53 Broadway, Tivoli, NY (845) 757-2100 hoteltivoli.org

K ENOZ A H A L L

L I V INGSTON M A NOR F LY F I S H I N G C L U B

5762 NY-52, Kenoza Lake, NY (845) 482-1022 kenozahall.com

331 Roundtop Rd, Germantown, NY (203) 807-1462 gatherwild.com

634 Old Rte 17, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 895-3440

323 Old Mill Rd, Wallkill, NY (845) 895-3440 audreysfarmhouse.com T HE A R NOL D HOUSE

839 Shandelee Rd, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 439-5070 thearnoldhouse.com

livingstonmanorflyfishingclub.com

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Upstate Woman

Field Guide.

R I V E R’ S E D G E

W IN DH A M M O U N TA I N C L U B

JEFFERSON V IL LE BA K E HOUSE

S T O C K A D E TAV E R N

313 Fair St, Kingston, NY (845) 514-2649 stockadetavern.com

19 Resort Dr, Windham, NY (518) 734-4300 windhammountainclub.com

TAV E R N O N M A I N

Eat and Drink 3351 NY-97, Barryville, NY (845) 456-0179 riversedgeny.com T H E D E B RU C E

982 Debruce Rd, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 439-3900 thedebruce.com T HE EL DR ED P R E S E RV E

1040 State Rte 55, Eldred, NY (845) 557-8316 theeldredpreserve.com T H E GR EEN HOUSES BY AU D R E Y ’ S FA R M H O U S E

2187 Bruynswick Rd, Wallkill, NY (845) 895-3440 audreysfarmhouse.com T H E STICK ETT IN N

ANNARELL A R ISTOR A N TE

276 Malden Turnpike, Saugerties, NY (845) 247-7289 annarellaristorante.com

4906 NY-52, Jeffersonville, NY (845) 482-6020 jeffersonvillebakeshop.com 4919 NY-52, Jeffersonville, NY (845) 482-2380 tavernonmainny.com

LOCA L 111

BÀ & ME

67 Main St, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 866-1480 baandme.com BEN JI & JA K ES

5 Horseshoe Lake Rd, Kauneonga Lake, NY (845) 583-4031 benjiandjakes.com C A L L ICOON W IN E M E RC H A N T

30 A Dorrer Dr, Callicoon, NY (845) 887-3016 C H U RC H H I L L A FTER HOUSE

T H E K A AT S K E L L E R

39 Main St, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 439-4339 thekaatskeller.com

111 Main St, Philmont, NY (518) 672-7801 local111.com

T H E H E RO N

M A IN STR EET FA R M C A F E

36 Main St, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 439-4309 mainstreetfarm.com P O L L I N AT O R S P I R I T S

40 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-3333 theheronrestaurant.com T H E L AU N D R E T T E

3380 NY-97, Barryville, NY (845) 557-0913 stickettinn.com VA N D E R B I LT L A K ESIDE

161 Main St, Philmont, NY (518) 672-7070 vanderbiltlakeside.com

Field Guide: Best of Upstate

539 State Rte 55, Eldred, NY (845) 557-8661 churchillafterhours.com F O G WO O D & F I G

24 Front St, Port Jervis, NY (845) 672-4222 fogwoodandfig.com

20 5th St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 588-2004 thelaundrette.xyz

16 Upper Main St, Callicoon, NY (845) 887-3289 pollinatorspirits.com

T H E WA L K I N

67 Main St Unit 2, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 439-1018 thewalk.in

P RO P E R T O G O

119 Kirk Rd, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-5245 narrowsburgproper.com

TP’S CAFE

7 Railroad Ave, Stamford, NY (607) 652-4752

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Field Guide.

Shop

CELESTINO

D RO O Z

K R I A WO R L D

345 Warren St Apt 3, Hudson, NY (646) 644-4450 celestinocouture.com

16 Pearl St, Livingston Manor, NY (315) 380-7999 droozandcompany.com

801 Main St, Margaretville, NY (347) 277-6917 kria.world

CLOBR

H E T TA G L O G G

A DEL CH EFR IDI F I N E J E W E L RY

47 E Market St, Rhinebeck, NY (845) 684-5185 chefridi.com

3362 NY-97, Barryville, NY (845) 456-0337 clobr.store

AT L A N D

C L OV E & C R E E K

613 Warren St, Hudson, NY (217) 918-1257 cloveandcreek.com

534 Broadway, Kingston, NY (845) 303-1197 at.land

C L OV E & C R E E K

73 Broadway, Kingston, NY (217) 918-1257 cloveandcreek.com

B OX WO O D L I N E N

22 Main St, Chatham, NY (518) 392-3918 boxwoodlinen.com

M A I S O N B E RG O G N E

85 Broadway, Kingston, NY (845) 216-4801 hettaglogg.com I N T E N T I O N A L LY BL A N K

C O N C R E T E + WAT E R

8 Pearl St, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 439-1155 concreteandwater.com

C A L L I C O O N PA N T RY ELEV EN SI X

43 Lower Main St, Callicoon, NY (845) 232-1706 thecallicoonpantry.com

45 Pine Grove Ave, #103, Kingston, NY info@eleven-six.co eleven-six.co

CATSKILL CHOCOLATE CO.

H U D S O N S Q UA R E BOU TIQU E

473 Main St, Catskill, NY (518) 719-0473 catskillchocolateco.com

107 Route 376 Suite 2, Hopewell Junction, NY (845) 447-2411 hudsonsquareboutique.com

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LILI AND LOO

259 Warren St, Hudson, NY (518) 822-9492 liliandloo.com

226 Bridge St, Narrowsburg, NY (213) 379-3900 maisonbergogne.com M A RY M AC G I L L

212 Main St, Germantown, NY (518) 851-1113 marymacgill.com M AY E R WA S N E R

504 Warren St, Hudson, NY (518) 821-7154 intentionallyblank.us J A R I TA’ S F L O R I S T

55 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-3828 mayerwasner.com MINNA

17 Tinker St, Woodstock, NY (845) 679-6161 weddingsbyjaritasflorist.com

421 Warren St, Hudson, NY (518) 697-5638 minna-goods.com

L A G A RC O N N E BOU TIQU E

N A R ROW S B U RG P RO P E R

3 Bridge St, Callicoon, NY (917) 815-3906 @la_garconne_boutique

44 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-5099 narrowsburgproper.com Upstate Woman

Field Guide.

NEWT

ST U DIO JESSIE L A Z A R

T HE HOU N D BOOKS

16 Proctor Rd, Eldred, NY info@jessielazar.com jessielazar.com

58 North Front St, Kingston, NY (845) 514-2924 newtboutique.com ON E GR A N D BOOKS

67 Main St, Livingston Manor, NY aaron@onegrandbooks.com onegrandbooks.com ON E GR A N D BOOKS

T HE M IL DR ED COM PL EX IT Y

37 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-7576 delawarevalleyartsalliance.org E Q U I S A RT G A L L E RY

37b Main St, Narrowsburg, NY mildredslane@gmail.com mildredslane.com

3 Union St, Roscoe, NY @thehoundbooks thehoundbooks.com

15 W Market St, Red Hook, NY (845) 758-9432 equisart.com

T H E V I N TAG E H O U S E

M IL DR ED’ S L A N E

S U N F L OW E R M A R K E T

4910 NY-52, Jeffersonville, NY (845) 482-6001 vintagehousejville.com

75 Mill Hill Rd, Woodstock, NY (845) 679-5361 sunflowernatural.com S U N F L OW E R M A R K E T

60 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (718) 812-8039 onegrandbooks.com

24 Garden St, Rhinebeck, NY (845) 876-2555 sunflowernatural.com

P E D RO B O R E G A A R D

T HE STON EHOUSE

101 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (212) 826-2660 boregaard.com

92 Main St, Delhi, NY (917) 224-6718 thestonehouseshop.com

PEG ASUS SHOES

TESS

10 Mill Hill Rd, Woodstock, NY (845) 679-2373 pegasusshoes.com

52 & VINE WINE & SPIR ITS

4921 NY-52, Jeffersonville, NY (845) 482-2455 @52&Vine

105 Alberts Way, Beach Lake, PA mildredslane@gmail.com mildredslane.com

T H R E E T U RT L E D OV E S

Fitness BODIES & PLANTS PILATES

41 B Main St, Livingston Manor, NY info@bodiesandplants.com bodiesandplants.com

62B Tinker St, Woodstock, NY @threeturtledoves threeturtledoves.com

P I L AT E S O N 8 T H

107 8th St, Honesdale, PA (570) 309-1511 sarahsimonspilates.com

Art

R5 2 H O M E

25 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-5260 @tess_narrowsburg

C AT S K I L L A RT S PAC E

48 Main St, Livingston Manor, NY (845) 436-4227 catskillartspace.org

4890 NY-52, Jeffersonville, NY rklocko@mac.com @r52Home

Field Guide: Best of Upstate

D E L AWA R E VA L L E Y A RT S A L L I A N C E

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THE CHI HIVE

22 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY (845) 252-5400 thechihive.com

One to Watch.

Meet Sally Wright, the driving force behind Catskill Art Space in Livingston Manor.

As the Executive Director, she led a major expansion, bringing in artists like James Turrell and Sol LeWitt. With roots in the Dia Art Foundation, Sally’s focus is local, exploring how nature can shape an artist’s work.

Photography by Noah Kalina

Is there an artist you have your eyes set on?

I’m really excited to present Mary Lucier’s work this summer.

She’s also based in the Catskills and is a pioneering video artist known for her use of multi-channel presentations. She has an acute understanding and reverence for our ecological landscape and play with ideas around this in novel ways.

What is your current state of mind?

Confused and heartbroken. How is compassion conditional on place, religion, and nationality?

In what ways does your upstate lifestyle influence the way you curate at CAS? Living here, you’re closely attuned to the elements, surrendering to their beauty and power. As seasons pass, you develop an intimate understanding of your surroundings. I’ve curated long-term presentations that explore time, duration, and place.

The works command visitors to stop, slow down, and take stock of their bodily (and emotional) relation to the work and how it changes with each visit.

When inviting collaborations with artists, what do you look for?

A singular point of view.

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What is your idea of slow living?

My husband’s cooking, cozy socks, hot baths. And, early to bed, early to rise.

Who or what is your greatest love?

My family.

When are you happiest?

Watching my children grow and learn, introducing them to music, artists, and art and seeing them share in my joy and make it their own.

What quote sums up your life?

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” ― Arthur Rimbaud If you weren’t working at CAS, what would you be doing?

A midwife or doula. I had my daughter at home and was transformed by the experience. It’s the most noble job to bring life into this world. I would be so lucky.

Upstate Woman

Upstate Woman

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Upstate Woman

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