Wonder can be found anywhere, especially in the places we tend to ignore. It might be in the apartment next door, where Michelle Millette’s Sherwood Forest Zine Library in Austin, Texas, holds a collection of 3,000 zines. Or it could be in the canal running through your town, which for Z Behl and Kim Moloney has become the setting for an upstream odyssey as they paddle six hours a day across 350 miles of the Erie Canal.
On the subject of overlooked wonder, I’d also like to introduce our Craft Archive Fellowship. In partnership with the Center for Craft, the program awards $5,000 grants to support research into underrepresented craft histories across the United States, and later publishes the fellows’ scholarship.
Today, I’m pleased to share the first installment in that series. In conversations with Bilphena Decontee Yahwon, her passion, care, and personal investment in examining the shared roots of Liberian basket weaving and Gullah sweetgrass basketry came through clearly. Her work explores how these traditions connect across continents.
“I could hear Liberia in the way people spoke,” she writes about her first visit to St. Helena Island, off the South Carolina coast, five years ago. In this essay, she traces how fannuh baskets function as both cultural tools and vessels of cultural memory.
—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
