Writing and Quilts, a Manifesto

Since the bulk of my work involves teaching freshman composition, I’m frequently confronted with the prototypical disaffected late-adolescent who finds everything boring. He is bored by politics, bored by peculiar social practices, bored by gastronomy, astronomy, theology and beer.

Yes, that’s right: today’s college freshman is even bored by beer, or claims to be anyway.

This makes it very difficult to find suitable subjects about which to write. And, as much as I hate
to say it, the disaffected late-adolescent has a point. As Paul Roberts notes in his classic essay on the topic of the freshman theme, pretty much all subjects, except sex, are really tedious on their own. Sex, of course, sells itself, which, I suspect, is one of the major reasons pornography so
upsets politicians. Purveyors of porn basically have a license to print money, and politicians cannot stand the idea that such a right would devolve to anyone else but themselves.

But I digress.

In order to make dull thing interesting, Roberts claims, you have got to find what is interesting about it and explain that in your writing. Take quilting, for instance. Most of those my age and gender would quickly assume that quilting was boring, and one can only imagine the sheer speed of eye-glazing the subject would no doubt produce in someone under the age of 25. Oh, they might be made to agree that quilts can be functional and maybe even pretty, but they would no doubt assert that the elders who tend to make such a fuss over quilts and quilting are probably overly sentimental and out-of-touch with “today’s society” with its cell phones and high-speed Internet and first-person-shooter video games, all of which provide a far more stimulating experience, as far as experiences go.

But then one spends some time actually looking at quilts. Even common star and wedding-ring patterns are highly complicated exercises in symmetry and form, the visual equivalents of the contrapuntal music of the Baroque. Unique variations on patterns are often produced spontaneously and by the quilters themselves. What other product of contemporary culture
creates durable, often heirloom-quality, material goods custom designed and individually made without the direct aid of industrial processes? Quilting is one of the last holdouts against a society built on infinite replicability and bottom-line approaches to manufacturing that alienate both quality and worker.

In other words, quilting is subversive.

If that does not persuade you that this subject is interesting, consider this: each quilt represents a stultifyingly difficult set of visuo-spatial problems. At each stitch, the quilter must coordinate her actions at a level of a fraction of an inch in order to produce an effect that plays itself out as a
pattern that occurs over many square feet. She must constantly imagine the whole, concentrate on the stitch at hand, and bear in mind the relationship between the two. The “multitasking” the young are so keen on just seems silly in comparison to what quilters are able to do–and do quite
well–for hours on end. And quilting is often a collaborative effort, so quilters must also coordinate their actions with those of several others simultaneously. That they do all this while also carrying on conversations that have nothing to do with the quilt and succeed in producing a thing of such intricacy and beauty is even more astounding.

Quilting is aesthetic, economic, psychological, physiological, and sociological. It is considerably more complex and, yes, interesting at close range than it is at the distance the young and fit seem happy to keep it. Quilting reveals itself to be a mighty good subject to write about after all, and it proves my last and most important point: if you are bored with the world around you, it probably means you aren’t paying attention.

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