Chelsea Green Publishing, 2002
Crafting Our Lives with Our Own Hands
Coperthwaite, a Maine native, has traveled the globe extensively over the years, but still calls Maine home, with his handsome hand-built 3-story yurt on Dickinson Reach in Machiasport. Yurts are what Coperthwaite is best known for, that circular shelter originally used like tents by Mongol nomads in Central Asia. In the sixties, they became more popular as affordable housing that also had good vibes. Coperthwaite and others promoted them as an easily and quickly assembled abode maximizing enclosed space with a minimum of material. He is also known as a philosopher and teacher advocating the opportunities for and benefits of simpler living. His own life choices and endeavors demonstrate that, and A Handmade Life shares those ideals with a wider audience. With examples of hand-crafted furniture, tools, and toys, Coperthwaite provides some instructions and encouragement.
His book, however, is less a how-to for what one person could do and more of an invocation to humankind to consider a “handmade life.” Sometimes an intense intention to persuade and convince results in prose that feels weighty, redundant or pedantic, and Coperthwaite’s does succumb to that at times. But the book is buoyed by the many beautiful photographs by Peter Forbes illustrating the text. His pictures capture the inspirational and exemplary essence of a simple life on Dickinson Reach. I wish there had been more autobiographical detail, more consideration of the circumstances that converged over his lifetime to bring Coperthwaite to those ideals. The many quotes he includes, ranging from Carl Jung and William James to Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau, add insight. So do the small, sporadic vignettes he shares, separate from the text, offering examples of what he did, learned and felt when interacting with other cultures in his travels. In general, with this book, Coperthwaite seems to have prioritized the message over the man. He may have been somewhat uncomfortable appearing to promote himself as a lifestyle guru. But one quote in particular appears applicable here, as if Walt Whitman had penned this message to Coperthwaite directly: “Re-examine all you have been told at school or at church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” So I look forward now to that kind of book, one about Coperthwaite’s “very flesh,” his own “great poem.”