Three Answers: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee,

-- Publishers Weekly, 5/12/2008 7:25:00 AM

Three Answers today from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, whose new book, Things I Learned from Knitting... Whether I Wanted to or Not, was just published by Storey Publishing.

PW: What accounts for the phenomenal growth of knitting in this country?

SPM: I think there are two things going on. One is that I don’t think it’s as big a boom as people think it is. I think there’s always been a tremendous number of knitters. Certainly if we look back at how many people were knitting during the second world war—it was almost considered unpatriotic to not be knitting. And those skills stay with people, so there’s always been generations and generations of knitters. I thing what really changed is that an entire culture and community has built up around it. So all these knitters who were sitting in their living rooms quietly minding their own business are now sitting in the middle of New York! And if I had to lay the blame on any one thing I’d say it was the Internet; it allowed knitters to find each other, and discover that things were being set up and get knitterly pen pals all over the world, and see blogs where they could show their work to other knitters any time of the day or night. Knitters just got way more connected and organized; it’s sort of like the idea the difference between somebody who’s always been a fan of Star Trek and then suddenly finding out the convention is coming to their town.

PW: You’ve become a major star in the blogosphere; what accounts for that?

SPM: It’s kind of an interesting gig, isn’t it? I would like to think that part of it has to do with writing well, and finding a way to say the things that other knitters wish they could say, were this their skill instead of something else that I’m sure they’re good at and I’m terrible at—like being on time, for example. The other thing is the idea that I’m genuinely enamored of this as a subculture. I see knitters as forming a really special place where they take care of each other, and I believe in a profound way that knitting really affects women—in particular their self-esteem. So I think that passion and skill and being in the right place at the right time—there’s a million writers who are far more talented than me, and part of it is luck. 

PW: Would you be able to single out the most important thing you learned from knitting?

SPM: For one thing, I think that knitting is a really excellent metaphor for life. I think it’s impossible to learn to get good at it and not have that sense of competence leak into the other parts of your life. To make a sweater you have to do something correctly and do it thousands of times. And that has to make you feel better about yourself. So I guess the most important thing I’ve learned is the idea that it can change the way you feel about yourself. An average pair of socks takes about 16 hours and between 20,000 and 40,000 thousand stitches. So if you’re going to complete something as simple as that, at the end of it you have to believe that you’re clever, you have to believe that you are patient and that you have followed through and you are good at finishing things. Also, it’s interesting because we live in a world where people, generally speaking, are more incompetent than they have ever been. For the first time in history we have a society where you interact on a minute-by-minute basis with technology and machines that you have no idea how they work, none at all. So I think it’s a really big deal for people to interact with something where they understand it entirely and they’re the whole boss of it. I did this and it’s never going to be upgraded in a way that I don’t understand.